THE overwhelming response to a crop circle's sudden appearance in a Hannington farm has caused headaches for the farm's managers.

The mysterious phenomenon cropped up last week and Shelley Klindt was shocked to discover it on Friday morning.

She briefly opened the field to visitors after pictures of the pattern taken by drones went viral.

Shelley urged sightseers to stay near the tram lines and not trample the crops but decided to stop people visiting the site when onlookers caused more damage.

She said: “I noticed that the gate to the field was open and when I went to close it, I saw that a lot of the wheat had been pressed down, it must have happened overnight.

“When I noticed the crop circle, a man was standing nearby with a drone and he showed me pictures of it from above.

“I tried to keep this quiet but the pictures went online and people started turning up."

Crowds of people from all over the world quickly gathered at the site to witness the weird wheat markings.

Shelley added: “It’s quite a pretty thing, people from Brazil, Canada and America all came to have a look, though you can’t really see it from the ground.

“I think it’s man-made but everyone else seems to think it’s spiritual or aliens or something.”

Mrs Klindt doesn’t own the farm but her husband’s family has been looking after it since the 1970s.

They have never had a crop circle appear in the fields before but claimed that one appeared in a neighbour’s fields in 2012.

Shelley added: “It’s a hassle, we were 10 days from combining the crops and now all the wheat that’s been pushed to the floor can’t be harvested, it’s ruined.

“We will have to claim this on our insurance which will make our insurance costs go up.

“The tram lines are 24 metres apart and it goes across three of them, that’s a lot of unusable wheat.”

The pattern will be gone in a few days when the combine harvesting begins.