Mr Lundberg is certainly a man, but he is neither little nor green and his preferred means of transport is a bicycle.

Yet he admits, freely and without a trace of smugness, that he and his partners, Rod Dickinson and Wil Russell, not only create crop circles but are making lots of money from them. They are three men sorting out the wheat from the cash, with not a UFO in sight.

The only green men to be found are those who envy the circle makers' ability to exploit their artistic talents.

Mr Lundberg has been making crop circles for 13 years. For most of that time, he has done it without a thought for profit, but in the past few years the commercial work, mostly in advertising, has taken off.

The list of clients and commissions is impressive. Last year, the team went to America to do a series of projects for AMD, a multibillion-dollar computer-chip company. They created the eye logo for reality TV show Big Brother,, a car-shaped pattern for a Mitsubishi publicity campaign; logos for the album covers of dance bands and advertisements for mobile phone company Orange.

They have branched out from wheat fields and now also work on sand and grass. They recently won a commission for Hello Kitty to produce the face of the Japanese company's cartoon cat in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, and are considering a project in Costa Rica.

The rewards for the crop circle entrepreneurs are high and growing. The AMD job was the group's most lucrative so far. Mr Lundberg is unwilling to give details, but says the contract was worth "tens of thousands of pounds". The budget for the Big Brother campaign was estimated to be £250,000 ($A645,000), and for Orange's Wiltshire project about £100,000.

"We are doing well," Mr Lundberg said. "We are all earning a very healthy living from crop circles."

Landowners benefit too, receiving payments from the companies or circle-makers for allowing their fields to be used. The income easily covers the damage to crops, leaving farmers with a profit.

Unlike the lucrative commercial ventures, night raids by circle makers acting as free agents irritate many farmers. The most recent crop circle appeared on Friday near Marlborough in Wiltshire, the county that spawns 80 per cent of Britain's crop circles. Neighbours said the landowner was furious.

"He had to get the combine harvester out and harvest a large area because he didn't want hundreds of people pouring on to his land to look at the crop circle," one neighbour said.

Not all landowners are unhappy. Some who wake up to find they have been "circled" make the most of it by charging visitors £1 or £2 for a look.

The Country Landowners Association described the night raids by circle makers as "rural graffiti", but backed the idea of circle makers and farmers working together to make money.

Colin Andrews, author of the best-selling Circular Evidence, the first book on crop circles, published in 1989, said up to 90 per cent of crop circles were probably man-made. "The other 10 per cent are not, and that is very important," he said. "There is definitely something very odd going on. We don't know what it is, but I believe there is some higher force involved."

Mr Lundberg's hero is Doug Bowers, a watercolour artist who, with Dave Chorley, a fellow artist, started secretly making crop circles in Britain in the late 1970s.

Bowers was inspired by "a couple of crop circles blamed on UFOs" while he was living in Australia. The pair continued their hoaxes for 14 years before confessing to a shocked - and, in some quarters, disappointed - world in 1991.

Bowers, now 80, is surprised at the commercial turn of late. "We just wanted people to think that a UFO had landed in a field, when it was really just two blokes with a plank of wood," he said. "And it worked a treat.

"We'd make the crop circles and crowds would come to see them. We used to mingle with them and listen to what they were saying, all these so-called UFO experts spouting off about aliens. We would look at each and burst out laughing.

"We did it for a laugh. Money - and even art - never came into it. Who would have thought it would come to this?"

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/26/1090693898851.html?oneclick=true