Tasmania is no stranger to weirdness, so it’s appropriate we have our very own crop circle mystery.

These Tasmanian crop circles didn’t appear on corn or wheat. Rather, they showed up on poppy fields. There are thousands of acres of these fields here, because Tasmania produces almost half of the world’s opium poppy supply. These crops are legal and grown for medicinal purposes. Poppies contain valuable alkaloid material that’s used for pain relief, including morphine, thebaine and codeine, and Tasmania is a hotspot due to ideal climate conditions.

It’s not known when the circles first appeared. Poppy farming started in Tasmania in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2009 that this story broke out. Basically, poppy growers were waking up on misty Tassie mornings to discover their farms covered with crop circles.

Imagine what it must’ve been like to discover them. You’d probably be annoyed about the damage to your crop before the questions started creeping in. What on (or off) earth caused this?

For most, the first thing to come to mind might be aliens. That’s what pop culture has taught us. Crop circles are large, sometimes intricate, patterns created by flattened crops that look like a spaceship had landed there. In actual fact, humans are the ones most cases can be attributed to. In 1991, two hoaxers, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, took credit for having created over 200 crop circles throughout England. After this was widely reported, copycats started creating more all over the world.

But these Tasmanian crop circles are different. They were not caused by humans. It would’ve been difficult to do, since poppy fields are well protected, with ‘keep out’ signs plastered over fences saying trespassers will be prosecuted and the illegal use of the crop may cause death.

So, some aliens that wanted a free high, then? Not that either. In 2009, it was revealed the culprit behind the crop circles were in fact…wallabies!

Bennett’s wallabies to be specific. They’re medium-sized marsupials common to eastern Australia and Tasmania. If you’re driving around the bush at night, it’s most likely these guys you’re spotting on the side of the road.

These cheeky wallabies had been sneaking under the fences, snacking on the poppies, then getting a high, which caused them to hop around in circles, trampling the crops and creating the crop circles.

It might sound like a joke, but this news was revealed when Tasmania’s attorney- general at the time, Lara Giddings (who later became premier of Tasmania), stood before parliament for a budget hearing. She said, “We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles.” Not an ordinary budget hearing by any means. “Then they crash,” said Giddings. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”

Giddings was answering questions about the security of Tasmania’s poppy stocks. Needless to say, this bombshell captured media attention, and news sites all over the world reported on the security-breaching, high-chasing marsupials.

At this time, Richard “Rick” Rockliff (the father of Jeremy Rockliff, current premier of Tasmania), was field operations manager for Tasmania’s largest corporate grower of opium poppies, Tasmanian Alkaloids, now known as Extractas Bioscience. Rick revealed it wasn’t just wallabies that were getting in on the action. He said deer and sheep that munched the poppies had been known to “act weird” afterwards. “There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” Rockliff told the media.

Retired farmer Lyndley Chopping had spent more than 30 years growing poppies and would see wallabies acting strangely in his fields. “They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away,” he told ABC News in 2009. “They’d come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock.”

So there you have it, the surprising culprit behind the Tasmanian crop circle mystery of ‘09. We’ll never look at wallabies the same way again.

Oui Oui Wallaby Believe it or not, that’s not the only weird and wonderful wallaby story out there. There’s a colony of them, about 150, who have emigrated to an unexpected place: France. Sacre bleu! The Tasmanian wallabies live in forests surrounding a French village called Émancé after escaping from a zoo in the 1970s. They escaped by burrowing through holes in the fencing, similar to their poppy escapades back home. The wallabies thrive to this day because of France’s similar climate to us, plenty of shelter, an abundance of food, and lack of predators. In 2003, yellow signs of a wallaby silhouette were installed. Now, they have become a mascot for the town, and residents still have a hard time convincing their friends that they’ve seen kangaroo-looking things on the side of the road.