Yahoo! Finally got round to reading the links & the maser info. Both were interesting, even though neither, to my mind, answers all the questions satisfactorily.
I don't think there's any doubt that some folk make the crop circles for sport - and even then, they're fascinating because of their beauty & the complexity of their manufacture.
While there
may be some truth in Sherry's assertions re masers producing the circles, it doesn't ring true to me that it's just bored, artistic military personnel playing games. It might be so, but it seems to me that if the only purpose was to kill time & maybe prank the public, some military personnel would be finding themselves up for court martial for wasting precious time & resources.
Unless it's a deliberate campaign by the military, intended to fool the public on a large scale into believing aliens are trying to communicate - as a lead-up to Project Bluebeam maybe?

Which would then make Richard D Hall's research findings nonsensical - unless there were more than one faction working in opposition to each other perhaps.
I agree with your observation about the human desire for adventure, attention and hoaxing — especially when it comes to the ‘paranormal’. And that makes it all the more tricky when trying to decipher what's real.

Richard's one of the few researchers though who I find quite endearing because to me, he just seems genuine (did you see him giving Cameron some shit over disclosure!?!

) and (unless you choose to dismiss his claims as sheer hoax, which is possible

) he seemed to have been thorough and painstaking in his investigations.
I read another theory about the circles a good few years ago by Rennie Henry (pen name = Alder), not to be confused with...
It was in a book called, "Theatre Earth - Who Pulls the Strings" which is divided into 4x 1,000ish page volumes.
Synopsis
Books were once in antiquity the conveyors of information, particularly from sages. Only latterly have books been conjoined with the goal of profit and Ego. Theatre Earth - Who Pulls the Strings? by the author rekindles the goal of antiquity and the purpose of books as the conduit for thoughts and new ideas, even heretical ideas, for which reason the library in Alexandria was burnt to the ground. The author has re-set the goals of intelligent but considered heretical authors, who despite controversial ideas, have felt compelled to place their thoughts and research in the public domain, despite the orthodox views and forces arranged against them.
I've parped on about that series of books ever since reading them, because they were so intruiging.
Rennie spent 15 years doing research for the book, after, she says, working as a bio-scientist, she had her funding withdrawn and her character assassinated, as a result, she claims, of finding a cure for cancer.
I'm digressing.
Anyways, she presents a case for there being some form of energy grid around the earth, which contains the gnenetic blue-print of everything. She thinks the GM tampering with crops and animals and even mankind is playing havoc with the feedback of energy between ourselves and the grid, and the crop-circles are some kind of resulting disturbance projected by this grid. I've probably made that sound ridiculous, but Rennie took approx 4,000 pages to explain her reasoning. Though I don't say her findings are correct, they are yet again, something interesting to contemplate I think.