Circular and other geometric patterns, some very intricate and complex,
appearing in the middle of fields, usually wheat fields and usually in
England. Most, if not all, of them are probably due to pranksters, such as
Doug Bower and David Chorley who, in 1991, admitted to hoaxing
approximately 250 circles over many years. There is a segment of the
population which believes the circles are messages from alien spacecraft.
Some even maintain that the aliens are trying to communicate with us using
ancient Sumerian symbols--a rather strange and roundabout way to
communicate with us, it seems to me, for such obviously advanced peoples.
Even scientifically minded people have been brought into this fray. They have wisely
avoided the
thesis that aliens have been carving out messages in crop fields. But they have stretched
their
imaginations to come up with theories of vortexes, ball lightning, plasma and other less
occult
explanations involving natural forces such as wind, heat, or animals. However, when
looking for a
naturalistic explanation of weird things we should never omit from our checklist the
possibility that
the phenomenon we are studying is a hoax. Crop circles, I believe, should be studied
along with
other hoaxes such as Piltdown Man and the Cardiff Giant.
Had crop circles existed in the thirteenth century, they would have been attributed to
Satan, who
was said to have been responsible for many weird happenings as well as for many
unweird things,
such as the construction of Stonehenge and Hadrian's wall between England and
Scotland. It was
believed by many that the ancients could not possibly have accomplished such feats on
their own.
Today, Satan's power as an explanation for weird or wondrous things has been usurped
by aliens.
