Our crop circle predicament

“Round in Circles” by Jim Schnabel is a book originally published in 1994. It deals with the strange and wonderful tale of the so-called crop circles. The crop circle craze began in the UK during the late 1970´s and reached its peak about ten years later. While the phenomenon soon spread all across the UK, and indeed all over the world, there was always an epicenter in the English county of Wiltshire, also the location of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill, three Neolithic sites important to the New Age and “alternative” communities. This is probably no coincidence. The crop circles are strange geometric patterns appearing mysteriously overnight in farmers´ fields. I´m baffled that so many people take them seriously – still today, there are crop circle enthusiasts on YouTube and elsewhere. To anyone but the true believer, the crop circles are obvious hoaxes. They usually don´t damage the crops, and even if they do, the farmer can easily make up for the losses by charging all tourists and New Age believers who want to see them. According to “people in the know”, the crop circles are created by the farmers themselves together with Druid Revivalists who enjoy playing pranks on their more gullible New Age cousins! (Schnable doesn´t mention this particular theory, though.)

That being said, I did get a slightly better understanding of the crop circle aficionados after reading “Round in Circles”. The earlier circles, whether or not they were man-made, were less complex than the later ones. Also, people had seen (or thought they had seen, or claimed to have seen) strange light phenomena at the crop circle sites. Mysterious sounds were also heard. Sometimes, eye witnesses reported cars breaking down for no apparent reason, or sudden whirlwinds. Thus, there were obvious tie-ins to both “earth lights” and ball lightning (which are usually seen as unknown or little known natural phenomena) and the entire UFO problematique. The UFO scene was split in “moderate” and “radical” wings, with the moderates probably sensing a connection to the aforementioned earth lights.

It´s not clear to me what Schnabel, who was involved in the circle-watching community himself back in the days, really believes about the strange lights and noises. I suspect he regards them as misidentified mundane phenomena. Thus, the eerie sound emitted by crop circles in the dead of night is really the song of a small bird, the grasshopper warbler! The lights are probably just car lights seen under tricky conditions. Schnabel himself once heard mysterious sounds in a field, ironically when he was trying to catch hoaxers. The sound turned out to be the pulsating rhythm of the blood in his own ears…

The circle-watching community soon split into roughly two camps, one naturalistic around Terence Meaden and one more metaphysical around Paul Delgado and Colin Andrews. Perhaps inevitably, the latter group turned out to be the strongest one. Meaden first proposed that the circles were made by a previously unknown vortex phenomenon (Meaden had studied whirlwinds). Later, he changed his theory and proposed “plasma vortices” as the cause, a more obvious idea due to the seemingly electro-magnetic character of the phenomenon. He got some support in this from a group of bona fide Japanese scientists studying ball lightning. Meanwhile, Delgado and Andrews proposed that alien intelligences, or perhaps Gaia, were the real movers and shakers behind it all. It was all a warning to humanity that Earth was dying and that we better mend our ways. Meanwhile, the crop circles themselves seemed to evolve and form more and more complex patterns. This was easily explained on the hoax theory, but also on the “alien intelligence” theory (provided you accept the existence of such intelligences in the first place), while Meaden found it increasingly difficult to accommodate the new artistic patterns to his idea of purely natural vortices creating havoc in the fields…

In 1991, two elderly artists named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward and revealed that many of the crop circles had been made by them as a gigantic prank. “Doug and Dave” soon became a household expression, especially among skeptics. Among other things, Bower and Chorley said that they deliberately made the patterns in the crops more complicated as time went by to indicate that Meaden´s vortex theory simply couldn´t be true. They must have been bemused when Meaden simply continued, making up new versions of the vortex idea to save appearances, a bit like the Ptolemaic epicycles. By contrast, the spiritual ideas of the other faction were sufficiently elastic to accommodate even pranksters. Perhaps the hoaxers were really under the sway of the alien intelligences or the Gaian archetypes? The Delgadonians also connected the crop circles to UFOs, aliens and government cover-ups. The Men in Black supposedly harassed cerealogists (as the crop circle investigators called themselves). The author mentions a neo-pagan circle-watcher who was visited by creatures best described as fairies, including one spouting two horns! They weren´t threatening, though, but rather told him to continue his research…

It´s interesting to note that some metaphysical believers doubted that the crop circles were supernatural in origin. Rather, they suspected some of their own people to be behind it all! There were rumors of animal sacrifices and strange nocturnal rituals at some crop circle sites. The acid house band KLF were behind a particularly crude hoax, when their own logo appeared in a farmer´s field. Unless I´m mistaken, KLF were inspired by the “Illuminatus Trilogy” and Discordianism! In the mainstream media, Doug & Dave were treated as the solution to the vexing problem of the circles, and so did most of the public (I think), but as already noted, the phenomenon simply continued. On the web, you can find excellent footage of the 2019 crop circles. There are a lot of tiresome exchanges between skeptics and true believers on YouTube. Perhaps wisely, Meaden eventually moved on and is now writing books about Stonehenge inspired by the theories of Marija Gimbutas, and his Wiki bio doesn´t even mention his heavy involvement in the crop circle craze.

No matter what you think of this infuriating topic, “Round in Circles” is probably a necessary read for everyone who wants an introduction to our crop circle predicament.