by Colin Wilson
On 18 June 1989, six investigators, including George Wingfield, were in a crop circle at Cheesefoot Head when a trilling noise began. It seemed to circle around the group in the corn. A female member of the group said: ‘If you understand us, stop’, and the trilling stopped for a moment, then resumed. Then Wingfield called: ‘Please will you make us a circle?’ The following morning, a new circle had appeared five hundred yards away, in the direction in which the trilling noise had finally moved away.
The six also noted that when the trilling stopped their watches showed them—to their astonishment—that it had gone on for an hour and a half, far longer than any of them remembered.
At exactly the same time the following year, 1990, a group including George Wingfield, John Haddington (the present Lord Haddington) and the publisher Michael Cox decided to set up a vigil at Wansdyke, near Silbury Hill. On the first night, Wingfield and Haddington saw lights along Wansdyke, while elsewhere Michael Cox again recorded the trilling sound. The following evening, the sound began again, and the lights moved from Wansdyke into the middle of the cornfield where they were standing: ‘They would flash on and off very quickly’, wrote Haddington, ‘and were an orange, red or greenish hue’.
Then, as they watched, hundreds of black rods began to jump up and down above the wheat. (In 1987, Busty Taylor had succeeded in capturing this phenomenon in a photograph.) Michael Cox tried to pursue the trilling sound with his tape recorder, but was suddenly overwhelmed with nausea, and his knees gave way. He had to stagger to the fence and sit down; but he had again captured the trilling noise on tape. Haddington remarks: ‘To the human ear this most musical sound has the most beautiful bell-like quality, really indescribable as it is so high-pitched. This does not translate on to a tape in a true fashion, coming out covered by a harsh crackling, static-like noise which is presumably caused by the discharge of high energy’. He is obviously correct: there is no reason why a tape recorder should not accurately record any sound, unless the sound is a by-product of some energy vibration that spoils the recording.
When the American television investigator Linda Moulton Howe was in England in 1992, Colin Andrews told her the story about visualising a Celtic cross, and remarked that he thought investigators could influence the circles. On 22 July a group of them went out circle-spotting, including a ‘psychic’ named Maria Ward. She told them that, on the previous day, she had received a mental impression of a design of a triangle with a circle at each of its points—she drew it on request. She added that she felt it had to do with Oliver Cromwell. Two days later, this exact design was found in nearby Alton Barnes, in a wheat field below Oliver’s Castle Hill, where Cromwell had fought Charles I in 1643.
The problem with such data is that, scientifically speaking, it is worthless. Even the two published accounts of the Busty Taylor episode differ slightly: he says he only thought of a Celtic cross, but did not mention it; George Wingfield, who was with him in the aeroplane, says he mentioned it. We can see how events are changed slightly in recollection. And a scientist would point out that no one could prove that Colin Andrews visualised a Celtic cross the night before one appeared, and that some hoaxer may have created the Alton Barnes triangle after hearing that a psychic had predicted it.
In fact, hoaxers quickly threw the whole phenomenon into doubt. In September 1991, two elderly landscape painters named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who lived in Southampton, claimed that they were the authors of most of the crop circles, and that their main piece of equipment was a short plank. Their claim was reported in the press around the world, and many people felt that this was the solution to the mystery—without reflecting that crop circles were now being reported from all over the world. Doug and Dave—whose names became a synonym for hoaxing—were commissioned by a documentary film maker to create a circle design at East Meon, and responded with an admirable pattern like a dumbbell, with additional designs at either end—it took an hour and a half. But they did it by trampling the wheat, and using short planks, often snapping stalks; on the whole, genuine crop formations show bent stalks—as if, Linda Howe says, rushing water had flowed over them.
The question is not whether they were telling the truth—they obviously were, in the sense that they had undoubtedly made dozens of hoax circles. But could they be taken seriously when they claimed that they—together with a few unconnected hoaxers—made all the circles since 1978? If so, why did they wait until September 1991 to claim credit? It seems clear that they finally approached the now defunct Today newspaper because they wanted to claim the prestige due for what they regarded as a kind of artistic endeavour. And obviously their story would be far less impressive if they claimed that they had been making circles only for the past two or three years. If they were going to make their bid for notoriety, they would want to claim credit for all the circles. But is it likely that two ‘artists’ would want to hide their light under a bushel for thirteen years?
That many of the crop circles are the work of hoaxers cannot be doubted; but the notion that they are all by hoaxers—including a circle in a Japanese rice field, whose soft Earth would show footprints—is hard to believe. It was an investigation by Terence Meaden in 1991 that made it clear that the hoaxer theory was inadequate. It was called ‘Blue Hill’, and was funded by Japanese universities, and associated with a BBC film project. Both Meaden and the BBC installed radar equipment whose aim was to detect both hoaxers and whirlwinds. Most of the six weeks of the project were uneventful, although new circles appeared further afield. But, towards the end, two circles were found close at hand in the radar-booby-trapped area, demonstrating fairly conclusively that they had not been made by either hoaxers or whirlwinds.
Between 1991 and 1993, an American biophysicist, W. C. Levengood, examined samples from known hoaxed circles, as well as some believed to be ‘genuine’. He discovered that the ‘genuine’ samples showed changes in the cell-pits (in Britain called pips or seeds), enlargements that he was able to reproduce only in a microwave oven. He also noted cell changes in the hoax samples—a lengthening of the pits—but these were due to being trampled on and squeezed through the cell wall. Even though Levengood concluded, ‘Whatever is doing these formations is affecting the fundamental biophysics and biochemistry of the plant’, cereologists, who had hoped for an instant test to distinguish hoaxes, had to admit that it was not as clear-cut as they might have wished.
Linda Howe tells how, in September 1992, Levengood was contacted by a farmer from Clark, South Dakota, about a six-hundred-foot circle that had appeared among his potatoes. The plants were all dead. Levengood studied the dead plants, and again found pit enlargement, often of more than a quarter, while the potatoes themselves had yellow streaks and cracks.
In Austinburg, Ohio, a gardener named Donald Wheeler discovered a large rectangle in his maize; the stalks had been flattened but not broken, and were all lying in the same direction. The wet ground showed no sign of footmarks. Dr. Levengood examined maize from inside the rectangle, and undamaged maize from outside. The ‘tassels’ on the undamaged corn were closed, while those on the damaged corn were open, indicating that their growth had been somehow accelerated. Linda Howe published photographs of the wheat, potatoes and maize examined by Levengood in her Glimpses of Other Realities, where the difference can be clearly seen.
One startling development—although at the time no one recognised how startling—was a long review of three books on crop circles in the New York Review on 21 November 1991. What was so unusual was that it was by Baron Zuckerman, one of the most distinguished members of Britain’s scientific establishment—perhaps the most. He had ended a brilliant academic career as chief scientific adviser to the British government. And, by 1991, he was eighty-seven years old. So why was such a man getting involved in a subject that most scientists dismissed as lunacy?
The answer may lie in the fact that Zuckerman had retired to a village near Sandringham in Norfolk, and that Sandringham happens to be one of the royal residenc
es. There is, among cereologists, a persistent rumour that crop circles appeared on the Queen’s estate at Sandringham, and that the response of Prince Philip was to send for their old friend Baron Zuckerman to ask his opinion. Zuckerman certainly went to the trouble of personally examining a number of crop circles.
One result was the New York Review article, written two years before his death, and two years after his alleged visit to Sandringham.
‘Creations of the Dark’ is a curious piece. There is no hint of that carping tone that has become the standard response of scientists to such bizarre matters. He begins by speaking of mysteries of the British landscape, like Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the white horses cut in the chalk, then, moving on to crop circles, mentions that almost a thousand appeared in England between 1980 and 1990. He goes on to speak sympathetically and at length about Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, authors of Circular Evidence, one of the books he is reviewing.
They believe that the circles are ‘caused by some supernatural intelligence’, he explains—yet still with no touch of the critical scepticism one would expect of a senior scientist. Even when he mentions that one of the cornfield inscriptions reads WEARENOTALONE, it is with no hint of scorn. This appears only at the end of his summary of the views of Terence Meaden, when he says: ‘How a downwardly directed turbulent vortex . . . could explain the more elaborate circle designs is not touched on . . .’, and goes on to quote Colin Andrews’s criticism that even a bouncing vortex could not make geometrical patterns. And, a few sentences later, he quotes with satisfaction Wingfield’s remark that rectangular boxes in the corn have ‘driven the final nail into the coffin of the atmospheric vortex theory’.
Why, he wants to know, have scientists not taken a more active interest in the phenomenon? The owner of one farm where Zuckerman went to look at circles told him it was owned by New College, Oxford, but that none of the science fellows there had shown any interest. Neither had the science teachers at Marlborough School, only ten miles away.
One useful step, Zuckerman suggests, would be to train university students to make hoax circles. If it proved to be easy, that at least would be one established fact. And if it proved to be difficult . . . well, we would be back at square one, still faced with the mystery.
What is perfectly clear, from Zuckerman’s admission that he has studied many of these circles, is that he does not accept either that they are natural phenomena, due to whirlwinds, or that they have all been created by hoaxers. The final impression left by the article—and by the very fact that a man as distinguished as Zuckerman had taken the trouble to write it—is that he is far from dismissive of the suggestion that at least some of the circles are the work of nonhuman intelligences, and that he feels that scientists ought to be trying to find out.
It so happened that, on the other side of the Atlantic, another scientist had been corresponding with Zuckerman and was following his advice. Gerald S. Hawkins was a British radio astronomer who had been professor of astronomy at Boston University, and had achieved international celebrity through his book Stonehenge Decoded in 1965. In 1960, he had used a computer to investigate an idea that had been planted in his head when he attended a lecture on Stonehenge at London University in 1949: that Stonehenge may be a complex calendar or computer to calculate moonrise and sunrise over the 18.6-year moon cycle. The idea, which caused fierce controversy at the time, is now generally accepted, and has become the basis of the new science of archaeoastronomy—the study of ancient peoples’ knowledge and beliefs about celestial phenomena. Subsequently he went on to apply the same techniques to the pyramids of Egypt.
Hawkins started Boston University research in 1989, the year that Time magazine published a long article on the crop-circle controversy. He was intrigued by the photographs, and by the comment of a few colleagues that perhaps the circles might provide him with another problem for computer analysis. After all, they were mostly in the same county as Stonehenge. Later that year, on a visit to England, he picked up a copy of Circular Evidence by Andrews and Delgado—which had become an unexpected bestseller, demonstrating that the phenomenon was now arousing worldwide interest.
Andrews and Delgado had carefully measured eighteen of the circles, and included the measurements in their book. A glance told Hawkins that this was not suitable material for computer analysis. The obvious alternative was a mathematical or geometrical approach—to compare the size of the circles.
As a typical scientist, Hawkins had already plodded through Circular Evidence page by page. Being an astronomer, he was treating the book like a star catalogue. Andrews and Delgado had measured twenty-five circle patterns with engineering precision, and gave them in order of appearance. The first forty pages were large circles with satellites, and the diameters revealed a musical fraction, accurate to one percent. Anyone can check this from the book by just taking a pocket calculator and dividing the large by the small. One percent, by the way, is high precision for the circle maker. It is only just detectable in a symphony orchestra, and totally unnoticeable in a rock group.
But after 1986 things changed. From this time on circles appeared with rings around them. Hawkins found the simple fraction was now given by the area of the ring divided by the area of the circle. From schooldays we recall that ancient area formula, pi-r-squared. Modern computer experts would say, ‘Ha! Data compression. We get a larger ratio from the same sized pattern’.
The first step in his reasoning was that, if the first circles had been made by Meaden’s vortices, then all patterns involving several symmetrical circles must be ruled out, since a whirlwind was not likely to make neat patterns. Which meant that the great majority of circles since the mid-1980s must be made by hoaxers. But would hoaxers take the trouble to give their patterns the precision of geometrical diagrams? In fact, would they even be capable of such precision, working in the dark, and on a large scale? They would be facing the same kind of problem as the makers of the Nazca lines in the desert of Peru—the great birds, spiders and animals drawn on the sand—but with the difference that the Nazca people worked by daylight and had an indefinite amount of time at their disposal, whereas the circle makers had to complete their work in the dark in a few hours.
Hawkins began by looking closely at a ‘triplet’ of circles which had appeared at Corhampton, near Cheesefoot Head on 8 June 1988. To visualise these, imagine two oranges on a table, about an inch apart. Now imagine taking a small, flat piece of wood—like the kind by which you hold an ice lolly—and laying it across the top of them. Then balance another orange in the centre of the lolly stick, and you have a formation like the Cheesefoot Head circles of 1988.
Now even a nonmathematical reader can see that the lolly stick forms what our teachers taught us to call a tangent to each of the oranges. And, since all the oranges are spaced out equally, you could insert two more lolly sticks between them to make two more tangents. The three sticks would form a triangle in the space between the three oranges.
That is a nicely symmetrical pattern. But, of course, it does not prove that the circle makers were interested in geometry. Perhaps they just thought there was something pleasing about the arrangement.
When he had been at school, Hawkins had been made to study Euclid, the Greek mathematician, born around 300 BC, who had written the first textbook of geometry. Euclid is an acquired taste; either you like him or you don’t. Bertrand Russell had found him so enjoyable that he read right through the Elements as if it were Alice in Wonderland.
As an astronomer, Hawkins had always appreciated the importance of Euclid, in spite of having been brow beaten with him at school. So now he began looking at his three circles, and wondering if they made a theorem. He tried sticking his compass point in the centre of one circle, and drawing a large circle whose circumference went through the centres of the other two circles. He realised, to his satisfaction, that the diameter of the large circle, compared with that of the smaller ones, was exactly 16 to 3.
So now he had a new theor
em. If you take three crop circles, and stick them at the corners of a small equilateral triangle, then draw a large circle that passes through two centres, the small circles are just three sixteens the size of the larger one.
He looked up his Elements to see if Euclid had stumbled on that one. He hadn’t.
Of course, it is not enough to work out a theorem with a ruler: it has to be proved. That took many weeks, thinking in the shower and while driving. Eventually, he obtained his proof—elegantly simple.
After this success, he was unstoppable. Another crop-circle pattern, in a wheatfield near Guildford, Surrey, showed an equilateral triangle inside a circle—so its vertices touched the circumference—then another circle inside the triangle. Hawkins soon worked out that the area of the bigger circle is four times as large as the smaller one.
Another circle used the same pattern, but with a square instead of a triangle. Here, Hawkins worked out, the bigger circle is now twice as large in area as the smaller one.
When another circle replaced the square with a hexagon, he worked out that the smaller circle is three-quarters the size of the larger one.
Now so far, you might say, he had proved nothing except that crop-circle patterns—which might have been selected by chance, like a child doodling with a pair of compasses and a ruler—could be made to yield up some new theorems. But, early in the investigation, he had stumbled upon an insight that added a whole new dimension.