Wheat Graffiti
A roundup of the top of the crops
By Daniel Pinchbeck
THEY SHOW UP EVERY SUMMER: spirals and interlocking rings,
alchemical and shamanic symbols, massive mandalas and Mandelbrot
sets, all cut into swaths of land — some as large as two football
fields set side by side. These patterns, made from swirled wheat
and flattened rapeseed, first appeared in the fields of southern
England 30 years ago. Their mysterious origin caused a media frenzy
until 1991, when two local farmers claimed responsibility for
a few of the early formations. The press, satisfied that the whole
thing was a hoax, decamped. But crop circles never went away.
From the Netherlands to Japan to the farmlands of Canada and the
Midwest, hundreds of new glyphs materialize every year — and they're
growing in both size and complexity.
The spectacle has inspired a fresh crop of media attention. Signs,
by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan, debuts August 2 starring
Mel Gibson as a Pennsylvania farmer who discovers supernatural
communications in his cornfields. Also coming in August is Crop
Circles: Quest for Truth, a documentary by Emmy award-winning
filmmaker William Gazecki. The film focuses on the robust New
Age subculture of "croppies." In England, as many as 10,000 believers
spend their summers tromping across the verdant hills of Wiltshire
and Glastonbury prospecting for new formations. They include not
only the expected druids, dowsers, and Deadheads but also more
levelheaded types — engineers, astronomers, laser scientists,
and biophysicists.
These croppies find a kind of scientific beauty and mystery in
the phenomenon. Gerald Hawkins, former chair of the astronomy
department at Boston University, thinks the artistry of the circles
is based on mathematics. He has found hidden geometrical forms
- pentagrams, hexagons, and other shapes — underlying the figures
he's analyzed. Then there's Colin Andrews, an electrical engineer
with a grant from billionaire UFOlogist Laurance Rockefeller,
who claims to have found a change in Earth's magnetic field where
the glyphs appear. Noting the recent increase in crop circles,
Andrews says, "You begin to get the distinct impression that there
is some kind of program running here." Andrews, when pressed,
tells of dozens of strange events that have befallen him during
his 18-year-long obsession: stopped clocks, inexplicable power
surges, ruined film. But the wildest stories come from the cult
croppie philosopher Michael Glickman, a former architect who has
been chasing circles since the 1980s. "The circlemakers are using
shape and number and form to access parts of our being that have
become culturally deactivated," he says. Glickman's theory is
that the signs point to some type of dimensional shift due to
arrive in December 2012: "Part of the program is reactivation
— that is separate from whatever hard information they might be
bringing."
Glickman's "hard information" refers to a moment at the end of
last summer's growing season when crop circles turned away from
the abstract. On August 14, an enigmatic human face, expertly
executed in halftones, turned up next to a huge radio transmitter
in Chilbolton, England. A few days later, a glyph appeared that
many croppies believe to be an alien response to a SETI radio
transmission sent into space almost 30 years ago. Formed out of
expertly twisted wheat, the pattern shows a strand of DNA made
with silicon instead of phosphorous, a transmission device of
unknown design, an alternate solar system, and an extraterrestrial
with a wide head.
One thing is for sure: The formation proves beyond a doubt that
the life-form responsible for it has a superevolved sense of humor.
In the words of Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute,
it's "good fun and a nice example of grain graffiti" — but not
worth taking seriously. "If aliens wanted to communicate with
us, why would they use such a low-bandwidth method?" he asks.
"Why not just leave an Encyclopedia Galactica on our doorstep?"
He also notes that SETI's original signal was aimed at the star
cluster M13, which means it will not reach its target for 24,972
more years. The institute, he says, "has no interest in investigating
the phenomenon further."
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GOT THE MESSAGE?
In 1974, an encoded radio transmission was fired into deep space
— the so-called Arecibo message. Its contents included the numerals
1 through 10, the atomic numbers of elements important to human
life, a depiction of the physical structure of DNA, our solar
system, a human figure, and the radio dish used to send the message.
Three decades later, a crop circle in an English field appeared
to reply — with some interesting amendments (see below).
