Steve Quayle News Alerts

August 10, 2002; Page C01
By Peter Carlson, Washington Post Staff Writer

It all began in the late 1970s, when strange circles began appearing in fields of grain in the countryside of southern England, not far from Stonehenge.

Inside the circles, crops -- usually wheat or barley or oats -- were flattened to the ground by some mysterious force that bent but did not kill the plants. At first, nobody paid much attention. But by the early 1980s, the circles were getting larger -- 20, 50, 100 feet across -- and sometimes clusters of a half-dozen or more would appear in the same field overnight.

The media took notice, and the resulting publicity attracted scads of mystics and scientists. The mystics claimed the circles were caused by UFOs or by cosmic energy or by Gaea, the goddess of Mother Earth. The scientists claimed they were caused by freak weather conditions or, believe it or not, by the mating dance of sex-crazed hedgehogs running in frenzied circles.

Both groups agreed on one thing: The circles couldn't have been created by humans working under cover of darkness during a short British night.

In the late 1980s, Terrence Meaden, a physics professor and amateur meteorologist, advanced a theory that seemed to explain the phenomenon. The circles were caused, Meaden said, by plasma vortexes -- electrified whirlwinds that formed high in the atmosphere, then swooped down to the ground, spinning the grain into flattened circles.

Meaden's theory seemed plausible for a while. But then crop circles changed. The newer ones were far more complex. Farmers arose to find their fields decorated with squares, stars, peace symbols and elaborate designs that looked like keys or IUDs or that weird glyph that rock singer Prince adopted as his new, unpronounceable name.

Meaden insisted that even these ornate "agriglyphs" could have been caused by his plasma whirlwinds. But that seemed so implausible that he found himself viciously mocked by the British media.

"He was so ridiculed," Andrews says. "I did feel a certain sympathy for him as a human being. But his theory was not a credible solution to the mystery."

As the crop circles grew more elaborate, they became tourist attractions. Travelers visiting Stonehenge detoured for helicopter rides over the mysterious glyphs. Farmers began charging admission to the circles, and tourists with a mystical bent would sit cross-legged in them, meditating.

Some people reported that they heard weird "trilling" sounds and saw saucers or balls of light while sitting in the glyphs at night. Other folks reported that proximity to the circles caused their cameras to malfunction and their dogs to panic and vomit.

As the mystery deepened, crop circles were discussed in Parliament and debated on television. They were the subject of dozens of books and countless magazine articles. And they began appearing outside England -- in Holland, Germany, Japan, Canada. A few appeared in the United States, too, but not many, especially when you consider our fabled stretches of amber waves of grain. Even today, more than 90 percent of the 10,000 reported crop circles have appeared within 50 miles of Stonehenge.

Then, in 1991, two elderly chaps told the British newspaper Today that they were responsible for the crop circles. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed they'd started making the circles as a prank one Friday night in 1978 after downing a few pints at a pub in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge. Over 13 years, they'd created more than 1,000 glyphs, they said, and copycats had done the rest.

To prove their point, they created a crop circle while a reporter watched. It was a simple process. They set up a pole with a string attached to the top. They pulled the string taut and walked in a circle. That created the perimeter. Then they flattened the grain inside the circle by pushing wooden planks around.

When they finished, the newspaper summoned Patrick Delgado, a prominent crop circle researcher. Delgado inspected the circle and issued his learned opinion:

"No human being could have done this," he said. "These crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is of a high level of intelligence."

Delgado, like Meaden before him, became a laughingstock. And "Doug and Dave" -- as the pranksters are invariably called -- became national folk heroes.

But many people -- including Andrews -- didn't believe the mystery was solved.

"Doug and Dave certainly did make some of them," Andrews says. "But we know they didn't make them all. Many farmers tell you they had circles in the '60s. An elderly man told me he had circles in his field in 1923 and 1924 -- as noted in his diary."

So the circles kept their hold on the public imagination. Mystics and scientists continued to visit them. Artists got into the act. So did Laurance Rockefeller.

for full article see,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1177-2002Aug9.html
Researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company