Strange Attractors

- Pulp Magazine, New Zealand

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious." - Albert Einstein

"Any one unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either" - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

On a cool, misty September morning in 1973, farmers claimed to have found what looked like 'saucer nests' in a field just outside of Wokurna, South Australia. By the mid-seventies, they were being spotted all over Hampshire, England, and it is estimated that in 1990 there were over 1000 crop circles on the ground that season. The 2003 season is well underway, with the rapeseed ready to harvest, the barley ripe and the first green wheat fields starting to dapple the countryside with giant rectangles. Already this year, there have been over 92 crop formations laid down in the rape and barley crops.

Crop circles seem to chink the spiritual gaps in many people's lives. Their cause has been debated for years, with explanations ranging from tornadoes and plasma vortexes to UFOs or hoaxers. In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed authorship to many of the crop formations up to that point, and as far back as the mid-seventies. "Certainly, Doug's intention was to give a gift to people," claims John Lundberg. John created circlemakers.org; he has made circles for clients like Pepsi, Orange and Mitsubishi; and is very actively making circles this year. "He very much believed in the reality of UFO's, to the point where he would actually go up at night on Cradle Hill to see if he could see any UFO's. He never saw anything, and it was kind of his frustration, that he couldn't actually have this type of experience. That was why it was such a selfless act; he wanted to give other people that experience."

While researchers, particularly those benefiting directly from the idea that crop circles are 'not of this earth', were quick to dismiss Doug and Dave's claims, they seemed to miss the point, assuming that the hoaxers were simply muddying the water of a grand discovery, rather than creating a phenomenon themselves. It is clear, however, that men can make these circles, and extremely complex ones at that. The biggest problem with the believer camp is the supposition that it took aliens fifteen years to figure out how to make straight lines in crops, or at least that is what my 10 year old niece tells me. The crop circle religion is beginning to embrace all the dogma and denial of any other these days.

Grant Wakefield's Croppies documented the circle makers as a people, as a movement, for the first time. He provides probably the clearest explanation of the crop circle phenomenon as a wholly human phenomenon. "I do believe that what goes on while people are making them and what goes on afterwards in the way people relate to them is 'paranormal'. I think what happens is that people so much want spiritual gaps in their life to be plugged, that they come to circles; and they so much want for something to happen, that it actually happens. I think hoax is a misnomer, like I said in the film, like Robert Irving says in the film. I think they are made by people but their motivations are very little understood by researchers. And they tend to dismiss them as mindless morons, when they all have backgrounds in art and graphic art design and they are very interested in the paranormal; they are trying to foster a kind of social phenomenon and they have done it. I mean it was listed in TIME magazine's one hundred most important events of the century. The way I look at it these days is in a world of superabundant technology and science, the fact that people can still go out with a piece of string and a bit of wood and shake the world; I think that's amazing."

"To be a circle maker is to occupy a really weird mental space," John elucidates, "as you have to be slightly masochistic. For the circles to function properly, people need to believe that these things are of non-human origin." When Doug and Dave went out to a wheat field in the mid-seventies, his intention when he started making circles was to feed off all the mythology at the time saying that flying saucers left nests when they landed.
"The first circle that Doug and Dave made was meant to look like a saucer nest, it was meant to look like the landing place of a UFO. They wanted people to believe that this in no way was connected to human kind. The reason that a crop circle has power is because it's inexplicable, it's a mystery. If you claim a formation, you drain all that mystery and power away from it. People say its man made. It's not interesting. We don't want to destroy the power of our artworks. Our job is to create belief systems for other people to inhabit."

What I found, researching this unique subculture, was that the 'believer' camp was quite ready to admit that some circles were man-made, but not all. There have been plenty of cases of researchers leaving out any details, like leftover stalk-stompers, that may infringe upon the 'genuineness' of a site, and many sites that have been subjected to radiation tests proving them genuine, ended up being man-made. The real magic, the dirty joke the circle makers have played, is the belief system that has sprouted from their work. Every action is interpreted and reinterpreted by researchers until there is no objectivity. The subtle play between the circle makers and the world is eloquently described by John.

"The reason why the circles made a jump from simple circles to more complex forms and designs can be attributed to Doug and Dave again. They were really keen for people to believe in the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, and there was a meteorologist who became involved in researching crop circles. He became convinced that they were being caused by a whirlwind, that they were natural formations. For Doug and Dave, this was terrible, because it was completely against their whole grand plan for the circles. What they did, to foil Terrence Meaden's theory, was to add more complex elements to the circles. They started off having a simple circle with a ring around it, in an attempt to undermine Terrence's hypothesis. What he did, then, was to expand his theory to incorporate the ring. Eventually, Doug and Dave decided that they needed to make a real jump in the geometry of the formations to completely quash Meaden's theory. That's when you started getting the pictograms and the insectograms, side bars, avenues, multiple circles. That jump in complexity was completely because of Terrence Meaden's research, and Doug and Dave's need to keep the circles outside of rational explanation. It's really interesting; there has always been a really symbiotic relationship between the people who research the circles, and the people, like myself, who create them. We very much need each other. Without the believers, then the whole phenomenon collapses in on itself. The reason that we continue to make circles is not particularly because we are into pattern-making, I think the actual designs themselves, to a certain extent are actually irrelevant. They just act as a catalyst for something else. For us, the something else that keeps us going is all of the stories, the myths and the folklore that then build up around the circles we have created. Without the believers and the researchers, it's just flattened wheat, or rural graffiti."

So are we alone? Does it really matter, if a few humans can inspire so many through as simple an act as bending a few plant stalks on a warm English evening? When Doug and Dave discovered other people were making circles in Wiltshire, they decided to make a formation there too. The next morning, the words 'WE ARE NOT ALONE' were carved into a Wiltshire wheat crop, a message from the original circle makers to the next generation, and a message to everyone, if they believe.