It's a shocking stat about crop circles, those mysterious patterns of transformed foliage that appear all over the world: About 80% of them are found within a 50-mile radius of British monument Stonehenge. This has to indicate something, but what?
We're coming to the end of another summer, and it was a banner season again for crop circles,. A couple of them have been found about our home region of Western New York.
Crop circles have appeared in fields of grass or grain in most parts of the world. They’ve come to wide attention only in recent decades, but some evidence suggest they’ve long been with us. Some are hoaxed, of course, but theorists (called “cereologists”) regard the rest as misunderstood natural effects or UFO touchdowns. In England, where they’re frequent and elaborate, there’s even a nickname (“croppies”) for the devotees. In the States where these things are simple and scarce, a 1998 study knew of only 50 reports. As of 2000, we had four confirmed in upstate New York, one in Orleans County’s Medina.
In July 1991, a farmer working in field spotted a dark circular space of flattened stalks as if the hand of providence had stamped it with a gigantic beer-bottle. In the week that followed there were many writeups, and thousands of sightseers came to the Roberts’ family farm at the corner of Salt Works and Maple Ridge roads.
“It was a finely-woven fan-like pattern,” reported Daryl Hardes, chairman of the Ultimate Frontiers Organization (UFO), who studied the circle before the mobs got to it. “Layers of grain laid down in different directions, several deep, without breaking the stalks. They looked like they had grown with a 90-degree bend to lie on the ground. Soil taken from it tested 100% sterile, while it was normal outside the circle. That couldn’t have been done with ropes and boards.” Some massive radiating force may have been at work. The original circle was a visible discoloration until the snow fell.
So often the Old World crop circles form near ancient monuments. By the Medina circle is the three and a half acre “Neuter Fort,” named for WNY’s pre-Iroquoian nation. Only half a mile from here is a large pit in which “the bones of many hundreds have been deposited.”
About a third of the world’s crop circles come with UFO reports. The night before the Medina circle was found a neighbor saw strange lights in the air, and across the road from it lived someone who’d seen a UFO at another time. The Roberts family seem to have heard the theories, and felt sure that no UFO made their circle. “The wheat wouldn’t have grown back like it did.” Maybe.
I don't know what crop circles are - except for the ones that are faked. Author and dowser Sig Lonegren has studied them and concluded that most of them do not represent "sacred space." Sig found the ones he looked at rather creepy. I think of them myself - those that aren't faked - as potential messages from the Gaia-mind, images that we ought to be interpreting.