Meaning of Crop Circles
May Lay Beyond Our Wits

If this mystery is ever solved, years from now, will we hit our foreheads and say, “how come I didn’t see this coming?”
Since the 1970s, crop circles, those gigantic, increasingly elaborated drawings better visualized from above that have been appearing overnight on corn, wheat, barley and rapeseed fields all over the world, have puzzled, mystified and challenged everyone and their loony uncles.
Attempts to debunk them failed miserably. From the pure naive, such as the two Britons who claimed authorship in the 1990s, and couldn’t reproduce their attempt under scrutiny, to the cutting edge, as the MIT grads who tried to recreate one and barely managed to draw a less than perfect circle, one can only expect more of the same.
Equally debunked was the UFO connection, or the natural occurrence explanation, or even the “man in black” conspiracy theory. If this is just a big hoax, it’s still clever enough to be always a few steps ahead of anyone’s powers of deduction or investigative talents. It seems to rather be something else entirely.
ILLUSION & BELIEF
And something else indeed is its other side, the mysticism that pops up as fast as the drawings themselves. The few cults that mystically worship the phenomenon lay their gospel on the belief that there’s a divine inspiration behind it, a real and all too powerful intelligence dictating messages through what’s now far from just circular drawings.
Not that there isn’t meaning that can arguably be read on such drawings. Astrophysicist Mike Reed, for example, saw on the Barbouri Castle circle, which appeared in 2008, an accurate depiction of the number Pi. And researcher Lucy Pringle identified the drawing that appeared last May near Malborough with the Leonhard Euler’s complex theorem.
As another layer of this fascinating puzzle is the fact that, out of the ten thousand reported and documented cases, 90% are located in England, as those two mentioned above. No one knows why.
But for whatever reason they exist, or whether we’ll ever find out how or why, what really is palpable reality is the sheer beauty and magnitude of the crop circle formations. Just their scale, esthetic perfection and abstract conceptualization are more than enough to induce awe, not exactly the urge to knee down and pray.
ELUSIVE PROOF
They share a lot with the famous pre-historicground drawings on the arid desert of the Nazca Valley in Peru. Or the Stonehenge monument, or the Sphinx of Giza, none of which easily traceable to any particular civilization. Except that the crop circles are happening now. One wonders, then, whether people in the future will identify them with our own civilization.
We either find a link soon between these mysterious formations and us, or they’re destined to become witnesses to our own accession and demise, whichever comes first. Exactly like those ancient monuments that even now, thousands of years later, we can’t precisely determine their origin and builders.