The Science of Crop Circles: 198

Something Has Flattened the WheatHuman beings have always looked at unexplained marks and assumed somebody was trying to tell them something. A scratch on a cave wall becomes a message from the ancestors. A strange light in the sky becomes a spacecraft. A mysterious stain on the kitchen ceiling becomes either a plumbing emergency or the face of a religious figure, depending on how expensive the plumber sounds. Crop circles belong to this grand human tradition of encountering something unusual and immediately promoting it into a cosmic announcement.They are enormous, precise and frequently beautiful. They appear in fields where no artwork existed the evening before, sometimes containing circles, spirals, mathematical relationships, fractals, astronomical references and shapes that appear three-dimensional when photographed from the air. The earliest modern formations were comparatively simple. Later ones became so complicated that they seemed to be evolving before our eyes. It was as though someone began with the letter O, discovered geometry and eventually decided to submit a doctoral dissertation by flattening forty acres of wheat.