The film’s audience is left to wonder how these complex and often hauntingly similar patterns could possibly crop up in such far-flung places all at once. How to explain this phenomenon, which has been documented many times over the last century?
It’s a question that has riveted Americans since long before “Signs” hit Main Street. The popular new flick may star Mel Gibson and boast the most skilled director of spooky cinema since Hitchcock, but its $150 million gross after just three weeks in theaters is at least partially due to the fact that no one quite knows what to make of crop circles, the eerie leitmotif at the heart of the movie.
Colin Andrews, the scientific consultant on the film and the author of the first book exploring these matters (“Circular Evidence,” first published in 1989), spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Suzanne Smalley about the history and science behind these real-life phenomenon. The 56-year-old worked as an electrical engineer for the British government until he started investigating crop circles nearly 20 years ago.
NEWSWEEK: How did you first become interested in crop circles?
Colin Andrews: I was driving through the British countryside close to Stonehenge in July of 1983. I glanced to my left, looked down onto a golden wheat field–and saw five circles perfectly cut into the wheat. It was a 75-foot circle, with four smaller circles positioned like five dots on a die. It formed a Celtic cross.
Did you get a closer look?
It took me 20 minutes walking through rough terrain to get to it. I walked back out and left tracks. That’s important because there were no other tracks. I reached a small circle, and the plants were rustling. Plants naturally want to be in the upright position, and yet they were jostling to try and pop back up as if they’d just been creased into position. There was a beauty to it, a symmetry that was most impressive. It looked too perfect and too large for what I had in mind as possibly a hoax. I know now a lot of [crop circles] are man-made. But nothing was cut or damaged. They were just bent over. I was looking for where people could have stood to make it. There was nothing. No compression to soil, no damage to plants.
What is the history of crop circles? How widespread is the phenomenon?
The earliest I’ve heard about were in 1923, 1924 and 1925. The elderly father of the farmer harvesting the field that I saw that day has a diary that shows he saw them back then [in the 1920s] … I’ve witnessed 11 in the Australian outback, I’ve seen them in Japan in the rice-paddy fields. In North Africa, we have a couple of reports. There are hot spots in Australia, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, the Netherlands, Germany, Ontario and India. There are many others, but these are the hot spots.
Where have most of them been found? Any trends?
The biggest glut of activity comes within a 40-mile radius of Stonehenge. We don’t know why. The correlations and data tell us that worldwide, most crop circles appear close to water and in southern England the bedrock is chalk … that’s fossilized sealife. That is a correlation that fits, because paddy fields in Japan sit on water and Indian burial grounds in New York state and Ohio sit on water. Another common denominator is fields that are built on bedrock containing large amounts of water. And another common thread is designs being found near circular archaeological sites that are often ancient burial grounds.
Tell us what scientists have found. Are the plants that make up the crop circles different from the plants that are untouched?
A U.S. biophysicist named W.C. Levengood has peer-reviewed his findings on crop circles. [He found] that the plants inside the real crop circles are changed at the cellular level. Their cell pit walls are fractured. That shows there is a change at the cellular level that causes the cells to split. You really cannot do it by jumping up and down on a plant. The plant decides to do it itself.
Have the crop-circle patterns changed over time?
The patterns have evolved. Since when I first started in the ’80s, they have gotten much more sophisticated. It’s like a learning process that’s still happening. We now, 10 years later, have many more patterns with much more intensity. We’re part way through the alphabet. The intelligence–the mind at work here–knows what it’s doing. Our thinking is that whatever’s creating crop circles has in its possession the total plan. There is an eerie side of this to me, and I’m hard to scare. I used to be a firefighter.
You had a strange occurrence in your home. Talk about that.
The police in Hampshire, England, were called to my home every night for several weeks after I’d gathered a stone from a depression in one of these crop carvings. I took that stone and put it into a [home] office where all the computers were, computers that had the largest database in the world on crop circles. I had a sensor alarm in the office, an alarm for my driveway and an alarm for my house. One night, the alarm was activated … The sensor had sensed heat and something moving across the room where I had the stone. That very night, every clock in my home stopped at the same time: 4:15 a.m. Even the battery-operated clocks stopped … I am totally convinced there is something totally eerie surrounding this phenomenon.
Why don’t you believe that crop circles are the work of pranksters?
We have 2,500 [crop circles] fully documented in detail. There are about 10,500 that we know existed from photo reports. I would say approximately 20 percent have no sign of a human hand. It’s simple detective work. We have engaged private agencies to look at this, too. We use money from private agencies. [Philanthropist] Laurance Rockefeller substantially funded me to look into this because he believes we need to separate the real thing from hoaxes.
There was one amazing incident near MIT, right?
Outside of MIT, circles were found seven years ago on a very thinly frozen Charles River. It was less than a 16th of an inch thick, and it wouldn’t have held a child’s weight. People could not possibly have executed it because they could not have stood on the ice. The pattern was acres and acres of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Has anyone ever recorded a crop circle while it was being formed?
We have some film … It’s controversial and we’re still checking it out. But the film allegedly was taken by a man on a hilltop in southern England. On the film, small balls of light move across a field at great speed, rotate in an arc and while rotating over a very large area several hundreds of feet across. You can see plants underneath begin to move. The balls of light are 60 feet above. A pattern of a snowflake is then formed in less than 10 seconds.
And that’s consistent with other eyewitnesses you’ve interviewed over the years, right?
All 50 people I’ve interviewed who say they’ve seen [crop circles] form, all say they form in about 10 seconds. That is exactly what we have on film here … We have detective agencies investigating the individual who filmed it, his background, his equipment. Both scientists and film experts are studying the tape to see if it is legitimate.
Bottom line, do you believe these crop circles were put here?
We don’t know yet whether crop circles are created by extraterrestrials. We do know these bright moving sphere lights have been witnessed. What’s in those spheres we don’t know. The furthest I can go is to say that crop circles are created by a mind. This is not random. There is a purpose. There is something real here.
