From
dona@bilver.uucp Tue Jun 18 20:32:01 1991
From: dona@bilver.uucp (Don
Allen)
Newsgroups:
alt.alien.visitors,alt.paranormal,alt.conspiracy,sci.skeptic,talk.religion.newage,misc.headlines,misc.misc
Subject:
CROP CIRCLES: Michael Chorost MUFON Symposium Paper
Keywords: Follow-ups
to alt.alien.visitors
Date: 17 Jun 91 19:14:41 GMT
Organization: W.
J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This
information is presented for your persusal and is a continuation
of my
policy of informing the public what is currently available. As
usual my *disclaimer* is simply to
present the data and let you form
your own opinion(s). Please feel free to agree,disagree,discuss
or
ponder :-)
As I do not have a great amount of time available to pursue
follow-ups
exclusively, comments to me should be directed to
dona@bilver.uucp
in mail.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The
following text comes from the MUFONET BBS (1-901-785-4943):
----Begin
Included Text ---------------------------------------------
Thesis for a Pre-Paradigm Science:
Cereology
Michael Chorost
Written March 1991; published July 1991
1. Cereology as a Pre-Paradigm Science
2.
Non-Human Intelligence?
3. The Problem with
"Intelligence"
4. A Guess: Are the Crop Circles
A Symbol System?
5. About Unconvincing Guesses
6.
The Future Looks Back on the Present: A Hopeful Guess
Appendix: Colin Andrews' Catalog of Formations, with
Annotations by
Michael
Chorost (not included in electronic version)
I'm writing this paper in March 1991,
well before the start of the
next crop circles season. I anticipate that by July, there will be new
developments I will want to talk about, instead of reading a paper
written
months before. Thus I
have not designed this paper to be read aloud.
However, since it is oriented toward grounding cereology as a
theoretical
discipline, I am likely to presume many of its points in my
talk. I will be
happy to
entertain questions about it in Chicago.
1. Cereology as a Pre-Paradigm Science
In this first of six sections, I want to
talk about cereology as a
discipline, and acquaint readers with some of
its complexities and prob-
lems.
In the remaining sections, I will explore one particular problem in
detail: are the circles a language?
And if so, how might we figure it out?
The crop circles phenomenon is much more
complex than it appears
at first glance, so it follows that cereology,
the study of the phenomenon,
needs to think ways which will encompass
that complexity. So it is impor-
tant
to establish right off that the phenomenon has aspects which make
naive
"the aliens have started talking to us" theories difficult to
uphold.
The evidence leads in
contradictory directions. For example,
researchers
(primarily meteorologists) have gathered eyewitness reports
of circles from
as far back as 1918, and have found written texts
describing what may be
crop circles from as far back as 1590. One 17th-century text describes
an
event in 1633, where a school curate saw, while walking at night in a
Wiltshire
field, "innumerable quantitie of pigmies or very small people
dancing
rounde and rounde, and singing and making all manner of small
odd
noyses." He heard "a sorte of
quick humming noyse all the time" and
"when the sun rose he
found himself exactly in the midst of one of these
faery
dances."1 Such "quick humming
noyses" have been heard in
present-day crop circles,2 and have been
captured on tape by the BBC
and other observers. The curate's story seems to fit, because
modern
crop circles are believed to form very rapidly, as this one
apparently did,
and the "pigmies...dancing rounde" could have
been a 17th-century
observer's way of interpreting a spinning, possibly
glowing force field.
Another text, authored by Robert Plott in
1686, discusses an appar-
ently similar event in 1590 and theorizes that
such artifacts are made by
lightning.
An illustration theorizes that cone-shaped "lightning strikes"
are responsible for the rings and, astonishingly, rings containing
squares.
David J. Reynolds notes
that Plott describes "'imperfect segments', rings
within rings,
squares (?!), 'Semicircles, Quadrants and Sextants' being
formed by
combinations of multiple strokes, differing angles of descent
and
variations in lightning strength across a stroke" (p. 348, italics in
originals.)3 Unfortunately, Plott
does not give enough information to make
it clear whether he is observing
"fairy rings", which are fungal infections
in the soil which
blight plants in slowly spreading circular areas, or crop
circles. In fact, much of his discussion points away
from crop circles.
Not once does
he mention that the plants are flattened in spiral patterns,
nor does he talk
about the intricate braiding often seen in crop circles.
And when he digs under one formation,
he discovers that the soil "was
much looser and dryer than ordinary,
and the parts interspersed with a
white hoar or vinew much like that in
mouldy bread, of a musty rancid
smell."4 This is a finding entirely consistent with fairy rings. And yet,
as Reynolds notes, Plott is
quite explicit about the existence of non-circu-
lar formations like
quadrants and hollow squares, going so far as to
provide diagrams of
them. To my knowledge, there is no such
thing as a
fairy square. Thus we
cannot eliminate the possibility that Plott saw what
we think of as crop
circles. Of course, it's also possible
that he saw
something which was neither fairy rings nor crop circles, but
something
else altogether.
Plott's discussion anticipates parts of
the modern debate with
remarkable fidelity. He devotes considerable attention to rumors of pos-
sessed
satanic dancers, but ultimately concludes that such "hoaxes" could
only account for a particular subset of the phenomenon: "If I must
needs
allow [dancers] to cause some few of these Rings, I must also
restrain
them to those of the first kind, that are bare at many places
like a path-
way; for to both the others more natural causes may be
probably as-
signed" (14.) It
appears that Plott anticipated the meteorological theory
by roughly 300
years.
These observations have to make any
alien-intelligence theorist stop
and think. Plott talks about events which happened in 1590. The
curate's anomalous sighting
happened a decade after the publication of
Shakespeare's First
Folio. If they are true crop circles,
and if they're by
aliens who have been trying to get our attention for
four centuries, there
is at least one species in the galaxy which is
remarkably dumb (and it's
not necessarily us.) The finders of these texts subscribe to the meteoro-
logical
theory, so they interpret the reports as evidence of a naturally
occurring
plasma-vortex phenomenon. The reader
may not accept that
theory, but whatever he or she does accept has to
take these astonishing
writings into account.
The
17th-century texts are not the only example of fractious data.
For every eyewitness report of a
glowing object or alien spacecraft
making a crop circle at night, there
is another eyewitness report of a
violent wind which flattens out a
circle in broad daylight.5 And there
are
now numerous articles claiming that the phenomenon is generated by
"earth energies" which determine the location and shape of each
crop
circle. The theory relies on
dowsing results. Nonsense? Possibly; but
Terence Meaden, the
arch-enemy of intelligence-oriented theories, has
begun using dowsing
himself, theorizing that "the metal-rod movement of
the dowser may
be related to a reaction to the minor changes in the local
magnetic field
of the soil induced by the plasma vortices and their fast-
spinning
fields."6 Whatever the validity of
such claims (and they need to
be tested!), they add further complications
to cereology.
I hope these examples have served to shred the belief that all
the
evidence points in one direction.
Hoax theorists point to the Bratton
hoax, an embarrassing but
quickly detected hoax perpetuated on one of
1990's surveillance groups;
alien-intelligence theorists point to eyewitness
reports and the humming
noises; vortex theorists point to other eyewit-
ness reports, and the
humming noises; earth-energy theorists point to
dowsing results, and the
humming noises; and everyone points to every-
one else as terrible
examples of interpretation of data.
So we have a
complex situation. That's nothing new;
it's life. But
there is an
illuminating way to describe the kind of complexity that reigns
now. I borrow from Thomas Kuhn's well-known work
The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions7 in suggesting that cereology is
a pre-paradigm
science. Kuhn
defines a "paradigm" as an "implicit body of intertwined
theoretical
and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and
criticism"
(17). More briefly, a paradigm is a way
of thinking which
unifies a scientific discipline. So far, that's exactly what cereology
lacks.
It consists of a mass of
disparate observations and a few theories, none
of which explain very
much. The absence of a paradigm is
beautifully
illustrated by two very different interpretations of what may
be an eye-
witness report of a quintuplet formation being made. On July 13, 1988,
according to
Circular Evidence, a woman saw "a large, golden, disc-shaped
object
within [a] cloud" which emitted "a bright white parallel beam...from
the bottom of the disc at an angle of roughly 65o [which] shone across
the sky towards Silbury Hill" (p. 115.) Delgado and Andrews imply that
an alien spacecraft used an
energy beam to inscribe the formation.
Terence Meaden, on the other hand, writes, "On 13th July
1988, a lady
was eyewitness to a hollow pencil-shaped tube (not a beam)
of light which
reached from cloud to ground for an observed period of a
couple of
minutes. A huge volume
of the cloud, which was at 4000 feet, appeared
electrified."8 One event, one witness; two interpreters,
two "facts"; no
paradigm.
So how are cereologists to conduct
pre-paradigm science? Kuhn
writes,
"In the absences of a paradigm or some candidate for a paradigm,
all
of the facts that could possibly pertain...are likely to seem equally
relevant. As a result, fact-gathering is a far more
nearly random activity
than the one that subsequent scientific
development makes familiar." (15)
This accurately describes how matters stand as of this
writing. The
sensible thing to do
is to repeat history, i.e. gather as many observations
as possible,
omnivorously, excluding nothing. There
should be routine
data collection with IR cameras, geiger counters,
magnetometers, plant DNA
assays, weather stations, and so on. Good photos and accurate measure-
ments
need to be taken; even dowsing results and unusual physical sensa-
tions should
be assiduously recorded. And everything
should be pub-
lished. Some sets
of observations may not be deemed relevant in the
future--that is the
risk of pre-paradigm science--but we owe it to future
researchers and
historians to bequeath them as rich a storehouse of data
as we can.
We could be doing better on this score. As of this writing, meas-
urements and
positional data of both English and North American forma-
tions are both
scarce and of uneven quality.
Instrumental experiments
are rarely performed. In addition, poor organization and political
battles
impede the release of what data does exist. Michael Green is sadly right
when he
notes that "inordinate professional jealousy and commercial rival-
ry...has
unfortunately marked the study of the subject to date, and has
led to a
hoarding of essential information."9
For example, the meteorolo-
gists are sitting on their data, partly
because they're unwilling to let
their opponents have it. The alien-intelligence theorists are also
sitting
on their data, partly because they feel reluctant to give away
the product
of many hours of hard work.
Neither concern is justified.
Researchers
are responsible only for the quality of their data,
not for what others do
with it.
It seems to me that anybody who thinks his data will help his
opponents
more than it will help him is in an unenviable position, as far
as his
theory is concerned. And to sit on data
is effectively to waste the
work that went into its collection. The CCCS (Centre for Crop Circle
Studies)
is trying to overcome these problems, and we should wish them
the best of
luck. Steady but polite pressure from
Americans may help,
too.
Two things are necessary, over and above performing the research:
a
smoothly functioning network funneling data toward publication, and the
attitude
that information should be shared with the community to promote
further
research. Secrecy and mercantile
considerations serve only to
gum up the works, especially at this fragile
stage. It would be best if
history
could record that information was freely and generously shared in
these
difficult early days. A 1991 report by
Chris Rutkowski and other
members of the NAICCR (North American Institute
for Crop Circles Re-
search) beautifully exemplifies this attitude. It lists 46 cases of ground
markings
in 1990, about thirty of which appear to be English-style crop
circles. It provides formation types, lay rotations,
dates, sizes, and
approximate locations.
(I am now writing a review of it, which I anticipate
will appear
in the May 1991 issue of the Mufon UFO Journal.) I hope
other cereologists will consider its example
well.
After obtaining data, cereologists will
just have to theorize as
carefully and responsibly as they can, and dare
to be wrong. Francis
Bacon
writes, "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confu-
sion."10 This maxim strikes me with particular force
when I contemplate
the meteorologists' corpus of research. I think its basic thesis is in
error,
yet even the few the scraps of data the meteorologists publish are
more
useful than the typically haphazard observations offered by people
whom I
think are closer to the mark. Organized
error can be re-organ-
ized into truth.
2.
Non-Human Intelligence?
2001: A Space Odyssey seems less science-fictional than it did in
1968,
now that artificial constructions of an anomalous nature are appear-
ing
repeatedly around the world. Most of
the major researchers in cere-
ology are convinced that human beings are
not making them, because they
cannot figure out what human device,
however sophisticated, could pro-
duce all of the observed effects and
remain undetected for so long. I am
inclined to agree with them, though I would add that it is always risky
to
underestimate the ingenuity of our own species. I suspect that the
possibility of a
fabulously intricate hoax, however slight, keeps a lot of
cereologists
awake at nights. Perhaps worrying about
the hoax theory is
one way of worrying about the implications of the
circles not being hoax-
es.
Some researchers, primarily the
meteorologists, believe that the
circles are produced by a natural
phenomenon that we have only now
begun to notice. Many people find this unconvincing. Nature can indeed
produce fabulously
intricate structures, like us, but I have never seen it
do so both
overnight and on such a vast scale. And
I find it difficult to
ascribe the rapidly increasing complexity of the
shapes to natural forces,
which typically change slowly when they change
at all.
By elimination,
I have become sympathetic to non-human intelligence
theories--as I
suspect many of my readers will be also.
There is some
slight anecdotal evidence for such theories;
NAICCR's report on ground
markings notes, for instance, that 4 of its 46
listed cases have UFO sight-
ings associated with them. Anecdotal evidence is notoriously difficult
to
use, however, so I will not appeal to it in my analysis.
Let us suppose--it is still more or less an outright
guess--that the
crop circles are the products of a non-human
intelligence, and explore the
implications of that thesis. It will be fun to do so, if nothing
else. The
rest of this essay will
be devoted to that undertaking.
It is possible, as I have remarked
elsewhere,11 that the formations
are the visible side-effect of some
deliberately directed physical process,
the way tire tracks and
footprints are. At present, there is
virtually
nothing that can be said about this important theory. Discussion only
becomes possible when
one hypothesizes that the formations are supposed
to mean something,
either to their creators or to ourselves.
And it is to
this possibility that I will devote most of my attention.
If we want to try to decode the circles, we are faced with
gigantic
problems at the very outset.
Typically, when we receive messages from
human intelligences, we
have some amount of shared background to draw
upon in decoding them. Shared language is obviously the most useful
background; but if that is absent, there are usually others, such as
shared physical environment, shared needs, shared knowledge of history,
shared interests, shared physiologies.
Not knowing Arabic, I can still
guess that an Arab with me in a
souk is hungry if he looks at me and
mimics the act of eating.
But we may share nothing with an alien intelligence. At any rate,
we can presume
nothing.12 We cannot presume similar
sensory equipment
or physical needs; we cannot presume similar
evolutionary conditions; we
cannot even presume corporeal bodies or a
sense of self. I could go on
and
on about the radical uncertainty involved.
To cut a long discussion
short, it comes down to this: we must
guess, just plain guess, that they
are like us in some ways, and proceed
accordingly. In writing about
decoding
a hypothetical alien message, Lewis White Beck argues that "we
must
guess that it is a message, guess what it says, and then try to see
if
the signal can convey that message."13
For example, we could guess
that the dimensions of the circles
encode mathematical relationships such
as pi and e, and search to see if
such numbers can be found in a sys-
tematic way. Or we could guess that certain logical relationships are
being
implied, and search for the most basic ones, such as transitivity
and
hierarchy. Or it could be posited that
the spatial locations of the
circles relative to each other are related
to spatial distances elsewhere,
such as between stars. The chances of picking the wrong message are
high, but Bacon's dictum about truth still applies.
3. The
Problem with "Intelligence"
I will dare to be wrong later in this essay, but I want to
make a
remark about "intelligence" first. The debate over the crop circles can
all
too easily polarize into two camps, intelligent versus non-intelligent
causation. But the entire debate could be off the
mark. The
phenomenon's cause may
not be "blind nature", but it may not be intelli-
gence the way
we know it, either. If it's aliens,
they might be far smart-
er than us in some ways, but dumb as bricks in
others. Or suppose the
circlemaker
is Gaia--an intelligence resulting from complex interactions in
the
biosphere of the planet? Or, the
combined psychic interactions of the
human race? Or a natural phenomenon which is being
manipulated by
such psychic interactions? Farfetched ideas, to be sure, but so is the
phenomenon. As my colleague Dennis Stacy has repeatedly
warned me in
correspondence, thinking along rigid "p or not-p"
lines can overlook
fruitful areas of inquiry. An arrow flying in a straight line can still miss
the
target.
Also, it is well to remember that all of
the words denoting "intelli-
gent beings" in English were
designed to refer to exactly one species:
Homo sapiens of Earth. All English words denoting "intelligent
non-human
beings" are negatives: "alien" is rooted in the
Sanskrit antara, which
means merely "other", and
"extra-terrestrial" means "not from Earth." In
terms of thinking about alien
intelligence, our language is as limited as
the counting system which
calls all quantities above five "many."
However, I will guess an intelligence not altogether different from
ours, simply because it is the easiest for us to think about. It is as
reasonable a place to start
as any.
Of course, the problem of decoding would
still be daunting. To
manage it,
we can make more guesses: perhaps the circlemakers have
already observed
us and know something about us. They
may have
guessed that our minds will leap to certain guesses, and
attempted to play
to our predilections.
(Such double-guessing could someday tell us quite a
bit about
them.) As Cipher A. Deavours points
out, aliens ought to have
some interest in developing codes designed to
reveal rather than conceal
information.14 Decoding could be orders of magnitude easier if the cir-
clemakers
have taken our ways of decoding into account.
We may be
seeing our humanness being filtered through alien
consciousness and
played back at us.
Of course, the
simplest way of communicating with us would have
been to use our own
symbols, or to use something readily comprehensible
to us, like groups of
circles corresponding to the prime numbers.
The
fact that we have not readily understood the circles suggests
a number of
possibilities: we have not really tried yet; there is no
message; there is a
message, but one whose content is not directed at us;
the entities are so
profoundly different from us that they cannot figure
out what we would
find easily accessible; they have more subtle motives
than straightforward
communication; they have decided to dispense with
easy formalities and
want us to think hard, perhaps with the implied lure
that the reward will
be worth the effort. I find the first the most preferable, since so little
has
been done by way of attempts at decoding.
In any case, it's reason-
able to guess that something complex and
multileveled is either happening
or being communicated.
4. A Guess: Are
the Crop Circles A Symbol System?
All this said, I will now risk being wrong in a major
way. I will
argue that we are
indeed looking at a symbol system. The
shapes seem to
have a certain "symbolicity" (see Colin Andrews'
catalog, Appendix I.) I
don't necessarily mean that they are a phonetic
alphabet like English; I
mean something more like pictorial codes or
schematics. However, I shall
have
to be rather vague about what I mean by the word "symbol." The
most specific definition I can
offer is "a mark which means something to a
group of people, by
convention." For there can be many
different kinds
of symbols. A
symbol can be a mark with exactly one referent; for exam-
ple, there is a
certain schematic which signifies exactly one kind of tran-
sistor. Or it can be a mark amenable to different
interpretations, like the
color red in the Soviet flag (it means
revolutionary political possibilities
to some, raw tyranny to
others.) Or it can be a mark which
functions in
a language, meaning little in itself but contributing to a
total meaning.
For example, the
physical mark "key" contributes in a certain way to the
sentence
"Where are my car keys?" and in a different way to "The key to
the treasure is there." It
seems to me that the circles could be symbols
in any of these ways (and
there are many more possible ways.) I
tend to
gravitate toward the third, language-oriented kind of
symbolicity, but I
don't wish to exclude the others. My intention is to spark a rich debate
by opening up possibilities, not to truncate debate by closing them
off.
To a lot of people, the formations
"feel" like a symbol system.
And
they do have broad structural elements in common with human
symbol
systems (which, it must be pointed out, may not be much of a basis
for
comparison.) Like many human
symbol systems, they can be broken down
into certain recurring basic
shapes--the circle the line, the rectangle, the
ring, the curved arc, and
so on. These elements are their
"strokes." If
the
formations are complex, they are complex by the accumulation of pre-
existing
elements, not the creation of new elements (though each summer
does bring
some new elements.)
Like human symbol systems, the crop
circles present enough variety
to suggest the possibility of reference to
a large number of objects or
ideas.
If we saw only three formations repeated over and over, we would
probably
be more inclined to think them artistic or cultural icons, or
natural
artifacts, rather than members of a linguistic or representational
system.
Like human symbols, their variety remains within limits; of
1990's
numerous single and double dumbbells, no two are alike, but all
are
recognizably part of a class.
It's a bit like the way the English letters
b,d,p,q,c, and o form
a recognizable class. The Egyptian
hieroglyph for
"bird" would stick out and look very strange in
that class, and indeed it
would not belong anywhere in the alphabet. As would the letter "b" look
very odd, if claimed to be a Chinese ideogram.
The
"variety within limits" argument is important for another rea-
son. The appearance of "scrolls",
rectangles, and triangles suggests that
there is no physical limitation
to the kind of shapes that can be created.
If a short rectangle can be made, so can long ones to form lines,
and the
scrolls suggest that irregular lines can be drawn
"freehand", as it were.
The fact that the formations seem to vary within boundaries seems
to
suggest a defined and ordered system.
Of course, there
are problems with the argument, such as that the
formations bear little
obvious spatial relationship to each other the way
human symbols usually
do. One is also hard-pressed to group
the weirdly
curvy "scroll" formations as belonging to the same
system as the highly
angular double-dumbbells; perhaps the scrolls really
are mistakes or
doodles. Or
perhaps the only message being conveyed is "Watch this
space, and be
here next summer." Humorists have
also suggested alien
art galleries and alien advertising. My guesses may more wrong than I
can
imagine. But for all that, I think it
is not crazy to guess that we are
looking at a symbol system, not random
squiggles.
It just may be possible to start grouping
1990's new formations into
classes.
Such attempts are highly arbitrary by their nature, conditioned
by
the viewer's predispositions (as are readings of Rorschach inkblots),
but
the attempt is worth making. It would
be interesting to see what
groupings other people make. Colin Andrews' catalog (see Appendix A)
lists 65 formation types (one is a known hoax, so I don't count it.) I can
derive the following classes
from studying Colin's catalogue:
(Numbers refer to the formation number in the catalog)
Single dumbbells (21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30,
31, 33, 36, 55)
Double-dumbbells (34, 35, 54)
Thetas (40, 41, 49, 50)
Plain circles with satellites (3, 5, 6, 17, 43, 52)
Ringed circles (10, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25,
38, 64)
Saturns (7, 8, 11, 32,
37, 46)
Rings (44)
Scrolls (45, 48, 65)
Triangles (47, 63)
Sports (unique formations, i.e. 26, 39,
53, 58, 59, 62)
To explain my nomenclature: I call the "thetas"
so because their split
central circle reminds me of the Greek letter
"O" (I imply no actual con-
nection to Greek.) The "saturns" remind me of Saturn
with its moons
(again, no connection to the planet implied, though it's
not impossible that
there be one.)
I take the name "scroll" from The Crop Circle Enigma
(which
shows pictures of them on p. 156.) I
name the "sports" so be-
cause a "sport" in biology is
a unique object.
Interestingly enough, it may be that the formation types are also
roughly
contiguous in space. The hand-drawn map
reproduced in Issue 2
of The Cereologist (p. 3) shows that all three
double-dumbbells appeared
quite close to each other, in fact within an
area five kilometers long and
two kilometers wide, just north of Alton
Barnes. At least six of the ten
single
dumbbells appeared in the Longwood Estate area, just southwest of
Winchester. The four thetas may fall in a line (it will
take much better
data to verify this.)
Two of the scrolls are quite close to each other, at
Beckhampton.
The spatial-relationships idea is being pursued vigorously by
Harvey Lunenfeld of East Northport, New York. We've been trying to
obtain positional data for as many of
the formations as possible, in order
to create a computerized
database. Harvey and his son Randy are
now
configuring sophisticated mapping software which will facilitate the
search
for spatial relationships, and also for correlations with other
types of
data. So far we've been
obtaining our positional data from thumbnail
deduction from photographs
and other available evidence. The job
will
become much easier once we gain access to satellite imagery good
enough
to show exactly where the formations are. Access to some of the English
databases
would also help greatly, of course.
Allow me to call
attention to the fact that certain elements recur in
different
contexts. The triangle's "F"
is much like the shapes jutting out
>from all three double
dumbbells. (Could it be significant
that none of the
single dumbbells have such shapes?) The other triangle's flanking shapes
are
very much like the double rectangles on many of the single dumbbells
(and,
note, none of the double dumbbells.)
One simple circle has a three-
fingered shape jutting out of it
which looks almost exactly like the one
attached to the Allington Down
(more precisely, East Kennett) double
dumbbell. Some of the single dumbbells and the theta formations have
partial
arcs as components. The saturns are a
combination of plain circles
with satellites and ringed circles. This evident combination and recombi-
nation
of elements makes it plausible to suppose that there is some form
of
"grammar" ruling their placement.
It may be
possible to work out the properties of the grammar
without understanding
the meaning of the symbols. One way to
do this is
to compare groups of symbols to each other, isolating
consistent statistical
similarities and differences. For example, if the ratios of the areas of
the
two circles in single dumbells compares in some consistent way to the
ratios of the lengths of the forks to their circles, that might indicate
a
meaningful element of language.
This particular example is mathematically
oriented, but other
strategies are feasible, too: one could compare the
spatial orientation
of the thetas to that of all of the other groups, or
compare the length
of formations to their compass orientations.
It is an
encouraging fact that cryptographers are frequently able
to decode
messages whose plaintext is written in a language they do not
know very
well. Deavours writes,
It is of interest
that codes can often be solved where
the underlying language of the plaintext is not known
for certain. One can also gain an immense knowledge of
the structure and
character of a communication without
understanding a single thought expressed therein. For
intergalactic communication, this offers much hope that
we may succeed in deciphering
what is received (203-
204.)
As evidence that meaning is not crucial to
decipherment, Deavours men-
tions that
the great French cryptanalyst,
Georges Painvain, of
World War I fame, solved many complex ciphers of the
German General Staff but possessed
so little knowledge
of
German that he was unable to translate the deci-
phered text after solution
(209).
Not knowing the
language need not impede understanding its shape and
general
characteristics. Such research could
yield one great practical
benefit down the road: upon receiving a Rosetta
Stone, we would then be
able to learn and read the language that much
more quickly, perhaps well
enough to begin using it ourselves. In the touchy and uncertain days
immediately
following alien contact, such an advantage might be very
welcome
indeed. This makes it all the more
imperative to facilitate re-
search with an effective network of data
distribution.
Figuring out what the grammar's shapes
represent (if grammar it is,
of course) will be tough, because the
formations appear to lack all social
context. There is no "Rosetta Stone" permitting them to be
compared to a
known symbol system; there are no objects helpfully put
next to them to
show what they depict or schematize; there are no
appreciative alien enti-
ties in view admiring them as art. Quite the contrary, they are placed
wordlessly
(so to speak) on this planet's largest equivalent of a blank,
lined sheet
of paper. But we should try. We can attempt to restore the
context,
or at least make one. Our guesses might
be correct.
But a
worrying philosophical issue intrudes here.
Let us say we
guess a message--a meaning--and find out that the
circles transmit it.
Can we be
sure that we have truly decoded the circles?
Perhaps not.
Humans are
infinitely resourceful at seeing patterns that are not there.
Edward R. Tufte, in his engaging book
"Envisioning Information", reprints
a picture of a rock in southern
Massachusetts which is covered with
ancient hieroglyphs.15 Next to the picture he reproduces ten
hand-drawn
sketches of the markings, made between 1680 and 1854. Not only are the
sketches strikingly
different, but different scholars have triumphantly
adduced totally
different origins for the glyphs: Scythian, Phoenician,
Runic, Viking,
and Algonquin, to name a few. Tufte
cheerfully damns this
as "scholarship of wishful thinking"
(73). I am not sure if there is any
way to solve the problem, other than asking the circlemakers what they
mean (and even that might not help as much as we think it would.) My
reaction is just to say, "Let
us see what we can guess and find, then see
which guess convinces the
most people, and deal with the philosophical
problems as they
arise."
The lack of
context is significant in another way.
It is a truism
that symbols mean something only in a social
context. If these shapes
have a
concrete and socially-based meaning to their creators, how are
they changed
by being engraved on fields on another planet?
Suppose
that the magnificent Fawley Down pictogram (a
"theta" formation) refers to
a Rigellian action which human
physiologies cannot duplicate? If we
know
nothing of Rigellian physiology, we'll never figure that out, will
we? And,
more importantly, how
does the meaning of the symbol change when it is
stamped, without context
or explanation, in a field of wheat near Winches-
ter, England? What does the symbol mean at that particular
place and
time, if anything?
Not, I feel sure, just to tell us what Rigellians do.
What would a glowing Coca-Cola
advertisement mean in a Brazilian rainfor-
est where Coke is not
available? Anything but "Buy
Coke." Perhaps it
would be
(meant as, read as) an ironic statement on the extravagance of
modern
advertising. But if a picture of that
advertisement in the rainfor-
est was reproduced as an advertisement by
Coke, the sign would again
mean "Buy Coke"--but also something
more, like "Coke is, or should be,
available literally
everywhere." Meaning is an event
with multiple layers,
most if not all of which are radically and subtly
dependent on context.
It is attractive to suppose that the
formations are a sort of logical
puzzle, like an IQ test. This would seem to make their context
internal
rather than external; the shapes would define their own
context. But this
argument is
misleading. If one was presented with
an IQ test without
knowing what it was, or being shown how to work with
the shapes pre-
sented, it would be meaningless. The very idea of the logical puzzle is
socially
constructed. The Soviet psychologist A.
R. Luria has shown that
it is almost impossible to convey the idea of the
syllogism to normally
intelligent but nonliterate people. When Russian peasants were given the
syllogistic
puzzle In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are
white. Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there
is always snow there.
What color
are the bears?, a typical response was, "I don't know. I've
seen a black bear. I've never seen any others. Each locality has its own
animals." From their point of view, it was absurd to
try to figure out the
color of bears with logic, since bear coats are
something you see, not
deduce.16
The ideas of the logical puzzle and the transitive relationship
are
evidently learned, not inherent to human intelligence. If there is a
logical pattern, it
would be nothing simple to figure out, for the first
thing we would have
to do is figure out what has to be figured out. And
that would almost certainly require the discovery of
some external context,
like an alien culture's way of thinking and
reasoning. Unless, of course,
the
circlemakers have tried to use some human mode of reasoning.
There are an enormous number of possibilities. A reading of the
circles will not come
easily. A lot will depend on the
ability to make
inspired guesses, and convince other people that they are
right. The
rest will depend on
good data, good analytical tools, and vast amounts of
hard work. But the potential payoff ought to make any
linguist salivate.
The field has
ample room for the next Chompollon.
5. About Unconvincing Guesses
Having put forward a
guess (of a sort), let me say something about
unconvincing guesses. I have seen quite a few articles purporting
to
decode individual formations to reveal some definite meaning, like
"Kha-
wah" ("life giver")17 or "This is a
dangerous place to camp."18 The
typical move in such guesses is to declare that the formation contains
letters in an ancient language or elements from an obscure symbol system,
and decode it by translating those letters/elements into English. I find
these kinds of guesses
uniformly unconvincing. If you compare
the cir-
cles to any language or symbol system, you'll score a number of
hits.
Compare them to English,
and you'll find F's, O's, C's, Q's, I's, M's, and
W's. Compare them to American traffic symbols,
and you can find resem-
blances to stoplights (i.e. three circles in a
row), dashed lines on the
road, and "no entry" signs. This second example is deliberately
ludi-
crous, but it illustrates the "Rorschach" quality of the
phenomenon: one
can see almost anything in it. Simple resemblance alone, let alone highly
approximate
resemblance, is a very shaky ground for decoding.
It is
also very common for such arguments to ignore the fact that
the supposed
"letters" and 'symbols" are stuck onto unrelated shapes,
and
otherwise distorted and garbled. It
doesn't make sense to use an
alphabet or symbol system by making it
nearly unrecognizable. Finding a
highly
resemblant set of symbols could change the whole game, but to my
knowledge,
no one has accomplished this, not even Michael Green in his
ambitious
attempt to link the circles to designs on ancient Roman and
Celtic stone
carvings.19 Green finds several
interesting similarities
between ancient carvings and modern crop
circles, but it's not enough to
establish a meaningful link, since
hundreds of formations have appeared
in the last few years, and there are
hundreds of Roman/Celtic shapes
which look nothing like any known crop
circle. More problematically, the
Roman/Celtic shapes are typically combinations of circles, so the probabili-
ty
of a few rough matches by pure chance is very high. And, of course,
even if the Celts were imitating crop
circles seen thousands of years ago,
their interpretations of them
("cosmic egg", "sun god", etc.) cannot be
known to be
the same as the intentions of the entities who generated
them. They could be completely off the mark, as
far as the circlemakers
are concerned.
The historical link would be exciting and valuable if
Green could
establish it more strongly, but it would be of little direct
assistance
in interpretative efforts.
In sum, most would-be
"decoders" look at a few formations, ignoring
all the rest;
they make no attempt to resolve diverse shapes into a sys-
tem; they fail
to consider disconfirming evidence.
Instead, they Rorschach
their theories into a small part of the
phenomenon, and find exactly what
they want to find.
Of course, no one can avoid Rorschaching
into the circles. I myself
have
read my hopes, beliefs, and professional biases into them. But one
must at least try to consider
the whole phenomenon and think about it
systematically. Error may then be productive error. Anything else is
only confusion.
6. The Future Looks Back on the Present: A
Hopeful Guess
There is
far more that could be said, but I am probably pushing
the limits of
Mufon's printing budget with a paper of this size, and the
patience of my
readers as well. I will close, then, by
offering a hopeful
look at the present from the viewpoint of the
future. Someday, there may
be a
paradigm which explains the crop circles to everybody's satisfaction.
Then it will be difficult for people
to see this strange and beautiful
phenomenon any other way. But historians will be fascinated by the
pre-
paradigm writings of this era.
To them our ways of seeing will look
untutored and naive, but also
fresh and new--the words of children
seeing things for the first
time. Despite their superior knowledge,
they
may envy us, we who have the extraordinary opportunity of first sight.
Naivete is a rare gift. Let us use it well.
Notes
(1)
R.M. Skinner, "A Seventeenth-Century Report of an Encounter with an
Ionized
Vortex?" Journal of Meteorology,
November 1990, p. 346. The
source
is John Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire (publication date not
given.)
(2) John Haddington reports
hearing and recording "a strange and beauti-
ful trilling noise"
in a circle at Bishops Canning, 1990.
See his "The
Wansdyke Watch", The Cereologist, issue 1
(Summer 1990), p. 15.
(3) David J. Reynolds, "Possibility of a
Crop Circle from 1590." Journal of
Meteorology, November 1990, pp. 347-352.
The text is Robert Plott's The
Natural History of Stafford-shire,
Oxford, 1686.
(4) Plott,
p. 15 (italics in original.) I am
grateful to Carl Carpenter for
sending me a xerox of the relevant chapter
of the book, pages 7-21.
(5) For examples of the former, see Delgado
and Andrews' Circular Evidence
(Bloomsbury Press, 1989), pp.
179-190. For examples of the latter,
see
Terence Meaden, The Circles Effect and its Mysteries (Artetech, 1989)
especially chapter 2.
(6)
Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Circles Effect
(held
at Oxford Polytechnic, June 23, 1990), p. 50.
This has been reprint-
ed as Circles From the Sky. The April 1991 issue of the Mufon UFO
Journal
contains a large bibliography which includes ordering information
for
most of the books cited in this paper.
(7) University of Chicago
Press, 1962.
(8) Proceedings, p. 39. The event is also discussed in The Circles Effect
and its
Mysteries, p. 55.
(9) Michael Green, "The Rings of Time: The
Symbolism of the Crop Circles."
In The Crop Circle Enigma (Gateway Books, 1990, ed. Ralph Noyes)
p. 139.
(10) Quoted in Kuhn, p. 18.
(11) Michael Chorost and Colin Andrews, "The
Summer 1990 Crop Circles",
Mufon UFO Journal, December 1990, pp.
3-14.
(12) Some people have tried to define what we can
presume. Gregory
Benford:
"The most extreme view one can take is to reject any category of
knowledge
of the alien, declaring them all to be inherently anthropomor-
phic or
anthropocentric, and flatly declare that the alien is fundamentally
unknowable"
(26). Benford later goes on to suggest,
though, that we may
be able to expand our categories to include alien
ways of knowing: "We
can make ourselves greater. We can ingest the alien" (27). ("Aliens and
Unknowability: A
Scientist's Perspective", in Starship, vol. 43, Winter-
Spring
1982-3, pp. 25-27.) On the other hand,
Marvin Minsky argues that
alien intelligence is likely to resemble ours,
because "every evolving intel-
ligence will eventually encounter
certain very special ideas--e.g. about
arithmetic, causal reasoning, and
economics--because these particular ideas
are very much simpler than other
ideas with similar uses" (127).
(Byte,
April 1985, pp. 127-138.)
Speculation is useful for defining the problem,
but it's rather
like Robinson Crusoe trying to do sociology.
(13) Lewis White Beck, "Extraterrestrial Intelligent
Life." In Extraterrestri-
als:
Science and Alien Intelligence, edited by Edward Regis, Jr. Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985.
(14) Cipher A. Deavours, "Extraterrestrial Communication: A
Cryptologic
Perspective", in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien
Intelligence. pp. 201-
214.
(Interestingly enough, the author's name is not a joke.)
(15)
Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information.
Graphics Press, Cheshire,
Connecticut, 1990.
(16) Luria's finding is
discussed in Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of
the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 52-53.
(17) Letter by Ernest P. Moyer, reprinted in Focus (Dec. 31,
1990), p. 16.
(18) Jon Erik Beckjord, broadside sheet, February
1991.
(19) Michael Green,
"The Rings of Time: The Symbolism of the Crop Circles."
In The
Crop Circles Enigma, Gateway Books, 1990, pp. 137-171.
About the
Author
Michael Chorost was educated at Brown and the University of
Texas at
Austin, and is now at Duke, working toward his Ph.D. in
Renaissance liter-
ature and philosophy of language. His first article on the subject, "The
Summer 1990 Crop Circles", was coauthored with Colin Andrews and was
published in December 1990's Mufon UFO Journal. He has also authored
a bibliography of the phenomenon.
The author may be contacted
at:
North American Circle
P.O. Box 61144
Durham, NC 27705-1144
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
EOF
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