Eerie Graffiti Keep Earthlings Running in Circles

Suzanne Taylor, all perky and flame-haired, was perched on a blazing white mantel of her cavernous living room. Forces of the converted were splayed at her feet. So Taylor did the only reasonable thing one could in such circumstances.

She preached.

The sermon of the day was crop circles, those seductive patterns that have been making bizarre overnight appearances in grain fields around the world.

“Nobody knows who’s making them,” Taylor said pertly but mysteriously. “And maybe that’s not even the question. It’s not who’s making them, but what are they? Why are they here?”

Crop circles, the Admiral Stockdales of the New Age, are gaining their own select following, much like the querying war hero--they’re winning the hearts and minds of a vast minority of New Agers who surround themselves with crop circle postcards, go on crop circle expeditions and think crop circle thoughts.

And on this balmy evening in a sprawling home high above Sunset, Taylor was presiding over her second crop circle salon, an evening of coffee cake, conversation and, well, you know.

“What’s happening,” continued Taylor, 58, “and something’s definitely happening, is that we’re being contacted. This is an intelligence. When one intelligence contacts another intelligence, the one making the contact is the smarter one.”

A little crop circle humor there.

Crop circle aficionados like Taylor thrill to the possibility that some being Not Of This Earth is communicating with us via strange pictographs forged from flattened wheat shafts--”graffiti of the gods,” as the phenomenon has been tagged by the press.

Taylor, an affable hostess, was pretty much the first on her block to go “ga-ga” for crop circles. When a friend’s son sent home pictures of English crop circles more than four years ago, “it knocked me out,” she says. “When we’re all of a sudden confronted with something so outside of our materialistic world, it’s like being in the presence of a god tapping you on the shoulder.”

Peter Sorensen, 50, a Santa Monica computer graphics writer, began to shed his scientific skepticism a couple of years ago when he flipped through a copy of “Circular Evidence,” a bible of crop circlers.

“I assumed they were hoaxers but very good artists. Then a couple of years later, I saw that book and thought, ‘Those are beautiful,’ ” says Sorensen, who is now obsessed. “I read that the plant stalks are bent without being broken--I prefer ‘kinked.’ I thought, ‘Holy crow, this is something else.’ Because if these guys are not lying, if they’re telling the truth, then this is not a man-made phenomenon. Period. End of story.”

Not quite.

“I think they’re man-made things that caught on like Hula Hoops or Pet Rocks and got kind of a life of their own,” says official crop circle debunker Barry Karr, of the Buffalo, N.Y.-based Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). “Like any other fad, it’ll die out eventually.”

Such party pooping doesn’t daunt serious crop circlers, whose still slender ranks seem to be increasing across the country, according to those on the circuit.

Consider George Wingfield, Taylor’s guest of honor for the evening, a former IBM engineer who has spent five years working with CSICOP’s nemesis, the Center for Crop Circle Studies, in Wiltshire, England.

Wingfield, 50, sniffs at charges that hoaxers cropped all of the more than 2,000 circles that have sprung up in England, and the American Midwest and elsewhere since 1980. And he bristles at the mention of Doug and Dave, two British artists who gleefully and sensationally summoned tabloids last year to witness their crop circle forgery. Doug and Dave claimed to be rather busily behind thousands of circles.

“They’re a couple of old liars, actually,” Wingfield harrumphs.

How then, he notes, to account for the smooth, clockwise swirls of stalks, rather than the rough furrows created by Doug and Dave’s planks and rollers? How to explain the high temperatures recorded shortly after circles form?

Wingfield told the salon-goers a tale of four of his crop circle compatriots--known as “cereologists,” after Ceres, the Roman goddess of vegetation. They were on circle alert, stalking a field all night in the hope of witnessing one being formed.

Around 3:30 a.m., they all fell asleep for an hour. “Suddenly one of them woke up, and he realized there was a huge pictogram just yards from them. He went into it, and he had a strange compulsion to take his shoes off. He said it felt as if he had a sunburn on his soles.”

The earthbound have suggested all sorts of possible explanations for the circles--one of the tastiest tags the culprits as helicopters that fly upside-down. Even CSICOP made short work of that one in its house organ, Skeptical Inquirer: “. . . Such antics would produce, not swirled circles, but crashed ‘copters. . . .”

A former Canadian physics professor, Terry Meaden, came up with another science-friendly possibility--that the circles were formed by an electrically charged, spinning wind that he dubbed the “plasma vortex phenomenon.”

But those explanations are bereft of the sheer romance that lures large bands of summer tourists to Wiltshire to sit in the circles and just be.

“I think it’s the biggest mystery on the planet,” says Sorensen, who shot 35 hours of crop circle videotape last summer. “Flying saucers are ephemeral. You can’t walk into one, sit down and think about it.”

In fact, Texas journalist Dennis Stacy griped to Taylor in a letter that the circles were positively swarming with pilgrims and T-shirt vendors:

“I expect a definite deterioration as more and more tourists and cereologists arrive on their doorstep and do even more damage than the original Crop Circle did, trespassing and trampling crop almost at will. If this were going on in America, no doubt several ‘investigators’ would already have had their backsides peppered with birdshot!”

On a less prosaic plane, people who have visited the circles sometimes report a sense of elation, headaches and an odd humming sound. Wingfield heard a high-pitched noise one night when he sat in a circle with five other cereologists.

“This noise approached us. It was extremely intense and penetrating for the best part of an hour, and it was really truly extraordinary. It behaved like a living thing, as though it were aware of us.

“I said, ‘Will you make us a crop circle?’ Later on when it got light, to my amazement, there was a fresh crop circle 300 or 400 yards away.”

Crop circlers love the idea of a little chitchat with the cosmos. The circles, they say, borrow from ancient and even Jungian symbols of consciousness, and since they’re trying to tell us something, we ought to be polite enough to listen.

Says Sorensen: “Some gentle mind is trying to, like a carrot, gently lead us in the right direction. And once you realize the depth of this mystery, slowly but surely everyone who realizes what’s going on is telling other people. You know what happens when you double a penny and double those pennies, pretty soon you have all the money in the world.”