Do Crop Circles Matter?

Debunking the mainstream debunkers

This circle appeared in Conholt, England, on May 22.

The New York Times just ran one of its occasional articles debunking crop circles, “Crop Circles Were Made by Supernatural Forces. Named Doug and Dave” (June 12), even though the phenomenon has been dormant for quite a while. These days, just a handful of patterns show up in the fields of Southern England every summer. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (when I investigated it), dozens upon dozens of crop circles would appear each season.

In The Times, Peter Wilson writes: “Three decades after the height of the crop circle craze, the phenomenon has taken on a new significance as a reminder that even before the era of social media and the internet, hoaxes were able to spread virally around the world and true believers could cling stubbornly to conspiracy theories despite a lack of evidence — or even the existence of evidence to the contrary.”

I find this statement so infuriating. The mainstream media has it way of clamping down on any subject that might pose a mystery for humanity — that might be worthy of our genuine interest — and turning it into crud. You get routinely mocked, ridiculed, and cast aside by the establishment if you go against its conventional wisdom.

Of course, this used to be the case when it came to psychedelic substances. When I started researching and writing about psychedelics in the late 1990s, the mainstream media maintained a rigorous tone of dismissal and mockery about these compounds. They couldn’t tolerate the idea that altered or transpersonal states might have great value for the individual. This possibility had to be ridiculed, dismissed with sarcasm. The establishment media and the academies, together, construct barricades around certain subjects, protecting the mainstream culture’s predetermined judgments, its morality and its materialist beliefs.

Diagrams of 130 crop circles, among those that appeared in 1997 alone

I just started an extraordinary book by the most impressive new thinker I have encountered in a while: Byung-Chul Han’s What is Power? Han offers some insight into this ideological operation. He notes that the most successful form of power does not require violence or coercion (as in a dictatorship). Instead, power works best when it is accepted, integrated invisibly and thoughtlessly, by its subjects: “Power as coercion and power as freedom are not fundamentally different; they differ only with regard to the degree of mediation.” Han explores Martin Heidegger’s “phenomenology of everydayness”: “Heidegger speaks of ‘the public way in which things have been interpreted’ [öffentliche Ausgelegtheit]which determines the ‘average understanding’, i.e. normal perception, the normal view of the world. It ‘controls every way in which the world and Dasein [Being] get interpreted, and it is always right’.” We are at a time now when this public mechanism of interpretation, zealously guarded by the establishment gatekeepers, is breaking down in some ways. Yet the bulwark holds, and it still requires a determined siege.

Today is my birthday, but, to be honest, I feel little joy. I keep reviewing mistakes I made in my life and work. After 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2007) was a bestseller, I felt I had a unique opportunity to help “the world” reach a new paradigm — a new realization of what Jean Gebser called “integral-perspectival” consciousness. I nearly demolished myself in the attempt. My frantic efforts verified Nietzsche’s aphorism: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” One mistake I made was to naively think that, just because I had expressed something rigorously and clearly in a book, that was enough. People would take the time to read it and understand. I could move onto new topics, new themes. That was stupid.

In 2012, I wrote in depth about the crop circles, after living in Southern England in the summer of 2002 and investigating them in depth. I interviewed a range of people who had been involved with the phenomenon for many years, including the “artists” who claimed responsibility for them, researchers and scientists studying them, New Age mystics, local farmers, and so on. I carefully addressed all of the reasons that it could not be, in its entirety, a hoax.

If the patterns are not all man-made, then we are dealing with some kind of contact experience, some form of communion, with another level or expression of consciousness that is seeking to communicate with humanity — in a wonderfully gentle and playful way. If the phenomenon is in some way a contact experience, then, rather then a subject of ridicule and dismissal, it is one of the most important phenomena we need to explore, particularly at a time when we seem, as a species, unable to interrupt the intensifying processes of ecological and social destruction we have unleashed.