Theses 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

********************************************
* THE U.F.O. BBS http://
www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
********************************************
Rixter
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080

---
þ Synchronet þ Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 IBBS Games