Free Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson Page A

more elaborate circle designs is not touched on . . .’, and goes on to quote Colin Andrews’s criticism that even a bouncing vortex could not make geometrical patterns. And, a few sentences later, he quotes with satisfaction Wingfield’s remark that rectangular boxes in the corn have ‘driven the final nail into the coffin of the atmospheric vortex theory’.
    Why, he wants to know, have scientists not taken a more active interest in the phenomenon? The owner of one farm where Zuckerman went to look at circles told him it was owned by New College, Oxford, but that none of the science fellows there had shown any interest. Neither had the science teachers at Marlborough School, only ten miles away.
    One useful step, Zuckerman suggests, would be to train university students to make hoax circles. If it proved to be easy, that at least would be one established fact. And if it proved to be difficult . . . well, we would be back at square one, still faced with the mystery.
    What is perfectly clear, from Zuckerman’s admission that he has studied many of these circles, is that he does not accept either that they are natural phenomena, due to whirlwinds, or that they have all been created by hoaxers. The final impression left by the article—and by the very fact that a man as distinguished as Zuckerman had taken the trouble to write it—is that he is far from dismissive of the suggestion that at least some of the circles are the work of nonhuman intelligences, and that he feels that scientists ought to be trying to find out.
    It so happened that, on the other side of the Atlantic, another scientist had been corresponding with Zuckerman and was following his advice. Gerald S. Hawkins was a British radio astronomer who had been professor of astronomy at Boston University, and had achieved international celebrity through his book Stonehenge Decoded in 1965. In 1960, he had used a computer to investigate an idea that had been planted in his head when he attended a lecture on Stonehenge at London University in 1949: that Stonehenge may be a complex calendar or computer to calculate moonrise and sunrise over the 18.6-year moon cycle. The idea, which caused fierce controversy at the time, is now generally accepted, and has become the basis of the new science of archaeoastronomy—the study of ancient peoples’ knowledge and beliefs about celestial phenomena. Subsequently he went on to apply the same techniques to the pyramids of Egypt.
    Hawkins started Boston University research in 1989, the year that Time magazine published a long article on the crop-circle controversy. He was intrigued by the photographs, and by the comment of a few colleagues that perhaps the circles might provide him with another problem for computer analysis. After all, they were mostly in the same county as Stonehenge. Later that year, on a visit to England, he picked up a copy of Circular Evidence by Andrews and Delgado—which had become an unexpected bestseller, demonstrating that the phenomenon was now arousing worldwide interest.
    Andrews and Delgado had carefully measured eighteen of the circles, and included the measurements in their book. A glance told Hawkins that this was not suitable material for computer analysis. The obvious alternative was a mathematical or geometrical approach—to compare the size of the circles.
    As a typical scientist, Hawkins had already plodded through Circular Evidence page by page. Being an astronomer, he was treating the book like a star catalogue. Andrews and Delgado had measured twenty-five circle patterns with engineering precision, and gave them in order of appearance. The first forty pages were large circles with satellites, and the diameters revealed a musical fraction, accurate to one percent. Anyone can check this from the book by just taking a pocket calculator and dividing the large by the small. One percent, by the way, is high precision for the circle maker. It is only just detectable in a symphony orchestra,