"The finest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle." Albert Einstein

Skeptics are only those who want to see proof and to come to conclusions after they've seen sufficient information and research upon which to make judgements. There's nothing at all wrong with being skeptical -- I am even a TRAINED skeptic, having been a journalist for 20 years -- skepticism is the foundation of our science and has an honorable place in human knowledge and culture.

Cynics, on the other hand, are as unavailable to logic as the most starry-eyed romantic and automatically assume that everything is full of shit, and have a great personal investment in being right about that. That's as stupid in its way as utter gullibility.

Anyway -- I'm not sure "hoaxer" is an appropriate term to use here. That implies that someone is making claims as to the extraterrestrial origin of ALL these phenomena, and I don't think that's the case. Some of them just turn up, without comment -- and of course, as humans need an explanation for absolutely everything, people immediately jump into the breach with their own interpretation of what these are.

Again, some of them are clearly a clumsy attempt to either make fun of people who believe these are UFO-related, or they're attempts to create the phenomenon for personal gain.

However, distinct from those are some others that are, purely and simply, works of art. HUGE, complex works of art at that. Again, I don't know how they were created, but they're beautiful, elegant and delightful to behold. If someone, or several someones are making the circles of which I've seen photos, he/they are brilliant creators and I'd love to just have a conversation with them about how they DID that. There are now allegedly about 10,000 crop circles worldwide, with 400 or so appearing yearly in England (Maybe it's the druids' ancient spirits playing around from Over Yonder, or as y'all would spell it, Yondre.)

Check out these: (If you can't find them on any Internet sites, I'll make copies of some images I have here and email them to you, if you'll PM me. But try to find them yourselves first because I'm dealing with multiple work deadlines and don't have time for much play).

Milk Hill, England, August 1997.
Litchfield, England, July 1995
Alton Barnes, England, June 1996
East Meon, England, July 1995
Avebury Trusloe, England, August 1994
Avebury, England, August 1994
Barbury Castle, England, April 1997
And a simply amazing one at, yup, you guessed it: Stonehenge, July 1996
My favorite, for delicacy and complexity, is one allegedly found at Windmill Hill, England, July 1996. It's this enormous spiral of circles coming off a center hub like filigree spokes, with smaller ornamental circles of diminishing size flanking the larger circles. The thing that impresses me about the photo (and maybe it's just cleverly superimposed photos. who knows? But again, the images are really sublime) is how perfectly balanced the circles are in relation to each other -- a symmetry you wouldn't really be able to appreciate until you've gotten a few thousand feet up in the sky...

I say it's art and I love it because it sends my imagination into overdrive -- as very little art seems to these days. So, bring'em on. (Of course, I might feel different if it were my crops being smushed, but that's another issue...)

WyoWoman