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professor. To others, the circles suggest the action of microwave-generated ball lightning, numerate whirlwinds, or some other peculiar atmospheric phenomenon.
“These scenarios apparently suffered a severe blow late last summer, when two elderly landscape painters, David Chorley and Douglas Bower, admitted to creating many of the giant, circular wheat-field patterns that cropped up over the last decade in Southern England. The chuckling hoaxers proudly displayed the wooden planks, balls of string and primitive sighting device they claimed they used to construct the circles. ' “But this newspaper-orchestrated, widely publicized admission didn’t settle the whole mystery. Gerald S. Hawkins, a retired astronomer who now divides his time between an apartment in Washington, D.C., and a farm in Woodville, Va., felt compelled to write Bower and Chorley last September, asking how they managed to discover and incorporate a number of ingenious, previously unknown geometric theorems - of the type that appear in antique textbooks - into what he called their “artwork in the crops.”
“He concluded his letter as follows: “The media did not give you credit for the unusual cleverness behind the design of the patterns.”
That article by Ivars Peterson attracted international attention and the following March 7th issue of Science News printed many letters from readers in Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Washington, Maine and even one from England. Roger Dorr from Portola Valley, Calif, wrote, “I’ll bet your article on crop circles draws more correspondence than anything you have published in recent history. Geometry would be an excellent way for extraterrestrials to try to bridge the language gap.” At least that writer had an open mind.
In explanation of the references to “geometry,” I’ll quote some exerpts from Dr. Hawkins’ recent article in the scientific journal Cosmos, Vol. 2, #1 (published by The Cosmos Club) entitled “Probing the Mystery of Those Eerie Crop Circles:
“The first clue I found among the crop circles in November 1990 was a great surprise - the rations of music. This is a little complicated, but to put it simply, let us take the white notes on the piano. For middle C, with perfect tuning, the pitch is 264 hertz (vibrations per second), and for C\ the octave above, the pitch is
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