Another slice of the natural philosophy of the masses
• Hodgepodge
Circular Logic
They call themselves cereologists, a term that makes them sound as if they're researching Cap'n Crunch or Froot Loops. But the people in this group study crop circles, those dazzling geometric designs that have been carved into barley, wheat, and oat fields throughout England, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
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Like Talbott, Colin Andrews, an electrical engineer from England who now lives in Branford, Conn., once thought the circles were a natural phenomenon. But today, the man Disney tapped to provide information for its ''Signs'' Web site doesn't mention the A-word. After all, who wants to get pegged as a UFO nut? Instead, he vaguely says, ''I don't think we're looking at anything quite in the area of Mother Nature. ... The evidence I'm having to go with is that ... whatever is making the crop circles knows precisely what it's doing.''
Hogwash, says Joe Nickell, 57, a senior research fellow at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in Amherst, N.Y., who has been investigating unexplained phenomena for 30 years. He easily earns his debunker tag, calling the croppies ''cultlike,'' ''pseudoscientists,'' and ''mystery mongers.'' In case you don't get his point, he adds, ''Some of these people are not credible.''
But hoaxers such as John Lundberg can't exist without them. Lundberg's brash, London-based three-man collective, Circlemakers, calls what it does conceptual art. He and his crew see their work as a collaborative piece involving the cereologists, the media, the public, and themselves.
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And how is it done? His www.circlemakers.org Web site, which has been logging a quarter of a million hits daily, offers a how-to guide suggesting designs and equipment (surveyor's tape, planks, garden rollers, hangers). According to his recommended method, the center is formed via an awkward one-man dance that has the circle maker pivoting on one foot while the other foot flattens the surrounding stalks. Surveyor's tape is then attached to a stick stuck into the center of the newly formed central circle. The circle makers decide on a radius length and then, keeping the tape taut, walk around the stick, leaving a slight trail with their feet. Voila! A perfectly made circle. All that's left is to stomp the formation into shape.
The hoaxers' activities caused Meaden to be ''utterly disgraced and humiliated,'' Nickell says. As for Andrews, who worked with Meaden and coauthored the first book on the phenomenon in 1989, Nickell says, ''He now has, to coin a phrase, egg on his face, shirt, jacket, trousers, spattered on his shoes.''
The Corn Is Flat
Sci-fi invasion epics often come swaddled in religion, with epilogues crediting God for sending everything from microscopic germs to atomic bombs to vanquish the alien threat. But I can't think of another that wears its faith as showily as M. Night Shyamalan's scary/sappy Signs (Touchstone), which seems destined to be a monster hit to strike a soothing chord in an especially anxious time. The title is a double-entendre. The movie takes off from the appearance of giant crop circles (two or three rings joined by a straight line, like bathroom-door sex symbols for the polymorphously peverse), one of which turns up in the Pennsylvania cornfield of the ex-minister protagonist, Graham Hess (Mel Gibson). These signs are obviously the work of extraterrestrials but of what stripe? Beatific or mean? Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or Independence Day (1996)? Have they come to heal humankind or to harvest it?
Stop reading if you want to be surprised. Because the truth is that for all the picture's B-movie shocks, its aliens are a red herring. The signs that interest Shyamalan are the ones from an even higher source the Almighty, whose existence was rejected by the hero after his wife was killed six months earlier in a "freak" road accident. (I put "freak" in quotation marks because the matter of coincidence is central to the film.) Graham left the ministry when his wife died: He stopped being a "Father" and he stopped being a father. Shyamalan asks: When will he realize that his faith is the only thing that can save his kids from the horror of a universe without God here expressed as a planet teeming with blue-green Mummenschanz men who scamper and click and expel poison gas?