Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (10 page)

But then, the same argument applies to crop circles in general.
Is it not more likely that they were simply patterns made for fun?

Against this objection, two facts stand out clearly.
One is that, for whatever reason, Lord Zuckerman decided to make a close study of the circles, and ended by being more than half convinced that they were not the work of hoaxers or whirlwinds.
The second is that Gerald Hawkins concluded that the circles showed signs of more care and intelligence than would be expected of hoaxers.
If two scientists, both pre-eminent in their own field, decide that the circles are worth serious attention, then are most of us justified in dismissing them as unimportant?

For me, an equally interesting question is:
why
did Zuckerman and Hawkins take the risk of having their names associated with the ‘lunatic fringe’ by displaying an interest in crop circles?
There can be only one answer: that both were carried away by a powerful first impression that this was no hoax—that
something or someone
was trying to communicate.

And, although Hawkins decided to hold back on publishing his investigation in 1993, after Linda Howe had published the first four theorems in her
Glimpses of Other Realities,
his communications with me up to the end of 1997 make it clear that he remains as actively interested as ever.

In due course, his fifth theorem became available on request from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
But the
Mathematics Teacher
decided against publishing it for the time being, perhaps feeling that mathematics in a cornfield was getting beyond the bounds of scientific propriety.

If so, they were not far wrong.
Looking back over the history of crop circles since 1980, it looked as if the circle makers were engaged in a kind of argument with those who did not believe they were real.
First the circles were blamed on midsummer whirlwinds, but, as the circle makers began making several at the same time, this explanation became more and more unsatisfactory.
As multiple whirlwinds—and other such absurdities—were postulated, they began adding lines, which could hardly be formed by whirlwinds.
When Hawkins recognised their geometry, and their diatonic ratios, they began making them increasingly complex, with triangles, squares and hexagons, and finally targets.

But a change in direction had been apparent since a design that had appeared at Alton Barnes in July 1990, with more than half a dozen circles joined by lines, and with objects like keys or runes sticking out of the side
.
The same night, its twin appeared near the Allington White Horse.
(Crop figures had always shown a tendency to appear near ancient sites.) From then on, an increasing number of circles seemed to have a symbolic rather than geometrical significance—some, for example, resembled signs of the zodiac.

If hoaxers were responsible, then we might have assumed that their passion for practical jokes would diminish after Doug and Dave confessed.
In fact, their number has remained undiminished—in 1996, according to Bob Rickard, it actually increased.
Perhaps hoaxers have turned it into a sport, like bungee jumping.
On the other hand, perhaps the circle makers have decided to go on trying to communicate until they are understood.

I came upon Hawkins and his theory by a fortunate accident.
After my lecture at the Fortfest in Washington in 1995, I strolled to the back of the hall, and met the conference organiser, Phyllis Benjamin.
The man standing with her looked vaguely familiar.
She asked me, ‘Do you know Gerald Hawkins?’

In fact, we had met at some academic conference years before.
We exchanged greetings, and I mentioned that I had recently reread his
Beyond Stonehenge
in the course of writing a book on the Sphinx and ancient civilisations; then the next lecture started, and we had to curtail the conversation.

After John Mack’s
Abduction
had aroused my interest in the abduction phenomenon, I began adding to my out-of-date collection of books on UFOs, which I had picked up
en masse
in a second-hand shop in Plymouth in the mid-1960s—such works as
The Case for the UFO
by M.
K.
Jessup and the books of George Adamski.
Seeking out the latest books on the phenomenon, I came upon
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
by C.
D.
B.
(Courty) Bryan.
It was an account of a five-day conference on UFO abductions held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 1992.
MIT is, of course, one of the most prestigious institutions of scientific learning in the US, and I was surprised that it should be willing to play host to a subject which, only a few years before, had been regarded by scientists with contempt and derision.

Bryan, an American journalist, went to the conference in a mood of total scepticism.
His large book makes it clear that he ended by recognising that open-mindedness is a better attitude.

One of the people he met at the conference was Linda Moulton Howe, author of
An Alien Harvest,
one of the first to conduct extensive investigations of cattle mutilations, and their possible connection with UFOs.
It was Linda Howe who told him about crop circles—how there had been around two thousand in the 1980s, from all over the world.
She mentioned the conclusions of Dr.
Levengood, who stated that the affected corn would have had to be subjected to the kind of heat found in a microwave oven.
She then went on to discuss the ideas of Gerald Hawkins at some length.

Here, I felt, was something that looked a little more solid than ‘contact’ stories like those described in
Uri
and
Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth.
I lost no time in ringing Phyllis Benjamin to get Gerald Hawkins’s address and phone number.
Soon after that I was speaking to him on the phone.

He is an easy man to talk to, generous with his time and ideas.
He began by advising me to purchase the
Harvard Dictionary of Music
to pick up the necessary technical background.
(Although I have always been an avid listener—and collector of gramophone records—I have never learnt to read music.) And, not long after this, a fat envelope arrived, containing articles about his investigations, accounts of the five theorems, and even a copy of Zuckerman’s ‘Creations of the Dark’ review.

By this time, I had also laid my hands on the most important of his later books,
Mindsteps to the Cosmos
(1983).
The premise of that book is that mankind periodically goes through what Hawkins calls a ‘cosmic mindstep’, a new, revolutionary change in man’s perspective on the universe.

Hawkins is talking about ‘mindsteps’ in astronomy, but they could apply just as well to the whole field of human evolution.

To begin with, says Hawkins, man was little more than an animal, stuck firmly on Earth.
Then he began to take notice of the heavens, and to invent myths in which the heavenly bodies are gods—he demonstrates that the Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh
is about gods who are also the sun, moon and planets.
This was Mindstep 1.
Then came the Greeks, who studied the heavens, and tried to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies—Mindstep 2.
But, since Ptolemy placed the Earth firmly at the centre of the universe, his scheme was impossibly complicated.
It was not until Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of the solar system that the next great mindstep took place.
The invention of printing also brought about a ‘knowledge explosion’.

The next step was the age of space, when man began looking to other galaxies, and finally began to grasp the size of the universe.
This was Mindstep 4.

And the next mindstep?
Could it be some totally new technology, enabling us to explore the universe?
Or perhaps contact with extraterrestrial civilisations?

And now, suddenly, I began to see why, unlike most of his fellow scientists, Hawkins was willing to admit the possibility that the crop circles might be some form of intelligent communication.
Mindsteps to the Cosmos
is a book about a vision—a clear recognition of how far man has come in a few thousand years.
But, as man looks outward to a universe of black holes and cosmic gushers, the question of meaning becomes more insistent.
Is man alone in the universe?
Or is he a part of some vast and intelligible pattern of life?
Should our knowledge of the size of the universe make us feel more lonely and frightened?
Or should it make us feel that, in some strange sense, we ‘belong’, that we are a part of the universe, as our individual cells are a part of our bodies?

A few decades ago, a scientist who looked for ‘meaning’ in the universe would have been regarded by his colleagues as downright dishonest.
The universe is self-evidently made of matter, and it operates according to material laws.
Man is merely a product of these material laws, and has no more ‘meaning’ than the wind and the rain.
Man’s notion that he is a priveleged species is a delusion.
He is a product of mere chance.

But there were a few scientists who questioned these views—on purely scientific grounds.
Around the turn of the century, a Harvard biochemist, Lawrence J.
Henderson, noted that life could not exist without certain unique and quirky properties of water, such as surface tension and the tendency to expand when frozen.
Similarly, the astronomer Fred Hoyle has argued that the universe seems oddly suited to the existence of life: alter just one or two of the conditions very slightly—like the way carbon is converted into oxygen by collision with a helium atom—and life would be impossible.
It is, he says, as if some ‘superintendent’ has ‘monkeyed with the physics’ to make life possible.

In the early 1970s, the astronomer Brandon Carter, of the Paris Observatory, also noted these ‘coincidences’ that made life possible.
For example, if the relative strength of the nuclear force and the electromagnetic force were different, carbon could not exist, and carbon is the basis of life.
Noting the high number of such ‘extraordinary coincidences’, Brandon Carter suggested that the universe
had
to create observers (i.e., us) at some stage.
This became known as the ‘strong anthropic principle’—the notion that intelligent life had to come into existence.

In their book
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(1986), John D.
Barrow and Frank J.
Tipler—an astronomer and a physicist—point out that, so far, life seems to have had very little effect on this vast material universe, and that, if it died out at this stage, it would be with a whimper rather than a bang.
So why did the universe bring it into existence in the first place?

This may sound like the familiar complaint of poets and philosophers: why does God permit tragedy, etc.?
But that is to miss its point.
For the question is not based on the assumption of a benevolent god, but upon such matters as ‘extraordinary coincidences’ in physics, and the ‘Large Numbers Hypothesis’ of the cosmologist Paul Dirac.

Barrow and Tipler ask: if life
had
to come into existence, does not this at least suggest that it must eventually go on to colonise the whole universe?
The question sounds as if it contains some element of religious optimism, so again it must be emphasised that it is strictly logical and scientific.
If the laws of nature brought life into existence—laws that sometimes look as if some superintendent has been monkeying with the physics—is it not conceivable that the same laws dictate that life will never die out?

Of course, it is also possible that the laws contain some principle that dictates that life must die out—for example, when the universe reaches the limits of its expansion, and begins to contract.
Yet it is hard to see that this makes sense.
Think of an ordinary explosion—a bomb, for example, or a volcano.
It creates only chaos.
But, when the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago—as most cosmologists think it did—with a big bang, it produced huge stars, whose immense inner pressure produced the heavy elements, which in turn produced life.
Now life may be an accidental by-product, like fungus on a wall, but it is also intelligent and adaptive and enduring.
So what Barrow and Tipler call ‘the Final Anthropic Principle’ could be correct after all.