Circles in the Corn

Here we are in the pleasant green countryside of rural Pennsylvannia, a corn farm, somplete with pre-harvest tall corn. Mel Gibson is the hero of this story, a disillusioned local priest (anglican or more correctly episcopalian) having given up his priesthood after his wife was killed in a road accident. He spends the whole length of the movie coming to terms with his loss and adjusting to realise that his depression is having an effect on his young family and his younger brother. For that I was greatful, a relatively normal family suffering loss, not the usual super achievers that Hollywood like to enforce as normal.

Then the dogs go crazy in the middle of the night, and that morning they discover a geometrical crop circle in their cornfield. With out explanation the corn has been flattened without being broken, which is, apparently, impossible for us simple farmers to do. It is consistent with some obscure book that the character played by Rory Culkin the son of Gibsons Graham Hess, finds in a bookshop in town. A book that the bookshop owner thought would never sell in such a conservative town, who then kept it against her better judgement to give it to the Hess Boy.

Full of unsubstantiated stories by unpublished professors, the book reinforces the myths already known in the community or at least the boy and his uncle. The tall aliens, the dogs barking and unexplained events in the middle of the night. I can't be sure, but the dark alien figure seems to be conflated familiar aliens with the men in black. I one act, the alien is found moving around the outside of the house and when almost cornered, it makes a spectacular jump to the roof. All the time the creature is dark and undefined.

The idea that the aliens might be communicating by radio lead the boy to find the baby alarm device that allows the parents to hear what the baby is doing. Now, for some reason only known to the authors, the aliens are found to be communicating on the frequency this device uses. All the time, the language is undecipherable by any except the children. When they finally meet up with one of them, close a personal, it spoke in the same way, the same mysterious language.

The whole idea of Crop Circles is, of course, not restricted to Hollywood. It has become so a part of our culture as to be worth exploring in fiction bythe movie industry. The real thing is a mystery to some and a practicle joke for others. Living, as I do in Australia, I haven't seen such things in my Melbourne suburban life. The alien origins hypothesis, I should think, is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence. Nothing in the real world has happened on the scale, local or internationally as postulated in Signs. The mystery is how these geometric indentations in the cereal crops came about. This was answered some years ago by two brothers in England called McWhireta or something close to that.

"It's only flattened corn..." Doug Bower, 1991

Doug Bower, assisted by his pal Dave, made his first circle in a Hampshire wheat field sometime during the summer of 1978. They made it on their hands and knees with a four-foot metal bar normally used to secure the back-door of Doug's Southampton studio.

"I'd always been interested in UFOs and flying saucers", he remebers, "...so I thought I'd make it look like one had landed." Whatever initially inspired him - divine guidance, the 1966 circle in a Queensland reed-bed, close to where Doug lived at the time, or simple ale-induced prankishness - the leap from provincial trampler to extraterrestrial super-force was swift.

Doug's daytime work-bench doodles transmogrified by night into gleaming sun-blessed articles of faith. This genius - fast-possessing others - couldn't be re-bottled.

Thousands of circles have since appeared world-wide in wheat, barley, oil-seed rape... grass, oats, linseed, peas, maize, mustard and rye... Gradually, inevitably, the circles grew appendages; curled scrolls unravelled into straw-perfect aisles; simple circles' sets became cathedral-like floor-plans - vast temporary sacred sites morphogenised the Gaiaic cry of nautili, whales, serpents, snails, scorpions, and spider's webs........

from the website http://www.circlemakers.org/

This all indicates to me that the only evidence is the man made rop circles. The belief in alien created crop circles or even some as yet not understood natural phenomenon all lack credibal evidence. More certainly, the more incredible the theory would require extremely creditable evidence, none of which has come forward.

As a story based on modern mythology, this certainly is entertaining and would give it 3 stars.