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By Calum McLeod in
Urumqi, Xinjiang
26 August 2001
Is it a teardrop, a
beard, the sun or the moon? And why do alien visitors to Earth leave
these mysterious signs in our fields? Some answers may lie in the wilds
of north-west China. There is no Chinese equivalent for "croppies"
yet, but the global army of crop-circle enthusiasts just gained a key
convert the their cause, virgin lands ripe for speculation, and
a great leap backwards into antiquity.
Close to the
Mongolian border, a Chinese explorer has discovered a series of stone
circles and other shapes he claims are the 2,500-year-old prototypes of
crop patterns found in recent years everywhere from Wiltshire to Western
Australia. More than 70 countries worldwide, embracing each continent,
have reported ever more bizarre examples appearing in corn and wheat
fields, or grass, flowerbeds and even snow.
China was among the
last major nations to resist a phenomenon so intriguing it has spawned
its own science – cereology – and survived the pranks of confessed
circle-makers. In the past year, Chinese man of mystery Zhang Hui,
research fellow at the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi, has harvested more
than 20 patterns that appear to match examples found in other countries,
but may pre-date them by up to 3,000 years. While croppies in the West
debate which circles are genuine mysteries and which the "agrarian
graffiti" of hoaxers, the Chinese finds are clearly man-made.
"The primitive
peoples who lived there were inspired by the crop circles they
saw," said Zhang, whose quest for the truth has taken him to the
farthest reaches of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an
expanse of Central Asian desert, mountain and grassland seven times
larger than the UK. "They thought the circles were a way of
communicating with the gods, and so placed rocks in the shape of the
circles."
Zhang found several
circles in the grasslands of Qinghe county beside the Sino-Mongolian
border, ranging from simple circles to more elaborate teardrop and other
shapes. Bemused by their geometrical sophistication, he went to Beijing
to consult Chinese translations of reference works by British croppies.
"I was amazed by the similarities," he said. "Both sets
show characteristics of modern, industrial civilisations, as you would
need modern instruments to make such perfect circles, yet these could be
the oldest records of crop circles world-wide. They show that the
phenomenon is much older than people thought."
Zhang published his
findings in the latest edition of a Chinese magazine, Western, which is
devoted not to gunslingers but the vast and under-populated provinces of
west China. The region is home to many non-Chinese ethnic minorities,
including most of China's Muslims. Several of Zhang's stone patterns
surround vast piles of stones gathered to commemorate not ancient
Chinese but warrior nomads known as the Scythians, an Indo-Iranian
people with Caucasian features.
The Scythian
connection will fuel fevered croppie speculation, since their conquests
were so extensive that Western historians have identified cultural
interaction with the ancient Celts, whose religious sites have been
among the leading locations for crop circles. Zhang suggests links to
places such as Stonehenge, for luminaries such as John Haddington of the
UK's Centre of Crop Circle Studies have noted that circles often appear
close to the sacred sites of Celts, Australian Aborigines and Native
Americans. Based in a region at the heart of the old Silk Road, Zhang is
keen to explore these tenuous links between East and West.
The first publicly
recorded crop circle, in 1678, in Stirlingshire, Scotland, came to be
known as the "Devil's Circle". Zhang noted a similar reaction
to a pattern in Qinghe, encircling a stone pile and tombstone with a
deer engraving. "The nomads call it the 'magic circle', and believe
whoever dares to touch the tombstone will offend the gods and be
punished."
He himself would have been punished if he had pursued
such research two decades ago. For years, Chairman Mao waged war on
"superstitious" beliefs he saw holding back his attempts to
modernise China. "During the Cultural Revolution, a group of Red
Guards in north-east China saw a crop circle appear in a field in a very
short time," Zhang recalled from a rare eyewitness account of a
formation actually in progress, published much later. "They were
stunned, but at the time, nobody was allowed to believe in such
'superstition'."
In these more
liberal times, 30-year-old Zhang has spent six years specialising in
China's "mysterious culture". Other fans of the unexplained
run China's booming UFO Society, with regional meetings and a newsletter
of regular sightings. So does Zhang agree with some Western croppies
that extra-terrestrial powers are creating these fields of dreams, and
not bored border guards, wind vortexes, electromagnetic fields, or even
hedgehogs as one theory goes?
"It's too early
too say for sure," was his sensible reply, "but there is a
definite connection with the cosmos. It could be a supernatural force,
or even an alien civilisation." The truth is still out there.
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