Since all our 'external' knowledge (including all of science, and academic research) is based on reliable eye-witness reports, and several people whom I regard as reliable have reported strange crop circle phenomena; I am now happy to accept that there is 'something' mysterious about some crop circles.
Most of the people I have encountered who write and speak on the subject are not convincing individuals by my judgement. Nonetheless some of them are; and because some such people are convincing to me, therefore (to put it negatively) I don't believe that the whole crop circle business is a hoax. Positively stated - some crop circles have had a 'supernatural' cause - beyond mainstream possibilities.
But what do I believe?
I believe crop circles are 'real' but trivial, in the same way that most 'mediums' who 'channel' spirits provide some information that may really be of supernatural origin, but which is trivial. Supernatural does not equal profound. Spiritual beings are real, but many of them (even among the broadly-benign) are foolish, conceited, ignorant - just like mortal Men.
Supernatural phenomena may also be evil - indeed they usually are either evil or trivial; esepcially when they are deliberately sought-for, by 'techniques' or strenuous meditational practices. We ought not to be too impressed by such things, esepcially not by their specific content. Yet our cultural materialism has made us naive and credulous of almost anything we believe to be real that we find 'scientifically' inexplicable. This is supernaturally equivalent to believing something simply because 'a bloke in the pub' told us; or because we 'read it in an old book'.
Over more than thirty years - before and after I became a Christian; my ineradicable conviction is that any spiritual being, or alien visitor, who uses shapes flattened into corn to 'communicate' with humans, when these shapes are enigmatic and can only be seen from the air, must be either crazy or joking! Of all the possible ways to communicate, this has to be one of the silliest imaginable.
If you were a serious angel (or an alien) who wanted to establish contact with people, and to pass on an important message - why on earth would you choose to make patterns in a crop field in Wiltshire; in vague hope that a light aircraft pilot (or nowadays a drone) might fly over and photograph it? Then that 'somebody' would correctly interpret the photographed corn shapes, and disseminate the information so that it reaches the relevant individuals...
The other problem for me is that corn circles are a material phenomenon inviting a materialist explanation; so that they are probably not a good way of inducing people to acknowledge the reality of a spiritual realm.
Nonetheless, there are example of corn circle fascination having served as a kind of 'entry drug' for some people. It gets them out into the countryside to experience things for themselves; makes them suspect the validity-of, and eventually learn to ignore, the mass media; it widens and opens their thinking. It is more possible that such a person may eventually come to Romantic Christianity, than someone who is locked-into the media-bureaucratic mainstream evil virtual reality.
So - while trivial in themselves; for such people, although not for me, crops circles have had a value.
Yet even so I am suspicious of the kind of value - in that sense that even when the speculations about crop circles are not simply materialistic (after all, technologically advanced aliens intervening in the earth using powerful forces or floating balls-of-light are just an extension of mainstream Western scientistic positivism); the focus on the abstract implications of abstract patterns printed on fields is (I believe) not what is required for the healing and progression of modern Man.
What is needed (by my understanding of things) is a recognition of reality as consisting of living, conscious beings with whom we may have direct (unmediated, not indirectly communicated) relationships: a kind of 'conscious animism' in the context of a Christian metaphysics.
By contrast, a spirituality of expert investigators technically unravelling enigmatic geometry, binary codes, fractal shapes and mathematical relationships is pretty the opposite of what I would most wish to see - of what we most need.
If the above remarkable formation - consisting of a stereotypical alien, and an ASCII-coded message to Mankind - is genuinely of supernatural/ extraterrestrial origin... it proves my point about the kind of beings that are involved!
