Indonesia’s first major crop cir­cle was dis­cov­ered in a rice field by a farmer on Jan­u­ary 23, adding the Asian coun­try to the grow­ing list of nations to find the mys­te­ri­ous for­ma­tions in its fields. The for­ma­tion resem­bles a “mulad­hara chakra — one of the basic chakras in Tantric Hin­duism.” While local sci­en­tists attrib­uted the crop for­ma­tion to human pranksters, nearby res­i­dents had var­i­ous the­o­ries, includ­ing a tor­nado and, of course, aliens in UFOs.

While the char­ac­ter­is­tics of some crop cir­cles are enig­matic and wor­thy of para­nor­mal inves­ti­ga­tion, I’ve never quite under­stood the con­nec­tion to extrater­res­tri­als. It doesn’t make sense. What would be the aliens’ pos­si­ble motive for leav­ing a large dia­gram in a field of crops? A mes­sage? What mes­sage? No dis­cernible mes­sage of any impor­tance has ever been deci­phered from one of these things. It seems that aliens could cer­tainly find an eas­ier, more direct and bet­ter under­stood form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The same goes for the idea that they are mes­sages “of warn­ing” from the Earth itself: What’s the mes­sage? If there is a mes­sage, we’re not get­ting it.