The 13th Earl of Haddington (cr. 1619) was minded to revise his theory about crop circles to incorporate pixies, he told me the other day while we were enjoying a pre-dinner cigarette at the chimney piece of a grand dining-room in Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. Lord H. – a whiskery, engaging gent in tartan trousers – has done a good deal of research into the subject, and has come to some interesting conclusions. He has now established to his satisfaction that crop circles are not made by aliens but – if I understand him rightly – by dead people. His working theory is that the patterns are an effort to communicate using alchemical formulae associated with the god Hermes. Hermes being a prankish character, these can be a little opaque. Take the example he mentioned: a formation that seemed to be in the form of an animal. It had one big shape for the body, a head with two curly-wurly antennae, and a sort of ladder coming out of the back.
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