CHIP OFF THE OLD CROP CIRCLE

The twenty minutes (if that) of media attention paid to last month's crop circle stunt is a reminder that enthusiasm for "unexplained" phenomena that once fascinated and even captivated large numbers of people can pass.

While there remains a substantial shelf of books purporting to explain the circles and their generally extra-terrestrial or otherworldly creators, and a vocal if not large audience for such books and related materials, the circles seem to have faded from the general public's sphere of interest.

From my perspective this is of course a good thing. The less interest the public has in swallowing the easily explained so-called mysterious phenomena that, uh, crop up from time to time the better.

Yet I felt a certain, if somewhat cynical, wistfulness when the circle near Chualar, California provoked little more than yawns when the story of its "discovery" broke in early January.

Of all the unexplained -- at least to those who don't understand them -- phenomena that have flared and faded over the past half-century, crop circles were my favorite.

For one thing, the crop circles, most of them long-since admitted to be hoaxes by the hoaxers themselves, were lovely, some of them strikingly so.One writer went so far as to identify them as "An Art of our Time." 

For another, they were more benevolent -- other than to the crops their creation crushed -- than most supposed extraterrestrial or otherworldly visitations. No abductions, no bodily probes -- just complex patterns in the wheat and corn fields.

Sure, some people interpreted them as dire warnings from beyond our world, but mostly the circles were enigmatic, open to aesthetic appreciation as well plenty of pretty nutty speculation.

While circles have become blasé in the general press -- the stories I saw were off the front page and well below the fold in newspapers, and metaphorically about the same on the TV news -- there's still a fairly frothy crop circle culture out there, ready to point out that the Nvidia hoax was:

• a part of the larger conspiracy to make crop circles blasé and thus hide their true purpose from humanity 
• could not have possibly been created by humans in the first place 
• was plowed under almost immediately in order to hide confirmation of one of the above
• you get the picture

But most of the posts and comments and threads I've seen regarding the Chualar cricle were desultory at best, and verged on (or beyond) parody at worst.

The time of the crop circle as focal point for public attention, not to mention vast energies from beyond this our world, would seem to be past.

Nvidia's PR-prompted crop circle was a clever idea that would probably have gotten more attention than it did if it had just come along fifteen or twenty years sooner.