Squaring the Circle

Wiltshire is best known for housing Stonehenge, but its mysteries don’t stop there. This southwestern British county is also the place where the most crop circles appear, a fact the Scottish photographer Robert Ormerod learned while at work on an ongoing project about space enthusiasm called Above Us the Day. Ormerod has always known about crop circles, but to him they seemed “to be part of popular culture as an oddity, mystery, and a bit of a joke.” The designs often appear overnight and are largely uncredited, presumably because they tend to be created on private property—fields for agriculture or grazing. “As I researched the project further,” Ormerod explains from his home, in Edinburgh, “I discovered that people travel from all over the world every summer to see one.” Ormerod’s images, shot by drone, capture the sprawling, perfectly symmetrical circles from above. They also give glimpses of those who come to explore them—“U.F.O. hunters, people interested in the supernatural, locals who took their kids to play in the fields.” For Ormerod, “the most interesting thing about it is that it appears to be a cultural manifestation of the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’” As to the question of how the creations come to be, “I leave it to the viewers to decide.” —Julia Vitale