Five hundred feet above the rolling Wiltshire countryside in southern England, pilot Graham Taylor and his passenger take in an unhindered view of the prehistoric monuments that pepper the landscape below. At precisely 5:30 P.M. on this wondrous July afternoon, the single-engine plane and its occupants glide eastwards above the sarsens and bluestones of Stonehenge, one of the ancient world's greatest feats of engineering.

            Below, the conjunction of Sun, summer, and Sunday has brought the tourists out by the hundreds. They mill a around the monument, ringed-in by the wide perimeter fencing and several security guards. Some of these guards keep awestruck visitors from wandering off the beaten track; others survey the surrounding fields from their high vantage points for more enterprising, nonpaying attendees. It's a typical working day for tourism, and pilot and passenger soak up the whole spectacle, bird's-eye style.

            Minutes later, after a textbook landing at a nearby airfield, the two men part company. The passenger, a doctor, begins the drive home. Coincidentally, the drive entails passing Stonehenge again, this time at ground level. But that will not be happening today: The A303 London-to-Exeter road has come to a complete standstill. Moreover, many drivers have abandoned their cars and are lining up on the edge of a field that borders the road. An accident? People are pointing at something in the field, some are taking photos.

            It is now 6:15 P.M. Within a forty-five-minute window some phenomenon has transformed the area into a chaotic sideshow. Something has arrived that had clearly not been there when the two men had first flown over.

            When aerial photos of the site make the evening papers they hypnotize the world: embedded in a pristine sea of wheat lies a sprawling impression of 149 circles, varying from one to fifty feet in diameter. The precision and symmetry of the pattern's curving spine measures a colossal 920 feet long by 500 feet wide.

            Most startling of all, the wheat has been swirled and flattened, with the plants' stems bent horizontally just an inch above the soil, and they are undamaged.

            Stonehenge and "Julia Set" from Secrets in the Fields by Freddy Silva

            These sightseers are gazing at a crop circle-in this case, a stylized representation of a computer-modeled fractal pattern named the "Julia Set."

            All this occurred in broad daylight barely two hundred yards from a well-guarded tourist attraction, and yet nobody was seen creating the cosmic artwork. Further investigation reduced the construction time frame to minutes, the clues coming from a sharp-eyed Stonehenge guard who noticed the formation, fully complete, in between one of his punctual, fifteen-minute rounds, and from a second pilot who had flown overhead a quarter of an hour after Taylor. The local gamekeeper, too, had inspected the field that morning and seen no disturbance. Was it possible that a group of human beings, skilled in both advanced mathematics and environmental art, had mastered the principle of invisibility and flouted the laws of gravity to levitate above the untouched wheat in order to create this masterpiece?

            If only the stones of Stonehenge could speak.

            Freddy Silva at the Prophets Conference Palm Springs