Another crop circle has appeared in the English countryside — and this one's clearly been made by someone, or something, that understands math.
At first glance, the strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out clockwise, doesn't look like much — modern art, perhaps.
But an electrical engineer from North Carolina — described by the London newspapers as a "retired astrophysicist" — figured out that it was an abstract representation of pi, the number at the center of Euclidean geometry.
The circle, one of hundreds that have sprung up overnight in the English countryside over the past two decades, appeared in early June near Wroughton, Wiltshire, just south of Swindon and about 80 miles west of London.
It's about half a mile from Barbury Castle, a pre-Roman fortress surrounded by long hillocks that may be the remnants of Iron Age buildings or burial mounds.
Lucy Pringle, who has a Web site selling her photographs of crop circles, took several aerial shots and posted them online.
Lucy Pringle's Crop Circle Photograph Library : Lucy Pringle's Crop Circle Photographs (June 2008)
