One day, in the summer of 1991, the author ventured to Wiltshire and Hampshire, in search of crop circles and an answer to their mystery. He soon became immersed in the subject, the most interesting aspect of which seemed not to be the odd swirled shapes in the fields, but rather the human beings who studied them: plasma physicists and ritual magicians, dowsers and ufologists, wealthy earls and dreadlocked travellers and, of course, the devoted cereal artists whose magnificent work lay behind it all - or almost all.