The crop circles do bring us to an area of plant life within the UFO mystery that has been explored: mushrooms. "Fairy circles" have a long history and rich lore, and some have speculated that they may have something to do with crop circles. In folklore, fairy circles are circular areas of altered grass or land in which mushrooms grow, and entities have been seen. The circles are indeed real, and have a scientific explanation involving fungi.

Mushroom lore and fairylore go hand in hand. The connection between mushroom legends and direct experience, (psychedelic and otherwise) and the UFO mythos is profound, and cannot be dismissed in a thought survey of the subject. In his book Supernatural, Graham Hancock lays out the case for this connection brilliantly. Traditional shamanic psychedelic experience induces a duplicate alien abduction scenario, and includes all the same features: discs in the sky, similar entities, probes, hybrid babies, and so forth.

In the book, Hancock even speculates that UFO craft may be some kind of evolved technological device used by entities to gain access into our dimension. The round disc shape itself, and oft-reported spinning motion seems to mirror folkloric accounts of fairies or entities seen making and moving together in their own circles, disappearing or appearing to passersby. Interestingly, the idea of spinning movement by discoid objects is obviously precedent in the motion of planets and solar systems, and we even the same aesthetic and mathematical elements to in our clock faces, to measure time.

And then there's Terence McKenna. His books The Archaic Revival and Food of the Gods are filled with pertinent insights and observations that may lend support to a cryptobotanical hypothesis. He even states, "…the mushroom told me it was an extraterrestrial." He also shares his wonder at the bizarre statement, unsure if it meant the actual fungi was originally from outer space, perhaps alluding to a panspermia theory, or if the mushroom was some kind of communicative device that, when ingested, provided the means to converse with an extraterrestrial somewhere on another planet.

What if we are to take the notion literally, but in a different way; what if the message is a key to a ufological Pandora's Box? What is a mushroom basically, insofar as science describes it? Fungi are neither plant nor animal. It's a thing unto itself, and fairly unclassifiable-an enigma in nature. It has even been recently postulated that fungi is more akin to animal life than plant life. That's pretty weird. Mushrooms exist in a liminal state (or perhaps more correctly, they are signified and designated as such by us) that might be expected; if they are a key, they might fit in a very strange lock, on a most bizarre door to a borderland.

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