Ms. Howe has received many local, national and international awards for her documentaries, including three regional Emmy's, a national Emmy nomination, Colorado's Florence Sabin Award for "outstanding contribution to public health," Aviation & Space Writers Association Award for Writing Excellence in television, and a Chicago Film Festival Golden Plaque. Some of her honored films have included Fire In The Water about hydrogen as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels; A Radioactive Water about uranium contamination of public drinking water in a Denver suburb; and A Strange Harvest about the worldwide animal mutilation mystery which has haunted the United States and other countries since the late 1960s - and continues to date. She continues to produce reports for television and radio, including news about science, the environment and unusual phenomena for the nationally syndicated radio series Dreamland and Coast to Coast hosted by Art Bell. She has appeared on many national and international television news and documentary programs including CBS's Day & Date; FOX's Strange Universe; CNN's Larry King Live; and NBC's network special and companion tape for The Mysterious Origin's of Man.

If you have bought, or even opened this excellent book, and find yourself reading its foreward, the chances are you do not have to be convinced that crop circles are mysterious, inexplicable and real. That is to say, they are not, for the most part, hoaxes-although the scientific community and the media seem committed to convincing the public that they are. Linda Moulton Howe wastes no time recapitulating the notorious Doug and Dave episode. She dismisses it in a single paragraph and gets on with exploring the complex, ongoing aftermath. And what she finds is a common thematic and symbolic thread, plus empirical evidence from scientific research that cannot be hoaxed.

If you did not know crop circles were glyphs incised into fields of grain and knew them only as photographs, you might think they were paintings produced by a genius abstract artists educated in some universal mystery religion or esoteric school. The figures speak directly to our human aesthetic/spiritual faculty, as does all art. The language spoken is at once familiar and strange. The crop circles resonate within, summoning up echoes of the philosophical/metaphysical/religious symbols used around the world since history began. Yet, rarely are they identical to what is known. Moreover, during the corp circle decades of the 1980's and 1990's, mysterious balls of light or light forms have been seen hovering about the formations, sometimes appearing on photographs and videotapes. Even lights and spheres invisible to the naked eye turn up on film and tape.

It's difficult to avoid the feeling that the circles and the circle makers, whoever or whatever they might be, are going to great lengths trying to tell us something. Possibly something important, and the inference is that the message must be positive since it runs counter-intuitive to associate so much beauty and harmony with negation. But what might that message be? And to what end? It is this positive aspect of the crop circle mystery that Linda Moulton Howe stresses while raising an important question about point and counterpoint. The symbol glyphs often have pentacles or geometries inside circles that suggest black and white magical rites. Could at least two players with different intents be competing on the chessboards of the fields? Thoroughly, thoughtfully, sensitively, she explores the innumberable resonances of the circles set up with symbols we already know from the ancient traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, the Far East, and shamanic societies. Symbols specific to none, reminiscent of all. Remarkable! And then there are those lights!