On August 10, 1990, an Idaho Air National Guard pilot flew over a dry lake bed in southeast Oregon. He saw a design a quarter mile wide.

It took about a month for the public to hear about it. The argument over who made it has run far longer.

The traditional view

The documented account comes from the people who made the design and from the agencies that looked into it.

The Deseret News reported in November 1990 that the pilot found the design on August 10 during a training flight. The discovery was not made public until mid-September. An artist from Fairfield, Iowa, named Bill Witherspoon later came forward to claim the work. The Bureau of Land Management fined him and his group $100 for defacing public land.

Witherspoon told the paper by telephone, "No, it wasn't aliens. It was just some guys." A Bureau of Land Management spokesman said the agency was "fully satisfied that we got to the truth of the matter."

Jamie Hale looked back on the story in The Oregonian in 2019. She reports that Witherspoon made the design with three friends and his 10-year-old son. They used binoculars, sticks, wires and about 12 miles of string, and the work took 10 days. Witherspoon described it in a letter to the Burns Times-Herald as "an artistic experiment on a grand scale."

The Iowa Source covers a 2019 documentary about the project. It was directed by Jim Ansley and narrated by Peter Coyote. The magazine says the film was made with the help of lost video footage.

The design itself is a Sri Yantra. Alessandro Chiodo of Sorbonne University describes it in Comptes Rendus Mathématique as a sacred diagram of Tantric Hinduism. It has nine triangles around a central point called the bindu, surrounded by lotus petals and a square enclosure. He notes that it is used in yoga meditation.

What It Actually Tells Us

In Earthly Enigmas I treat the formation as human-made. I tell the story of Bill Witherspoon and four friends. They began on the first full moon of July 1990 and finished on the tenth day.

I explain the missing footprints with the playa itself. The surface records every disturbance, and a desert rainstorm erased the traces.

I write that the crew had blueprints, the original plow, video footage and named witnesses. I write that people who had already decided it was alien or governmental refused all of it. I call that confirmation bias. I call the formation an Earthly Enigma because it was entirely and deliberately human.

I also give the figure its own attention. I describe nine interlocking triangles that form 43 smaller triangles. I write that it has been present in Indian sacred tradition for at least five thousand years. I write that every intersection in the figure must be geometrically exact. I think the question worth asking is why the geometry reaches people.

What the Record Leaves Open

Both accounts lean on questions the evidence cannot yet answer. Three of them stand out.

How old is it?

I write that the Sri Yantra has been present in Indian sacred tradition for at least five thousand years. I have not checked that figure.

Chiodo writes that "the origins of the Śrī Yantra are unknown." He traces the figure through the rituals tied to it and cites a poem attributed to a disciple of the eighth-century philosopher Ādi Śaṅkara.

Monika Hirmer writes in Religions about the Tantric tradition of Śrīvidyā, whose practitioners work with yantras. She says its presence in the Indian subcontinent "dates back to the sixth century CE, although its Sanskrit sources do not precede the eighth or ninth century."

Chiodo's summary of the paper is in French and the translation here is mine. It says Alexey Kulaichev refers to a seventh-century Buddhist inscription from Sumatra that mentions the figure. It says Kulaichev also alludes to a hymn in the Atharva Veda about a similar figure of nine triangles. Chiodo adds, following Gérard Huet, that no published representation earlier than the seventeenth century is known. He says the dating of its first creation remains open. I have not read Kulaichev or Huet.

What is the earliest evidence for the Sri Yantra, and where is it?

How exact is exact?

I write that every intersection in the figure must be geometrically exact. The mathematics adds a complication.

Chiodo calls the construction of the figure "an elementary and nontrivial problem." He works out a straightedge and compass method for drawing it. His own hand-drawn figure shows what he calls "slight imperfections."

His French summary says the two traditional methods, one from the commentator Kaivalyāśrama and one from Lakṣmīdhara, are imperfect. It says the rules the figure must meet allow a family of figures with four free parameters. It says Kulaichev's question of whether only one figure exists is still open. I have not read the papers behind those statements.

Witherspoon told the Iowa Source that "it is absolutely impossible to make the Sri Yantra perfect." He says he followed instructions from an old temple in Badrinath, India. He also recalls a paper by a Scottish math professor that calls the figure irrational like pi. I have not checked that.

If many figures fit the rules, which one is the Sri Yantra?

Why did the story not end?

The makers and the Bureau of Land Management gave one account. James Deardorff, a research professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, gave another. I do not name him in the book. I describe him as a retired professor who published a sixteen-page article and told Bill by phone that it was a government cover-up of an extraterrestrial event.

The Deseret News reports that in 1990 he alleged the government made up a "cover story" with Witherspoon and his group. He said, "Their story doesn't make any sense." He asked about the delay of roughly 40 days between the discovery and the report, with the question "Why that big delay?" He doubted that an old cultivator could cut furrows that neat. He doubted that the crew could work 10 days in 90-degree heat without running short of water. He also pointed to the missing footprints, which Witherspoon said a rainstorm washed away.

Sanskriti magazine summarizes his 1991 article in a British magazine about unidentified flying objects. It says that when the crew was asked to demonstrate, their line came out half an inch deep. I have not read his article and I have not checked that.

I read this pattern as confirmation bias, and I say so in the book. The agency, the makers and a documentary stand on one side. A researcher who studied a videotape and the artist's account stands on the other.

What would a person who doubts the account need to see?

The questions I can't put down

Some questions need more room than one article gives them. Two of them keep pulling me back.

Did the Sri Yantra stay in India? In the book I write that it did not. Chiodo's summary says Kulaichev found a mention in a seventh-century Buddhist inscription from Sumatra. It also reports a 1977 hypothesis by Nicholas Bolton and Nicol MacLeod that a similar construction goes back to ancient Egypt. Chiodo says that hypothesis is still considered today. I have not read their paper. I follow the question through Earthly Enigmas.

Does the figure do anything? The tradition I describe holds that a properly made Sri Yantra brings peace, harmony and well-being. I also describe blind visitors at an exhibition who moved directly and repeatedly to a painting with a Sri Yantra hidden behind it. I have not checked that account. The Iowa Source says Witherspoon wanted to test the belief that art, as technology, creates powerful influence. I have not found a published test of the figure's effect. You can read a free sample of the book before you decide. The articles section has more subjects in the same format.

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