Freddy Silva has a theory about crop circles.

No, not little green men, he says, chuckling. Though he warns it may sound just as ridiculous.

He believes the iconic formations seen around the world are made by intense sound waves blasting and heating the grass. Sound waves maybe sent by angels.

Silva’s sold more than 40,000 copies of his book, “Secrets in the Fields,” in which he details that theory. Since 2002, it’s been translated into three languages. He’s a popular speaker on the UFOs and supernatural lecture circuit.

All no more unusual, perhaps, than a Portuguese-born British crop circle expert living in Maine.

When it comes to the phenomenon, he’s hardly alone.

Two national groups that track crop circle sightings have counted almost a dozen over the past 50 years in Maine. According to their records, the time of year doesn’t seem to matter so much. Silva has seen one in Cape Elizabeth in the snow.

“I love talking about it because it opens people up to such a huge amount of our history,” said Silva, 48. “Of course, it’s very beautiful, artistic and mysterious. But it is hard work — you don’t do it for the money.” 

The oldest Maine sighting in the Independent Crop Circle Researchers’ Association archives goes back to Turner in 1959: A woman in her driveway heard a hum and “watched several balls of light flying low over a field about 1,000 feet away … The circle was found where the BOL’s had landed.” Seven others appeared in Palermo, Gardiner and Aroostook County, according to the records.

The most recent: Dec. 26, 2005, in Waldo County.

Silva estimated that half of present-day crop circle reports are faked, people out tromping in tall grass with 2x4s. The other half are real — whatever real may mean.

“Back in the early ’90s, even the media took it very seriously. They obviously realized there was a real phenomenon,” Silva said. “It was only from 1991 afterwards that certain government forces hired a couple of people to claim that they’d (been creating the crop circles themselves, the whole time.) It was a cover-up. Still is.”

Silva, who lives in Portland — a girl brought him to Maine — said the sometimes whimsical, often geometric crop circles appear on the Earth’s magnetic energy lines, called “dragon lines” or “fairy roads,” and above aquifers. The same principle, he claims, was used to site Stonehenge and the pyramids in Egypt.

“Places where the veil between worlds is very thin,” Silva said. “Once you go into these spaces, your perception, your depth of vision, is very, very different. You are touching a lot of other realities at the same time.”

Those “dragon lines” are different from the more commonly known ley lines, Silva said. Another distinction he draws: Crop circles aren’t places where UFOs touched down. Those spots are “saucer nests” and, like faked crop circles, actually bend the depressed grass.

“In the real ones, nothing’s been damaged; the plant has been subjected to a very intense burst of heat, about 1,600 degrees Celsius in about one nanosecond,” Silva said. “It’s enough to make them behave like molten glass and it folds over, re-hardens at the base, just hovering above the soil. No physical thing has actually touched it. The only thing that would be able to create that would be sound below the human hearing range, which is called infra-sound.”

And what’s behind that?

The answer, he mused, is in Chapter 12.

“My belief is, and my experience is, that we’re dealing with a universal consciousness. Some people call it angels, fairies,” Silva said. “Some people call it God.”

Silva spoke this summer at the International UFO Museum in Roswell and at the Science & Consciousness Conference in New Mexico last March, among a dozen other venues. Come January, he’ll start posting next year’s lecture schedule. Already on tap: two weeks in New Zealand and a return to Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment.

He’s gotten used to a fair amount of skepticism; that comes with the occupation. For him, with lecturing and documentary film work, crop circles are a full-time job. (According to Amazon.com, his “Secrets” book is its second-best-selling book on crop circles.) He said he’s lost friends — and a marriage — to his pursuits, yet he’s holding his ground.

“The things that people can get out of it, even to the point of being healed with these things, is quite exquisite,” Silva said.

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send photos, ideas and saucer nests to [email protected].