Right. This worshipping of symbols and signs is fascinating stuff. Where do they come from? I am talking about pre organized religion times, because the organized sales of ideas and symbols are not fascinating as a mystery.
I was an avid student of the Transition for a number of years, Royce (the moment in time where consciousness seems to have "flicked on" in our cultural records).
Sensory deprivation and ritual substances seems to have been the standing theory for a number of years. I really like the ideas emerging now in the anthropology community in considering the
acoustics (because
consider all of the senses!!!) of ancient places (the "blue rocks" at Stonehenge or the less recent "music caves").
But I can imagine listening to the person who knew more stories than anyone else, after
he maximized the degrees of separation between himself and the people [EDIT: Terrible me... there were obviously matriarchal societies - in fact some argue that matriarchal culture prevalently preceded patriarchal.]
To be quite honest, there is limited research into it, but if what keeps people alive gets preserved over generations, elders are like the lynchpin of a cultures agency (or tyrants, priests, and divine right of royalty). And so whatever they were doing, by that logic, had to have been successful most of the time, for... some utilitarian amount of the culture or else, the tradition would have fallen out of practice as that culture would have died out.
I'm rather enjoying the image of the priests of Egypt high on peyote painting their temple walls lol
It is not as silly as you might think 
It is not such a bad theory when you look into the effects of these various substances you know. Most people will state that they have a profound religious experience. So I can easily see that pre literate societies took these visions as proof of the existence of higher beings(god) and eventually started worshipping symbols or signs depicting these visions.
As I mentioned above, there might of course be many other theories which are more spot on 
Well, I was going to make the further tongue-in-cheek comment that we'd find it difficult to name a human culture that didn't get their leaders fucked up (unless it was a matter of persecution... over intoxication of consciousness), but that isn't strictly true. A great number of cultures and societies have followed the intoxicated, though (and still do the way politicians abuse legal drugs).
As for no one noticing... its in a farm 
, not so difficult to hide in acres of farmland (daylight or otherwise).
Ok, fine Some of them might get away with that. Still would like to know some of the techniques they use.
How to Make a Crop CircleCrop circles demystified: how the patterns are createdCirclemakers - Beginner's GuideRebuttals to most of these involve measuring phenomenon by scientific methods or otherwise and looking for anomalies - the most obvious one is that many crop stalks in circles don't match breaking patterns of board planks pressing them down.
For one thing, no one in the DMT trials or on ayahuasca actually goes anywhere. Which would, in turn, suggest no one who experiences a UFO abduction goes anywhere.
It makes me think that the guiding narrative and the pageantry of ritual are necessary aspects...
