26, 2023, 2: 08 p.m.ET Fairy circles inspire wonder in viewers and fuel contention among experts.... Maestre and his colleagues were not part of the sometimes fractious fraternity of fairy circle researchers.... They got sucked into the mystery when Emilio Guirado, a data scientist also at the University of Alicante and one of the study’s authors, spotted something strange on Google Earth: patterns in Niger that appeared to be fairy circles....