Crop Circles

[Caj]

3. They are the result human hoaxter/artisans who are vastly intelligent, apparently incapable of blunder, located--or willing to travel--all over the world, and completely obsessed.

Well, there's nothing particularly unlikely about lots of people located all over the world willing to make crop circles. There are, after all, millons of lots of people located all over the world.

There certainly are people who view this as an art form, and try to top themselves every year with more complex and aesthetically pleasing designs. So there certainly is a motivation for people to make them.

As for their complexity, I think the circles that are known fake are pretty good evidence that ordinary people can do some tremendous things in a short time. Try:

http://www.circlemakers.org/bigbrother.html <-- 7 hours.
http://www.circlemakers.org/uktv.html <-- 6 hours.

Again, I'd like to see a single crop circle which is genuinely inexplicable, meaning that ordinary people could not have made it overnight.

Caj

[TelegramSam]

From Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander (Obscurus Books: Diagon Alley, London, UK):

Mooncalf
M.O.M. Classification: XX

The Mooncalf is an intensely shy creature that emerges from its burrow only at the full moon. Its body is smooth and pale grey, it has bulging round eyes on top of its head, and four spindly legs with enormous flat feet. Mooncalves perform complicated dances on their hind legs in isolated areas in the moonlight. These are believed to be a prelude to mating (and often leave intricate geometric patterns behind in wheat fields, to the great puzzlement of Muggles.)

Watching Mooncalves dance by moonlight is a fascinating experience and often profitable, for if their silvery dung is collected before the sun rises and spread upon magical herb and flower beds, the plants will grow very fast and become extremely strong. Mooncalves are found worldwide.

Note: "M.O.M." = Ministry of Magic. A rating of XX designates a creature that is "harmless / may be domesticated".

[Caj]

3. Ripe gran damages rather easily, if you doubt it take a look at what a serious windstorm can do to standing crops. Half a dozen people trudging through standing grain carrying ropes and boards and stakes and lights would cause visible damage - which seems to be excluded in many of these cases.

Except, there are plenty of crop circles which we know were made by hoaxers, and they are also free of visible damage. We also know that they are made in a matter of hours, and many overnight.

Here's another interesting page from circlemakers.org:

http://www.circlemakers.org/nztrip.html

They had to make this overnight in 4 hours. Note that they added a couple extra circles in the lower right, distant from the main design, to show that this could be done without tramping a visible path to them.

Caj

[Darwin]

Do people have so little faith in human ingenuity that we must postulate that things like the Pyramids in Egypt (or Mesoamerica), or crop circles, or whatever just HAVE to have been made by little green men or some wacky cosmic luftvortex? Isn't that a sad statement about humanity?

I was thinking something very similar a few minutes ago as I was walking through the family room to the kitchen, when I looked over and saw this:



My wife (who, by the way, never attended a day school in her life, till English classes in her late 40s) used to crochet, but couldn't understand the few pattern books I got her. So, we're at a friend's house, and they had these doilies and such with a sort of pineapple pattern on them. My wife taken one look at them and said, "That's nice. I think I can do that." At the end of the evening, as we walked out to the car, she said, "I know can do that." As soon as we got home, she got out her thread and hooks, and proceeded to do so--from nothing more than looking at them. When I asked how she did it, she said she didn't know. When I asked her to teach me, she couldn't analyze the process. She didn't count loops. In fact, she hardly seemed to be paying attention as she worked at it. (Based on the length of a roll of thread, multiplied the number of empty rolls in bunch of grocery bags, I once calculated that one of her crocheted bedspreads had about 5 miles of thread in it.)

She also worked out designs of her own. But she couldn't explain them--she just did them. It was like David Grier on guitar. She was a natural. (Makes me a little sad. Now only one hand operates, and she can't even remember what she had for lunch--or even that she did have lunch.)

(There are some closer details at http://www.coastalfog.net/whistles/may2.jpg and http://www.coastalfog.net/whistles/may3.jpg )

And here's a page from George Bain's Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction (the Dover reissue):



I mean, the Picts had no more class than to paint themselves blue, but they apparently either figured out this kind of thing or, like my wife, did it intuitively. Personally, I think people are pretty cool critters.

[Caj]

Which reminds me: if a crop circle could only have been designed by a being of higher intelligence, how would we know? Wouldn't we need a higher intelligence to notice it?

After all, if we can look at the design and see some significant pattern ("look, a golden rectangle,") then clearly we can design a circle with that pattern ourselves.

I guess that if a crop circle contained the solution to an unsolved problem, for instance a factoring of one of the larger unsolved RSA challenges or next week's lotto numbers, that would demonstrate a higher intelligence. But I can't imagine a geometric design that couldn't be thought up by people---but which we could recognize as impossible to be thought up by people.

Caj

[Dale]

Click here to jump to a page with a VIDEO of the technique of making crop circles!

I watched the video. It shows a guy walking in a circle pushing down crops with a board. WOW! That explains everything.

Ooops. Sarcasm is not attractive on me.

Now, on the other hand, some of the better ones done by "circlemakers", like

http://www.circlemakers.org/nztrip.html

(Thanks, Caj)

has done more than anything else on this thread to get me down off my high cloud.

On a personal note, I probably have more reasons than usual to be looking for wonder these days.

Thanks for a fun discussion. I wonder how long I'll keep that avatar.

[Dale]

Har! It's come and gone as myseriously as a crop circle. For a minute there "CROP CIRCLE T-SHIRTS" was one of the google ads at the top of this thread. The Miracle of Google.

[Caj]

I'll add one more link, because it details the experiences of crop-circle makers, versus crop-circle "researchers", on the supposed difficulty of making these things quickly in the dark:

http://www.circlemakers.org/freddy.html

The summary is that these guys made a few nifty circles in the dark, and people insisted they couldn't have been man-made. Some quotes:

Two summers later we made a formation for the BBC consisting of 100 circles in 2.5 hrs. It was constructed under test conditions with no artificial lighting. The logo in the middle of the formation (belonging to our sponsors Yellow Pages, which [crop circle researcher Fred Silva] mistakes for 'bad geometry'!) took 20 minutes to construct, and the rest of the geometry about 30 minutes (we can't remember the exact timescales of each construction step - but this is close). That leaves 100 minutes for....100 circles. An average of 60 seconds per circle: VERY humanly possible (we were filmed doing it, with thermal imaging cameras).

As we suspected people were about at Avebury that night. Crop circle enthusiast Chad Deetkin reported being there for several hours on the Art Bell radio show "Dreamland" on 15 August 1999 in an interview with Linda Howe: "And Linda I can tell you we were so close we were probably the distance of a housing city block, which is what, a 1000ft at the most, away from where this thing appeared and when you think about it in the light of a full moon we could see the field very clearly. And there was nobody there, and even after we'd left about ah - it was about quarter to twelve when we left, we circled the whole area several times in our car because we just wanted to see if anything was happening, it was such a strange night. And we came back, it would have been twelve thirty or so and there was still nothing there. "

The seven of us entered the field at 11pm, with two journalists. A total of nine people. Deetkin's story only reinforces our conviction, that, with element of surprise on our side it is very, very easy to slip into a field and create a large formation without being detected. In Anatomy of Deception Silva maintains that it is hard to create patterns in the English countryside without being caught. He is wrong and not alone.

Caj

[Walden]

The only time I recall seeing crop circles was the one time in my life that I went farther north in these United States than southern Missouri. As we flew over idaho I saw lots of them. Then the captain explained how the Idahoans plow their fields that way.

When I was a young child, my father was pastor in a rural church in southwestern Oklahoma, for a few years. It was hardly possible to support a family on the amount the minister of a small congregation makes, and he worked as a farm hand to make ends meet. I went with him on occasion, as he plowed the fields, and he always plowed them in a certain very specific pattern. These patterns were for the purpose of soil conservation, and had been learned the hard way by the western farmers, after the dustbowl. These were not circles in crops, nor did they have a thing in the world to do with the patterns being spoken of, but I just was thinking about that.

[Wombat]

I've concluded only one thing: They are intelligent in design and nobody seems to know how they are made or by whom or what. It's a mystery.

Surely that's all one could conclude. It's strange the way people can't just live with mystery. When I hear true believers talking about UFOs they talk as though, by calling them that, they'd somehow identified them. That's mad—the first word in the phrase is 'unidentified.'

People who come up with extraterrestrial or supernaturalistic explanations, beause ...er .. what else is there and you have to say something don't you (?) ... never factor in the antecedent improbablilites in their hyposthses.

Just take the ET hypothesis. Not only do these creatures have to have all the skills and stealth of hoaxers, they have to have a peculiar single mindedness to make themselves manifest to us in this way and only this way. Try explaining that one away.

[kevin m.]

Maybe all you skeptics in this discussion are henchmen of the alien organizations behind the crop circles and are trying to confuse and instill doubt into those of us seeking the TRUTH!

D*mn!.
'The truth will out'.
As you Earthlings say.

[Walden]

I guess it depends on the world-view one embraces, or one's society embraces, as to what one holds ought to be open to consideration.

Space men are an important part of the mythos of secular American society. The same people who would give no serious consideration to the notion that it was done by brownies, much less by dæmoniacs, hold that we ought to be open to the idea of life on other planets.

One of the apologetics for this mythology tends to sound something like this, "Of all the millions and millions of galaxies, are we to assume that life only formed on this one tiny planet?" Other assumptions seem to be that "life" is somehow defined as in earth's physical life, and that it would have some interest in communicating with man. These mythologies exist in most groups of people, just the particulars vary.

From my faith tradition, I am not likely to assume the circles were made by Vishnu, and I would be much more likely to look for a "rational" earthly explanation than to assume it was done by beings from another planet.

A devout Roman Catholic might be more likely to see it as a message from a saint, while a Dispensationalist might reject that notion quickly, and say it is "A sign in the earth" of the nearness of the Rapture.

A New Age devotee might be more inclined to be open to the notion that the patterns are caused by cosmic vibes, or something.

We all see life through filters. Some of us admit it. Some of us don't.

[kevin m.]

A Drunken,sunburnt, Guardian reading Geordie!

Oh my God,what a thought.

Slan,
D.

Now that's what I call a STRANGE phenomenon.
You see, I'M NOT a 'Geordie' - I'm actually a 'Mackem' from Sunderland!!

[Martin Milner]

In England it's very easy to get into a field without leaving tracks, you walk along the tramlines where the tractor sowing the crop drove.

One problem I have NOT believing it's all the effort of hoaxers is that the crop markings appear in remote fields - never near a major road or motorway, where they may be caught red-handed.

I've read a magazine called The Fortean Times for years, about strange phenomena. Crop circles come up regularly.

http://ss465.logika.net/cgi-bin/ss_quer ... &x=10&y=11

I've actually seen a crop circle close to in Wiltshire a few years ago. Lovely pattern, but too conveniently situated near a hill from which it can be easily viewed for my liking.

[Lorenzo]

Dale, are you're starting to go in circles, Dale, are you're starting to go in circles? Circular thinking can lead to trouble. I like trouble. I'm starting to get dizzy. Thanks. I like revisiting crop circles from time to time...it's my old stomping grounds.


"Our lives are made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled."

...and now back to circular breathing.