Slashdot Mirror

http://www.circlemakers.org/

Not only do companies do such things, there's even a company specialising in crop circles.

Not only do companies do such things, there's even a company specialising in crop circles.

In that case, i'd love Adam and Jamie making a Fractal crop circle like the ones by the circlemakers.

Come to think of it, i'd LOVE to see an explanation around the UFO and how the crop circles have evolved over time...

fill it up with young MIT grads

But MIT Kids drive people crazy.

Sure. Bring on the crop circles!

Here you go. One of the guys that makes some of them is basically an artist, kind of like Christo, into environmental art or land art. He likes to include ostention (urban-legend type myths) as part of the art. Besides making crop circles, they also believe part of the art is the carnival atmosphere social phenomena that follows it, so they actually don't overtly publicise that they're behind them.

"Given that we were intrigued by what looked like a face on the surface of mars, maybe we should create some face-like formation on earth. This way, passer-by aliens may see the creation and send a probe of their own"

Bigger than these?

"so he can drive over the same tracks in his wheat field every year (I'm not kidding, read the fine article) and compress as little of his soil as possible"

As opposed to following the stupidly obvious tyre-tracks, marked by a 3-foot dip in crop height along the places you've driven before?

C'mon, look at the photos and tell me you need a GPS to figure out where the last person drove their tractor?

It was made over several nights - the frame was spotted by a farm-hand one day and it appeared the following day.

It is only a short drive from where I live and I visited it on the holiday weekend - the horizontal lines are indeed *extremely* straight - they were definately made with the help of a laser sighting device, however they are very cheaply available (a few hundred pounds) and don't need a lot of skill to operate. They found a small electronic "sighting device" at the scene, though I haven't seen any photos of what it was.

Oh, on the "farmers loss" situation - the enthusiasts had a whip-round and paid him to cut around the formation, and he had a donation box (£2/person) at the gate, I reckon he made more on the crop circle than the entire field has made him in 10 years.

this formation is by the best "public" crop circle makers, and it doesn't even come close to the skill in the Crabwood "3D" style formation.

Gareth

How about this, from circlemakers.org, which calls into question the doctorate of one of the people often cited with respect to supposed "biophysical changes" in plants in crop circles?

Well I don't. I honestly believe that there are people who sneak out in the middle of the night and create geometric figures in fields of cereal crops. Those circles are real. Very real.

"One summers evening in 1978 after several pints in the Percy Hobbs Doug Bower and Dave Chorley were taking the air on a bridle path on the Longwood Estate, near Cheesefoot Head. They were talking about UFOs. Bower (who used to live in Melbourne, Australia) recalled a case in Queensland, where a UFO had reportedly ascended from a swirled nest of marsh-grass. 'What do you think would happen if we put a nest over there?' Bower joked to Chorley, pointing to a nearby wheatfield. 'People would think a flying saucer had landed." Jim Schnabel

circlemakers.org is a handful of guys who go out and make crop circles for fun and profit. They have put on presentations on how to make crop circles and they have been videoed in the process.

But when the spectacular Milk Hill formation, the largest and most complex crop circle ever, occurred on August 13/14, 2001, even they had to say:

"Awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, mind-warping, incomprehensible and bloody huge."

When the hoaxers are impressed, and no one else comes forward to claim responsibility, it kind of makes you think...

Presumably your skilled crop circle maker accompanied by several friends would be able to make pretty much any design using a plan, gps equipment, wooden boards rope, posts etc.

It's quite funny and sad that there are people who believe that alien visitors do them when logic, common sense and websites(!) demonstrate it is actually humans.

Well... as long as they're circles, and are made in crops, they're real crop circles...

Anyway, here's an interesting HOWTO you can follow to create your own circles. Here's an excerpt: ;)

The tools you will need are relatively unsophisticated; a 30 metre surveyors tape - this is preferable to string (...), a 1-2 metre board or plank with a rope attached to each end to form a loop - this is known as a stalk-stomper... dowsing rods - these should be made of copper, and purchased from an expensive new age shop.

The crop circles were made by a couple of fellows from Winchester named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. They made the circles for years at night, and Bower even kept the secret from his wife for seven years. When they finally told the public, few people believed them, and the UFO crowd still insists that the hoax was not the crop circles but the claim of authorship. (ObNeologism: ("cereology" -- those who study crop circles.) Never mind that Bower and Chorley have the original designs and dates, signed the drawings with "DD," and other supporting evidence. Of course, there is also Doug Bower's statement that he was programmed by UFOs to make the circles. Sigh.

Some links:
An interview with Doug Bower
An article by Carl Sagan on crop circles
Circlemakers, an art group creating crop circles

flip

Wow, our story submitter really tortured that data. Fortunately, it confessed before things really got ugly:

In comparison, only 2,000 UFOs are spotted every year in the United States represent, making just 0.0002 sightings per square kilometer

And exactly how much bigger is the USA compared to Scotland?

I recommend visiting the Circle Makers website. It's very interesting, and humorous, especially when one considers how worked up people get about aliens coming down (in the middle of the night of course) and carving intricate patters into our fields.

The best part is how it all started out as a joke while intoxicated, but soon they purposely propagated the myth of alien artists, and then would "stage" alien lights, etc using props to please the believers who had come to observe the "aliens." Great stuff to be found on the site.

As my grandma still says, that's ka-ka. I bet Pinker could play hell with those syllables.

we have every evidence to believe that the military IT sector is incompetant, or at the very least careless. Sure, the NSA hires as many engineers as they can get their hooks into, but consider the trial of Wen Ho Lee from Livermore Labs.

He allegedly conned his co-workers into logging him into systems above his security clearance, and is charged with using his augmented access to abscond with directions for building THE BOMB. if he is deliberately being made into a pawn in some kind of obscene international game, the SFbay area papers are doing a pretty good job because he looks guilty as hell.

Can you convincingly argue that some manager in the US military power structure or in research WANTED to give the PRC the blueprints to build a fusion weapon as a budget gambit? I mean, there are some crazy people out there, but most of them I know are bearish on increasing the nuclear stockpile.

Short of secret alliances to build gravity lasers with space aliens, this is pretty much the most embarrassing thing that could happen to the US nuclear weapons program, short of blowing up Chicago by accident. But it got out anyway! Team that up with the recent hi-profile NASA failures, and I think that the preponderance of evidence suggests that the US government is as careless/incompetant as ever (pick your adjective).

bottom line, if HAL was out there, somebody would have slipped up or intentionally spilled the beans.