Slashdot Mirror
Top of the Crops 2002
Steeltoe writes "For those deeply familiar with crop circles, 2, they are truly an amazing wonder of the world. Not only are they getting unnervingly complex and beautiful, but last year researchers found themselves dumbfounded by an ET-face with an accompanying encoded CD-disc, 2, 3! Clearly, there are not enough wonders in the world, but lack of wonder and excitement! If you like adventure, you cannot turn your back on this, 2! Check out the cool circles of 2002 at Crop Circle Connector and at Circlemakers 'Top of the Crops 2002', or even take a physical *gasp* tour during the high-peak season next summer and see for yourself!! Only imagination may tell what will pop up from the crops in 2003."
Makes me wonder how long it will be before someone hacks together some control units, a lawn tractor, and a gps system and some randome patteren generator software and creates an autonomous crop circle generator.
How cool would it be to drop off this contraption in the middle of a field, set some width/height parameters, and let it run free, just to see what you could come up with. Maybe even have it draw fractal patterns or somthing.
-===- "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserver neither" -===-
Of course you can. And they can, too. But there are a few more phenomina to it than just pressing down crops.
Nearly-perfect geometic shapes
small (measured in micron) iron spheres scattered throughout the crop circle
Slightly elevated radition / "cooked" effect to pushed-down corn
and, finally, odd performance from aircraft around crop circles
The last one its the one that threw me. On the "TV mentury" that documented a few graduate engineers faking a "genuine" crop circle, their helicopter suffered an loss of power over the darn thing. Odd--not the stuff of religious revelations, but odd.
Crop circles may be an as-yet undocumented natural phenomina, a higher-order of technology (Military or "UFO"), or just a really, really, REALLY clever prank. I don't know, I've never seen one.
But they are more than you can do with "just a 2x4 and a piece of rope."
To me this stuff is at least 99,999% bunk. There is the universal claim that these circls are too symmetrical or spiritual to be handmade. The believers claim that there is no way for human beings to make these symbols without leaving obvious trace to human presence.
Last year a german TV magazin (stern tv) decided to evaluate that. After finding out that it was possible, they... well, they became alien and just did it. A large field was picked, the "impressions" were made with such other-worldly gadgets as tree logs, rope and a bunch of carbon-based glucose operated water bags.
The result: crop circles indistinguishable from all the other ones that are worshipped all the time. All the german esoteric elite piled up at that field, people sold the t-shirts and posters, and everyone believed that the god-forsaken place of Schönwalde was location to extra-terrestrial visits.
http://www.fosar-bludorf.com/kornkreis/
Scroll down a bit to see a picture of the circle in question. Interestingly enough (and although the creation of the circle was filmed) the site which has the picture is part of the "believers" who are not going to abstain from their initial belief that it is the work of alien visitors. Notice any weird feelings when looking at it? Well, if it is hunger it might be for a reason, the pattern has been taken from a salami pizza, the weird thingy coming out of one of the outer circles is a deplaced pepperoni.
Well, the wackos running the site are currently bashing the TV magazine people for obstructing the truth and stuff like that. A bunch of the wackos have found magnetic anomalies ("up to 1000%"), dehydrated soil but no burned plant matter, silicium chipping ("broken off a spaceship") or measured modulated signals on obscure frequencies. Some people just WANT to believe...
+++ath0
According to the link, the aliens use ASCII, i.e. they can receive our data transmissions and figure out their encoding, but rather than reply using the same medium, they go stomp out ASCII in a corn field. Uh-huh...
Besides, shouldn't they be submitting a proposal to extend Unicode so future crop circles can use their character set?
My jaw dropped when I saw the alien face and disc. Remarkable! Very clever technology must have been employed in order to pull this off with such precision. The execution is flawless! I'm very impressed.
Certainly this is no ordinary rope-and-plank job, One wonders if the thing was perhaps a clandestine practical execution of a tech student's exam project?
The site of the artwork may be close enough for the DGPS beacon at the Bristol Channel to have helped the punters get the edges of the rectangle aligned so precisely, but presumably a laser sighting device similar to the ones used by land surveyors could have been sufficiently accurate.
Once the rectangle corners had been defined and the circle perimeter traced, it may have been fairly trivial for two operators, or teams, to traverse the sides of the rectangle in parallel with the Device running a straight line from side to side and flattening the crop row with variable force (or width) according a predetermined bitmap courtesy of photoshop and some clever artistry. I'd love to see the original bitmap and compare with the finished formation.
You can see a thin groove at the center of each scanline in the closeup ground photos, which seems to be a wheel track. The device design is unknown, so we don't know if it had 1,2 or even 4 wheels. A rope could have been its suspension from above, though you'd think that would have caused variations in pattern density with the rope at the edges being more taut.
It would need to be somewhat heavy in order to flatten the crop and have enough mechanical force to gradually engage and disengage the crop flattening part of the mechanism during the course of each row. Perhaps the device was guided on twin taut ropes from either side of the formation, or perhaps guided optically by lasers.
From the closeup pictures the pattern looks like it was applied in one direction alone, so perhaps returning the cart to the other side was a waste cycle instead of using bidirectional 'printing'.
Interestingly, the wheel groove of the spiral is between the spiral pattern bands, as opposed to centered in the middle, so a different machine may have been used here, perhaps operating concurrently with the alien portrait scanline 'printer'.
The question remains how the row alignment came to be so spot on both in terms of row spacing and 'horizontal hold' from row to row : The vertical details are quite precisely in sync from row to row, so the tech and methodology used is indisputably excellent.
I hope eventually the artists and hoaxers come forth and reimburse the farmer for his losses, and reveal their clever technology. I think that would make for an interesting read.