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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" -===-
an ET-face with an accompanying encoded CD-disc
...
So did someone read off what was encoded on the disc with ET? I bet it reads something like this:
Microsoft End-User Licence Agreement
(1) This licence entitles you to limited-use rights to this crop circle
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
It's not another one of those free AOL CDs is it!?!
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."
If you will notice, nearly all of these things are in fields that have tracks - parallel lines through the field. Is this a machinery (tractor, harvester, irrigatation) track? ANYHOW, if you look closely, the track always intersects the design in the center, or at a node that could be the "pivot point" of the design. Why does the design always align with the tracks? Could it be that this is the ingress and reference point for a clever ground crew? NAW, the aliens just like fields with tracks and the symmetry of aligned patterns!
and assumptions out there. 99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four, and who have made up their minds and decided that every single instance of a crop circle all over the world, past and future, can be explained away by that one method. I had expected a little more from the Slashdot crowd.
I am one of the biggest skeptics out there, but I always try to balance it with an open-minded analysis of all available facts. Looking at all the factors involved, it seems to me that calling every single crop circle instance a hoax with confidence is just impossible. Let's run down some factors here:
Numbers: First off, there's the sheer number of these things occurring all over the world. They often show up in areas where the locals have never heard of the crop circle phenomenon and don't care when they do. They show up in areas where everyone is so poor that no one has time for stupid practical jokes. They show up all over the world.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Size: Some of these crop circles are huge. A pair of people may be able to flatten a circle 75 feet across in a few hours during the night, but even a team of people wouldn't be able to finish some of these things in one night.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Precision: There is an amazing level of geometrical precision to many crop circles. They aren't all just flattened circles, they're quite often fairly complex geometrical patterns. And they're huge, layed out on flat ground with nothing high nearby to get up on and observe the progress of the pattern. I have a distinctly hard time believing that anyone could create a pattern that precisely in the dark. Even in the daytime, without precise surveying instruments and some way to measure and mark off every single arc of the pattern, it would be really difficult. Certainly more than a few hours work if it was just a pair of people.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Evidence on the ground: In the types of crop circles that aren't immediately identifiable as hoaxes (yes, there are hoaxes, and they are almost always easy to identify, go check out some of the links), there are strange phenomena that happen inside the circles. The stalks of plants are bent without being broken. Have you ever tried to bend the stalk of any plant like grass, wheat or corn to a 90-degree angle without breaking it? Personally, I don't know of any way to do it.
There's also evidence of odd things like stunted growth within the circle and things not growing there even months or years after the fact. I'd love to know how a two-by-four could do that.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
History: Crop circles didn't just start in the last couple of decades with a couple of 40-year old guys and a board. There are instances of them a long ways into the past. I'd be willing to bet that the "original" hoaxters who claimed to have done some of the circles had gotten the idea from something they heard or read about that had already happened. I think the hoax is the fact that they believed they'd started it all.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Human nature: The nature of the human animal is pretty set, and always has been. There are a lot of things that just don't jive if you make a blanket statement that every circle is created by a single person or set of people. People crave attention and recognition. Do you know anyone who knows someone who actually made a crop circle? No? The larger the circle, the more people it would have taken to create it, and the more chance for some dumbass to get drunk and start bragging about he and his buddies getting together and making "that big crop circle on the south side of town".
Saying that human hands created every crop circle ever made would also mean that there are a lot of copycats in the world. A lot of people who just love the idea of crop circles and think nothing would be more fun than going out and making their own, and then never telling anyone about it for the rest of their lives. Why? I don't buy it.
I see several people posting about how "somebody should just catch those dumb kids in action and show it on video, and all this would go away". So you know a lot of groups of teens who are organized, motivated, knowledgeable in the correct use of things like surveying instruments and laser distance measuring devices, or even know how to run a tape measure with the necessary precision to create a beautiful mathematically complex geometrical pattern 200 feet across in the space of a few hours? The idea is just ludicrous. Ever think just for a minute that there might be another reason that no one has been able to "catch them at it"? I'll let you ponder that one.
(This factor, in and of itself, I do not offer as complete evidence.)
Taking all of these factors into account, I, the skeptic that I am, find it scientifically implausible to believe that crop circles are a purely human-derived phenomenon.
Ever think for a moment that there might just possibly be things out there that we don't understand yet? That science doesn't yet have the answer to everything? That everything can't just be explained away on a moment's notice without examining all the evidence? Extra-terrestrials don't even have to enter into it. There are things right here in our natural world that we just don't yet understand.
I think that the treatment of the poster is deplorable. Everyone seems to be just immediately writing him off as a kook (like the first post) and not even bothering to examine the history and wealth of physical evidence about this phenomenon. Yes, there are plenty of kooks out there, but they can't all be kooks. That's like classifying everyone on Slashdot a troll because some trolls happen to post here.
As I said in the beginning, I had expected a little more openmindedness and intelligent discussion on Slashdot (yeah, I know, silly me, but it does happen here). I hope that a few of you who thought you knew everything will just take a few minutes to read the articles, and think, and wonder about our endlessly amazing universe, like the poster of the article suggested.
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.