All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Aug. 21, 2007 - Skeptoid
16:42
Skeptoid #62: Crop Circle Jerks

Crop circles are commonly known to be man made, yet some still insist they must be of alien origin. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Hoaxers vs Paranormal Believers 00:07:50
Crop circles are a relatively recent addition to the mythology of UFOs.
But when a pair of British guys revealed that they'd hoaxed a lot of them themselves with some ropes and planks, not only did it fail to convince the UFO true believers, but it also failed to adequately explain many of the crop circles out there.
Many more than two guys could have ever made themselves.
Crop circles are today on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Crop Circle Jerks.
Tonight we're going to take our dowsing rods and our tin foil helmets, stand out in a remote wheat field, and try to feel the psychic energies as a UFO comes down and forms a gigantic, complicated geometric pattern by crushing the wheat.
It might use a whirling dimensional vortex as its mechanism.
It might be ball lightning or some strange effect of the wind.
It might be the aliens trying to communicate with us.
It might be the Earth herself expressing profundities.
Or it might be a couple of clowns with a piece of wood.
We've all heard how in 1991, two old English guys, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, went public with the confession that they had been making crop circles throughout England since 1976, using ropes and planks and simple surveyors' tricks.
They generally did it after pub night on Fridays and had a rollicking good time.
They had been enjoying the resulting media circus immensely and would gladly have taken their secret to the grave, but for Bower's wife who noticed the mileage on his car and wondered if he was having an affair.
So to protect Bower's marital bliss, the two made a public confession and even did live demonstrations on TV.
The media reported that the crop circle phenomenon had been solved.
But of course to any intelligent person, Bower and Chorley's confession didn't prove a thing, any more than Ray Wallace's family's confession about him making bigfoot prints proved that there weren't also a thousand other sources of footprints.
Artist John Lundberg, who formed a group called Circle Makers, has been making many of the most complex and beautiful crop circles ever since the public confession, including many for commercial purposes.
Even I made an effort in the late 1980s.
My friend and I took some old skis and were going to make a crop circle in Irvine, California.
But when we got there, we discovered the last remaining field had just been plowed for a new subdivision.
One good thing about the crop circle phenomenon is that there are very few people left who believe that they have some cause other than pranksters.
But those few people are resolute in their belief.
Hoaxing is now so prominent that most of the staunchest crop circle researchers now concede that the vast majority of crop circles are man-made.
However, some of them have found an out that lets them continue to stroke their paranormal explanations for even the man-made variety.
Some researchers now believe that the same paranormal or alien forces that create real crop circles are also responsible for controlling the minds and actions of the hoaxers.
Thus, even the man-made crop circles are equally significant as evidence that an unknown intelligence is behind all crop circles.
One prominent researcher of crop circles is a man named Colin Andrews, who used to call himself CPRI, or Circles Phenomenon Research International, until he ran out of money a few years ago.
His website at cropcircleinfo.com offers CD-ROMs and PowerPoint presentations about crop circles for sale, but little in the way of testable hypotheses about non-human origins of crop circles.
His research methods largely center on dowsing and psychics, which is what I'd do too, since those sources produce claims of such a nature that they cannot be tested or falsified.
In 1993, Andrews contacted Masahiro Kahata, a Japanese software engineer who constructed a simple device for measuring electroencephalogram activity and displaying it colorfully on a Macintosh screen.
He calls it the interactive brainwave visual analyzer.
Kahata came to England and the two of them tromped around taking amateur EEGs of people on the street as a control, and also of dowsers in the act of examining crop circles.
Andrews reported, What we found measuring with a computer real-time in the fields was that the right brainwave activity of the dowser, at the precise moment those seven rings were measured and reacted to by the dowsing rods, spiked in all the brainwave frequencies, alpha, theta, beta, and delta, at the precise moment the dowsing rods moved.
Andrews regards this as hard scientific evidence that the dowsers are reacting to a physical manifestation of the crop circle, though he's vague on what that might be.
As it turns out, Kahata had also done similar experiments on his own in the 1970s, when he applied an earlier version of his device to magicians and self-described psychics while they were performing spoon bending tricks.
He got the same results, higher EEG activity during the spoon bending performances.
Was this evidence of an unknown psychic force?
Science writer and magic teacher Dorian Sagan, son of Carl Sagan, offered a different conclusion.
If there is a tightly correlated increase in mental activity while a psychic is bending spoons, it is probably because he is nervous he is going to get caught.
Now I'll grant that most dowsers, especially those who invest the time and money to travel to crop circle sites, are not consciously out to fool anyone and thus aren't nervous that any deception will be detected.
But since dowsing of any kind has never passed any rigorously controlled test, and it's well established that many psychics and other mediums are genuinely but unconsciously using well-established cognitive phenomena to guide their divinations, sorry but they are.
Honest dowsers are probably genuinely excited every time their dowsing rods move.
And genuine excitement is just as good at making an EEG jump as is the state of being nervous.
Most neurologists agree that EEGs are useful to a certain point.
You can derive basic information from them, but they are too vague to indicate anything complex, like sending telepathic messages.
Intense concentration on a pattern, for example, can produce a recognizable signal in some cases.
Why Skeptics Are Ignored 00:06:52
An epileptic seizure throws up a giant spike.
But to state that any given spike indicates the presence of a paranormal force, and not the excitement or nervousness of the dowser, you need to leave the realm of what neurologists have learned and enter the land of pure speculation.
Andrews himself states that the same spikes in EEG activity were observed on one occasion when a military helicopter flew close by.
Such a flyby would make me pretty nervous.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding.
Together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
So much for dousing the crop circles.
What about their formation?
The people who make them use simple tools and surveying techniques to transfer complex plans into a full-scale wheat field.
But what about those said to be formed by paranormal means?
How does that happen?
Colin Andrews explains further.
The eyewitnesses I've interviewed in many countries over the years have all agreed with me on one point.
When they claim to have seen circles form, they appear in 10 to 15 seconds.
In any picture you see of Colin Andrews visiting a crop circle, he's loaded with camera equipment and so is everyone else in the picture.
In fact, it's hard to find any picture of crop circle investigators where everyone in the shot is not holding a camera or binoculars or something.
Finger on the trigger.
So my question to Colin Andrews would be, did you not ask these crop circle investigators who witnessed the formations why, in every single case, they failed to produce a single photograph or frame of videotape showing this wonderful creation?
If I were Colin Andrews, these investigators are not those whose testimonials I would flaunt to the world.
Instead, I would tell them they screwed up and probably even accuse them of trying to hoax me.
How can they spend all day and night camped out on the hilltop, finger on the video camera trigger, witness a crop circle forming, and produce only a lengthy list of verbal reports?
And no video.
Inexcusable for a conscientious researcher.
The first thing I would fault Colin Andrews for would be requiring only the lowest of standards for the information he accepts as evidence.
So what about all these numerous eyewitness accounts of crop circles being formed in seconds by hovering balls of light?
Well, again, I'd point to the evidence issue.
These eyewitnesses, or at least those reporting the accounts, always turn out to be crop circle believers.
If they'd seen a real event, they probably would have used that camera hanging around their neck.
But in every case, they've failed to do so.
Well, almost every case.
There is one famous video of white balls of light actually creating an entire crop circle, in seconds.
It's called the Oliver Castle video, and you can find it on YouTube.
It was made by John Wabe in 1996 or 1997, a partner in a small video production company called First Cut Studio.
He took some simple video of the completed crop circle and ran it through their Quantel paintbox.
In a video subsequently broadcast on the Discovery Channel and on National Geographic, he showed how he rubber-stamped other pieces of the wheat field background to erase the crop circle and then un-erased it bit by bit underneath some flying white dots that he added.
He then added some shake and some artificial generation loss to the video and presto!
A great hoax was done.
For years it was considered definitive proof by many crop circle believers.
But when he finally went public with how he made it, guess what?
Few believed him.
And many still believe to this day that the video is genuine and that it's his confession that is the real hoax.
Web pages accuse him of earning huge sums of money, government payoffs, for discrediting a genuine video.
Even if you read the comments on YouTube, which are, granted, mostly the half-literate and profanity-laced ravings of young people, it's painfully clear that many people cannot be convinced by any evidence that a paranormal phenomenon is not real.
And although some prominent crop circle researchers, Colin Andrews among them, do accept that the video is a fake, many do not.
Believer websites assert that top video analysts have proven that the Oliver Castle video cannot have been faked.
My favorite among these top analysts is Jim Deletoso, whom you may remember from Skeptoid Episode 41.
De La Toso is one of the most vocal UFO advocates and claims to have spent six weeks at an underground base for gray aliens outside Dulce, New Mexico.
Judge his credibility for yourself.
It's an interesting world we live in where you can tell a group of people that you made a crop circle with a rope, even show them how you did it, and they still insist that an unknown paranormal intelligence did it.
The Oliver Castle Video Debate 00:01:55
You can tell them that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and they'll insist that it's 5, even after you line up 4 apples for them.
You can make a simple hoax video with them sitting at your elbow watching and they'll conclude the video's real and you're a paid government stooge.
And then they'll put their tinfoil helmet back on.
Thanks to all of you who continue to send in great ideas and references for the show.
It's a huge workload as you can imagine and every little bit helps.
Just come to skeptoid.com and email me with your suggestions.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com Hello everyone, this is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection