June 15, 2019 • 39 mins
For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. I hope you had some breakfast,
cereal and cartoons this morning, and now you're moving on
to Stuff you Should Know selects. My pick is what's
the deal with crop Circles? From November two. Uh. This
is pretty interesting to me because crop circles are clearly
man made and just h there for Internet weirdos to
(00:25):
think are made by aliens? And what's better than that? Right?
Please enjoy? Right now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes this whole thing Stuff
(00:48):
you Should Know the podcast. That's right, let's go on,
good man. I got on my snow shoes and I'm
walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. Hey, run
into snowshoes. Well, let's sort of a large snowshoe. I
could see that though. Yeah, that would definitely work. Yeah right,
but it's easier you can do something else with your
(01:08):
hands while you're using this. That's a good point. So, uh,
did you ever have the led Zeppelin box set? From?
Uh my college roommate did. Yeah, so you're familiar with
the crop circles and the suggestion that by led Zeppelin
that it was there Zeppelin that was responsible for all
of them. Was that what that was? Yeah? I didn't
(01:29):
pick up on that because on the cover of the
box set there's like this awesome, very real life crop
circle formation and then the shadow of the Zeppelin floating
over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow
every Okay, Yeah, that was the whole thing. Like said,
led Zeppelin took responsibility for those, right, And by the way,
we got a lot of responses on how they got
the name led Zeppelin, So thank you to the hundreds
(01:52):
of people. Yeah, where the e where the A went.
They didn't want people to think it was lead Zeppelin
exactly makes total sense, right, the Zeppelin in front the
lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication
that the led Zeppelin Zeppelin was responsible for crop circles.
But that's one of the few suggestions that have been
(02:14):
made for what makes crop circles. And this is really
strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a
quarter of a century. How crop circles are made who
makes them? And yet there's still a lot of people
called seriologists after series The Goddess of Agriculture um, who
(02:39):
are like, no, this this those people, that's the that's
the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're responsible for crop circles,
which leaves on accounted for. Yeah. I don't even call
it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah,
so I saw somewhere at one point somebody say it's
the most scientific, most science based art there because the
(03:01):
stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of
them is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah, some smart
people are behind these, uh what I like to call art.
They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on
a cornfield. No, but they are people, Yes they are,
and we've kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted
(03:23):
to find out who makes crop circles it's art, you
can turn the episode off. But if you do, you're
gonna miss out on some kind of some cool interesting
stuff if you ask me. Yeah, And what I think
is weird is that despite the fact that it is
definitely not aliens and all this stuff that people propose,
we'll get into all that is that even when the
people came out and said no, we've been making crop
(03:44):
circles for years, some people like no, no, no, they're
being paid to say that, Yeah, there's aliens. In fact,
that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories.
Those just admitting that you're responsible, you suggest that you
you're Yeah, somebody's put you up to admitting it, you're
it's disinformation basically, and that's what a lot of people
(04:05):
have said. A lot of people say it's m I five.
And the reason they say it's m I five is
because if you start tracing the history of crop circles,
they originated basically the hoax did um in England, specifically
in a couple of counties in England. Yeah, I mean
not only originated, but I think um of all crop
(04:27):
circles have existed in southern England, even though they're they're
you know, they've had someone like Japan and the United States,
some other parts of Europe, but yeah, ninety over in
southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to
undertake the process of circle art exactly for one reason
or another. Who knows, well, I can tell you how
(04:50):
it started out yeah, so there crop circles. If you're
a seriologist, you will point to the sixteenth century maybe
when somebody he's like, the first what could be described
as a crop circle is accounted for. Um. I couldn't
find anything to back that up, but apparently in the
(05:10):
sixteenth century that's where the first description came from. I
did find in the seventeenth century, and there's a wood
cut of something called the mowing Devil, and it's a
it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle.
But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah,
he I don't understand how this became some sort of
(05:31):
weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then,
because if you look at the wood cut, it is
satan with a scythe and he is clearly cutting down
corn or something some wheat harvest. But cutting, yeah, he's not.
It's not that's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. They're like,
(05:51):
you know, it's a cornstock that has laid down but
not damaged supposedly, right, they yield the pressure without breaking.
So this is this is just complete WHOI to me?
And there's even more so the there's an explanation on
the wood cut itself. Well, it's a story. Yeah, basically
a um, a man uh balked at the price that
(06:14):
he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain.
And the man said, I would rather have the devil
harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke
up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find
that the devil was harvesting his green and he probably
went to hell for it. But that was the whole
story behind the mowing devil. If you're a seriologist, this
is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of
(06:36):
says a lot if you ask me. But um, something
that does kind of pop up that's a little a
little less easily explained, came along in eighty in the
issue of In an issue of Nature, there was an
Englishman named John Rand Capron or Capron, and he was
from Surrey, and he said that he found a field
(06:56):
of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as
if by wind. Yeah, and they say there's a crop circle. Yeah,
maybe it's possible. He said that it's to him, he
thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again we'll get
into other explanations later, but one of them is that
they are the result of like a tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah.
(07:19):
But what what he didn't say was that it was
like a perfect circle. And this circonference was you know,
I mean it could have just been a windy spot
where some stuff was knocked down, you know, right the yeah, exactly.
He didn't say it was in the shape of an
Egyptian arc or anything like that, right, or an alien
smoking pot. That's a real one. That's really um. So
(07:44):
that those are like the earliest evidence of crop circles.
And then in the sixties the first modern idea of
a crop circle came about in Um Australia and there
was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a
circular depression, UM, and it had been associated with the
UFO sighting, and you know, it made the rounds in
(08:06):
the media and even then a lot of people said
it was probably a tornado or a cyclone or something
like that. Um. But there was a dude who happened
to be in Australia at the time when it was
being reported on. It was you know, a big hubbub
and everything, and um his name was Dave Crop circle,
(08:28):
Dave crop circle, No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name is Dave,
Doug Bauer, and Doug Bauer when he got back from Australia,
he was hanging out with a friend of his one
night in drunk there. They'll just come out and admitute
they were drunk at the pub and he told his
buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't that be hilarious
if we went out and made our own crop circle?
(08:51):
And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious
so much, so let's go do it. So they figured
out how to do it, and they made the first
crop circle in nineteen like the first crop circle, the
first hoax crop circle what you call art was made
in and um, what's funny about the whole thing is
they made these things for years, hundreds of them, yes,
(09:14):
but say the first couple dozen maybe nobody noticed because
they made them on flat fields. And then they finally
figured out, why what if we made one on like
a field that was on an incline. They made that one,
and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal
phenomenon took off like a rocket. Yeah, and people, uh
(09:36):
caught on obviously, and started making their own crop circles
all over England UM and all kinds of cool designs UM.
By the nineteen nineties it was a genuine tourist attraction.
Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay
me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle.
Apparently they were charging to offset the damage under their
(09:57):
crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah,
I saw where it could. It didn't damage the crops.
I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop
circle itself. Yeah, yeah, I think it can damage it.
But the I mean, the hallmark of it is that
the grain is bent but not broken, So as long
as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance
it could continue growing or try to grow back upright
(10:19):
or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken
grain in a crop circle. Yeah, I mean, I guess
we should talk about the design. Say, most of the
times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of
different shapes now, but they started out as circular UM
either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples, and sometimes
they're connected, sometimes they're not um. They are usually bent
(10:41):
in one way for a while, so either laying down
clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they
can be clockwise for ten feet and then counterclockwise. And
from the sky you see these different kind of swirly patterns,
like a layered swirly pa. It's very impressive. Yeah, and
and again this started really kind of to take off
(11:04):
in the eighties and throughout the nineties. Um and as
they became more and more popular and more and more
widespread in the media and um among people who watched
the X Files, and again that the nineties were a
deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennial millennium. Um So,
(11:27):
I think that kind of really helped the popularity of
crop circles explode because there are a lot of people
are like, these are signs from aliens. Are either alien landing,
like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions right, or
else they're leaving They're leaving science for us. There's even
a movie called Science, a terrible, terrible movie, um starring
(11:48):
Mel Gibson about this very thing. Um So, there is
a lot of people who bought into it like that,
and as as the awareness of crop circles grew, so
did the complexity of them to where you did have
people who were sitting down and coming up with like
really incredible math and then going out and doing it
in a crop circle form. Yeah, and some people uh
(12:11):
use that like it's it's this one is exactly four
times larger than the one below it and as evidence
that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are
good at figuring out design and geometry and math. There's
there's specifically a man who kind of um uh I
guess provided a stumbling block to the debunking of um
(12:35):
crop circles. His name is Gerald S. Hawkins, and he
is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast,
and he used his math skills to analyze crop circles
and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of Euclidean
geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some
(13:02):
non human agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the
scope of human understanding. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician
could learn something from the something new, and that implied
that something extraterrestrial was behind him. While his findings have
been um challenge time and time again. So he believed
(13:22):
that he believed it was I thought he said he
was debunking. No, no, he he confounded debunking. He created this,
he did bunk um. And the thing is the language
he's using, the math he's using is real math. So
the average person can't come in and look at this
and be like this is wrong for this and this
reason and this reason, um and then his I think
(13:44):
the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed
at all in what appears to be normal um academic
math forums. It's just it doesn't exist. It doesn't like,
it doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his
initial findings in a respected math journal, it hasn't. If
this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry,
(14:06):
it would be in textbook revolutionary. Yeah, and it's just
not discussed. So I think that in and of itself
is a pretty good example of how seriologists butt up
against skeptics, and and the whole thing is continued. Somebody
will present a body of evidence and then nobody is
either capable or willing to just go to the trouble
(14:27):
of debunking it. Yeah, and these things like this article
is I don't know if I can recommend people read
this one. It's it seems like it was written by
a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Um. But one
thing has struck me as odd in this article at least,
is um. These things are usually like they're big, you know,
there're several hundred feet right, maybe a hundred feet it says,
(14:47):
sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah, I don't understand that.
That's that's called like stepping on a piece of wheat, Like,
how can a crop stork will be several inches across?
There was some stuff in here that I couldn't find
any support for or anywhere else. Like, here's a sentence
for you under the title who makes crop circles? The
(15:08):
first sentence is the answer of who or what is
creating these crop formations is not an easy one to answer?
Is Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence
to Um. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for
hundreds of designs, hoaxes can't account for all the thousands
of crop circles created. Yeah again, hoaxes can account for
(15:30):
every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah,
I was really disappointed with this. I put in for
an article update. Oh yeah, good. All right, so we'll
talk about a little more about where these are located
and what kind of fields are used after this break.
(15:59):
All right, So you mentioned in a couple of counties
in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire or where most of these are,
which kind of makes sense if people are saying he
may to built some crop circles. Oh yeah, how do
you do that? Right? Here's how you do it. Oh cool,
I'll go do one right. You know, it's localized for
the most part. And the reason it's localized there is
that's where Dave and Doug lived exactly. That's where they live.
(16:22):
That's where the crop circles started. So yes, they were, Um,
they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is
that's where stonehenges. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, sure,
Dave and Doug lived there, Who cares? They were put
up to it, saying that they did it by m
I five. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah.
(16:47):
All kinds of fields can be used, um for this art,
corn oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. Um. I like the corn ones.
I think that that makes a nice canvas. I don't
know that I've seen a corn one. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I like the corn ones. Well I think they were
corn and not signs, right right, surrounded by corn. I
tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow
(17:10):
my hip for campus to form memories of that movie.
Uh so, I guess we should cover some of the
theories because we covered like a big foot and other
things that aren't real to um so, so here's what
seriologists believe. Um we mentioned that it's an alien calling card.
Perhaps a lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, oh I
(17:31):
saw some I heard some strange noises, I saw some
weird lights. There's a fair famous video called the Oliver's
Castle video where you see these strange lights above the
field and you actually see the crop circle on video form,
it's a field and then it just depresses into a
crop circle. You've seen this, Oh yeah, it's on YouTube.
(17:53):
But that guy who made that video came out and said,
here's how I did that. It's uh, these computer program
ms and it's paint and um it's all fake. But
some people say no, no, no, no no. That guy
was paid off to say that, or m I five
kidnapped his family and made him say it. But it's
I mean, it's very cool looking. But that is the
(18:15):
you know. One of the points that UM rational people
point to is like, if these things are being made,
why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right,
Because cameras are ubiquitous video cameras, people look for this stuff.
They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Well, yeah,
there was a very famous um operation by a group
(18:35):
of seriologists who camped out at a field um for
several like a week or two I believe, back in
the eighties or nineties, and apparently not only did no
crop circles form during the time they were camped out
in that area, none didn't all of England during that
(18:56):
time that they were. They publicized that they were camping out,
and then right in the operation ended, a crop circle
popped up, like I think a couple of football fields
away from where they've been campused. Because Doug in what
was his name, Dave Dave were like, all right, they're
gone exactly, let's go mess with him. Another one is
that UM, a lot of people say that, uh, there's
this um, this plasma that can form ionized wind basically, yeah,
(19:21):
the plasma vortex theory, and and that it forms a cyclone.
It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe,
or counterclockwise, one of the two their cyclonic and anti cyclonic.
Whichever way that they said the the cyclone rotates the
the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated
(19:42):
the other way. Then when they were like, yeah, there's
anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time,
like there's been a real um tug of war playfulness
between people popping up in the media experts on crop
circles saying something and the people making the crop circles
um doing the opposite of what those people just said
(20:05):
to prove them wrong with their crop circles. Right after that, Yeah,
I think the English have a like with banks, you know.
I think there's a undercurrent in England of like cheeky
mess with the establishment sort of. Yeah, subverse of art
and hoaxes and pranks, and it seems like I admire anything.
It's kind of neat. Another theory is that down draft
(20:27):
from like a helicopter and airplane, a small airplane might
push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns. But
they've tried to recreate that, and of course that's not possible. No,
it's not possible, but that is a theory. Again, there's
the the cyclone theory. Um. This was another thing in
this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory
(20:47):
says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling,
ring wind called vortices. That's not the most scientific theory.
The most scientific theories that humans are making the crops circles.
Like what is going on with this article. It's just
whacky to me, But that is a theory. That's a
theory that some people put out. They say, um, when
the when that um crop circle in the sixties in
(21:09):
Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's
a cyclone. They call it a willy nilly. That was
my Australian accent to know, they call it a willie willie. Yeah. Um,
And that was something that they said that it was possible.
It was that. They also said it could be a
lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO, but that win
(21:31):
theory has been around for a very long time. Uh.
And a guy named Dr Terence Meaden, who's from the
Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. Yeah, he says that, Um,
there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says
that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning
(21:52):
and not only can they make crop circles these, this
dust can glow and that accounts for the lights. There's
the UFO. So he's using pseudoscience to debunk even further pseudoscience. Yeah,
I'm surprised it doesn't say Doctor Terrence Meeting, formerly of
(22:12):
the Tornado and Storm Research right. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Um.
Supposedly there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop
circles and people that go to visit them report feeling
tingling sensations all over their body. Um. I think this
is explained as easy as if you get someone that
(22:35):
believes in a electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and
stick them in the middle of one, they're gonna feel
a tinkling sensation. That was another thing that I ran into.
I couldn't find any um evidence to back that statement up, Like,
who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these these fields and is
it being are they are they reproducible? The findings um.
(22:59):
They was another crop circle called the Julius set It's
a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's amazing from what
I could find. It's the largest ever. It was like,
um three hundred meters nine hundred feet in diameter. That's enormous,
and it's four hundred and nine circles. Um. Just basically
look up the Julius set Um. It's very awesome. But
(23:21):
it was right next to Stonehenge. Like, there's plenty of
images of this crop circle with Stonehenge in the background,
and apparently a lot of women who went to visit
it um found that their menstrual cycles sync up, and
then some women who had already been through menopaud started
menstruating again. Both are things that can happen, can they
(23:43):
without you know, aliens taking part? Did that happen? Though? Like?
Who who documented this? This is the thing Like people
are just saying stuff and there's you can say whatever
you want and it doesn't it doesn't count necessarily, at
least not if you're trying to explain something thing. Yeah,
I think both of those things can happen. Like I'm
a forty and you know, like I think there are
(24:04):
limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond sciences
capabilities to explain things right now that there are things
that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now,
trop circles to me, are not one of them. They
they they're just not that's because it's art. Uh. In
the there was a biophysicist named Dr William Levin Good
(24:25):
who um discovered that crop circles were damaged, uh and
as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. Um.
So he says, I think they're being heated from the
inside by some kind of microwave energy. And uh, there's
a god named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon,
a professor of physics, who said, Yeah, you can build
(24:50):
something called a magnetron using uh stuff from like a
household cooker and its well VOT battery, and you can
essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah,
that might be possible that they have been heated by microwaves,
because that is another way that you can make a
crop circle. Um. He says that these crops usually have
joints in the stocks like a corn stalk does, and
(25:13):
if you heat it up it expands. Yeah, and it's
gonna fall over. Um, that would be funny if there's
a bunch of platform and it popped. But um, he says,
I'm not saying this is how they do it. But
using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program,
you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this,
(25:34):
and that is something that possibly could happen. Again, the
clearest theory is that humans are doing it. And we'll
talk more about evidence that seriologists point to and evidence
that skeptics point to, and then how you make an
actual crop circle. Right after this m hm, so Chuck,
(26:09):
there's a couple of pieces of evidence that seiologist point to.
They're very rarely, if ever footprints found around a crop
circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah.
If you look at any picture of a crop circle,
any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going
to see, um, little lines that go all along the field.
(26:34):
Those are left by the tractor, their tractor tracks. Yeah,
And crops are planted in rows exactly, so you can
just move in and about them, and you know why
they're planted in rows so you can move in and
about them without stepping on the crops exactly. Um And
like we mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came
out in and said, hey, we did this BBC. Come along,
(26:58):
let's film a little documentary and I'm gonna show you
how to do a rope and plank uh crop circle.
And apparently one of the guys had racked up a
bunch of mileage on his car. I don't know if
it's true or not, but it makes for a good story.
And his wife was got onto him and it's like, hey,
(27:18):
what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And
that's why he came out and said, now, I haven't
been cheating on you. This is why there's all this
extra mileage, and I'm gonna go public with it. So well,
they were the only three people in the world who
knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public
because the government like people had bought into this lock
stock and barrel like there was it was just UFOs
(27:41):
possibly that we're doing this like right, like smart people
were talking about this. The media was covering it like
are these UFOs and these guys are just sitting back laughing.
And apparently the Queen had a book on our summer
reading list that was released by her press people that
um included like some crop circle X where it's like
UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world. What
(28:04):
was going on? So the Queen was even mean this
and these two guys and the guy's wife are just
sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. Uh.
And then apparently the British government was about to conduct
an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need
to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's
go forward. And they came forward in like September, and
(28:28):
apparently within days they were on Good Morning America showing
the world how to do this stuff. And a lot
of people started doing it after that because they're like,
this is kind of fun and I'm an artist as well. Uh.
And here's how you do it. Well, there's some different
ways you can get a magnatron apparently, but the most
conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank um.
(28:51):
So you're gonna choose a spot, you're gonna choose a field,
you're gonna create your little design This could be a circle.
It could be the mental brought set or the Julia set. Yeah,
whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah,
because you know it is math and you have to
work it out and you have to have a pretty
good eye for or brain for design. I guess two,
draw something on a page and make it hundreds of
(29:13):
feet across. It's like these are talented people. You're gonna
get to your field and you basically, uh, you basically
act as a human compass, not like a math compass
that you used to draw a circle, not a compass
to show you which way north is. And you're gonna
put one person in the middle and that's gonna be
he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope
(29:35):
and you're gonna mark off your four uh opposite uh
marks as the circle. And you're gonna give the guy
in the center a rope, give someone on the outside
a rope, and they're just gonna walk in a big
circle as he holds that rope, and that's gonna make
essentially a near perfect circle. In theory, it forms the
diameter of the circle. Yeah, if you're taking your time,
(29:57):
then you're gonna have a pretty good looking circle. Right,
and then after that you start just moving inward from
the outside in, just stomping the the uh, the grain down, yeah,
with your big snowshoe like things, and there you have
a crop circle. Yeah. And you can, like I said,
you do one for three ft going this way, and hey,
I'm gonna jump around and turn the other way and
(30:18):
lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears
that Steiny the weirdos of the world. How does that happen? Yeah?
And the whole key apparently is planning it out ahead
of time and then just translating what's on paper into
real life. You know. Basically all it takes is a
little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles, and a couple
(30:39):
of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crop
circle if you know what you're doing. Yeah. You could
also use a gardener lawn roller, um or the traditional
rope stop stalker, right, and there you have it. There's
a group called circle Makers dot org and they were
very much inspired by Doug and Dave. Think Dug and
(31:00):
Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But these guys, um,
they their their websites still up. It's not nearly as
active as it was like five ten years ago, but
they were getting paid by companies around the world to
make crop circles. Um Like they they made a Nike
crop circle. They made um like a Swedish furniture stores
(31:24):
crop circle. Not d they make the Swish They made
a foot like a footprint, like a huge footprint. Um
and uh. They just did tons of them and got
paid apparently like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each
one they did for them. So these guys spent their
early two thousands making bank running around doing crop circles.
At the same time they're they're teaching people how to
(31:47):
do it, and simultaneously, seriologists are still investigating this and
so they they they seriologists came up with they're also
called croppies, we should say crop ease, came up with
some steps you need to take when you're investigating a
crop circle. Are we gonna go over these? Sure? Uh.
(32:08):
They talked to eyewitnesses and say, did you see her
hear anything weird because there's a crop circle? And they'll say, yeah, actually,
come to think of it, I did hear something weird?
Am I going to be on the news? Right? Um,
they check out the weather patterns UM in the area
of the previous night, because that's it always happens overnight,
(32:29):
which UM enthusiasts will say, you know this is they're
doing it under under nightfall too not be caught as aliens,
and they're sending secret messages, and rational thinking people say, no,
they're artists. Are doing it under nightfall to not get caught.
Same we can keep the hoax going. Uh, what else
(32:52):
do you do? Uh? Supposedly they will bring out machines
to actually measure soil and use like X ray diffraction
analysis and electromatic electromagnetic energy readings. They're analyzing all of
this information and I don't I don't know what they
come up with. I like, clearly they've been forced to say, yes,
(33:16):
some of these are hoaxes, like the alien smoking pot right,
cannot be explained by seriologists. Um. There was a very
there was a famous one that said, UM, we are
not alone spelled out all in one word basically but
in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot
of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you were not alone?
(33:37):
If these are messages from aliens? And do they just
happen to speak English. Yeah. So, um, there's a lot
of a lot of points that skeptics point do the
ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these um.
And there was a guy named Joe Nicol and Uh
he writes for UM, the Committee for Scientific and Instigation
(34:00):
si C s I UM and they he basically came
up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One
is that there was an escalation in frequency as they
became more and more popular, which is kind of a
weird thing. Uh. They the geographic distribution of him was
again concentrated primarily in this region of England, even though
(34:24):
you'd find him elsewhere, Brazil, Japan, all over. Uh. You
can also explain that by the fact that people were
inspired by other crop circles. Um, there is an increasing complexity,
which means that they're getting better at it exactly. Um.
And then there was the like they called the Shynus factor,
which was they were only done at night, knowing had
(34:45):
ever seen a crop circle formed. That one guy's YouTube
thing UM not outstanding well, which was faked exactly unless
he was paid off to say it was faked exactly.
And it's pretty tough to dis prove that. Yeah, I think,
like I said, I think of people, Um, just look
at this as really cool public displays of art, because
(35:07):
they're amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able
to accomplish with their hands and feet. They they somebody
redid the Nasca hummingbird, you know, the Nasca lines. Um
they did like kind of a more stylized version of that. Again,
the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight
up pot leaf of course. Um, someone did the moth Man,
(35:31):
the West Virginia moth Man, the Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah, like,
people got really good at this. Um and and like
you said, I mean, if you look at it as art,
it's pretty pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a
fun conversation to over here at an English pub is
a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of uh,
(35:54):
what kind of circle they can make next. I bet
that's a lot of fun to listen to. And you know,
a rural county in England in a pub, I'd love
to be in on one of those. We'll go to Wiltshire,
Yeah maybe I will. Ah, you got anything else? I
got nothing else? So that's crop circles. The mystery continues.
If you want to learn more about crop circles, you
(36:16):
can type that word into how stuff works in the
search bar, or don't, and then it'll bring up this weird,
weird article. Yeah. Uh, and since I said search bars,
time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh
Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys and Jerry, I was writing to
make a comment on something Chuck said on the last
(36:37):
listener mail animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that
the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored
by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting
that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right,
I remember that. Yeah, this girl had had I believe,
doctor in psych psychologist, psychologist parents who kind of just
(36:59):
ignored her her mental issues, which I thought was weird.
He said. I don't know if it's just the country
where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for
that in Casa day Herrero coucio depato. Jerry, do you
know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates
into in the black Smith's Home stick knives. It alludes
(37:22):
to what happens when an expert on something tends to
neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah,
it's like here, we say, the cobbler's children have no shoes.
Yeah exactly. Um yeah, interesting. I bet every country has
their own. Say it makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah,
I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not Chilean.
The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine.
(37:42):
The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances,
an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef
that orders fast food, etcetera. Maybe they're just tired of
doing that same thing over and over again, they just
want to stop and rest when they get home. Or
maybe they're just jerks. Who knows, but apparently it happens
often enough that the situation got its own saying around
(38:04):
these parts more than one stay classy, best Witches. Matt,
Thanks Matt, and Matt was super excited that this was
gonna get on listener to mail because he's been a
listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt,
way to hang in there. All I had to do
is right in. Yeah, you're bad to get on. At
some point and Cassa de Herrero Cucio de Polo. I'm
(38:25):
gonna get that tattooed above my waistline in the Blacksmith's
Home Stick Knives. I don't get that one, all right.
Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If
you want to try to confound us, you can do
so via Twitter at s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
(38:46):
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of i Heeart Radios. How Stuff Works from more
podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(39:07):
H m hm
Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. I hope you had some breakfast,
cereal and cartoons this morning, and now you're moving on
to Stuff you Should Know selects. My pick is what's
the deal with crop Circles? From November two. Uh. This
is pretty interesting to me because crop circles are clearly
man made and just h there for Internet weirdos to
(00:25):
think are made by aliens? And what's better than that? Right?
Please enjoy? Right now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes this whole thing Stuff
(00:48):
you Should Know the podcast. That's right, let's go on,
good man. I got on my snow shoes and I'm
walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. Hey, run
into snowshoes. Well, let's sort of a large snowshoe. I
could see that though. Yeah, that would definitely work. Yeah right,
but it's easier you can do something else with your
(01:08):
hands while you're using this. That's a good point. So, uh,
did you ever have the led Zeppelin box set? From?
Uh my college roommate did. Yeah, so you're familiar with
the crop circles and the suggestion that by led Zeppelin
that it was there Zeppelin that was responsible for all
of them. Was that what that was? Yeah? I didn't
(01:29):
pick up on that because on the cover of the
box set there's like this awesome, very real life crop
circle formation and then the shadow of the Zeppelin floating
over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow
every Okay, Yeah, that was the whole thing. Like said,
led Zeppelin took responsibility for those, right, And by the way,
we got a lot of responses on how they got
the name led Zeppelin, So thank you to the hundreds
(01:52):
of people. Yeah, where the e where the A went.
They didn't want people to think it was lead Zeppelin
exactly makes total sense, right, the Zeppelin in front the
lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication
that the led Zeppelin Zeppelin was responsible for crop circles.
But that's one of the few suggestions that have been
(02:14):
made for what makes crop circles. And this is really
strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a
quarter of a century. How crop circles are made who
makes them? And yet there's still a lot of people
called seriologists after series The Goddess of Agriculture um, who
(02:39):
are like, no, this this those people, that's the that's
the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're responsible for crop circles,
which leaves on accounted for. Yeah. I don't even call
it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah,
so I saw somewhere at one point somebody say it's
the most scientific, most science based art there because the
(03:01):
stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of
them is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah, some smart
people are behind these, uh what I like to call art.
They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on
a cornfield. No, but they are people, Yes they are,
and we've kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted
(03:23):
to find out who makes crop circles it's art, you
can turn the episode off. But if you do, you're
gonna miss out on some kind of some cool interesting
stuff if you ask me. Yeah, And what I think
is weird is that despite the fact that it is
definitely not aliens and all this stuff that people propose,
we'll get into all that is that even when the
people came out and said no, we've been making crop
(03:44):
circles for years, some people like no, no, no, they're
being paid to say that, Yeah, there's aliens. In fact,
that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories.
Those just admitting that you're responsible, you suggest that you
you're Yeah, somebody's put you up to admitting it, you're
it's disinformation basically, and that's what a lot of people
(04:05):
have said. A lot of people say it's m I five.
And the reason they say it's m I five is
because if you start tracing the history of crop circles,
they originated basically the hoax did um in England, specifically
in a couple of counties in England. Yeah, I mean
not only originated, but I think um of all crop
(04:27):
circles have existed in southern England, even though they're they're
you know, they've had someone like Japan and the United States,
some other parts of Europe, but yeah, ninety over in
southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to
undertake the process of circle art exactly for one reason
or another. Who knows, well, I can tell you how
(04:50):
it started out yeah, so there crop circles. If you're
a seriologist, you will point to the sixteenth century maybe
when somebody he's like, the first what could be described
as a crop circle is accounted for. Um. I couldn't
find anything to back that up, but apparently in the
(05:10):
sixteenth century that's where the first description came from. I
did find in the seventeenth century, and there's a wood
cut of something called the mowing Devil, and it's a
it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle.
But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah,
he I don't understand how this became some sort of
(05:31):
weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then,
because if you look at the wood cut, it is
satan with a scythe and he is clearly cutting down
corn or something some wheat harvest. But cutting, yeah, he's not.
It's not that's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. They're like,
(05:51):
you know, it's a cornstock that has laid down but
not damaged supposedly, right, they yield the pressure without breaking.
So this is this is just complete WHOI to me?
And there's even more so the there's an explanation on
the wood cut itself. Well, it's a story. Yeah, basically
a um, a man uh balked at the price that
(06:14):
he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain.
And the man said, I would rather have the devil
harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke
up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find
that the devil was harvesting his green and he probably
went to hell for it. But that was the whole
story behind the mowing devil. If you're a seriologist, this
is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of
(06:36):
says a lot if you ask me. But um, something
that does kind of pop up that's a little a
little less easily explained, came along in eighty in the
issue of In an issue of Nature, there was an
Englishman named John Rand Capron or Capron, and he was
from Surrey, and he said that he found a field
(06:56):
of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as
if by wind. Yeah, and they say there's a crop circle. Yeah,
maybe it's possible. He said that it's to him, he
thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again we'll get
into other explanations later, but one of them is that
they are the result of like a tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah.
(07:19):
But what what he didn't say was that it was
like a perfect circle. And this circonference was you know,
I mean it could have just been a windy spot
where some stuff was knocked down, you know, right the yeah, exactly.
He didn't say it was in the shape of an
Egyptian arc or anything like that, right, or an alien
smoking pot. That's a real one. That's really um. So
(07:44):
that those are like the earliest evidence of crop circles.
And then in the sixties the first modern idea of
a crop circle came about in Um Australia and there
was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a
circular depression, UM, and it had been associated with the
UFO sighting, and you know, it made the rounds in
(08:06):
the media and even then a lot of people said
it was probably a tornado or a cyclone or something
like that. Um. But there was a dude who happened
to be in Australia at the time when it was
being reported on. It was you know, a big hubbub
and everything, and um his name was Dave Crop circle,
(08:28):
Dave crop circle, No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name is Dave,
Doug Bauer, and Doug Bauer when he got back from Australia,
he was hanging out with a friend of his one
night in drunk there. They'll just come out and admitute
they were drunk at the pub and he told his
buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't that be hilarious
if we went out and made our own crop circle?
(08:51):
And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious
so much, so let's go do it. So they figured
out how to do it, and they made the first
crop circle in nineteen like the first crop circle, the
first hoax crop circle what you call art was made
in and um, what's funny about the whole thing is
they made these things for years, hundreds of them, yes,
(09:14):
but say the first couple dozen maybe nobody noticed because
they made them on flat fields. And then they finally
figured out, why what if we made one on like
a field that was on an incline. They made that one,
and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal
phenomenon took off like a rocket. Yeah, and people, uh
(09:36):
caught on obviously, and started making their own crop circles
all over England UM and all kinds of cool designs UM.
By the nineteen nineties it was a genuine tourist attraction.
Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay
me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle.
Apparently they were charging to offset the damage under their
(09:57):
crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah,
I saw where it could. It didn't damage the crops.
I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop
circle itself. Yeah, yeah, I think it can damage it.
But the I mean, the hallmark of it is that
the grain is bent but not broken, So as long
as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance
it could continue growing or try to grow back upright
(10:19):
or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken
grain in a crop circle. Yeah, I mean, I guess
we should talk about the design. Say, most of the
times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of
different shapes now, but they started out as circular UM
either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples, and sometimes
they're connected, sometimes they're not um. They are usually bent
(10:41):
in one way for a while, so either laying down
clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they
can be clockwise for ten feet and then counterclockwise. And
from the sky you see these different kind of swirly patterns,
like a layered swirly pa. It's very impressive. Yeah, and
and again this started really kind of to take off
(11:04):
in the eighties and throughout the nineties. Um and as
they became more and more popular and more and more
widespread in the media and um among people who watched
the X Files, and again that the nineties were a
deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennial millennium. Um So,
(11:27):
I think that kind of really helped the popularity of
crop circles explode because there are a lot of people
are like, these are signs from aliens. Are either alien landing,
like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions right, or
else they're leaving They're leaving science for us. There's even
a movie called Science, a terrible, terrible movie, um starring
(11:48):
Mel Gibson about this very thing. Um So, there is
a lot of people who bought into it like that,
and as as the awareness of crop circles grew, so
did the complexity of them to where you did have
people who were sitting down and coming up with like
really incredible math and then going out and doing it
in a crop circle form. Yeah, and some people uh
(12:11):
use that like it's it's this one is exactly four
times larger than the one below it and as evidence
that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are
good at figuring out design and geometry and math. There's
there's specifically a man who kind of um uh I
guess provided a stumbling block to the debunking of um
(12:35):
crop circles. His name is Gerald S. Hawkins, and he
is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast,
and he used his math skills to analyze crop circles
and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of Euclidean
geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some
(13:02):
non human agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the
scope of human understanding. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician
could learn something from the something new, and that implied
that something extraterrestrial was behind him. While his findings have
been um challenge time and time again. So he believed
(13:22):
that he believed it was I thought he said he
was debunking. No, no, he he confounded debunking. He created this,
he did bunk um. And the thing is the language
he's using, the math he's using is real math. So
the average person can't come in and look at this
and be like this is wrong for this and this
reason and this reason, um and then his I think
(13:44):
the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed
at all in what appears to be normal um academic
math forums. It's just it doesn't exist. It doesn't like,
it doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his
initial findings in a respected math journal, it hasn't. If
this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry,
(14:06):
it would be in textbook revolutionary. Yeah, and it's just
not discussed. So I think that in and of itself
is a pretty good example of how seriologists butt up
against skeptics, and and the whole thing is continued. Somebody
will present a body of evidence and then nobody is
either capable or willing to just go to the trouble
(14:27):
of debunking it. Yeah, and these things like this article
is I don't know if I can recommend people read
this one. It's it seems like it was written by
a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Um. But one
thing has struck me as odd in this article at least,
is um. These things are usually like they're big, you know,
there're several hundred feet right, maybe a hundred feet it says,
(14:47):
sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah, I don't understand that.
That's that's called like stepping on a piece of wheat, Like,
how can a crop stork will be several inches across?
There was some stuff in here that I couldn't find
any support for or anywhere else. Like, here's a sentence
for you under the title who makes crop circles? The
(15:08):
first sentence is the answer of who or what is
creating these crop formations is not an easy one to answer?
Is Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence
to Um. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for
hundreds of designs, hoaxes can't account for all the thousands
of crop circles created. Yeah again, hoaxes can account for
(15:30):
every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah,
I was really disappointed with this. I put in for
an article update. Oh yeah, good. All right, so we'll
talk about a little more about where these are located
and what kind of fields are used after this break.
(15:59):
All right, So you mentioned in a couple of counties
in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire or where most of these are,
which kind of makes sense if people are saying he
may to built some crop circles. Oh yeah, how do
you do that? Right? Here's how you do it. Oh cool,
I'll go do one right. You know, it's localized for
the most part. And the reason it's localized there is
that's where Dave and Doug lived exactly. That's where they live.
(16:22):
That's where the crop circles started. So yes, they were, Um,
they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is
that's where stonehenges. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, sure,
Dave and Doug lived there, Who cares? They were put
up to it, saying that they did it by m
I five. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah.
(16:47):
All kinds of fields can be used, um for this art,
corn oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. Um. I like the corn ones.
I think that that makes a nice canvas. I don't
know that I've seen a corn one. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I like the corn ones. Well I think they were
corn and not signs, right right, surrounded by corn. I
tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow
(17:10):
my hip for campus to form memories of that movie.
Uh so, I guess we should cover some of the
theories because we covered like a big foot and other
things that aren't real to um so, so here's what
seriologists believe. Um we mentioned that it's an alien calling card.
Perhaps a lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, oh I
(17:31):
saw some I heard some strange noises, I saw some
weird lights. There's a fair famous video called the Oliver's
Castle video where you see these strange lights above the
field and you actually see the crop circle on video form,
it's a field and then it just depresses into a
crop circle. You've seen this, Oh yeah, it's on YouTube.
(17:53):
But that guy who made that video came out and said,
here's how I did that. It's uh, these computer program
ms and it's paint and um it's all fake. But
some people say no, no, no, no no. That guy
was paid off to say that, or m I five
kidnapped his family and made him say it. But it's
I mean, it's very cool looking. But that is the
(18:15):
you know. One of the points that UM rational people
point to is like, if these things are being made,
why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right,
Because cameras are ubiquitous video cameras, people look for this stuff.
They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Well, yeah,
there was a very famous um operation by a group
(18:35):
of seriologists who camped out at a field um for
several like a week or two I believe, back in
the eighties or nineties, and apparently not only did no
crop circles form during the time they were camped out
in that area, none didn't all of England during that
(18:56):
time that they were. They publicized that they were camping out,
and then right in the operation ended, a crop circle
popped up, like I think a couple of football fields
away from where they've been campused. Because Doug in what
was his name, Dave Dave were like, all right, they're
gone exactly, let's go mess with him. Another one is
that UM, a lot of people say that, uh, there's
this um, this plasma that can form ionized wind basically, yeah,
(19:21):
the plasma vortex theory, and and that it forms a cyclone.
It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe,
or counterclockwise, one of the two their cyclonic and anti cyclonic.
Whichever way that they said the the cyclone rotates the
the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated
(19:42):
the other way. Then when they were like, yeah, there's
anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time,
like there's been a real um tug of war playfulness
between people popping up in the media experts on crop
circles saying something and the people making the crop circles
um doing the opposite of what those people just said
(20:05):
to prove them wrong with their crop circles. Right after that, Yeah,
I think the English have a like with banks, you know.
I think there's a undercurrent in England of like cheeky
mess with the establishment sort of. Yeah, subverse of art
and hoaxes and pranks, and it seems like I admire anything.
It's kind of neat. Another theory is that down draft
(20:27):
from like a helicopter and airplane, a small airplane might
push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns. But
they've tried to recreate that, and of course that's not possible. No,
it's not possible, but that is a theory. Again, there's
the the cyclone theory. Um. This was another thing in
this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory
(20:47):
says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling,
ring wind called vortices. That's not the most scientific theory.
The most scientific theories that humans are making the crops circles.
Like what is going on with this article. It's just
whacky to me, But that is a theory. That's a
theory that some people put out. They say, um, when
the when that um crop circle in the sixties in
(21:09):
Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's
a cyclone. They call it a willy nilly. That was
my Australian accent to know, they call it a willie willie. Yeah. Um,
And that was something that they said that it was possible.
It was that. They also said it could be a
lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO, but that win
(21:31):
theory has been around for a very long time. Uh.
And a guy named Dr Terence Meaden, who's from the
Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. Yeah, he says that, Um,
there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says
that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning
(21:52):
and not only can they make crop circles these, this
dust can glow and that accounts for the lights. There's
the UFO. So he's using pseudoscience to debunk even further pseudoscience. Yeah,
I'm surprised it doesn't say Doctor Terrence Meeting, formerly of
(22:12):
the Tornado and Storm Research right. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Um.
Supposedly there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop
circles and people that go to visit them report feeling
tingling sensations all over their body. Um. I think this
is explained as easy as if you get someone that
(22:35):
believes in a electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and
stick them in the middle of one, they're gonna feel
a tinkling sensation. That was another thing that I ran into.
I couldn't find any um evidence to back that statement up, Like,
who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these these fields and is
it being are they are they reproducible? The findings um.
(22:59):
They was another crop circle called the Julius set It's
a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's amazing from what
I could find. It's the largest ever. It was like,
um three hundred meters nine hundred feet in diameter. That's enormous,
and it's four hundred and nine circles. Um. Just basically
look up the Julius set Um. It's very awesome. But
(23:21):
it was right next to Stonehenge. Like, there's plenty of
images of this crop circle with Stonehenge in the background,
and apparently a lot of women who went to visit
it um found that their menstrual cycles sync up, and
then some women who had already been through menopaud started
menstruating again. Both are things that can happen, can they
(23:43):
without you know, aliens taking part? Did that happen? Though? Like?
Who who documented this? This is the thing Like people
are just saying stuff and there's you can say whatever
you want and it doesn't it doesn't count necessarily, at
least not if you're trying to explain something thing. Yeah,
I think both of those things can happen. Like I'm
a forty and you know, like I think there are
(24:04):
limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond sciences
capabilities to explain things right now that there are things
that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now,
trop circles to me, are not one of them. They
they they're just not that's because it's art. Uh. In
the there was a biophysicist named Dr William Levin Good
(24:25):
who um discovered that crop circles were damaged, uh and
as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. Um.
So he says, I think they're being heated from the
inside by some kind of microwave energy. And uh, there's
a god named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon,
a professor of physics, who said, Yeah, you can build
(24:50):
something called a magnetron using uh stuff from like a
household cooker and its well VOT battery, and you can
essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah,
that might be possible that they have been heated by microwaves,
because that is another way that you can make a
crop circle. Um. He says that these crops usually have
joints in the stocks like a corn stalk does, and
(25:13):
if you heat it up it expands. Yeah, and it's
gonna fall over. Um, that would be funny if there's
a bunch of platform and it popped. But um, he says,
I'm not saying this is how they do it. But
using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program,
you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this,
(25:34):
and that is something that possibly could happen. Again, the
clearest theory is that humans are doing it. And we'll
talk more about evidence that seriologists point to and evidence
that skeptics point to, and then how you make an
actual crop circle. Right after this m hm, so Chuck,
(26:09):
there's a couple of pieces of evidence that seiologist point to.
They're very rarely, if ever footprints found around a crop
circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah.
If you look at any picture of a crop circle,
any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going
to see, um, little lines that go all along the field.
(26:34):
Those are left by the tractor, their tractor tracks. Yeah,
And crops are planted in rows exactly, so you can
just move in and about them, and you know why
they're planted in rows so you can move in and
about them without stepping on the crops exactly. Um And
like we mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came
out in and said, hey, we did this BBC. Come along,
(26:58):
let's film a little documentary and I'm gonna show you
how to do a rope and plank uh crop circle.
And apparently one of the guys had racked up a
bunch of mileage on his car. I don't know if
it's true or not, but it makes for a good story.
And his wife was got onto him and it's like, hey,
(27:18):
what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And
that's why he came out and said, now, I haven't
been cheating on you. This is why there's all this
extra mileage, and I'm gonna go public with it. So well,
they were the only three people in the world who
knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public
because the government like people had bought into this lock
stock and barrel like there was it was just UFOs
(27:41):
possibly that we're doing this like right, like smart people
were talking about this. The media was covering it like
are these UFOs and these guys are just sitting back laughing.
And apparently the Queen had a book on our summer
reading list that was released by her press people that
um included like some crop circle X where it's like
UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world. What
(28:04):
was going on? So the Queen was even mean this
and these two guys and the guy's wife are just
sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. Uh.
And then apparently the British government was about to conduct
an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need
to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's
go forward. And they came forward in like September, and
(28:28):
apparently within days they were on Good Morning America showing
the world how to do this stuff. And a lot
of people started doing it after that because they're like,
this is kind of fun and I'm an artist as well. Uh.
And here's how you do it. Well, there's some different
ways you can get a magnatron apparently, but the most
conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank um.
(28:51):
So you're gonna choose a spot, you're gonna choose a field,
you're gonna create your little design This could be a circle.
It could be the mental brought set or the Julia set. Yeah,
whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah,
because you know it is math and you have to
work it out and you have to have a pretty
good eye for or brain for design. I guess two,
draw something on a page and make it hundreds of
(29:13):
feet across. It's like these are talented people. You're gonna
get to your field and you basically, uh, you basically
act as a human compass, not like a math compass
that you used to draw a circle, not a compass
to show you which way north is. And you're gonna
put one person in the middle and that's gonna be
he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope
(29:35):
and you're gonna mark off your four uh opposite uh
marks as the circle. And you're gonna give the guy
in the center a rope, give someone on the outside
a rope, and they're just gonna walk in a big
circle as he holds that rope, and that's gonna make
essentially a near perfect circle. In theory, it forms the
diameter of the circle. Yeah, if you're taking your time,
(29:57):
then you're gonna have a pretty good looking circle. Right,
and then after that you start just moving inward from
the outside in, just stomping the the uh, the grain down, yeah,
with your big snowshoe like things, and there you have
a crop circle. Yeah. And you can, like I said,
you do one for three ft going this way, and hey,
I'm gonna jump around and turn the other way and
(30:18):
lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears
that Steiny the weirdos of the world. How does that happen? Yeah?
And the whole key apparently is planning it out ahead
of time and then just translating what's on paper into
real life. You know. Basically all it takes is a
little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles, and a couple
(30:39):
of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crop
circle if you know what you're doing. Yeah. You could
also use a gardener lawn roller, um or the traditional
rope stop stalker, right, and there you have it. There's
a group called circle Makers dot org and they were
very much inspired by Doug and Dave. Think Dug and
(31:00):
Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But these guys, um,
they their their websites still up. It's not nearly as
active as it was like five ten years ago, but
they were getting paid by companies around the world to
make crop circles. Um Like they they made a Nike
crop circle. They made um like a Swedish furniture stores
(31:24):
crop circle. Not d they make the Swish They made
a foot like a footprint, like a huge footprint. Um
and uh. They just did tons of them and got
paid apparently like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each
one they did for them. So these guys spent their
early two thousands making bank running around doing crop circles.
At the same time they're they're teaching people how to
(31:47):
do it, and simultaneously, seriologists are still investigating this and
so they they they seriologists came up with they're also
called croppies, we should say crop ease, came up with
some steps you need to take when you're investigating a
crop circle. Are we gonna go over these? Sure? Uh.
(32:08):
They talked to eyewitnesses and say, did you see her
hear anything weird because there's a crop circle? And they'll say, yeah, actually,
come to think of it, I did hear something weird?
Am I going to be on the news? Right? Um,
they check out the weather patterns UM in the area
of the previous night, because that's it always happens overnight,
(32:29):
which UM enthusiasts will say, you know this is they're
doing it under under nightfall too not be caught as aliens,
and they're sending secret messages, and rational thinking people say, no,
they're artists. Are doing it under nightfall to not get caught.
Same we can keep the hoax going. Uh, what else
(32:52):
do you do? Uh? Supposedly they will bring out machines
to actually measure soil and use like X ray diffraction
analysis and electromatic electromagnetic energy readings. They're analyzing all of
this information and I don't I don't know what they
come up with. I like, clearly they've been forced to say, yes,
(33:16):
some of these are hoaxes, like the alien smoking pot right,
cannot be explained by seriologists. Um. There was a very
there was a famous one that said, UM, we are
not alone spelled out all in one word basically but
in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot
of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you were not alone?
(33:37):
If these are messages from aliens? And do they just
happen to speak English. Yeah. So, um, there's a lot
of a lot of points that skeptics point do the
ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these um.
And there was a guy named Joe Nicol and Uh
he writes for UM, the Committee for Scientific and Instigation
(34:00):
si C s I UM and they he basically came
up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One
is that there was an escalation in frequency as they
became more and more popular, which is kind of a
weird thing. Uh. They the geographic distribution of him was
again concentrated primarily in this region of England, even though
(34:24):
you'd find him elsewhere, Brazil, Japan, all over. Uh. You
can also explain that by the fact that people were
inspired by other crop circles. Um, there is an increasing complexity,
which means that they're getting better at it exactly. Um.
And then there was the like they called the Shynus factor,
which was they were only done at night, knowing had
(34:45):
ever seen a crop circle formed. That one guy's YouTube
thing UM not outstanding well, which was faked exactly unless
he was paid off to say it was faked exactly.
And it's pretty tough to dis prove that. Yeah, I think,
like I said, I think of people, Um, just look
at this as really cool public displays of art, because
(35:07):
they're amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able
to accomplish with their hands and feet. They they somebody
redid the Nasca hummingbird, you know, the Nasca lines. Um
they did like kind of a more stylized version of that. Again,
the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight
up pot leaf of course. Um, someone did the moth Man,
(35:31):
the West Virginia moth Man, the Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah, like,
people got really good at this. Um and and like
you said, I mean, if you look at it as art,
it's pretty pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a
fun conversation to over here at an English pub is
a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of uh,
(35:54):
what kind of circle they can make next. I bet
that's a lot of fun to listen to. And you know,
a rural county in England in a pub, I'd love
to be in on one of those. We'll go to Wiltshire,
Yeah maybe I will. Ah, you got anything else? I
got nothing else? So that's crop circles. The mystery continues.
If you want to learn more about crop circles, you
(36:16):
can type that word into how stuff works in the
search bar, or don't, and then it'll bring up this weird,
weird article. Yeah. Uh, and since I said search bars,
time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh
Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys and Jerry, I was writing to
make a comment on something Chuck said on the last
(36:37):
listener mail animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that
the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored
by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting
that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right,
I remember that. Yeah, this girl had had I believe,
doctor in psych psychologist, psychologist parents who kind of just
(36:59):
ignored her her mental issues, which I thought was weird.
He said. I don't know if it's just the country
where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for
that in Casa day Herrero coucio depato. Jerry, do you
know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates
into in the black Smith's Home stick knives. It alludes
(37:22):
to what happens when an expert on something tends to
neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah,
it's like here, we say, the cobbler's children have no shoes.
Yeah exactly. Um yeah, interesting. I bet every country has
their own. Say it makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah,
I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not Chilean.
The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine.
(37:42):
The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances,
an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef
that orders fast food, etcetera. Maybe they're just tired of
doing that same thing over and over again, they just
want to stop and rest when they get home. Or
maybe they're just jerks. Who knows, but apparently it happens
often enough that the situation got its own saying around
(38:04):
these parts more than one stay classy, best Witches. Matt,
Thanks Matt, and Matt was super excited that this was
gonna get on listener to mail because he's been a
listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt,
way to hang in there. All I had to do
is right in. Yeah, you're bad to get on. At
some point and Cassa de Herrero Cucio de Polo. I'm
(38:25):
gonna get that tattooed above my waistline in the Blacksmith's
Home Stick Knives. I don't get that one, all right.
Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If
you want to try to confound us, you can do
so via Twitter at s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
(38:46):
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of i Heeart Radios. How Stuff Works from more
podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(39:07):
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