Crop Circles Were Made by Supernatural Forces. Named Doug and Dave
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is _not_ to say that people don't create these by hand -- including some extremely complex formations -- but certainly not Doug and Dave, and overnight (and often times in just a few hours), and in great volume, with a depth of symbol and reference written in, day after day after day.
There is real mystery here, and I would recommend that anyone who would like to look into it deeper (if only to debunk!) read 'Secrets In The Fields: The Science And Mysticism Of Crop Circles' (https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Fields-Mysticism-Circles-anni...)
>In its heyday there were probably five groups creating crop circles, Mr. Irving said,
The book I posted above goes into great detail on how to distinguish between the two kinds.
What is "astronomically and symbolically correct"?
To your second question: many of the symbols and data embedded in the more mysterious crop imprints is well thought out and contains a remarkable amount of meaning, and oftentimes includes representations of seemingly-important celestial configurations through time. They're not just like: a circle here, a pattern there. There's clear information being communicated through the art.
What’s funny to me is how we completely miss the point: how is this a prank? How are these circles "fake"?
The circles themselves are real, and amazing art and fascinating as an experiment , whatever it is. Yet somehow soon as someone supposedly "debunks" circles as being man made, somehow the circles stop being interesting?
If anything i think circles highlight that big flaw in human thinking. The6 highlight just how desperate we are for normality.
(Of course, you can have transcendent magical acts that are still awesome even when you know how they're done, as Penn and Teller love to illustrate with their cups and balls trick. But the bar is a little higher.)
If you think it was made by aliens, then how do you think it happens (e.g. the force needs to be not too high), why would nothing be recorded, why only on planted fields and not elsewhere?
Just to be clear, I don't think any of them were made by aliens, but my questions are sincere, I hope you have some coherent structure built upon different axioms and would love to explore it.
I’m not aware of any such evidence.
My mum loved all things supernatural, occult, and so on — she took it all very seriously, but all her sources were either anecdotal or literally conspiracy theorists, never, for example, a CCTV camera or a Geiger counter.
What even is a “unique radiation signature” in this context? Is this in the same sense that DHMO is “a deadly industrial solvent”?
Since there is a lot, can you point us lazy people to a few legitimate references for these claims? I can't find any.
But there were some very interesting circles. Like this one, which appeared overnight next to the A303, which is one of the busiest roads in the area.
https://www.science.org/content/article/jaw-dropper-crop-cir...
The Doug and Dave story is obviously ridiculous. IMO there's no way two fat old dudes could do something like this.
It would be challenging to draw a design like this by hand on paper with drawing tools, never mind across nearly half a kilometre in a wheat field at night.
At the very least it's clear it was planned, measured out, and laid with unusual competence.
You'd need a team of a good few people and very possibly some surveying equipment - not impossible, but not at all a trivial project.
Compare with a more recent attempt which shows what a crude circle looks like.
https://nextnature.net/magazine/story/2007/crop-circles/065_...
All parts are based on a circle ("arms" are just incomplete circles). That's a stick in the ground and some string.
Start with the big circle in the middle. Why 6 arms? Because then distance between biggest arm circles is the same as the distance from them to the center circle. Easy to put them evenly around.
I'm sure it still takes some time to make them, but the figure is neither complex nor accurately done. I don't see why a few bored students couldn't do it overnight.
That doesn’t rule out its veracity, but does suggest it could be more motivated by making sales through sensationalism than contributing to the record of knowledge through scholarship.
In the case of self-publishing by an author with no familiar affiliations, one would probably want to treat the information you receive as a single attestation that may need further validation (if its truth is important to you).
Once you’re more familiar with the author or recognize other trusted parties who have invested their own trust in them, you may treat it differently.
It’s no different than a random podcast or blog. You don’t just blindly trust someone because they talk about the same thing all the time, do you?
I should hope you look at a variety of trust signals and validate what you hear in proportion to the strength of those signals.
If you use the "I can't trust X because he studies on this" line of thinking then anything outside of the mainstream will be hard to take seriously. Amateurs advocating weird idea X won't be taken seriously because their advocacy will be amateur. Experts will be dismissed because they have a career interest in X.
It’s certainly not the intent of what I wrote, nor something that I would even take credit for saying generally.
I don’t really even see it there now, but I guess that’s the nature of reading one’s own writing. It’s easy to read it the way you meant, and can be hard to see all the different angles others might take on it.
You also seem to be ignoring where I’m very careful not to discredit the author or the work, saying that neither his source of income or mode of publication speaks authoritatively against the actual veracity or quality of the work, and that they are simply things to be aware of as one personally interpret the work.
Since I agree with you, I’m happy to hack at the strawman with you (“expertise comes in many forms and shouldn’t be rejected simply because there are other incentives involved!”), but it really just doesn’t feel like you’ve been engaging with what’s actually in the text as written.
Unfortunately, you've also just described all* modern media/journalism outfits, too.
*All is not literal, but a close approximation when weighted by readership/viewership. I don't discount that real scholarship exists, but it only exists in small lagoons of the internet, and widespread attention seems to purge the serious scholarship away from previously good outlets.
You shouldn't discount research as not "actual research" just because it shows you something you don't like.
On the other hand, it is common with various mysteries, that there are people, who are heavily invested studying them. It is hard for them to admit that there could be just simple explanation.
Every crop circle I’ve read about is still well within the realm of human ability. Crop circles would be one of the least complex things created by people.
Imagine devoting your life to studying them and then slowly realizing it was probably just a prank. I’d blame aliens too. Better to double down than admit it was all for nought.
https://youtu.be/iB6gcSyl6Fs?t=1163
https://youtu.be/opAZgrQLhN4?t=150
They created their own crop circle using the same method as Doug and Dave, and then watched as two different kind of people came to the place:
- the "New Age" folks with their pendulums, rods, measuring "vibrations" and reading "energy" with the help of "quantum physics"
- the skeptics
The "New Agers" concluded it was made by aliens and "energies" (both amusing and cringeworthy to watch), the skeptics didn't fall for it and concluded a human creation, like every crop circle they've analyzed so far.
Now, when a crop circle appears on the Moon or a highly unreachable place, when it's drawn on a field with no grooves to hide the steps, then we might be on something. In the meantime, it's just glorified street art.
So confirmation bias equally on both sides. :)
Then they'll go on for an hour or so about how THEY'RE a scam, and the REAL crop circles have nothing to do with them. Or some other horse shit.
Anything that doesn't confirm or at least for comfortably within their fantasy vision for what they believe is violently rejected.
You know, like most conspiracy nuts.
[0]: https://boingboing.net/2010/06/21/of-crop-circles-meme.html
Ah but who am I kidding, even back then there were Qanon type conspiracies, but they circulated at bars and backyards instead of on the Internet and cable news.
You’d think by now there would be video prrof all over youtube of these circles being made.
Have I jus5 not looked in the right places? Anyone have a link?
Surely with gopro night vision etc. someone can easily show us how they make these circles?
Ahhhh, or it is a secret? A trade secret … the artist doesn’t reveal their techniques? How convenient.
I’ll apply same reasoning to circles than ufos : prove me you make them.
The "burden of proof" is on both sides.
This is a common refrain from folks, who either accidentally or on purpose, are attempting to throw up barriers to have their beliefs genuinely challenged, and it works by misconstruing what "proof" actually means in a practical sense.
Here's a real world example of proof. A company wants to sell aspirin. To sell aspirin in the US, the FDA requires proof that the pills do contain a certain amount of aspirin, and that the pills don't contain any materials in high enough concentrations to be considered dangerous. Thus the company must prove a positive (Condition A: pills contain aspirin) and a negative (Condition B: pills don't contain harmful materials in harmful concentrations). For a single pill, both of these conditions are straightforward to prove. For condition A, grind up a pill and using methods of physical chemistry, quantify the concentration of aspirin and verify that the concentration is as it should be. Condition B is more arduous to prove, but still straightforward. You can either test for all harmful materials known to man or you can can attempt to quantify all materials present in the pill and show by exhaustion that there's absolutely no plutonium, arsenic or botulism in the pill (among millions of other things). Whew! Mission accomplished!
But hold on, it was a lot of work just to prove condition B for one pill, maybe we can simplify things a bit as there are approximately 1 billion other pills to test. So lets skip plutonium testing. It's a rare material that is not involved in any way in our manufacturing process. Since we don't have live cultures of any sort either, we can probably safely skip botulism. In fact, we can skip testing for millions of compounds because there's no probably mechanism for them to be introduced into our pills. "But wait," someone says from the back of the room, "How do we know for 100 percent certainty that these things aren't in our pills? Can we really be sure?" After reviewing the physical security of our facilities and double checking our process, we express our confidence in the new process. "But wait," that persistent guy in the back of the room says, "what if there are aliens from another planet with the power of teleportation who are spiking our pills with botulism? What now?" After recovering our senses, we kick that guy out of the room.
Cool, we now have a practical test process for ensuring that a pill is safe and effective. We just need to grind up each of our 1 billion pills, test them all, and we can be certain of the safety and efficacy of each of the pills we just destroyed. Hmm, we may have a problem. How exactly are we supposed to sell pills if our testing process is destroying them all? We closely monitor our manufacturing process, and we test the pills from a test run to ensure that our mixing process is sufficiently thorough to guarantee an even distribution of ingredients in each pill. Now instead of testing every pill we make, we can simply take a few from each batch. If there's something wrong or weird about the pills we test, we can test more to confirm there's a problem. "But wait," the persistent guy in the back of the room says. "What if teleporting aliens from another planet are swapping out the faulty pills in our test samples with good pills in order to trick us into thinking our batches are safe?" Wait, how did that guy get back in the room? Maybe it really was teleporting aliens. Whoops, nope. Someone left the side door open. That makes way more sense.
The problem of asking for proof in this situation is that proof has been provided, and in response you've escalated the request for proof without sufficient justification. We have many examples of folks demonstrating the techniques used to create crop circles, including the techniques necessary for shaping the crops and the techniques used for laying out a pattern. No crop circle presented has ever had qualities that are outside the possibility of the shown techniques, or advancements in those techniques. So trying to drag aliens back into the conversation is no different than insisting we test for teleporting aliens when we manufacture aspirin. If we want to bring aliens back into the subject of crop circles, we first need to prove 1) that aliens exist, 2) that they're visiting the Earth, 3) their methods of propulsion are totally outside our knowledge of the physical universe, and 4) that we have some reason to believe that they use grain fields (for example, why don't they use wild prairies?). If you can present that information, then we can talk about aliens and crop circles.