Become an anti-nuke; you too can have fun

[maury <maury@WEBTEXAS.COM>]

Mark, it was near this same time that we pulled off our first stunt with

the tethered lawn mower ....  snicker, snicker.  Are containment

structures

really just the eggs laid by aliens waiting to be hatched by global

warming????

Maury    maury@webtexas.com

================

July 15, 2002

Crop Circle Confession

How to get the wheat down in the dead of night



By Matt Ridley



On August 2, Touchstone Pictures released Signs, starring Mel

Gibson as a farmer who discovers mysterious crop circles.

Directed by Sixth Sense auteur M. Night Shyamalan, the movie

injects otherworldly creepiness into crushed crops. The truth

behind the circles is, alas, almost certainly more mundane:

skulking humans. Herewith is the account of one such trickster.



I made my first crop circle in 1991. My motive was to prove

how easy they were to create, because I was convinced

that all crop circles were man-made. It was the only explanation

nobody seemed interested in testing. Late one August night,

with one accomplice--my brother-in-law from Texas--I stepped

into a field of nearly ripe wheat in northern England, anchored a

rope into the ground with a spike and began walking in a circle

with the rope held near the ground. It did not work very well: the

rope rode up over the plants. But with a bit of help from our feet

to hold down the rope, we soon had a respectable circle of

flattened wheat.



Two days later there was an excited call to the authorities from

the local farmer: I had fooled my first victim. I subsequently

made two more crop circles using far superior techniques. A

light garden roller, designed to be filled with water, proved

helpful. Next, I hit on the "plank walking" technique that was

used by the original circle makers, Doug Bower and the late

Dave Chorley, who started it all in 1978. It's done by pushing

down the crop with a plank suspended from two ropes. To

render the depression circular is a simple matter of keeping

an anchored rope taut. I soon found that I could make a

sophisticated pattern with very neat edges in less than an hour.



Getting into the field without leaving traces is a lot easier than

is usually claimed. In dry weather, and if you step carefully,

you can leave no footprints or tracks at all. There are other,

even stealthier ways of getting into the crop. One group of circle

makers uses two tall bar stools, jumping from one to another.



But to my astonishment, throughout the early 1990s the media

continued to report that it was impossible that all crop circles

could be man-made. They cited "cerealogists"--those who study

crop circles--and never checked for themselves. There were

said to be too many circles to be the work of a few "hoaxers"

(but this assumed that each circle took many hours to make),

or that circles appeared in well-watched crops (simply not true),

or that circle creation was accompanied by unearthly noises

(when these sounds were played back, even I recognized the

nocturnal song of the grasshopper warbler).



The most ludicrous assertion was that "experts" could distinguish

"genuine" circles from "hoaxed" ones. Even after one such expert,

G. Terence Meaden, asserted on camera that a circle was genuine

when in fact its construction had been filmed by Britain's Channel

Four, the program let him off the hook by saying he might just have

made a mistake this time. I soon met other crop-circle makers,

such as Robin W. Allen of the University of Southampton and Jim

Schnabel, author of Round in Circles, who also found it all too easy

to fool the self-appointed experts but all too hard to dent the

gullibility of reporters. When Bower and Chorley confessed, they

were denounced on television as frauds. My own newspaper

articles were dismissed as "government disinformation," and it

was hinted that I was in the U.K. intelligence agency, MI5, which

was flattering (and false).



The whole episode taught me two important lessons. First, treat

all experts with skepticism and look out for their vested interests --

many cerealogists made a pot of money from writing books and

leading weeklong tours of crop circles, some costing more than

$2,000 a person. Second, never underestimate the gullibility of

the media. Even the Wall Street Journal published articles that

failed to take the man-made explanation seriously.



As for the identity of those who created the complicated

mathematical and fractal patterns that appeared in the mid-1990s,

I have no idea. But Occam's razor suggests they were more likely

to be undergraduates than aliens.



                            © 1996-2002 Scientific American, Inc. All

rights reserved.

_________________________

The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight

its enemies is: Lunch.                                 Michael Friedman





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