To all the sceptics and debunkers out there: what exactly are the explanations for crop circles? I was asked recently how to explain crop circles, and I realized that I know next to nothing about this set of phenomena. In fact, I don’t even know if there are such things as unexplained crop cirlces, it all sounds like a PL (Pastoral Legend).
A search of the Straight Dope documents (articles and message boards) revealed nothing, so I am posting my question here. Factual answers will be highly appreciated. Bonus points to anyone who avoids mention of UFOs and the lost continent of Atlantis…
Abe
IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
–Ambrose Bierce
The most straightforward explanation is that people come along in the middle of the night and flatten down the crop in geometric patterns.
Shortly after the height of interest in crop circles in England (? about 1992), several people came out and admitted to making them. One individual provided a demonstration for a TV programme in which he used a rope tied to a stake in the middle of what was to be the circle to keep the shape ciurcular and a plank to flatten down the crop smoothly and without any footprints. By repeating this process several times to create a number of overlapping shapes, he was able to produce some quite large and rather impressive designs.
I seem to remember that the K Foundation (aka KLF) were also involved in making crop circles before the “burn a million quid” stunt, but I can’t remember the details.
I once saw a crop circle near the White Horse at Uffingham (well worth a visit if you’re ever in that part of the world (the Horse, not the circle)). It was a rather desultory affair, about 20’ in diameter, not quite circular, and with the appearance of having been trampled down. I think that the “ancient-mystic” associations of the area (the Horse and Weyland Smithy) attracted a lot of New Age types.
One of the main protagonists was this young guy who progressively got weirder and more outlandish with his crop circle designs. he deliberately set out to make patterns that almost, but not quite, looked significant, so that finally the New Agers would wake up to their fake-ness.
Instead, they thought it was some kind of message being sent.
Judd Nelson hosted a “Secrets Revealed” program that showed how crop circles are made. A team of young men jumped out of a van with 2" X 8" boards about 4’ in length, with rope tied to the ends. They ran along the paths that the irrigation equipment makes, so as not to leave footprints. The funny thing is, that the ‘mystical significance’ of the relative sizes of the circles, comes about due to the spacing of those tracks and the lengths of the boards.
The men pair up in twos or threes and set their boards end to end. The begin knocking down the wheat, stepping on the board, pushing the board forward, stepping on the board, and by repetition of this process, end up making a circle around the end of the innermost board.
They came with plans drawn on graph paper and within about 40 minutes, they had completed an enormous, complex pattern of circles, arcs and lines.
Stephen Stephen’s Website
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I’ve just come across a letter in this month’s Fortean Times on this very subject (UK edition, Feb. 2000, p. 51 or thereabouts).
The correspondent describes how, as an evacuee in Gloucestershire in the 1940s, he and his friends would run around in fields of crops to make patterns, eventually graduating to making near-perfect circles by using a rope.