I am wondering if anyone out there can tell me if they have any suggestions, or have attempted in pulling off a fake UFO sighting or crop circle?
Three ideas I’ve prototyped so far are:
(1) Silver pill-balloon filled with Helium and a blinking LED taped to the bottom.
(2) (film) Flashlights one wet pavement with a floodlight orthoganal to the camera, making it look like an evening sky.
(3) (film) Looking out of window at night and using bright reflections to super-impose images wherever you want them in the sky.
I am trying to get fresh ideas for practical jokes on some friends. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
On one of those Discovery Channel mythbuster shows they had an interview with a guy in the UK who admitted to faking dozens of crop circles over his lifetime. He tied long wooden boards to his feet and shuffled through the fields, breaking the stalks of wheat. He spent a long time drafting out the path he would have to walk, and making sure the circles were totally symmetrical and the lines were totally even. I believe this has been confirmed to be the case in several American crop circle sightings as well.
From my understanding the mark of a ‘true’ crop circle involved no breaking of the stalks, just bending, broken stalks may fool a farmer but it would not fool a experenced crop circle investagotor or what ever they call themselves.
I made some UFOs once in the early '70s. We made hydrogen with lye and aluminum and used it to fill balloons. You can tape crinkled foil over them if you need to make them more visible. Hanging long streamers from the bottom also made them show up better.
If you do something like this be careful of the lye and the hydrogen. I just about lost an eye from that.
I know one of the guys that did the circle in southern Washington (Kennewick?) featured at the beginning of Signs (misidentified as one in England, I think). They were drunk high school boys (and he’s just turned 30 so I guess this would have been '92 or '93) with 2x4s and rope. He’s explained to me in enough detail of site and date, etc, that I believe him. I suspect strongly that all the crop circles out there have been successfully faked by someone.
I had an idea about that one, but I’ve not had a chance to prototype it yet. Take a chalk-spreader that football coaches use to put markings on grass football fields and fill it with really FREAKING hot water and a heater, use static points and strings to run it in circles – Make sure its a really cold night and run it in the pre-determined circles. The stalks should bend over and leave little burn bulges at the stalks, while a % of the plants will survive, while laying down. The stalks might need some help laying over, but the board thing sounds pretty good.
Yeah Thanks. but if perchance you actually knew someone with coherent ideas on such a device, I would be grateful for a source .
I have some mathematical models based on some weird independant physics I derived years ago, but no hope of designing a prototype in my life-time… – too many missing particles & variables that need empirical data.
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