I apologise in advance: Crop Circles

Great Debates
21

This is not actually a proof that all crop circles are hoax. Ever heard of induction vs. deduction?

Deduction: Swans are white. This is a swan -> it is white.
Deduction is logically founded.

Induction: This is a swan. It is white -> all swans are white.
Induction is logically not founded, although all empirical research is based on it. There we can learn whether empirical science is able to prove something. Refer to Sir Karl Popper for details :smiley:

Anyway, we all know that “true” phenomena get copied rather quickly by hoaxers. So, this really does not prove anything.

22

You are ignoring the third alternative. Why do these guys suddenly think of creating crop circles while having a pint in the pub? And why does this fad spread all over the world? Isn’t it clear? The aliens use their mind beams to implant a crop circle creating impulse into innocent human minds!

So indeed it is hapless humans who are doing the crafty aliens’ bidding. This cunning ploy deflects all suspicion from their devious machinations. I of course am safe from their influence because I’m having my tinfoil hat safely glued to my head.

My apologies for the abhorrent amount of adjectives in this post.

23

Fun Fact:

The real Zeta Reticuli is actually two stars, Zeta[sub]1[/sub] Reticuli and Zeta[sub]2[/sub] Reticuli, which are probably orbiting each other some 5000+ A.U.s apart.

Which begs the question: Which of the two Zeta Reticuli stars is the aliens’ home planet orbiting?

24

This may be the wine speaking, but Zeta Reticuli sounds uncommonly dirty for a star’s name.

25

Probably it’s the star’s porn name. You know, the name of the first planet to orbit you combined with the name of the stellar nursery where you were born.

26

No way, dude! Everybody knows they are caused by neutral, non-aligned electrons vibrating at the universal nano-frequency of 2.74 gilahertz, objectifying the space-time continuum of hyperspace, propagating thru wildly warped & wavy wormholes!

Sheesh. Don’t get me started…

27

I’ve seen crop circles in Avebury (site of the graetest neolithic monuments in the UK and nr Stonehenge), but it has been well known for a while that there are groups of people who go out and create these crop circles. Sorry no aliens.

28

Talk about timing. There was a piece on the WGN morning news today about some crop circles that have “appeared” in the midwest. (sorry, no link) In the first picture they showed, two lines going from the circle formation to the edge of the field were clearly visible.

Now, I suppose those could have been made by people going into the field after the formation was made, but it’s certainly possible that the people who did the plant stomping weren’t particularly careful about walking in between rows and not treading on the soybeans.

To their credit, the news people didn’t seem to think the loonies were right about the circles being extraterrestrial in origin.

Of course, there were all those green glowing meteor fragments…

29

What happens to the wheat? Do these circles damage the harvest? Do the farmers ever sue?

How would you serve a summons on a Martian, anyway?

30

The story of the two drunks was debunked less than a week after they told it. Scientists quickly pointed out the difference between the circles they made and “something” else made.

The sheer numbers of the circles would have debunked them anyway. On some nights over 100 crop circles appeared and something like 1500 appeared in a year. The crop circles were not limited to England, but appeared all over the world.

If one truly wants to know about them there are a lot of good books out. While I don’t know if they were made by aliens or not, I am sure they were not made by two drunks from a pub.

Love

31

Max, that wasn’t just a “tee hee”, but a full belly laugh. Thanks!

And lekatt, do you mean to say that none of them was created by aliens in the throes of a near death experience? :wink:

32

The wheat was not damaged. The stems were bent over in a uniform style, but not broken.

There are about 70 books on crop circles listed on Amazon, read at least 5 or 6 of them. Read both sides of the debate so you can make up your own mind. Being skeptical for the sake of skepticism is insane.

  1. Vital Signs: A Complete Guide to the Crop Circle Mystery and Why It Is Not a Hoax
    by Andy Thomas, Mike Leigh (Paperback - January 2003)

Love

33

lekatt, good sir, without contributions from you and those who think like you, this forum would be noticeably duller. More thoughtful, rational, and enlightened, perhaps, but certainly duller. Thanks for sticking with it!

I’ve always wanted to ask this here… Cite?

Damn, you got us! We rationalists stupidly put all our eggs into the thesis basket that only two guys in the entire world were capable of squashing plants with a rope and a board! What fools we were! Yep, you paranormalists sure got us good this time…

This “something else” that made the ostensibly “real” crop circles: What’s your theory about why that “something” listened to and followed the news so adamantly that the number of crop circles were so strongly correlated with the timing of press reports?
Oh, and thanks for expressing your fondness. I love you, too.

34

No, the extraterrestrial phlogiston vortices use their boards and ropes gently enough that the crops are unharmed and are still harvestable.

In fact, farmer’s often make extra cash by charging admission to the lekatt’s of the world to come and gawk at the Braille of the Gods. There’s a seeker born every minute!

If I were a farmer and wanted to make some quick cash, I’d actually hire the “vortices” to express themselves in their fields…

35

talk about copycats… i was browsing the local video store, and i see some movie about crop circles in the new releases. Was it SIGNS? NO. i forget what it is called. Dangerous Warnings or something close to that…anyways… can someone tell me which movie came out first, and the second part, is “dangerous signs” worth checking out.

36

I will repeat what Q.E.D. stated, and say that it is absurdly unlikely, bordering on the impossible, that any crop circle, seen anywhere, can be cinsidered “authentic”, meaning a creation, for whatever reason, by extraterrestrials.

Radiation? Iron glaze? Growth rate slowed? Plant DND altered? Glowing mineral nearby? Stange sounds heard that night?

Fine, I’ll believe it the very second you show some proof. Lekatt, having books in Amazon isn’t proof- they have books on The X-Men, astrology, and the use of civet cat gallbladder as an aphrodesiac.

Crop circles are fakes. They’re made for fun, for publicity, for pay, out of sheer boredom, as an intentional hoax or for a movie.

If such indicia were indeed made by some space aliens, why circles in grain fields? I’ve never heard of a circle in a golf course, or on the White House lawn, or stamped in the snow.

No “alien” has ever burned a circle into a Wal-Mart parking lot, or melted one into Mendenhall Glacier. The circles always involve just bending the grass over- it’s never cut up and hauled off (because that’s too much work for the hoaxters) or burned (because that moves from pranking into outright vandalism, it’s harder to hide the process in the dark, and foresnic analysis can detect the fuels used.)

The circles, large as they are, are always confined to one field- wouldn’t aliens have the technology to make an ideogram that covers, say, most of Kansas? There’s areas where grain fields stretch for hundreds of miles, yet the largest circles ever made are only a few hundred yards at best.

Nope, sorry. Every crop circle was made by human hands for human purposes.

37

:smiley:

Brilliant!

38

**
Yeah, it’s come up.

**
Understand Karl Popper for the big picture.

Please, not this again. Every single bloody crackpot latches on to this canard like pit bull with a salami. Yes, it’s quite true that the scientific method never “proves” anything. But that’s not the way science works. You don’t have to demonstrate that every single occurence of crops circles ever was caused by a few lads from the local. I’ll skip the technical explanation why, but by now, the burden of proof is squarely on the shoulders of those who claim that the “lads” have tentacles and that the “local” is on Tau Ceti.

This is like the crap Erich Von Daniken used to pull. “The pyramids are big and really old! Could they have been built by extra-terrestrials???” Yeah, I suppose they could. They could have been built by an extinct race of mildly-retarded giant purple dinosaurs. But if you’re going to advance this hypothesis, you are going to have to pony up the evidence to prove it. Oh, and guess what? Questions aren’t evidence.

39

You’ve got your assumptions backwards. The default presumption is that crop circles (or any other suchlike phenomena) are the product of human effort unless it can be proven that humans are not capable of producing them.

It has been more than adequately demonstrated that humans are not only capable of producing crop circles but that they do it fairly effortlessly and frequently. There is no necessity, then, to postulate aliens or “vortexes” or anything non-human. Crop circles represent a textbook case of Occam’s razor. Adding aliens to the equation is a classic example of unnecessary multiplication.

if you see graffitti on the wall do you wonder if maybe this obscene word was scrawled by an alien or do you assume it was a human?

How are crop circles any different?

40

Lekatt, AKA Leroy of the Infinite Love, has never met a paranormal phenomena he didn’t like. Why should Crop Circles be an exception?