New crop circle movie

Weren’t those conclusively proven to be a hoax, a few years back?

Yes, Doug Bower and David Chorley admited to it being a hoax. I believe they were the first to do this sort of thing. I would imagine others copycated thier style.
The movie is fiction, not a true story, therefore it doesn’t matter if it is real or not. Speculative Fiction writers wouldn’t be able to write about much if it had to be 100% true.

There’s 3 movies about crop circles coming out, not just “Signs”. I believe one is a documentary, which I bet the OP is referring to.

Speilberg(sp) is doing some sort of alien-abduction movie/series as well, I believe.

Didn’t any of these people read ‘Demon-Haunted World?’

Who cares if they did or didn’t? Signs isn’t really about crop circles anyway and it certainly doesn’t purport to be ‘the real’ deal’ about their meaning and existance.

The two guys who ‘admitted’ to creating more than 250 of them were unable to create a high-quality circle with people watching.

http://www.cropcircleradius.com/Articles/whatever.html
http://www.cropcircles.org/reports/vigay.php

The true believers seem rather credulous to me, some of the other things that they believe seem to be totally whacked out to me. However, there are some characteristics of some circles that seem unlikely to be explained by a couple of guys stomping around in a field.

http://www.lovely.clara.net/education.html

Clearly at least some of the circles are man made, probably most of them. But it is by no means clear that ALL of them are.

IMO, One of the most sensible people in the scene believes that they are all man made, but HE can’t duplicate the best of what is out there.

http://cropcircleconnector.com/Sorensen/PeterSorensen99.html

But if the first crop circles were man made, woun’t you figure the ones after were man made too? I mean, why would “real” crop circles start appearing after hoxes?

I can’t duplicate the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean it was made by an alien.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

From the site linked above by Epimetheus, is an article claiming that a man-made circle in 2001 is a poor replica of a “genuine” circle discovered in 1995:

[Emphasis added]

Hahahaha! These people have obviously never taken a simple drafting course. An ellipse can be made with two pins (or posts, if you’re standing in a cornfield) and a loop of string.

I love it when “cerealogists” (my new favorite word) claim that some crop circles are just way too complicated for mere humans to make. Yeah. And the pyramids were made by aliens, too.

I still say it’s just aliens just having a goof.

They’re probably laughing their asses off at all the fuss we make.
:smiley:

Please tell me that you’re not offering http://www.lovely.clara.net/education.html as a cite for the above assertion, Tejota.

I’m speechless.

BTW, I am refering to “Signs”. Unaware of other movies.

A couple of years ago one of the UK papers, The Daily Mail if recall, (not know as a great scientific journal;
)) did a test.

The hoaxers created a crop design in one night and then ‘experts’ were asked to examine it. All the experts agreed it was dominantly otherworldly.

Not much without a cite, I know.

  • Gartog

Don’t worrry, that’s not what I’m saying. Like I said, a lot of what the believers think is hogwash. Clara.net is one of the most credulous. But they do mention blown nodes and higher-than-normal radiation levels.

But if you look at the cites, it, and a few others have some information about evidence that the crop has been ‘heated’ prior to being lain down that has to my never been explained as a natural consequence of stomping on the crop.

In particular if any one has ever shown that ‘blown nodes’ are a normal result of crop-stomping, that fact has never made it into the debunkers literature.

In fact, I’m struck by the lack of rigor on the part of the debunkers just as I’m flabbergasted by the hokum that the believers spout. (like the idea that an ellipse is hard to draw).
Or the idea that the geometry is somehow sacred… :rolleyes:

However, I’ve never seen either a refutation or adequate explaination for this:

And there’s this paper, which I find hard to explain:
http://execonn.com/cropcircles/isotopes.html
Supposed evidence of neutron bombardment??
Bad data? Nothing out of the ordinary?? or is there something really there?

And this is interesting, but could be just an unreliable witness…
http://www.lovely.clara.net/crop_circles_history96.html
(notice the caption on the julia set picture at the top) - supposedly, a pattern appeared in a field near stonehenge in daylight sometime between 5:00 PM and 5:45 PM.

I’m 90% sure that there are rational explanations for all of this,
but, so far, the debunkers seem to be spending more time sneering than actually providing explanations.

Most rational people, debunkers included, consider the idea that little green men travel interstellar distances to make pretty patterns in cornfields under cover of darkness to be pretty startling. Common sense dictates that the evidence for this claim must be overwhelming. But what evidence do we have?

I find the above too vague to be convincing.

There is some stuff about short-lived radio-isotopes from a paper written in 1992. I’m not an expert in that field, so I can’t pick apart their findings, but in their conclusion the writers strongly urged further testing. But after ten years, where’s the further testing to confirm that paper’s findings? Without confirmation, we can never know if the writers made an error somewhere, no matter how clever they think they are.

Claims that crop circles affect local electrical power generation, electronice equipment or magnetic fields can be easily verified. None have been.

Not helping the true believers’ case is talk of “sacred geometry”, dowsing and “resonance therapy”, as well as asserting that the geometry of “real” crop circles is just too hard for humans to replicate.
On the other hand, we have a plausible story for the human origin of crop circles (including a confession by the originators!), demonstrated cases of people making them, and no instances or evidence that can only be explained by invoking extra-terrestrials.

Simply put, why shouldn’t we laugh at the idea?

The term “hoax” is a little misleading here. Some crop cirlces are explained; they’ve obviously just been physically flattened. Some circles, however, remain mysteries. Some have all stalks bent at the node, not at the base; you can’t do that with a two-by-four, to my knowledge. In some the stalks are interwoven on the ground. These unexplained crop circles are just that-- unexplained.

Anyone who claim aliens make crop circles isn’t thinking straight. If I asked who what causes ball lightning, and you didn’t know, would you say A) “I don’t know.” or B) “Aliens.”?

So, what causes the unexplained crop cirlces? I don’t know. I bet you don’t, either. That doesn’t mean aliens are involved, though. So please, leave any talk of aliens out of this conversation.

The night the UFOs didn’t land (Daily Mail, August 7, 1999, by Sam Taylor)

Don’t forget the Circlemakers website. These people seem to make some excellent, high quality crop circles to me. :stuck_out_tongue:

Correction: The plants are bent at 90 degree angles without being broken, and some undereducated but highly creative cereologist out there decided that this “must” have been caused by a short burst of heat.

In fact, this particular phenomenon has been explained. I’ve even seen the explanation on at least two different crop circle TV shows on the Discovery Channel and/or Learning Channel. (This is quite remarkable, considering the latter channel’s penchant for pseudoscience shows.)

When a “cereologist” holds up a wheat stalk and says to you, “Look, if I bend it, it breaks! The wheat stalks in the crop circles are bent but not broken. Therefore, aliens must have done it” – notice that said cereologist is always making the demonstration with a dry wheat stalk. If you bend a moist wheat stalk, such as what you might find at 3 AM with all the early morning dew having condensed on it, you can bend it at a 90 degree angle and it won’t break. And it’ll retain that bent-but-not-broken shape after it warms back up and dries back out.

When a “cereologist” holds up a wheat stalk and says to you, “Look, if I bend it, it breaks! The wheat stalks in the crop circles are bent but not broken. Therefore, aliens must have done it” – notice that said cereologist is always making the demonstration with a dry wheat stalk. If you bend a moist wheat stalk, such as what you might find at 3 AM with all the early morning dew having condensed on it, you can bend it at a 90 degree angle and it won’t break. And it’ll retain that bent-but-not-broken shape after it warms back up and dries back out. **
[/QUOTE]

That’s what I’d assumed. Now why couldn’t a farmer “who know how the land ticks” think of that?