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Post by ouloncollouphid on Aug 7, 2005 9:35:22 GMT -4
Hello everyone,
I've just seen (part of) a documentary on crop circles (Quest for the Truth) which was quite interesting. The people and scientist-types interviewed didn't appear to be loonies and made some intriguing points.
I've never been particularly interested in the subject before but was amazed at the staggering beauty, complexity and geometrical perfection of the designs.
So what do you lot make of it all? Have I been taken for a sucker?
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Post by frenat on Aug 7, 2005 12:02:28 GMT -4
my opinion...
college engineering students with nothing better to do on a weekend.
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Post by echnaton on Aug 7, 2005 13:08:55 GMT -4
my opinion... college engineering students with nothing better to do on a weekend. It would be interesting to study the dates the circles were created and look for correlations. Such as weekends, as you say, or holidays, showing more circles with finals periods potentially showing fewer. I also suspect that they are highly correlated with beer consumption, but don’t think there is a good way to test this. On the other hand, maybe the ET jokesters are just a bunch of wild intergalactic frat boys on a similar schedule. What do they drink?
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Post by echnaton on Aug 7, 2005 13:10:00 GMT -4
And welcome to the board, ouloncollouphid.
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Post by gwiz on Aug 8, 2005 3:34:05 GMT -4
college engineering students with nothing better to do on a weekend. As far as I recall, a few years after the first crop circles appeared, a couple of middle-aged blokes claimed to have started it all off, and gave any journalist who was interested a demonstration of the techniques. Once it got going, of course, students/young farmers/old farmers who could fence one off and charge admission... they all got in on the act.
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Post by gezalenko on Aug 8, 2005 10:22:19 GMT -4
Hi there. If you Google "crop circles" one of the very first results is this site www.circlemakers.org/about crop circles in the UK. If you look into that, I think it confirms that certainly most - and probably all - crop circles in the UK are man made.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 8, 2005 16:25:16 GMT -4
The fact that at least some crop circles are known to be human increases the likelihood that all of them are human. Not that one explanation has to explain all formations, but for any one formation it is automatically more likely that it is human in origin. Why? Because it is a hypothesis known to be possible and to have been practiced. That makes it more plausible than an untestable hypothesis like space aliens.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Aug 8, 2005 16:46:48 GMT -4
As far as I recall, a few years after the first crop circles appeared, a couple of middle-aged blokes claimed to have started it all off, and gave any journalist who was interested a demonstration of the techniques. The two blokes were Doug and Dave, though I don't recall their last names. They actually signed some of their crop circles with a "DD" hidden somewhere in the design.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 8, 2005 21:59:24 GMT -4
I think that some few crop circles were natrually occuring, I've seen a program where it was shown that they culd be created by small vortexes created by wind swirling about hills. However these would only form small often slighty distroted circles. It could explain the existance of stone circles and things.
That said, in recent years these things have gne from small circles to huge patterns, and the most likely reason is because more and more people are out their doing them.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 15:19:44 GMT -4
Yes, some crop circles were natural, but clearly so. When faced with any crop circle of uncertain origin, the known previous causes automatically have extra credibility, and would be considered acceptable tentative conclusions in the absence of distinctive evidence. That is, once it is known that humans are responsible for some of the crop circles, it's a reasonable null hypothesis that has to be falsified for additional crop circles.
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Post by Sticks on Aug 10, 2005 7:12:02 GMT -4
Some years ago, IIRC the Guardian Newspaper and BBC Radio 4's Farming Today issued a challenge to people to come into their plot in a field under the cover of darkness, create their Crop - artwork and then leave. (To test the human hoax hypothosis HHH)
The result was a collection of the most intricate designs, similar to the ones the UFO lobby were claiming to have been made by extraterrestrials. Proof, that crop circles could be faked, and by Occams Razor, they all are.
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Post by ouloncollouphid on Aug 10, 2005 14:10:46 GMT -4
Thanks for the replies, everyone. It looks like the circles aren't that mysterious after all then. A pity. I much preferred the Aliens explanation, or the 'shadows of another dimension' stuff - that sounded great. Oh well. I had looked at a few sites, including the 'Circlemakers' one but it's a bit difficult to tell if they're for real, any more than the 'Aliens did it' sites. Hence the appeal to you guys to alert me to anything worth being alerted to. And the various 'experts' on the documentary did sound very plausible, with some intriguing ideas. However, what sort of clinched it for me was a glance at the documentary-maker's website, where he flogs copies of the DVD. (I suppose that's fair enough, really, but it set a faint Sibrelian Alarm bell ringing.) www.cropcirclesthemovie.com
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Post by rocketdad on Sept 1, 2005 14:25:47 GMT -4
I read a book by a true believer last year, and by the end of it I was convinced my brother-in-law and I could do it with 20 feet of string and one ski. THEN I googled and found the guys who used a stick-on-a-rope instead of a ski. Really explains why one circle is often laying the other direction... tired legs!
Neat art medium, though. I'd like to try it myself.
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Post by JayUtah on Sept 1, 2005 18:30:07 GMT -4
Yeah, but I live in a desert. We'd have to start a new paranormal phenomenon: dust circles.
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Post by ktesibios on Sept 1, 2005 22:59:19 GMT -4
As far as I recall, a few years after the first crop circles appeared, a couple of middle-aged blokes claimed to have started it all off, and gave any journalist who was interested a demonstration of the techniques. The two blokes were Doug and Dave, though I don't recall their last names. They actually signed some of their crop circles with a "DD" hidden somewhere in the design. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. Dave died in 1997; I don't know about Doug, who would be around 80 years old now. Here's a newspaper article about them from 1999: www.manchester.com/features/crop.php
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