Crop circle debunking help needed

ehcks said:
That is some awesome art. Triangles, triangles, and more triangles.


Unrelated question: Anyone have a source on the actual damage caused by a crop circle? The grain still grows while knocked down, right, as long as it's not uprooted?
Click to expand...

Here are the people who make British crop circles. You could ask them.
http://www.circlemakers.org/
 
ehcks said:
Unrelated question: Anyone have a source on the actual damage caused by a crop circle? The grain still grows while knocked down, right, as long as it's not uprooted?
Click to expand...
Depending upon the type of crop and the time during the growing season, a crop circle can have varying adverse effects on the crop.

The early season ones which are in Oil Seed Rape (Canola) damage the plant quite a lot as it's not a grass and the stalks tend to break rather than bend. However, very early OSR formation can recover quite well as OSR is a strong plant.

The wheat ones if made early in the growth season can recover fully as long as they are not visited by hoards of crop circle tourists and therefore be harvested in the normal way.

The wheat ones made later in the season usually stay down, but the wheat heads will still mature and be harvestable. It does however mean that the farmer has to drop the mowing head on the combine harvester a few inches to be able to collect the flattened stuff.

Usually in the crop circle hot spots of Wiltshire and Hampshire, the circles get visited (and therefore trampled to death) by lots of tourists, so in these cases there will be no chance of harvesting the crop within the circle.
In a lot of cases, the farmers put an 'Honesty box' at the entrance of the field and people will gladly pay some change to go into the field and see the circle. This way, the farmer can actually make more money than by selling the harvested crop, though there are no official figures for how much ever gets raised in this way, the 1996 Julia Set fractal design opposite Stonehenge reportedly netted the farmer £15,000, but that was really in the hey day of circle lore.

There are of course, farmers who don't wish to encourage the damage from circlemakers, or the tourists and they cut the formations out as soon as they are reported ensuring that there is no way the crop can be harvested and sold.
 
Stray Cat
Thank you for the link. If possible, could you please tell me in more detail whereabouts to look? e.g. third picture on right hand side after ...
or halfway down the page on the left, or something.
 
Sorry Susan,
I don't know how your computer reformats web pages for you, but the link should have taken you directly to a crop circle that was reported at New Warren Farm, nr Lane End, Hampshire on 14th July which is on the A272, just East of Winchester.
It's made up from a series of nested triangles.

Hope this helps. If not, let me know :)
 
Stray Cat
Thank you - I clicked on the link again and it did, indeed, take me straight to the picture! I don't know what I did before.
 
I had to put this up here
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2011/latejuly2011.html

Some amazing formations just this last week in Wiltshire. Check out the three that were made in Devizes, the two by Roundway Hill especially, near the recently carved white horse there (1999). Also the one in West Kennett and the one by Windmill Hill just the last few days. And tell me these guys are not the most fantastic artists in the world today..

And don't forget to check the last one from Cherhill (also near a famous white horse in the landscape), reported yesterday! An alien smoking a pipe! What does it mean!? Personally I think it means the aliens are letting us know that they have come for our tobacco!
 
the blue raven said:
And don't forget to check the last one from Cherhill (also near a famous white horse in the landscape), reported yesterday! An alien smoking a pipe! What does it mean!? Personally I think it means the aliens are letting us know that they have come for our tobacco!
Click to expand...

Oddly enough, I did this Illustration last year... ;)

Alien-smoking.jpg


Though I suggest the pipe maybe more to with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
 
Yes, sadly the only time I'm aware of anyone using microwaves was an experiment done by a group of MIT students a few years ago.
Needless to say, they failed to get the crop to bend over in this way.
As for GPS - There's no need for it in crop circle making.
Lasers do get used every so often, this is a new trend though and basically a slightly easier way to measure angles instead of using traditional geometry.
Example of tools in use

On the whole that article and the justification for Richard Taylor to write that article seems very odd. It doesn't take much work to "examine the evidence" and find out that nodes bend naturally without microwaves or plasma being needed and that on the whole the geometry required to plot a crop circle doesn't require GPS. :)
 
Are those wallabies tied up, since they are making perfect circles rather than chaotic meandering?
 
Check out this one that appeared a few days ago, it's one of the biggest ever, really impressive - a snake/serpent formation
http://www.examiner.com/unexplained...est-woodhay-down-wiltshire-uk-field-video-ufo

I just thought I would add a few comments here, the farmer was really pissed off and harvested the immature crop as soon as he could and being immature he had to dump the crop (well I assume it's for compost now). Now he has lost a lot of money because of that, and here is where I add my five cents..

Frankly I think the farmer has made a big mistake, I understand he's pissed off, but if he had left the formation alone and actually bothered to check the state of the downed crop, to see if it was all damaged and broken, twisted, snapped and so worthless OR NOT; he may have noticed that few of the crops are often permanently damaged, just bent down fairly gently and then they 'bounce back' and continue to grow to maturity. I mean I don't know the case in this formation, nobody knows most probably but it is often the case that the downed crop, especially in the most impressive well-made formations is not seriously damaged at all but laid down fairly gently (that's why the believers insist that they are not man-made :rolleyes: ).

Yet the farmer in his rage didn't even appear to do a survey here (at least that appears to be the case), he let his mood get the better of him, and so he probably harvested the crop for no good reason ie threw a lot of potential revenue down the drain because he let his anger get the better of him. If he had consulted other farmers who have these formations appear on their fields frequently, he may have been surprised to hear how little damage is often done, the problem comes with all the visitors to the crop circles.

Also this is where I have an idea, but I doubt it would ever get implemented, for one it would mean more cooperation between so many different parties with their own interests, setting aside their differences.. and cooperation between different businesses thinking long-term, rather than short-term (and I know how unlikely that is). Tourism has boomed in that part of England thanks to the crop circles, with hotels, B&Bs, pubs, restaurants doing good business thanks to all the tour groups. What if they agreed to give collectively a certain amount of their takings to the farmers who have these formations made on their fields?

It would all be above board and it would be divied up at the end of the season, all transparent, and a commission of the farmers' associations in the region and the local small business associations and tourist councils would oversee it. So if one farmer had three formations on his field, depending on their size etc, he would receive more compensation than a farmer who only had one (taking into account size comparisons of course), a farmer who had none of course wouldn't get anything. It would benefit the farmers and it would benefit the local tourist operators including the hotels and the croppie tourists themselves, as they would have the cooperation of the farmers to leave the crop circles alone and allow them to be visited for at least a few days. It would get rid of all the problems with 'honesty boxes' put in the fields and subjected to theft and dishonest grifters setting up their own 'honesty boxes'. It would be a win-win.

It would mean unprecedented cooperation by all the parties here, where in-fighting, back stabbing, mutual vendettas, squabbles and the like appear to run rampant; so it wouldn't be easy to get off the ground..

Maybe this is where believers and skeptics could put aside their differences and support such an initiative *that benefits everybody*. However given their mutual loathing I'm not under any illusions about how difficult that would be! but I don't think it's impossible, just nearly so!
 
It's very easy to be judgemental towards the behaviour of this farmer, compare him unfavourably with nice Farmer Wotsit down the road who put up an honesty box and gave the money to charity, blah di blah. Time and again crop circle enthusiasts get too self-righteous in this regard, IMO.

Perhaps he just didn't want hundreds of woosters trampling over his field, blocking the lanes with their cars so they could go and 'feel the energies'. City folk often fail to understand the deep connection farming people have with their land. In many respects it would be a better analogy to compare this chap's field with your living room. If some graffiti appeared on your living room carpet, would you be happy to let a bunch of strangers traipse in an out of your house to stare and sit on your carpet? And how affronted would you be if, when you told those strangers they were not wanted, rather than leave they turned round to you and told you to charge them a pound at the door?

I'm not saying I'm on Mr Angry Farmer's side, or that he is right to consider his wheat field inviolable. I like crop circles too. But there is always another perspective and it I think it would serve some croppies to appreciate this.
 
the blue raven

However annoyed the farmer might have been, the design was there long enough for a microlight to be organised along with a photographer who had plenty of time to take pictures! Sounds like a bit of good planning by quite a few people at least? :)
 
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