Crop Circles

[JunkMonkey]

Originally Posted by Dave

While most were found over the weekend, there were significantly more on Fridays than other days. Very strange!

Anyone have a reason?

Makes sense to me: if you were going to be up all night one day a week you might as well make it a Friday as it gives you time to catch up on your sleep before you have to be back a work on Monday. Some of these guys are getting on a bit, they've been doing this for years - they're not as young as they used to be.

EDIT: I misread. They were found on Friday meaning they were made on Thursday night. Which if I remember my feckless youth correctly was Giro Day! (That list was compiled in 1992) Get up, get down the Post Office, cash your Giro fill up with Breaker Lager and go tramp a field flat. What else was there to do in Wiltshire before the Internet? God, I miss the Eighties.

[J Riff]

Someone said that the circles were each a representation of the new improved Atomic table of elements. Hope someone is keeping track of them all.

Another point - all along, people involved in the coverup have gone out and deliberately created hoaxes. None of them have the slightest idea who's doing crop circles, it ain't us.

And not to put too fine a point on it... but if you see it on the news, anything important, you know it has been sanitized, the names changed, the right people paid off, and anything offensive to certain groups surgically removed.

Dave - Delta/Alpha. There's a Russky cosmonaut in the house at the moment, too. We are waiting for the mighty ones to speak. Never a shred of paperwork since the 50s when the penny dropped.

Think a minute and you will realize that no common astronaut can be sent to deal with aliens. They have to come back and tell the truth, we don't. They are not trained for it, they would snap.
The coverup has been for reasons you won't like, but will understand. The 30 yrs. conditioning have been neccessary. Wait.

[skeptical]

Riff

You obvously have little knowledge of conspiracies. The cardinal rule of conspiracies is simple : too many members ensure betrayal.

The "magic number" is 7. That is the number of members that researchers found, on average, make for a 50:50 chance of betrayal. Get a conspiracy with many more than 7 members, then a whistleblower becomes inevitable.

A conspiracy to hide crop circle causes would require a lot more than 7 people. Therefore, if such a conspiracy was real, it would already have been betrayed. It has not, therefore there is no conspiracy.

I suggest you dump your pseudo-religious belief that crop circles, and no doubt, UFO's are little grey men in flying saucers. They are not. The evidence that crop circles are made by hoaxers is overwhelmingly strong. The evidence that UFO's are extraterrestrial is overwhelmingly weak.

[J Riff]

Hopeless. This is why it's been so easy, people will fight to the death to deny something they have no real knowledge of.
There are huge, massive, sprawling crimes and operations which you know nothing of, involving hundreds of people, kept secret for fifty years. A whole bunch of them, including UFOs.
Mind, what you say is generally true, which is why a mere handful of people have done the actual nuts and bolts. Wait and see.
Far as I can tell, there's only a certain narrow age range of people left to deal with, before anything can safely come out. I imagine that people over 30 are more or less aware, at least generally, what has happened.
Happened. This will be the shock - no more discussion, no more theorizing - here's the facts and the video and all of it. You won't like it.
Go to the NASA board if you want a real argument, or a UFO board. I speak in here because, bion, it's more fun than the NASA geeks, who are forced to grind their teeth a lot. In here, we have open minds and SF concepts galore, so that if 'disclosure' happens, everyone should be able to deal with it to some degree.
Plus, I'm a SF writer and fan since the fifties, there is no better home, and nobody is forced to lie in here, as they are elsewhere. Over and out.

[skeptical]

Originally Posted by J Riff

There are huge, massive, sprawling crimes and operations which you know nothing of, involving hundreds of people, kept secret for fifty years. A whole bunch of them, including UFOs.

Wrong.
You only have to look at the mafia families. They represent a conspiracy with a very, very powerful disincentive plan. "If you betray us, we kill you."

In spite of that, over the past 50 years, the history of the mafia is the history of repeated betrayals, and mafia families broken up and locked up. The power of the mafia destroyed by betrayals. Those betrayals are inevitable, because each family consists of a lot more than 7 people.

Get it straight. You cannot have a secret operation involving hundreds of people, without betrayal. It is a law of human behaviour.

Shoot. The crop circle hoaxers themselves illustrate the point. There are more than 7 hoaxers, so the hoaxes were betrayed, and the nature of those hoaxes is common knowledge.

You cannot keep a secret if too many people know it. You cannot maintain a conspiracy if too many people are members. There is absolutely no chance, repeat - none, that a secret group of hundreds of people can cover up stuff about crop circles and UFO's.

[Anthony G Williams]

Originally Posted by skeptical

Get it straight. You cannot have a secret operation involving hundreds of people, without betrayal. It is a law of human behaviour.

It is rather a waste of time using logic to argue against delusional fantasy - your chances of achieving a change of mind are as close to zero as makes no difference.

[J Riff]

Assume astronaut Cooper lands and informs the debriefing people that he saw a silver disc flying alongside his aircraft. A radar blip confirms this.
This information becomes what as known as a fact.
Astronaut Cooper does not lie, he virtually cannot. He does not hallucinate. He saw something, radar confirms it. It is real.
Then, Astronaut Ruff lands and says - I saw it, I saw the pilot of the saucer! The blip confirms the saucer. The pilot is a ___, says Ruff.
This becomes a fact, never questioned again.
Lie? About aliens? Are you NuTs!? Cooper, lie?
Uh, NO.
Now, MiB Dave goes to interview a farmer about a crop circle said to have formed in under a minute.
The farmer is normal, hard working. His eyes are clear, his behaviour is open and consistent, etc. etc. etc.
They may check into his past, but often not. He is not lying or hallucinating, and there is no motive for such.
Hand the guy over to the FBI experts and they will return the same result.

So, is this a fact, a crop circle forming in a minute?
Y'see... YOU have to decide, Mibster. Someone has to, right?
What if it was your Dad? It's always someone's Dad, y'see? His daughter is standing there staring at you as if daring you to suggest her Dad is anything other than what he says he is - and he isn't. He's telling the truth.
It's aggravating, to this day, to have Cooper or anyone like that questioned.
You, I don't know from. A guy like that I would trust with my life.
The crop circle formed in under a minute. I believe the farmer, because people do not lie for no reason.
Two such incidents constitute virtual proof. There's nothing personal, there's no opinion involved, it's just common sense combined with professional expertise with people.
The MIBs are convinced, the public can think what they like.
It doesn't prove a UFO made the particular object in question - only that people didn't.

[HareBrain]

Originally Posted by skeptical

A conspiracy to hide crop circle causes would require a lot more than 7 people. Therefore, if such a conspiracy was real, it would already have been betrayed. It has not, therefore there is no conspiracy.

I'm sure the larger and more complex patterns would have taken more than seven people to create in one night (unless robot etc etc). But though some creators of some circles have confessed, I don't believe they have for the particularly spectacular ones such as those in the video in the first post. Why doesn't that seven-person "rule" apply here?

[Anthony G Williams]

When the crop circles hit the news in the 1980s, they were at first very simple - a circular area of plants flattened in a circumferential alignment. It was claimed that such simple circles had occasionally been reported in the past. The most popular explanation at that time was for a natural cause - some kind of rare and intense meteorological phenomenon - and much effort was expended in trying to identify what it could be.

Then the circles started to get more complex, and I recall watching a TV debate in which a proponent of the "natural" theory was tying himself into knots trying to account for the complexity. It was by then obvious that while it was just possible that the early simple circles had some natural cause, the later ones had to be artificial. Over the next couple of decades, the complexity multiplied.

Then some people with a loose hold on reality started babbling about aliens (as they do, concerning just about everything, at every opportunity). However, this was soon shot down when some of the original perpetrators confessed and demonstrated how they did it, but that didn't discourage the alien fantasists of course - merely confirmed their delusion that it was all a big cover-up. Not even the fact that you can get very fancy designs made to order nowadays - as demonstrated in the QI link I provided - discourages the fantasists.

The reason why you don't get "leaks" reported in the press from the perpetrators is simply that it isn't really news any more, since there's no secret about how it's done. The only time you hear about it in the news media might be on a slack news day when they want to fill some space with a pic of a particularly artistic example. But there is a good reason why they tend not to go around boasting about it - the farmer may slap a criminal charge against them. The crop is his livelihood, after all.

Apart from the harm to the farmers' pockets, I rather like crop circles - they are a most impressive and appealing temporary art form, which is presumably the motivation for doing them. There must be a considerable sense of achievement among the perpetrators of a particularly fine example. The art may not last long, but aerial photographs of it will.

One common thread among the alien fantasists is a lack of faith in humanity's capabilities. "People," they say, "couldn't possibly have built those pyramids / made the Nasca lines / transported those vast stones / made those crop circles." That merely demonstrates a failure of the imagination. People are very capable and ingenious, and are more than able to do all of those things. In fact, they are all very simple and easy by comparison with the achievements which we take for granted today (like sending rovers to Mars, or just posting a message on the internet).

We live in a complex environment and, although we are learning more every day, we don't understand everything and don't have an immediate answer to every question. That should be seen as a trigger to more research, rather than an excuse to go "off with the fairies" and believe all kinds of bizarre notions for which there is little or no evidence. However, the results of such research into unexplained phenomena are increasingly pointing to faulty human perception and memory - for which there is a huge and growing body of evidence.

Something instructive happened to me a few years ago, as may have mentioned before. I live in a rural, hilly area in which fields are typically divided by dry stone walls. I was walking along a lane next to a small field when I noticed that a bicycle, with no-one on it, was running along the top of the wall on the far side of the field, all by itself. For a few seconds I was shocked and dumbfounded - how on earth could this be possible? The wall was far too rough for a cycle to run along it - it would instantly fall off if anyone tried to put it up there and push it. My eyes were providing clear evidence of something that was physically impossible. Then as the bicycle reached the end of the wall I realised the truth - the cycle was fixed to a roof-rack of a car which had been travelling along a lane on the other side of the wall, and by coincidence the roof-rack was at exactly the same height as the top of the wall. A simple example, but it demonstrated to me the potential for human misperception.

[J Riff]

Pfffft*....

Meanwhile, the professionals who investigate such things look at you like some kind of monkey wandered into the party.
Appeared in the eighties is right, that's when it started. All other 'alien' sightings, perhaps 10,000, did not involve crop circles.

A fantasist doesn't believe what his senses tell him.

You'd have to be a Grade A nutbag to not believe there haven't been saucers flying around for aeons. Likewise, tons of evidence for non-human construction of crop circles, is supposed to be negated by someone's opinion?

The least scientific words ever spoken, must be 'I don't believe..."
Look at the evidence, and leave opinion out of it. Or, show proof of your theory.
A fantasist could be someone capable of ignoring 10,000 slabs of evidence in favor of his fantasy of a non-alien universe. )
Doesn't mean aliens make crop circles! But I seriously doubt people are clever enough. * )

[skeptical]

Riff must think people are idiots.

" No, it is not possible. Mere humans can't do it. They cannot do crop circles, because they are too complicated."

Riff, you and I might not be able to do it, because we are too damn stupid. That does NOT mean no-one else can.

Take Stonehenge. Lot's of crackpots have claimed that aliens must have been a part of building Stonehenge, since primitive people could not do it. Well, watch the following video, and tell me that!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0

[HareBrain]

Originally Posted by Anthony G Williams

The reason why you don't get "leaks" reported in the press from the perpetrators is simply that it isn't really news any more, since there's no secret about how it's done. The only time you hear about it in the news media might be on a slack news day when they want to fill some space with a pic of a particularly artistic example. But there is a good reason why they tend not to go around boasting about it - the farmer may slap a criminal charge against them. The crop is his livelihood, after all.

Good point.

[JunkMonkey]

Originally Posted by Anthony G Williams

One common thread among the alien fantasists is a lack of faith in humanity's capabilities. "People," they say, "couldn't possibly have built those pyramids / made the Nasca lines / transported those vast stones / made those crop circles." That merely demonstrates a failure of the imagination.

Simultaneously the same alien fantasists will credit the 'Ancients' with all sorts of 'lost knowledge' that holds them up to be our superiors in many respects. Anyway you cut it they will have their cake and eat it, and have it again tomorrow.

Good post, AGW, makes a lot of good points very clearly.

Originally Posted by HareBrain

I'm sure the larger and more complex patterns would have taken more than seven people to create in one night

Why? Why would they have taken more than seven people? If you had ever worked on any physical job for any length of time I doubt if you would have said that. Go to work on building sites for a few years and just see how much work a human being can do in a couple of hours when they put their mind to it. (Preferably a small scale local builders without lots of machinery to do all the work.) Just look at the canal network in the UK, and all the railway lines and dams the Victorian built - made for the most part by men with hand tools. By comparison, flattening a field of defenceless barley is a doddle.

That you can't believe that it is possible is a failure on your part to recognise how bloody incredible people are. The fantasists may have a really low opinion of themselves and project that feeble world-view on the rest of the human species but take a cold hard look at the world and you will soon see humans are wildly industrious, and inventive creatures. Probably too industrious, and inventive for our own good - but that's opening another (Gaiean) can of worms.

[J Riff]

Problem is - some people maybe don't realize that the people who investigate these things are just exactly like you lot. Could be you, easily. Open-minded, educated, normal, well-read, high IQ.... y'Know?
So, yes, people can and are idjits, often. The guy who saw a small creature run through his garden. You get there and he's cracked out. Take a look around, no footprints, file under unsolved.
The farmer? Unsolved - OPEN.
Why open? You believe him. I mean - You, not me.
Then someone wanders up and starts accusing the farmer of being an alien supporter, or some kind of mental case, while he's standing there looking at his field.
He suggests he get some psychiatric help. His daughter kicks him hard where it hurts most. I chuckle. Unsolved - Open case number *.
The X files and other shows make people think weird stuff is happening, all kinds of different unexplainable events, all the time. They aren't. There's no special agents sitting around waiting for this kind of excitement to pop up. If I went and saw someone about something it's because it was in my neighborhood and I was asked. There's no pay, no status, no nothing.
But, reports come in, you've all seen them. There's thousands if you dig a bit into the past.
And, logically, they should all be linked somehow, and this has proven to be the case.
Almost every single unexplained event that has occured could be attributable to aliens.
Not all unexplained events can be attributed to humans.
Then - what explanation do we have the most evidence for, across the board of all events.
Bloody aliens every time. There's no other explanation that fits.
Nobody is trying to make this happen.
But - crop circles included, nobody asks the big question. WHY is this then being covered?
Because, like I said, this is YOU or you and your pals, looking at this stuff, not Superman and the CIA, and deciding what to do.
You cover it up if you find the real stuff. So it's got to be a very good reason, right?

You might think there are a lot of fervent UFO nuts out there, but I find the anti-alien crew to be much more tenacious. I blame television for overdoing it on both fronts.

[JunkMonkey]

Originally Posted by J Riff

Almost every single unexplained event that has occured could be attributable to aliens.

Almost every single unexplained event that has occurred could be attributable to a small pink elephant called Geraldo.