Top of the Crops 2002 461
Steeltoe writes "For those deeply familiar with crop circles, 2, they are truly an amazing wonder of the world. Not only are they getting unnervingly complex and beautiful, but last year researchers found themselves dumbfounded by an ET-face with an accompanying encoded CD-disc, 2, 3! Clearly, there are not enough wonders in the world, but lack of wonder and excitement! If you like adventure, you cannot turn your back on this, 2! Check out the cool circles of 2002 at Crop Circle Connector and at Circlemakers 'Top of the Crops 2002', or even take a physical *gasp* tour during the high-peak season next summer and see for yourself!! Only imagination may tell what will pop up from the crops in 2003."
No mystery... (Score:2, Informative)
Someones not going to be happy.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Encoded CD (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.swirlednews.com/article.asp?artID=51
Encoded message (Score:3, Informative)
as taken from this ranting article [swirlednews.com]
Get out that baloney detection kit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Idiot pranks (Score:4, Informative)
A dangerous prank (Score:3, Informative)
Nearly Perfect Geometrical Shapes (Score:5, Informative)
Milk Hill 2001 (scroll down, it's the 3rd one) [temporarytemples.co.uk]
Possibly made by the same people but with only 3 arms in the spiral [earthfiles.com]
Perfect geometry? The spiral arms don't even have the same number of circles in each arm. The Milk Hill formation has 13 circles on five of six arms of the spiral; the other arm has only 12. The 3-arm spiral has two arms with 11 circles and one with 12.
Stand in awe if you like, but jeez, this is obvious BS that these things are anything like 'perfect'.
Re:Always the tracks...not true at all (Score:4, Informative)
"MORE ON THE 'ET FACE & DISC' DECODING " (Score:2, Informative)
"For those not yet familiar with the decoding, the full message verbatim reads: "Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEvE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING. Acknowledge."
Re:Decoded? (Score:5, Informative)
I would have been more entertained to read that it had (c) 2002, Sony Music Corporation.. Then they'd have the RIAA trying to shut down the site.
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES.
Much PAIN but still time.
EELRIJUE.
There is GOOD out there.
We OPpose DECEPTION.
COnduit CLOSING [bell sound]".
This answer was found at:
http://www.dcccs.org/the_alien_at_crabwood_farm_ho use.htm [dcccs.org]
http://home.clara.net/lucypringle/articles/crabwoo d.html [clara.net]
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=381&cat egory=Environment [earthfiles.com]
(this one requires a registration. I haven't read it yet)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 &oe=UTF-8&scoring=d&q=EELRIJUE&btnG=Google+Sea rch [google.com]
DejaNews shows 57 threads
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&scoring=d&q=EELRIJUE&sa=N&tab=g w [google.com]
Google finds 66 sites.
Most of these sites scream hoax or conspiracy. One message said straight-up that there's no way anyone could decode it (yada, yada. They just didn't try hard enough. I do the impossible twice before lunch daily.{grin})
I'll give you a piece of my open mind. (Score:2, Informative)
Hypothesis: All crop circles are made by human beings.
Evidence: (as taken from this post, apparently a Difinitive Source) "99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four." From this statement we can confirm that a) there are hoaxsters out there who delight in the media attention they get from creating crop circles, and b) this knowledge is widespread and by no means a new thing. It's knowledge so common that every farmer out in the middle of nowhere with a short-wave radio or a TV posesses it. Keep in mind that I come from a rural area, and yes, every farmer in the world has some kind of contact with the outside world, even in the poorest parts of it.
Knowing this, and knowing that there are almost as many scams as there are suckers (for reference: PT Barnum), one could easily come to the conclusion that a tiny minority of farmers could easily account for every crop circle there ever was, especially considering the amount of attention said circles get. More interesting is how any evidence about their appearance (sudden or otherwise) is purely subjective on the part of the owner of the field and his neighbours, who were likely involved if there was a conspiracy against yonder city folk. Even more interesting is how crop circles have been getting more and more complex over time, probably in direct relation to media coverage and its availability to rural people.
The size and geometric precision and/or complexity can easily be explained by the fact that yes, farmers and other rural citizens are indeed clever, even intelligent. In fact, about the only thing that you can discern from the existence of these patterns is that they were made by someone with a little knowledge of geometry, indicating an intelligence of some kind. To assume that this sort of precision is beyond human beings is insane. We are obviously capable of much more than this. If you want an excellent example of what simple people can do with simple tools, the pyramids in Egypt were built by them. We don't know exactly what methods they used, and we aren't exactly sure why they did it that way because the process was largely undocumented (or the documents were lost), but they did. Sound familiar?
Already, we have a means, a motive, and an opportunity. All it would really take to create one is for a single person to say "hey, I can do that," draw up a coherent plan for doing so, get support from as many as four surrounding landowners for corroborating statements and labour, and then do the deed on a Sunday. This is far from a complicated plan, and the engineering/landscaping/surveying work is admittedly easily in the grasp of human beings. It's in fact so simple that it could conceivably be done without the landowner's knowledge or consent.
So now we've narrowed it down to two possible choices as to who implemented this plan. On the one hand, we have human beings. They're already there, they're intelligent enough, and they have a reason to do it (namely, because there's plenty of fools out there who would believe that it wasn't people). Alternatively, we have some other, non-human force at work here. Perhaps aliens, or perhaps gods. Assuming aliens, it would take them a great deal of effort to get here, and then the only way they attempt to communicate with us is by making mysterious patterns in wheat fields in the middle of the night, or when noone is looking otherwise. Moreover, these patterns can only be deciphered from the air and consist of very simple geometric shapes (well, until recently anyway). This is by far the most preposterous way to communicate. It is open to so much interpretation as to render itself completely meaningless, unless it is merely a code known only to the aliens themselves, not unlike the human activity of warchalking. In this case, it's merely interstellar graffiti and thus completely irrelevent to us.
The entire argument boils down to the exercise of Occum's Razor: The simplest explanation is the usually the right one. The simple explanation is that people did it as a prank, it caught on and only they know how they do it, because it's an exercise left up to the prankster. The best alternative explanation is that something that noone can see, and with methods some of us can't comprehend, made these things for deliberately mysterious reasons. This latter explanation isn't even my own, but the same one presented by the sort of kooks you can expect to try to explain the phenomenon with aliens and UFO's and ghosts. It is for this reason alone I can definitively say that every last crop circle is made by humans, because the alternative means a leap of faith so large that only a sucker would make it.