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."
crop circle robots (Score:5, Interesting)
How cool would it be to drop off this contraption in the middle of a field, set some width/height parameters, and let it run free, just to see what you could come up with. Maybe even have it draw fractal patterns or somthing.
Amazing wonder? Uh, no. (Score:1, Interesting)
No, they're either desperate scams by farmers about to go out of business or declare bankrupcy, scam artists hoping to sell books("LOOK! ALIENS! Oh, by the way, I have a book all about crop circles, $20!) or pranks by local bored (high school, college) students. It is -well- established that they're made by someone with a wooden plank, a helper, and a rope between them. The motives may differ, but the source is always the same- humans. They're also very easy to make without anyone noticing- you can't see very far into a field, so you could do it in the middle of the day.
Ever notice these crip circles just tend to gravitate towards farmers who aren't doing well financially, NEVER appear anywhere else(like random fields, forests, mall parking lots, etc..) and those farmers usually just happen to charge admission or sell stuff?
Besides, they'd have to be some pretty goddamn stupid aliens to a)have nothing better to do or b)think it's a real way of "communication"
Re:Crop Circles (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course you can. And they can, too. But there are a few more phenomina to it than just pressing down crops.
Nearly-perfect geometic shapes
small (measured in micron) iron spheres scattered throughout the crop circle
Slightly elevated radition / "cooked" effect to pushed-down corn
and, finally, odd performance from aircraft around crop circles
The last one its the one that threw me. On the "TV mentury" that documented a few graduate engineers faking a "genuine" crop circle, their helicopter suffered an loss of power over the darn thing. Odd--not the stuff of religious revelations, but odd.
Crop circles may be an as-yet undocumented natural phenomina, a higher-order of technology (Military or "UFO"), or just a really, really, REALLY clever prank. I don't know, I've never seen one.
But they are more than you can do with "just a 2x4 and a piece of rope."
The disc (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like a hoax/joke, but if it it a joke they might have a funny recording imprinted for the disc-shape.
Idiot pranks (Score:3, Interesting)
(As a side note though, it's interesting that something like this is only devestating to cultures that rely on agriculture. Agriculture, while it's great for mass production of food, is a "place all your eggs in one basket" bet with nature. Horticulturists also have some of the same worries, but not as many. Pastoralists mostly gather their vegetables from nature. Hunter/gatherers have a very varied diet, and lots of mobility.)
Re:Crop Circles (Score:3, Interesting)
There's the faked 2x4 crop circles, and then there are others with much more curious evidence.
Unfortunately, rebuttals are lacking for the tougher evidence that supporters put forth (biological changes to the plants, higher radiation, a microwaved like effect, etc.)
Can anyone help me out with some rebuttals on these issues? I for one, still believe that they are all a hoax, but I'm looking for some good explanations to these somewhat scientific sounding evidences. Its one thing to be laugh and say "Ha, its just a bunch of pranksters." and another to ask "So, can anyone fake these evidence? Are they natural? Are these evidences a bunch of crap?"
Two Interesting Facts About Crop Circles (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Crop circles occur only in countries with agricultural surpluses.
crap-in-a-box (Score:5, Interesting)
Last year a german TV magazin (stern tv) decided to evaluate that. After finding out that it was possible, they... well, they became alien and just did it. A large field was picked, the "impressions" were made with such other-worldly gadgets as tree logs, rope and a bunch of carbon-based glucose operated water bags.
The result: crop circles indistinguishable from all the other ones that are worshipped all the time. All the german esoteric elite piled up at that field, people sold the t-shirts and posters, and everyone believed that the god-forsaken place of Schönwalde was location to extra-terrestrial visits.
http://www.fosar-bludorf.com/kornkreis/
Scroll down a bit to see a picture of the circle in question. Interestingly enough (and although the creation of the circle was filmed) the site which has the picture is part of the "believers" who are not going to abstain from their initial belief that it is the work of alien visitors. Notice any weird feelings when looking at it? Well, if it is hunger it might be for a reason, the pattern has been taken from a salami pizza, the weird thingy coming out of one of the outer circles is a deplaced pepperoni.
Well, the wackos running the site are currently bashing the TV magazine people for obstructing the truth and stuff like that. A bunch of the wackos have found magnetic anomalies ("up to 1000%"), dehydrated soil but no burned plant matter, silicium chipping ("broken off a spaceship") or measured modulated signals on obscure frequencies. Some people just WANT to believe...
Keyhole Sats (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to learn more about them, look up the "Keyhole Satallites" in google. You can take what is public knowledge and apply a dash of Moores Law to come up with some pretty scarry stats on the newest models. Although, I'd guess that the true power in the Keyhole birds lies in their ability to view in the infra red or ultra violette ranges. Or maybe even use lasers to pick up audio from space.
James Randi site: crop circles done by students (Score:1, Interesting)
Just scroll a little ways down.
Hey..there is one of you out there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its simple folks. Lots of them are created by humans. No doubt. Lots of them cannot possibly be created by humans alone. They are too precise and carry too much meaning.
I have been studying crop circles for a while and have read lots of information.
Did you know that..
1.) Even though very very precise, the shapes are not perfect. For instance, if there is a shape of a circle, it will not be perfectly round. It will have measurements similar to what a perfect circle would look like if it were projected DOWN on the surface of the earth from about 200 miles up in the air. Sorry, I couldn't find a link for this information, it came out of my books. Don't ask me how they do the math to arrive at this conclusion, its way beyond me.
2.) The ground under the plants which have been flattened in the geometries contains traces of chemicals and compounds which indicate extreme heat. The ground right next to it, under stalks which have not been bent or flattened looks perfectly normal. Go Here [execonn.com] and here [cropcircleresearch.com].
3.) There was one or more formations in which a porcupine was found in the very center, flattened and dead. Its Quills were arranged in the same spiral pattern as the circle. Go Here [ee.net].
4.) in 2001, a formation appeared near a radio telescope. In 1974, Carl Sagan and some other folks transitted a message out into space. The formation appears to be a reply. go Go Here [cropcircleresearch.com] and here [yowusa.com].
5.) The formations themselves contain information in the order in which they are created and their location. Much study has been done on their relevance to each other by their physical location. No links to this that I am aware of.
There are tons and tons of little stories like that that individually don't mean much. However, taken together, paint a pretty different picture.
Its very sad that so many of you
Much of this information isn't on the Net. It is however, published in a number of books.
A very good one is by a fellow named Freddy Silva, its called "Secrets In The Fields". Its clear that he has an axe to grind, but you cannot discount the information in it.
Paul Vigay has a good site Here [cropcircleresearch.com]
I believe that something is going on here which needs further research.
Open up your minds folks. We ain't in the dark ages anymore.
Re:"MORE ON THE 'ET FACE & DISC' DECODING " (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, shouldn't they be submitting a proposal to extend Unicode so future crop circles can use their character set?
Brit tech students rule! (Score:5, Interesting)
My jaw dropped when I saw the alien face and disc. Remarkable! Very clever technology must have been employed in order to pull this off with such precision. The execution is flawless! I'm very impressed.
Certainly this is no ordinary rope-and-plank job, One wonders if the thing was perhaps a clandestine practical execution of a tech student's exam project?
The site of the artwork may be close enough for the DGPS beacon at the Bristol Channel to have helped the punters get the edges of the rectangle aligned so precisely, but presumably a laser sighting device similar to the ones used by land surveyors could have been sufficiently accurate.
Once the rectangle corners had been defined and the circle perimeter traced, it may have been fairly trivial for two operators, or teams, to traverse the sides of the rectangle in parallel with the Device running a straight line from side to side and flattening the crop row with variable force (or width) according a predetermined bitmap courtesy of photoshop and some clever artistry. I'd love to see the original bitmap and compare with the finished formation.
You can see a thin groove at the center of each scanline in the closeup ground photos, which seems to be a wheel track. The device design is unknown, so we don't know if it had 1,2 or even 4 wheels. A rope could have been its suspension from above, though you'd think that would have caused variations in pattern density with the rope at the edges being more taut.
It would need to be somewhat heavy in order to flatten the crop and have enough mechanical force to gradually engage and disengage the crop flattening part of the mechanism during the course of each row. Perhaps the device was guided on twin taut ropes from either side of the formation, or perhaps guided optically by lasers.
From the closeup pictures the pattern looks like it was applied in one direction alone, so perhaps returning the cart to the other side was a waste cycle instead of using bidirectional 'printing'.
Interestingly, the wheel groove of the spiral is between the spiral pattern bands, as opposed to centered in the middle, so a different machine may have been used here, perhaps operating concurrently with the alien portrait scanline 'printer'.
The question remains how the row alignment came to be so spot on both in terms of row spacing and 'horizontal hold' from row to row : The vertical details are quite precisely in sync from row to row, so the tech and methodology used is indisputably excellent.
I hope eventually the artists and hoaxers come forth and reimburse the farmer for his losses, and reveal their clever technology. I think that would make for an interesting read.
Re:Keyhole Sats (Score:3, Interesting)
Except I suppose for the dishes that recieve the signals... but surely that isn't much compared to the cost of putting up the thing in the first place.
Encoding error (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite bit: