Crop circle
[2] Crop circles have been described as all falling "within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes" by Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University.
In the United Kingdom, reported circles are not distributed randomly across the landscape, but appear near roads, areas of medium to dense population, and cultural heritage monuments, such as Stonehenge or Avebury.
[13][14] In 1991, meteorologist Terence Meaden linked this report with modern crop circles, a claim that has been compared with those made by Erich von Däniken.
[n 2] In 1932, archaeologist E. C. Curwen observed four dark rings in a field at Stoughton Down near Chichester, but could examine only one: "a circle in which the barley was 'lodged' or beaten down, while the interior area was very slightly mounded up.
[20] During the 1960s, there were many reports of UFO sightings and circular formations in swamp reeds and sugarcane fields in Tully, Queensland, Australia, and in Canada.
[21] For example, on 8 August 1967, three circles were found in a field in Duhamel, Alberta, Canada; Department of National Defence investigators concluded that it was artificial but couldn't say who made them or how.
[22] The most famous case is the 1966 Tully "saucer nest", when a farmer said he witnessed a saucer-shaped craft rise 9 or 12 m (30 or 40 ft) from a swamp and then fly away.
Odgers, Director of Public Relations, Department of Defence (Air Office), wrote to a journalist that the "saucer" was probably debris lifted by a willy-willy.
[9] In 1991, two self-professed pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, made headlines by saying they had started the crop circle phenomenon in 1978, using simple tools consisting of a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in straight lines.
[10][34] Writing in Physics World, Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon said that "the pictographs they created inspired a second wave of crop artists.
"[10] After reports of simple circles in the 1970s, increasingly complex geometric designs have been created by anonymous artists, in some cases to attract tourists to an area.
The winning entry was produced by three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a plank, string, a telescopic device and two stepladders.
[42] A 3 ha (7 acres) crop circle depicting the emblem of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance was created in California in December 2017 by a father and his 11-year-old son as a spaceport for X-wing fighters.
[citation needed] In 2000, Matthew Williams became the first man in the UK to be arrested for causing criminal damage after making a crop circle near Devizes.
He reported on "expert" sources such as The Wall Street Journal who had been easily fooled, and mused about why people want to believe supernatural explanations for phenomena that are not yet explained.
[10][50] In 1880, an amateur scientist, John Rand Capron, wrote a letter to the editor of journal Nature about some circles in crops and blamed them on a recent storm, saying their shape was "suggestive of some cyclonic wind action".
[10] The meteorological theory became popular, and it was even referenced in 1991 by physicist Stephen Hawking who said that, "Corn circles are either hoaxes or formed by vortex movement of air".
[10] The weather theory suffered a serious blow in 1991, but Hawking's point about hoaxes was supported when Bower and Chorley stated that they had been responsible for making all those circles.
[63] Since becoming the focus of widespread media attention in the 1980s, crop circles have been the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators, ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrial beings.
Thomas Djamaluddin [id], research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at LAPAN stated, "We have come to agree that this 'thing' cannot be scientifically proven."
Among others, paranormal enthusiasts, ufologists, and anomalistic investigators have offered hypothetical explanations that have been criticised as pseudoscientific by sceptical groups and scientists, including the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
A small number of scientists (physicist Eltjo Haselhoff, the late biophysicist William Levengood) have claimed to observe differences between the crops inside the circles and outside them, citing this as evidence they were not man made.
[50] In 1996, Joe Nickell objected that correlation is not causation,[50] raising several objections to Levengood's methods and assumptions,[70] and said, "Until his work is independently replicated by qualified scientists doing 'double-blind' studies and otherwise following stringent scientific protocols, there seems no need to take seriously the many dubious claims that Levengood makes, including his similar ones involving plants at alleged 'cattle mutilation' sites."
[59] When Ridley wrote negative articles in newspapers, he was accused of spreading "government disinformation" and of working for the UK military intelligence service MI5.
[34] Ridley responded by noting that many "cereologists" make good livings from selling books and providing high-priced personal tours through crop fields, and he claimed that they have vested interests in rejecting what is by far the most likely explanation for the circles.
[12] A 17th-century English woodcut called the Mowing-Devil depicts the devil with a scythe mowing (cutting) a circular design in a field of oats.
The pamphlet containing the image states that the farmer, disgusted at the wage demanded by his mower for his work, insisted that he would rather have "the devil himself" perform the task.
[12] In the 1948 German story Die zwölf Schwäne (The Twelve Swans), a farmer every morning finds a circular ring of flattened grain in his field.
[12] The difficulties that exist in communicating the results of archaeology have undoubtedly contributed to the flourishing of writers, such as Erich von Däniken, who take a particular delight in deriding the inability of 'experts' to find explanations that seize the imagination of the public.
(...) I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall.
