Qi - 1/10/10

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hilaryyyx

New member
What was Stephen Fry on last night, part of the programme felt like I'd slipped into watching the BBC's controversial Conspiracy Files.

He claimed that crop circles were first heard of in the 1970s, information which may have been lifted off the internet, and may indeed apply to those made by pranksters, but documentaries on the subject reveal that English farmers first reported them some 200 years ago, observing simple circles in their fields from overlooking hills. It was thought then they were caused by small tornadoes, or even dancing fairies.

Additionally what are considered genuinely mysterious crop circles are not simply constructed by some men trampling around with a board on a rope while using a surveyor's tape, their only objective being to flatten the wheat. The wheat has been subjected to a heat source which causes it to heat up from the inside and explode around the joints. There is residual radiation detected in the centre of the circle. Tiny metal spherules are found evenly distributed around the circle.

These conditions are used by those investigating crop circles to distinguish an unusual phenomena from a simply made hoax.

A Discovery channel documentary tasked some NIST undergraduates with making such a crop circle by dawn which fulfilled all this criteria. They successfully exposed the wheat to microwaves causing it to heat up and burst open at the joints by spending several hours carrying a hand held and highly dangerous device they made, and they set off a small explosion to evenly distribute the spherules around only the crop circle, but they made a lot of noise, had plenty of artificial light, and failed in their deadline, and with only a simple crop circle.

I don't know who does the research for QI but they need to look further than Wikipedia.
 
That may well be the case. I'm not subscribing to little green men touching down in flying saucers. Or it may be a natural phenomena.

The more intriguing crop circles, occurring around the world, cannot be the product of some men fresh from the pub using only a board and a tape measure. There's a bit more to them than that.
 
I'll find you one if you wish, but it's something I'd succeed in only after reading up many web pages, to find confirmatory text linking to a specific photo. Perhaps this is something you could do yourself?

It's not really about 'my opinion', and I do not have any great personal interest in crop circles. It just annoyed me that QI dismissed them all in such a cavalier fashion, and presented them all being hoaxed as fact. Crop circles which exhibit plant and soil damage/exposure are not make believe, the phenomena has been subjected to scientific research and peer-reviewed publication. It remains an unexplained phenomena.

When man has tried to copy those same requirements (heating a crop from the inside, background radiation inside the circle, metal spherules) and do so undetected during only 4 hours on a summer night so the circle is completed by dawn, his experiment failed.
 
No, unexplained is one thing it is not. There are many, many explanations - you just choose to be in the tiny minority that rejects the explanation(s) that most other people believe.
If you want to go searching for mysticism, or aliens that's your prerogative. Everyone else? we're happy with the simple explanation that it's a mixture of the local brew, a few mischievous blokes and some planks of wood.
 
Like all such occult realted subjects ....... quite certainly, there's a lot of pranksters and charlatans about, and .......... there's also no way to prove the genuine article doesn't exist (since, that's logically impossible!)

For example, most "ghosts" may well be caused by various subconscious wishes and promptings, infrasound, etc. Which makes it "quite likely" that any single occurence is due to such causes. But, there's no way to absoulutely disprove a possible "supernatural" explanation!
 
I don't believe in mysticism to explain this, or that extraterrestrials are responsible.

What I know from slightly more than casual reading/viewing is that some crop circles are considered genuine unexplained phenomena because they defy the simple explanation that some men trampled across crops in the dead of night. I'm not even referring to the increasing complexity of modern crop circles, but instead the already mentioned exposure to a heat source which heats wheat from the inside out, to radiation detected in the centre (which causes electrical interference), and to small metal spherules found inside such circles.

Stephen Fry, in his conspiracy rant, and the QI research team who feed him, presented his/their belief as a fact, on a factual quiz.
 
By cereologists, who study them to peer-reviewed published research level.

They would know within 5 minutes of arriving at a crop circle made by the men on QI that it was a hoax, simply by visually examining the wheat, to establish if it has exploded from the inside, bursting open at the joints, due to exposure to an internal heat source.

They take soil samples, and in circles with wheat which has been exposed to heat they find what is thought to be a byproduct of that heat source evenly distributed inside the circle - microscopic spherules, perfect spheres of metal, which do not occur outside the circle.

This is how they differentiate between straightforward hoaxes and circles which present themselves as unexplained phenomena.
 
I could tell within 5 seconds that it was a "hoax". That includes 4 seconds to say the words "This is a hoax". That goes for *all* crop circles, not just the ones made by the guys on QI.
 
People who study crop circles on the premise that at least some of them are genuine, let their research be reviewed by other people who study crop circles on the premise that at least some of them are genuine. Where's the hard, real scientific evidence.
This is interesting to read. Especially if you are about to go to sleep and still feel a bit restless.
The microscopic spherules thingy originates in one report on a 1993 - hoax - crop circle and is rehashed ad infinitum on all the crop circle web sites.
 
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