Crop Circles

[Kitsune]

I had thought that crop circles had been completely debunked.....
Apparently not though?

[Shroom Man 777]

A lot of things have been thoroughly debunked. That doesn't stop people from believing in them, really.

It's not a coincidence that a lot of these thoroughly debunked but believed things try to appeal to "spiritualism" or something. Like, pseudoreligious stuff. Crop Circles look strange and pretty. Homeopathy and Cold Fusion work on semi-mythical pseudoscience.

People really love that stuff, especially if they don't give it much thought.

[Patrick Degan]

Funny coincidence, but I'd just gotten through the chapter in Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World which featured the crop circle hoax and how, even after the perpetrators confessed to the hoax and demonstrated on TV how they did it, the credulous continued to believe in the hand of alien intelligence in the subsequent circles.

[Mobiboros]

The problem is ambiguity. Crop Circle enthusiasts point to some of the circles and say "But no one has stepped up to admit they did it so you can't say for certain ALL crop circles are made this way". They take a lack of anyone claiming to have created many of the circles as wiggle room.

[Kitsune]

Let us pretend that either there is some spirit out there or aliens....
What would a deity care about making weird circles in crops unless it has a really strange sense of humor?
Aliens, you travel 1000+ light years and you make crop circles?

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe you have a small isolated group of aliens who can't get home. They're stuck with monitoring the Earth, like a bunch of Federation scientists. I mean, we could be the only other form of sentient lifeform they've discovered. But after centuries of watching and monitoring and occasionally experimenting, these alien scientists gradually go insane and start making Crop Circles for dickish fun. And speaking of dickish fun, they also start abducting folks and for some scientific sodomy.

Basically your scientists get really bored and start frying anthills with magnifying glasses.

It would make for an interesting story.

[cosmicalstorm]

I had thought that crop circles had been completely debunked.....
Apparently not though?

It has been debunked, or is there something we dont know about?

[PeZook]

Aliens, you travel 1000+ light years and you make crop circles?

It's the same aliens who can't guide their spacecraft without making huge piles of stone in the desert and have to go all conspirationzorr rather than simply conquering the world via orbital bombardment. They're really fucking weird, I tell ya.

[Mobiboros]

Aliens, you travel 1000+ light years and you make crop circles?

People travel thousands of miles to see the worlds largest ball of twine. If you can cross thousands of lightyears the same as people roaming the Earth why wouldn't you have a larf on the yokels?

This corresponds to my theory on the movie Signs. It wasn't an invasion force, it was a frat prank that went really wrong. If you picture the aliens as drunken fratboys, it makes so much more sense.

[ray245]

Well, given that humans can be just as dumb as any other animals at times, I think aliens will make stupid mistakes as well.

I've got a friend who believed at aliens visited earth as tourist, same reason why tourist visit africa to see wild life.

And when they come over they, they will cloak their ships. However, some aliens are dumb enough to forget about cloaking thier ships, which in turn, allow us to see thier ships.

[Hillary]

Well, given that humans can be just as dumb as any other animals at times, I think aliens will make stupid mistakes as well.

I've got a friend who believed at aliens visited earth as tourist, same reason why tourist visit africa to see wild life.

And when they come over they, they will cloak their ships. However, some aliens are dumb enough to forget about cloaking thier ships, which in turn, allow us to see thier ships.

You have a friend who's even dumber than you? Will wonders never cease.

[ShadowRider77]

Well, actually the idea of "tourist-aliens" could indeed explain the behavior they exhibit whenever they happen around an airplane (ie fly around a little then speed away FTL...). Think about it: you have brought the kids to make some sightseeing in Sahara or Amazzonia for their science project on your brand-new Lexus (We are implying the aliens come here driving their own vehicle, so I suppose we are talking about a Lexus hover-car or something...). You are driving around minding your business when one of those shitty horse-drawn carts the natives use cuts your way. What a truly civilized being does in these situations? Of course you lower your side window, hurl some insults (that the guy probably won't understand anyway...) and then speed away before he can reply. The aliens do the same: when that F15 cuts their way they drop their cloak, hurl some telepathic insult (that humans cannot hear anyway) and speed away. Everything fits!

By the way, this would explain crop circles also: Earth governments know the aliens come regularly around, so they made an agreement with some alien tour promoter to offer the tourists some weird Terran activity to watch and make pictures of, much like those staged 'tribal' ceremonies. And since they (Earth governments, that is...) don't want to share the royalties, they do everything in secret and send the Men in Black Helicopters creating crop circles around. They even paid some misinformators to say it was them to make the circles, so to cover up. Once again, everything fits!

Jokes apart, what is there to debunk about crop circles? Seriously, there is no evidence of anything remotely "mysterious" here. Also, we actually know who started this prank, and many of those who continue this today make movies of it (I once saw on youtube a vid of a group of guys who, in about 8 hours or so, made a firefox symbol in a field...). People's gullybility sometimes astounds me...

[Zixinus]

I recall there was one famous in reporter in the country. He once asked a nut (who also writes books on anti-gravity fields and the like, which at first glance looks genuine, I think he was a actual physicist that failed in the academic field and now is trying his luck at the crackpot field) about the crop circles. The nut went on about aliens, hidden symbols and other bullshit.

Then the reporters invited the kids who made the crop circle. They fully admitted it and even brought fucking video of them doing it.

The nut? Refused to believe them.

[TithonusSyndrome]

This corresponds to my theory on the movie Signs. It wasn't an invasion force, it was a frat prank that went really wrong. If you picture the aliens as drunken fratboys, it makes so much more sense.

It would make more sense if they behaved as depicted by any given episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Signs was that bad.

[PeZook]

Jokes apart, what is there to debunk about crop circles? Seriously, there is no evidence of anything remotely "mysterious" here. Also, we actually know who started this prank, and many of those who continue this today make movies of it (I once saw on youtube a vid of a group of guys who, in about 8 hours or so, made a firefox symbol in a field...). People's gullybility sometimes astounds me...

People have a tendency to think "If I can't think of a way to do it, it's impossible to do"

This is why arguments like "These symbols are way too complicated!" seem convincing to them. Of course, by this logic, building a nuclear reactor or an aircraft carrier is impossible as well. Except, of course, we do it all the time. But what'a really surprising is the incosistency with which the logic is applied: after all, few enough people ever saw an aircraft carrier in construction, and it's hellishly complicated. Therefore, we may just as easily claim all US aircraft carriers are in fact built by aliens.

[ShadowRider77]

I recall there was one famous in reporter in the country. He once asked a nut (who also writes books on anti-gravity fields and the like, which at first glance looks genuine, I think he was a actual physicist that failed in the academic field and now is trying his luck at the crackpot field) about the crop circles. The nut went on about aliens, hidden symbols and other bullshit.

Then the reporters invited the kids who made the crop circle. They fully admitted it and even brought fucking video of them doing it.

The nut? Refused to believe them.

I once saw something similar in a conspiracy theorist forum (Hey, I can have fun too, isn't it?), the nut challenged 'everyone' to bring him evidence that crop circles ("Not the easy ones, though! The complex ones!") were man-made. When he was shown the movies of college kids making very complicated (and sometimes quite artsy) 'circles' he answered more or less "Well, you have yet to prove that all circles are man-made, isn't it?"...

[Darth Wong]

I recall there was one famous in reporter in the country. He once asked a nut (who also writes books on anti-gravity fields and the like, which at first glance looks genuine, I think he was a actual physicist that failed in the academic field and now is trying his luck at the crackpot field) about the crop circles. The nut went on about aliens, hidden symbols and other bullshit.

Then the reporters invited the kids who made the crop circle. They fully admitted it and even brought fucking video of them doing it.

The nut? Refused to believe them.

I once saw something similar in a conspiracy theorist forum (Hey, I can have fun too, isn't it?), the nut challenged 'everyone' to bring him evidence that crop circles ("Not the easy ones, though! The complex ones!") were man-made. When he was shown the movies of college kids making very complicated (and sometimes quite artsy) 'circles' he answered more or less "Well, you have yet to prove that all circles are man-made, isn't it?"...

The worst thing is that 99% of people don't know a logical rebuttal to this argument. The fact is that they haven't proven that 100% of crop circles are man-made. What they did do was fulfill Occam's Razor, and show that alien visitation is not necessary to explain crop circles.

Unfortunately, the population at large refuses to recognize Occam's Razor as a valid logical concept, because it is so damaging to religious beliefs.

[PainRack]

Wasn't it also argued that simple crop circles could be made by natural forces?

[ShadowRider77]

The worst thing is that 99% of people don't know a logical rebuttal to this argument. The fact is that they haven't proven that 100% of crop circles are man-made. What they did do was fulfill Occam's Razor, and show that alien visitation is not necessary to explain crop circles.

Unfortunately, the population at large refuses to recognize Occam's Razor as a valid logical concept, because it is so damaging to religious beliefs.

Hmm...I actually think that population at large has no idea that anything like "Occam's Razor" exists at all. Around here it is so, at least. Sad, I think...

Just for the record, when the nut wrote that, I couldn't help but intervening. I told him that, according to his 'logic', I could affirm that chairs could not be made by man, and that it fell on him to prove that all chairs in the world were man-made. It was, I believe, my first post on that forum. Two hours later, when I checked again the forum, I found that the webmaster had banned me and deleted my post. Typical of conspicary theorists' mindset, I suppose...

[Napoleon the Clown]

How about the conspiracy nuts prove aliens could even get here in a reasonable time frame while obeying the laws of physics? We can go from there after that...


Anyway, people that believe it's aliens believe such because they want it to be true, just like people who believe in their religion despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Reality just isn't good enough for a lot of people, and they can't settle with watching/reading a good sci-fi or fantasy movie/novel.