Home > Blurbs > Crop Circles

Crop Circles

Statement

Crop Circle picture The term "crop circles" refers to elaborate circles, lines, and other figures that occurred in what fields, chiefly in England. Explanations for them included wind vortices, UFOs, and other mysterious forces. Crop circles showed every sign of being a hoax., perpetrated by people. The number escalated in frequency as news of them got out. They only occurred out of sight of credible witnesses. They gradually became more complex as time went by. Those who posited extraordinary causes were unable to give a coherent, testable explanation, while skeptical investigators could create crop circles by ordinary means. Believers in extraordinary causes for them only guessed and tried to rationalize, while the hoax hypothesis for the crop circles pulled together all the strings of the mystery and gave a credible explanation.

A hoax is what the crop circles turned out to be. In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted that they had been creating crop circles for years. They showed their techniques and showed the ease with which the circles were made, without detection. Paranormalists scoffed, showing that the two couldn't have produced all the crop circles. They didn't -- other hoaxers, such as Pam Price and Rob Irving came out and admitted what they had been doing. Several people showed, in a competition, that it was not difficult to make complex circles. Investigators Joe Nickell, and James Randi, visited England and could readily duplicate crop circles. Paranormalists were unable to tell the difference between their hoaxed circles and "genuine" ones.

Crop circles features that are "unhoaxable" have been duplicated by ordinary human beings. Claims of unique changes in soil and plant structure in the circles have not been sufficiently verified. Since they can be easily made, circles in other countries are probably hoaxes too. Since no extraordinary explanation need be invoked, paranormal believers in the circles are obviously needlessly complicating the mystery.

Sources

Crop Circles - Skeptic's Dictionary
"Mystery of the Crop Circles.", SciTrek program, Discovery Channel, 1996
Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer, "The Crop Circle Phenomenon: An Investigative Report.", Skeptical Inquirer, (Winter 1992) vol. 16 #2, pp. 136-149
Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer, Mysterious Realms, Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1992
Nickell, Joe, "Levengood's Crop-Circle Plant Research", Skeptical Briefs, (June 1996), vol. 6 #2, pp. 1-2