Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. I hope you had some breakfast, cereal and cartoons this morning, and now you're moving on to Stuff you Should Know selects. My pick is what's the deal with crop Circles? From November two. Uh. This is pretty interesting to me because crop circles are clearly man made and just h there for Internet weirdos to think are made by aliens? And what's better than that? Right? Please enjoy? Right now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes this whole thing Stuff you Should Know the podcast. That's right, let's go on, good man. I got on my snow shoes and I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. Hey, run into snowshoes. Well, let's sort of a large snowshoe. I could see that though. Yeah, that would definitely work. Yeah right, but it's easier you can do something else with your hands while you're using this. That's a good point. So, uh, did you ever have the led Zeppelin box set? From? Uh my college roommate did. Yeah, so you're familiar with the crop circles and the suggestion that by led Zeppelin that it was there Zeppelin that was responsible for all of them. Was that what that was? Yeah? I didn't pick up on that because on the cover of the box set there's like this awesome, very real life crop circle formation and then the shadow of the Zeppelin floating over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow every Okay, Yeah, that was the whole thing. Like said, led Zeppelin took responsibility for those, right, And by the way, we got a lot of responses on how they got the name led Zeppelin, So thank you to the hundreds of people. Yeah, where the e where the A went. They didn't want people to think it was lead Zeppelin exactly makes total sense, right, the Zeppelin in front the lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication that the led Zeppelin Zeppelin was responsible for crop circles. But that's one of the few suggestions that have been made for what makes crop circles. And this is really strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a quarter of a century. How crop circles are made who makes them? And yet there's still a lot of people called seriologists after series The Goddess of Agriculture um, who are like, no, this this those people, that's the that's the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're responsible for crop circles, which leaves on accounted for. Yeah. I don't even call it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah, so I saw somewhere at one point somebody say it's the most scientific, most science based art there because the stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of them is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah, some smart people are behind these, uh what I like to call art. They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on a cornfield. No, but they are people, Yes they are, and we've kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted to find out who makes crop circles it's art, you can turn the episode off. But if you do, you're gonna miss out on some kind of some cool interesting stuff if you ask me. Yeah, And what I think is weird is that despite the fact that it is definitely not aliens and all this stuff that people propose, we'll get into all that is that even when the people came out and said no, we've been making crop circles for years, some people like no, no, no, they're being paid to say that, Yeah, there's aliens. In fact, that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories. Those just admitting that you're responsible, you suggest that you you're Yeah, somebody's put you up to admitting it, you're it's disinformation basically, and that's what a lot of people have said. A lot of people say it's m I five. And the reason they say it's m I five is because if you start tracing the history of crop circles, they originated basically the hoax did um in England, specifically in a couple of counties in England. Yeah, I mean not only originated, but I think um of all crop circles have existed in southern England, even though they're they're you know, they've had someone like Japan and the United States, some other parts of Europe, but yeah, ninety over in southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to undertake the process of circle art exactly for one reason or another. Who knows, well, I can tell you how it started out yeah, so there crop circles. If you're a seriologist, you will point to the sixteenth century maybe when somebody he's like, the first what could be described as a crop circle is accounted for. Um. I couldn't find anything to back that up, but apparently in the sixteenth century that's where the first description came from. I did find in the seventeenth century, and there's a wood cut of something called the mowing Devil, and it's a it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle. But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah, he I don't understand how this became some sort of weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then, because if you look at the wood cut, it is satan with a scythe and he is clearly cutting down corn or something some wheat harvest. But cutting, yeah, he's not. It's not that's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. They're like, you know, it's a cornstock that has laid down but not damaged supposedly, right, they yield the pressure without breaking. So this is this is just complete WHOI to me? And there's even more so the there's an explanation on the wood cut itself. Well, it's a story. Yeah, basically a um, a man uh balked at the price that he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain. And the man said, I would rather have the devil harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find that the devil was harvesting his green and he probably went to hell for it. But that was the whole story behind the mowing devil. If you're a seriologist, this is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of says a lot if you ask me. But um, something that does kind of pop up that's a little a little less easily explained, came along in eighty in the issue of In an issue of Nature, there was an Englishman named John Rand Capron or Capron, and he was from Surrey, and he said that he found a field of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as if by wind. Yeah, and they say there's a crop circle. Yeah, maybe it's possible. He said that it's to him, he thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again we'll get into other explanations later, but one of them is that they are the result of like a tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah. But what what he didn't say was that it was like a perfect circle. And this circonference was you know, I mean it could have just been a windy spot where some stuff was knocked down, you know, right the yeah, exactly. He didn't say it was in the shape of an Egyptian arc or anything like that, right, or an alien smoking pot. That's a real one. That's really um. So that those are like the earliest evidence of crop circles. And then in the sixties the first modern idea of a crop circle came about in Um Australia and there was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a circular depression, UM, and it had been associated with the UFO sighting, and you know, it made the rounds in the media and even then a lot of people said it was probably a tornado or a cyclone or something like that. Um. But there was a dude who happened to be in Australia at the time when it was being reported on. It was you know, a big hubbub and everything, and um his name was Dave Crop circle, Dave crop circle, No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name is Dave, Doug Bauer, and Doug Bauer when he got back from Australia, he was hanging out with a friend of his one night in drunk there. They'll just come out and admitute they were drunk at the pub and he told his buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't that be hilarious if we went out and made our own crop circle? And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious so much, so let's go do it. So they figured out how to do it, and they made the first crop circle in nineteen like the first crop circle, the first hoax crop circle what you call art was made in and um, what's funny about the whole thing is they made these things for years, hundreds of them, yes, but say the first couple dozen maybe nobody noticed because they made them on flat fields. And then they finally figured out, why what if we made one on like a field that was on an incline. They made that one, and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal phenomenon took off like a rocket. Yeah, and people, uh caught on obviously, and started making their own crop circles all over England UM and all kinds of cool designs UM. By the nineteen nineties it was a genuine tourist attraction. Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle. Apparently they were charging to offset the damage under their crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah, I saw where it could. It didn't damage the crops. I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop circle itself. Yeah, yeah, I think it can damage it. But the I mean, the hallmark of it is that the grain is bent but not broken, So as long as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance it could continue growing or try to grow back upright or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken grain in a crop circle. Yeah, I mean, I guess we should talk about the design. Say, most of the times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of different shapes now, but they started out as circular UM either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples, and sometimes they're connected, sometimes they're not um. They are usually bent in one way for a while, so either laying down clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they can be clockwise for ten feet and then counterclockwise. And from the sky you see these different kind of swirly patterns, like a layered swirly pa. It's very impressive. Yeah, and and again this started really kind of to take off in the eighties and throughout the nineties. Um and as they became more and more popular and more and more widespread in the media and um among people who watched the X Files, and again that the nineties were a deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennial millennium. Um So, I think that kind of really helped the popularity of crop circles explode because there are a lot of people are like, these are signs from aliens. Are either alien landing, like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions right, or else they're leaving They're leaving science for us. There's even a movie called Science, a terrible, terrible movie, um starring Mel Gibson about this very thing. Um So, there is a lot of people who bought into it like that, and as as the awareness of crop circles grew, so did the complexity of them to where you did have people who were sitting down and coming up with like really incredible math and then going out and doing it in a crop circle form. Yeah, and some people uh use that like it's it's this one is exactly four times larger than the one below it and as evidence that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are good at figuring out design and geometry and math. There's there's specifically a man who kind of um uh I guess provided a stumbling block to the debunking of um crop circles. His name is Gerald S. Hawkins, and he is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast, and he used his math skills to analyze crop circles and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some non human agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the scope of human understanding. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician could learn something from the something new, and that implied that something extraterrestrial was behind him. While his findings have been um challenge time and time again. So he believed that he believed it was I thought he said he was debunking. No, no, he he confounded debunking. He created this, he did bunk um. And the thing is the language he's using, the math he's using is real math. So the average person can't come in and look at this and be like this is wrong for this and this reason and this reason, um and then his I think the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed at all in what appears to be normal um academic math forums. It's just it doesn't exist. It doesn't like, it doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his initial findings in a respected math journal, it hasn't. If this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be in textbook revolutionary. Yeah, and it's just not discussed. So I think that in and of itself is a pretty good example of how seriologists butt up against skeptics, and and the whole thing is continued. Somebody will present a body of evidence and then nobody is either capable or willing to just go to the trouble of debunking it. Yeah, and these things like this article is I don't know if I can recommend people read this one. It's it seems like it was written by a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Um. But one thing has struck me as odd in this article at least, is um. These things are usually like they're big, you know, there're several hundred feet right, maybe a hundred feet it says, sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah, I don't understand that. That's that's called like stepping on a piece of wheat, Like, how can a crop stork will be several inches across? There was some stuff in here that I couldn't find any support for or anywhere else. Like, here's a sentence for you under the title who makes crop circles? The first sentence is the answer of who or what is creating these crop formations is not an easy one to answer? Is Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence to Um. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for hundreds of designs, hoaxes can't account for all the thousands of crop circles created. Yeah again, hoaxes can account for every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah, I was really disappointed with this. I put in for an article update. Oh yeah, good. All right, so we'll talk about a little more about where these are located and what kind of fields are used after this break. All right, So you mentioned in a couple of counties in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire or where most of these are, which kind of makes sense if people are saying he may to built some crop circles. Oh yeah, how do you do that? Right? Here's how you do it. Oh cool, I'll go do one right. You know, it's localized for the most part. And the reason it's localized there is that's where Dave and Doug lived exactly. That's where they live. That's where the crop circles started. So yes, they were, Um, they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is that's where stonehenges. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, sure, Dave and Doug lived there, Who cares? They were put up to it, saying that they did it by m I five. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah. All kinds of fields can be used, um for this art, corn oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. Um. I like the corn ones. I think that that makes a nice canvas. I don't know that I've seen a corn one. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I like the corn ones. Well I think they were corn and not signs, right right, surrounded by corn. I tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow my hip for campus to form memories of that movie. Uh so, I guess we should cover some of the theories because we covered like a big foot and other things that aren't real to um so, so here's what seriologists believe. Um we mentioned that it's an alien calling card. Perhaps a lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, oh I saw some I heard some strange noises, I saw some weird lights. There's a fair famous video called the Oliver's Castle video where you see these strange lights above the field and you actually see the crop circle on video form, it's a field and then it just depresses into a crop circle. You've seen this, Oh yeah, it's on YouTube. But that guy who made that video came out and said, here's how I did that. It's uh, these computer program ms and it's paint and um it's all fake. But some people say no, no, no, no no. That guy was paid off to say that, or m I five kidnapped his family and made him say it. But it's I mean, it's very cool looking. But that is the you know. One of the points that UM rational people point to is like, if these things are being made, why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right, Because cameras are ubiquitous video cameras, people look for this stuff. They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Well, yeah, there was a very famous um operation by a group of seriologists who camped out at a field um for several like a week or two I believe, back in the eighties or nineties, and apparently not only did no crop circles form during the time they were camped out in that area, none didn't all of England during that time that they were. They publicized that they were camping out, and then right in the operation ended, a crop circle popped up, like I think a couple of football fields away from where they've been campused. Because Doug in what was his name, Dave Dave were like, all right, they're gone exactly, let's go mess with him. Another one is that UM, a lot of people say that, uh, there's this um, this plasma that can form ionized wind basically, yeah, the plasma vortex theory, and and that it forms a cyclone. It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe, or counterclockwise, one of the two their cyclonic and anti cyclonic. Whichever way that they said the the cyclone rotates the the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated the other way. Then when they were like, yeah, there's anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time, like there's been a real um tug of war playfulness between people popping up in the media experts on crop circles saying something and the people making the crop circles um doing the opposite of what those people just said to prove them wrong with their crop circles. Right after that, Yeah, I think the English have a like with banks, you know. I think there's a undercurrent in England of like cheeky mess with the establishment sort of. Yeah, subverse of art and hoaxes and pranks, and it seems like I admire anything. It's kind of neat. Another theory is that down draft from like a helicopter and airplane, a small airplane might push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns. But they've tried to recreate that, and of course that's not possible. No, it's not possible, but that is a theory. Again, there's the the cyclone theory. Um. This was another thing in this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling, ring wind called vortices. That's not the most scientific theory. The most scientific theories that humans are making the crops circles. Like what is going on with this article. It's just whacky to me, But that is a theory. That's a theory that some people put out. They say, um, when the when that um crop circle in the sixties in Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's a cyclone. They call it a willy nilly. That was my Australian accent to know, they call it a willie willie. Yeah. Um, And that was something that they said that it was possible. It was that. They also said it could be a lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO, but that win theory has been around for a very long time. Uh. And a guy named Dr Terence Meaden, who's from the Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. Yeah, he says that, Um, there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning and not only can they make crop circles these, this dust can glow and that accounts for the lights. There's the UFO. So he's using pseudoscience to debunk even further pseudoscience. Yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't say Doctor Terrence Meeting, formerly of the Tornado and Storm Research right. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Um. Supposedly there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop circles and people that go to visit them report feeling tingling sensations all over their body. Um. I think this is explained as easy as if you get someone that believes in a electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and stick them in the middle of one, they're gonna feel a tinkling sensation. That was another thing that I ran into. I couldn't find any um evidence to back that statement up, Like, who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these these fields and is it being are they are they reproducible? The findings um. They was another crop circle called the Julius set It's a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's amazing from what I could find. It's the largest ever. It was like, um three hundred meters nine hundred feet in diameter. That's enormous, and it's four hundred and nine circles. Um. Just basically look up the Julius set Um. It's very awesome. But it was right next to Stonehenge. Like, there's plenty of images of this crop circle with Stonehenge in the background, and apparently a lot of women who went to visit it um found that their menstrual cycles sync up, and then some women who had already been through menopaud started menstruating again. Both are things that can happen, can they without you know, aliens taking part? Did that happen? Though? Like? Who who documented this? This is the thing Like people are just saying stuff and there's you can say whatever you want and it doesn't it doesn't count necessarily, at least not if you're trying to explain something thing. Yeah, I think both of those things can happen. Like I'm a forty and you know, like I think there are limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond sciences capabilities to explain things right now that there are things that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now, trop circles to me, are not one of them. They they they're just not that's because it's art. Uh. In the there was a biophysicist named Dr William Levin Good who um discovered that crop circles were damaged, uh and as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. Um. So he says, I think they're being heated from the inside by some kind of microwave energy. And uh, there's a god named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon, a professor of physics, who said, Yeah, you can build something called a magnetron using uh stuff from like a household cooker and its well VOT battery, and you can essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah, that might be possible that they have been heated by microwaves, because that is another way that you can make a crop circle. Um. He says that these crops usually have joints in the stocks like a corn stalk does, and if you heat it up it expands. Yeah, and it's gonna fall over. Um, that would be funny if there's a bunch of platform and it popped. But um, he says, I'm not saying this is how they do it. But using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program, you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this, and that is something that possibly could happen. Again, the clearest theory is that humans are doing it. And we'll talk more about evidence that seriologists point to and evidence that skeptics point to, and then how you make an actual crop circle. Right after this m hm, so Chuck, there's a couple of pieces of evidence that seiologist point to. They're very rarely, if ever footprints found around a crop circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah. If you look at any picture of a crop circle, any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going to see, um, little lines that go all along the field. Those are left by the tractor, their tractor tracks. Yeah, And crops are planted in rows exactly, so you can just move in and about them, and you know why they're planted in rows so you can move in and about them without stepping on the crops exactly. Um And like we mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came out in and said, hey, we did this BBC. Come along, let's film a little documentary and I'm gonna show you how to do a rope and plank uh crop circle. And apparently one of the guys had racked up a bunch of mileage on his car. I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for a good story. And his wife was got onto him and it's like, hey, what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And that's why he came out and said, now, I haven't been cheating on you. This is why there's all this extra mileage, and I'm gonna go public with it. So well, they were the only three people in the world who knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public because the government like people had bought into this lock stock and barrel like there was it was just UFOs possibly that we're doing this like right, like smart people were talking about this. The media was covering it like are these UFOs and these guys are just sitting back laughing. And apparently the Queen had a book on our summer reading list that was released by her press people that um included like some crop circle X where it's like UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world. What was going on? So the Queen was even mean this and these two guys and the guy's wife are just sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. Uh. And then apparently the British government was about to conduct an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's go forward. And they came forward in like September, and apparently within days they were on Good Morning America showing the world how to do this stuff. And a lot of people started doing it after that because they're like, this is kind of fun and I'm an artist as well. Uh. And here's how you do it. Well, there's some different ways you can get a magnatron apparently, but the most conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank um. So you're gonna choose a spot, you're gonna choose a field, you're gonna create your little design This could be a circle. It could be the mental brought set or the Julia set. Yeah, whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah, because you know it is math and you have to work it out and you have to have a pretty good eye for or brain for design. I guess two, draw something on a page and make it hundreds of feet across. It's like these are talented people. You're gonna get to your field and you basically, uh, you basically act as a human compass, not like a math compass that you used to draw a circle, not a compass to show you which way north is. And you're gonna put one person in the middle and that's gonna be he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope and you're gonna mark off your four uh opposite uh marks as the circle. And you're gonna give the guy in the center a rope, give someone on the outside a rope, and they're just gonna walk in a big circle as he holds that rope, and that's gonna make essentially a near perfect circle. In theory, it forms the diameter of the circle. Yeah, if you're taking your time, then you're gonna have a pretty good looking circle. Right, and then after that you start just moving inward from the outside in, just stomping the the uh, the grain down, yeah, with your big snowshoe like things, and there you have a crop circle. Yeah. And you can, like I said, you do one for three ft going this way, and hey, I'm gonna jump around and turn the other way and lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears that Steiny the weirdos of the world. How does that happen? Yeah? And the whole key apparently is planning it out ahead of time and then just translating what's on paper into real life. You know. Basically all it takes is a little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles, and a couple of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crop circle if you know what you're doing. Yeah. You could also use a gardener lawn roller, um or the traditional rope stop stalker, right, and there you have it. There's a group called circle Makers dot org and they were very much inspired by Doug and Dave. Think Dug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But these guys, um, they their their websites still up. It's not nearly as active as it was like five ten years ago, but they were getting paid by companies around the world to make crop circles. Um Like they they made a Nike crop circle. They made um like a Swedish furniture stores crop circle. Not d they make the Swish They made a foot like a footprint, like a huge footprint. Um and uh. They just did tons of them and got paid apparently like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each one they did for them. So these guys spent their early two thousands making bank running around doing crop circles. At the same time they're they're teaching people how to do it, and simultaneously, seriologists are still investigating this and so they they they seriologists came up with they're also called croppies, we should say crop ease, came up with some steps you need to take when you're investigating a crop circle. Are we gonna go over these? Sure? Uh. They talked to eyewitnesses and say, did you see her hear anything weird because there's a crop circle? And they'll say, yeah, actually, come to think of it, I did hear something weird? Am I going to be on the news? Right? Um, they check out the weather patterns UM in the area of the previous night, because that's it always happens overnight, which UM enthusiasts will say, you know this is they're doing it under under nightfall too not be caught as aliens, and they're sending secret messages, and rational thinking people say, no, they're artists. Are doing it under nightfall to not get caught. Same we can keep the hoax going. Uh, what else do you do? Uh? Supposedly they will bring out machines to actually measure soil and use like X ray diffraction analysis and electromatic electromagnetic energy readings. They're analyzing all of this information and I don't I don't know what they come up with. I like, clearly they've been forced to say, yes, some of these are hoaxes, like the alien smoking pot right, cannot be explained by seriologists. Um. There was a very there was a famous one that said, UM, we are not alone spelled out all in one word basically but in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you were not alone? If these are messages from aliens? And do they just happen to speak English. Yeah. So, um, there's a lot of a lot of points that skeptics point do the ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these um. And there was a guy named Joe Nicol and Uh he writes for UM, the Committee for Scientific and Instigation si C s I UM and they he basically came up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One is that there was an escalation in frequency as they became more and more popular, which is kind of a weird thing. Uh. They the geographic distribution of him was again concentrated primarily in this region of England, even though you'd find him elsewhere, Brazil, Japan, all over. Uh. You can also explain that by the fact that people were inspired by other crop circles. Um, there is an increasing complexity, which means that they're getting better at it exactly. Um. And then there was the like they called the Shynus factor, which was they were only done at night, knowing had ever seen a crop circle formed. That one guy's YouTube thing UM not outstanding well, which was faked exactly unless he was paid off to say it was faked exactly. And it's pretty tough to dis prove that. Yeah, I think, like I said, I think of people, Um, just look at this as really cool public displays of art, because they're amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able to accomplish with their hands and feet. They they somebody redid the Nasca hummingbird, you know, the Nasca lines. Um they did like kind of a more stylized version of that. Again, the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight up pot leaf of course. Um, someone did the moth Man, the West Virginia moth Man, the Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah, like, people got really good at this. Um and and like you said, I mean, if you look at it as art, it's pretty pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a fun conversation to over here at an English pub is a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of uh, what kind of circle they can make next. I bet that's a lot of fun to listen to. And you know, a rural county in England in a pub, I'd love to be in on one of those. We'll go to Wiltshire, Yeah maybe I will. Ah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? So that's crop circles. The mystery continues. If you want to learn more about crop circles, you can type that word into how stuff works in the search bar, or don't, and then it'll bring up this weird, weird article. Yeah. Uh, and since I said search bars, time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys and Jerry, I was writing to make a comment on something Chuck said on the last listener mail animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right, I remember that. Yeah, this girl had had I believe, doctor in psych psychologist, psychologist parents who kind of just ignored her her mental issues, which I thought was weird. He said. I don't know if it's just the country where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for that in Casa day Herrero coucio depato. Jerry, do you know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates into in the black Smith's Home stick knives. It alludes to what happens when an expert on something tends to neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah, it's like here, we say, the cobbler's children have no shoes. Yeah exactly. Um yeah, interesting. I bet every country has their own. Say it makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not Chilean. The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine. The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances, an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef that orders fast food, etcetera. Maybe they're just tired of doing that same thing over and over again, they just want to stop and rest when they get home. Or maybe they're just jerks. Who knows, but apparently it happens often enough that the situation got its own saying around these parts more than one stay classy, best Witches. Matt, Thanks Matt, and Matt was super excited that this was gonna get on listener to mail because he's been a listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt, way to hang in there. All I had to do is right in. Yeah, you're bad to get on. At some point and Cassa de Herrero Cucio de Polo. I'm gonna get that tattooed above my waistline in the Blacksmith's Home Stick Knives. I don't get that one, all right. Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If you want to try to confound us, you can do so via Twitter at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of i Heeart Radios. How Stuff Works from more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm

Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. I hope you had some breakfast, cereal and cartoons this morning, and now you're moving on to Stuff you Should Know selects. My pick is what's the deal with crop Circles? From November two. Uh. This is pretty interesting to me because crop circles are clearly man made and just h there for Internet weirdos to think are made by aliens? And what's better than that? Right? Please enjoy? Right now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes this whole thing Stuff you Should Know the podcast. That's right, let's go on, good man. I got on my snow shoes and I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. Hey, run into snowshoes. Well, let's sort of a large snowshoe. I could see that though. Yeah, that would definitely work. Yeah right, but it's easier you can do something else with your hands while you're using this. That's a good point. So, uh, did you ever have the led Zeppelin box set? From? Uh my college roommate did. Yeah, so you're familiar with the crop circles and the suggestion that by led Zeppelin that it was there Zeppelin that was responsible for all of them. Was that what that was? Yeah? I didn't pick up on that because on the cover of the box set there's like this awesome, very real life crop circle formation and then the shadow of the Zeppelin floating over it. Oh, I don't think I noticed the shadow every Okay, Yeah, that was the whole thing. Like said, led Zeppelin took responsibility for those, right, And by the way, we got a lot of responses on how they got the name led Zeppelin, So thank you to the hundreds of people. Yeah, where the e where the A went. They didn't want people to think it was lead Zeppelin exactly makes total sense, right, the Zeppelin in front the lead Zeppelin. Anyway, it turns out that it's complete fabrication that the led Zeppelin Zeppelin was responsible for crop circles. But that's one of the few suggestions that have been made for what makes crop circles. And this is really strange topic, frankly, because it's been out for about a quarter of a century. How crop circles are made who makes them? And yet there's still a lot of people called seriologists after series The Goddess of Agriculture um, who are like, no, this this those people, that's the that's the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're responsible for crop circles, which leaves on accounted for. Yeah. I don't even call it a hoax. I just call it art. Well, yeah, so I saw somewhere at one point somebody say it's the most scientific, most science based art there because the stuff that crop circles are made of, a lot of them is some really impressive Euclidean geometry. Yeah, some smart people are behind these, uh what I like to call art. They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around on a cornfield. No, but they are people, Yes they are, and we've kind of spoiled it. So if you wanted to find out who makes crop circles it's art, you can turn the episode off. But if you do, you're gonna miss out on some kind of some cool interesting stuff if you ask me. Yeah, And what I think is weird is that despite the fact that it is definitely not aliens and all this stuff that people propose, we'll get into all that is that even when the people came out and said no, we've been making crop circles for years, some people like no, no, no, they're being paid to say that, Yeah, there's aliens. In fact, that's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories. Those just admitting that you're responsible, you suggest that you you're Yeah, somebody's put you up to admitting it, you're it's disinformation basically, and that's what a lot of people have said. A lot of people say it's m I five. And the reason they say it's m I five is because if you start tracing the history of crop circles, they originated basically the hoax did um in England, specifically in a couple of counties in England. Yeah, I mean not only originated, but I think um of all crop circles have existed in southern England, even though they're they're you know, they've had someone like Japan and the United States, some other parts of Europe, but yeah, ninety over in southern England. They clearly are inspired in that area to undertake the process of circle art exactly for one reason or another. Who knows, well, I can tell you how it started out yeah, so there crop circles. If you're a seriologist, you will point to the sixteenth century maybe when somebody he's like, the first what could be described as a crop circle is accounted for. Um. I couldn't find anything to back that up, but apparently in the sixteenth century that's where the first description came from. I did find in the seventeenth century, and there's a wood cut of something called the mowing Devil, and it's a it's a devil, and he's clearly making a crop circle. But there's a pretty good explanation for the whole thing. Well, yeah, he I don't understand how this became some sort of weird pseudo proof that they had crop circles back then, because if you look at the wood cut, it is satan with a scythe and he is clearly cutting down corn or something some wheat harvest. But cutting, yeah, he's not. It's not that's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. They're like, you know, it's a cornstock that has laid down but not damaged supposedly, right, they yield the pressure without breaking. So this is this is just complete WHOI to me? And there's even more so the there's an explanation on the wood cut itself. Well, it's a story. Yeah, basically a um, a man uh balked at the price that he was quoted by a laborer to harvest his grain. And the man said, I would rather have the devil harvest my grain than you. And so when he woke up the next morning, he was quite surprised to find that the devil was harvesting his green and he probably went to hell for it. But that was the whole story behind the mowing devil. If you're a seriologist, this is the first evidence of crop circles, which kind of says a lot if you ask me. But um, something that does kind of pop up that's a little a little less easily explained, came along in eighty in the issue of In an issue of Nature, there was an Englishman named John Rand Capron or Capron, and he was from Surrey, and he said that he found a field of wheat that appeared to have been knocked about as if by wind. Yeah, and they say there's a crop circle. Yeah, maybe it's possible. He said that it's to him, he thought it was cyclonic wind action. And again we'll get into other explanations later, but one of them is that they are the result of like a tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah. But what what he didn't say was that it was like a perfect circle. And this circonference was you know, I mean it could have just been a windy spot where some stuff was knocked down, you know, right the yeah, exactly. He didn't say it was in the shape of an Egyptian arc or anything like that, right, or an alien smoking pot. That's a real one. That's really um. So that those are like the earliest evidence of crop circles. And then in the sixties the first modern idea of a crop circle came about in Um Australia and there was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a circular depression, UM, and it had been associated with the UFO sighting, and you know, it made the rounds in the media and even then a lot of people said it was probably a tornado or a cyclone or something like that. Um. But there was a dude who happened to be in Australia at the time when it was being reported on. It was you know, a big hubbub and everything, and um his name was Dave Crop circle, Dave crop circle, No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name is Dave, Doug Bauer, and Doug Bauer when he got back from Australia, he was hanging out with a friend of his one night in drunk there. They'll just come out and admitute they were drunk at the pub and he told his buddy about that, and they said, wouldn't that be hilarious if we went out and made our own crop circle? And Dave said, I think that would be really hilarious so much, so let's go do it. So they figured out how to do it, and they made the first crop circle in nineteen like the first crop circle, the first hoax crop circle what you call art was made in and um, what's funny about the whole thing is they made these things for years, hundreds of them, yes, but say the first couple dozen maybe nobody noticed because they made them on flat fields. And then they finally figured out, why what if we made one on like a field that was on an incline. They made that one, and all of a sudden, the whole crop circle paranormal phenomenon took off like a rocket. Yeah, and people, uh caught on obviously, and started making their own crop circles all over England UM and all kinds of cool designs UM. By the nineteen nineties it was a genuine tourist attraction. Even farmers were saying, come to my farm and pay me some shillings and come look at my cool crop circle. Apparently they were charging to offset the damage under their crops by so many people flocking to these farms. Yeah, I saw where it could. It didn't damage the crops. I just don't see how that's possible. The actual crop circle itself. Yeah, yeah, I think it can damage it. But the I mean, the hallmark of it is that the grain is bent but not broken, So as long as it's not broken, there's still a pretty good chance it could continue growing or try to grow back upright or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's tons of broken grain in a crop circle. Yeah, I mean, I guess we should talk about the design. Say, most of the times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of different shapes now, but they started out as circular UM either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples, and sometimes they're connected, sometimes they're not um. They are usually bent in one way for a while, so either laying down clockwise or counterclockwise, or if they get super crafty, they can be clockwise for ten feet and then counterclockwise. And from the sky you see these different kind of swirly patterns, like a layered swirly pa. It's very impressive. Yeah, and and again this started really kind of to take off in the eighties and throughout the nineties. Um and as they became more and more popular and more and more widespread in the media and um among people who watched the X Files, and again that the nineties were a deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennial millennium. Um So, I think that kind of really helped the popularity of crop circles explode because there are a lot of people are like, these are signs from aliens. Are either alien landing, like alien spacecraft landing and leaving these impressions right, or else they're leaving They're leaving science for us. There's even a movie called Science, a terrible, terrible movie, um starring Mel Gibson about this very thing. Um So, there is a lot of people who bought into it like that, and as as the awareness of crop circles grew, so did the complexity of them to where you did have people who were sitting down and coming up with like really incredible math and then going out and doing it in a crop circle form. Yeah, and some people uh use that like it's it's this one is exactly four times larger than the one below it and as evidence that it's something extraordinary and not just people who are good at figuring out design and geometry and math. There's there's specifically a man who kind of um uh I guess provided a stumbling block to the debunking of um crop circles. His name is Gerald S. Hawkins, and he is a retired astronomer who became a crop circle enthusiast, and he used his math skills to analyze crop circles and basically said, I've discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry in crop circles, which implies that there was some non human agency creating crop circles, something advanced beyond the scope of human understanding. Because if this incredibly brilliant mathematician could learn something from the something new, and that implied that something extraterrestrial was behind him. While his findings have been um challenge time and time again. So he believed that he believed it was I thought he said he was debunking. No, no, he he confounded debunking. He created this, he did bunk um. And the thing is the language he's using, the math he's using is real math. So the average person can't come in and look at this and be like this is wrong for this and this reason and this reason, um and then his I think the real giveaway, though, is his work is not discussed at all in what appears to be normal um academic math forums. It's just it doesn't exist. It doesn't like, it doesn't get any recognition. Even though he published his initial findings in a respected math journal, it hasn't. If this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be in textbook revolutionary. Yeah, and it's just not discussed. So I think that in and of itself is a pretty good example of how seriologists butt up against skeptics, and and the whole thing is continued. Somebody will present a body of evidence and then nobody is either capable or willing to just go to the trouble of debunking it. Yeah, and these things like this article is I don't know if I can recommend people read this one. It's it seems like it was written by a believer. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Um. But one thing has struck me as odd in this article at least, is um. These things are usually like they're big, you know, there're several hundred feet right, maybe a hundred feet it says, sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah, I don't understand that. That's that's called like stepping on a piece of wheat, Like, how can a crop stork will be several inches across? There was some stuff in here that I couldn't find any support for or anywhere else. Like, here's a sentence for you under the title who makes crop circles? The first sentence is the answer of who or what is creating these crop formations is not an easy one to answer? Is Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer. There's another sentence to Um. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for hundreds of designs, hoaxes can't account for all the thousands of crop circles created. Yeah again, hoaxes can account for every single one of the crop circles ever created. Yeah, I was really disappointed with this. I put in for an article update. Oh yeah, good. All right, so we'll talk about a little more about where these are located and what kind of fields are used after this break. All right, So you mentioned in a couple of counties in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire or where most of these are, which kind of makes sense if people are saying he may to built some crop circles. Oh yeah, how do you do that? Right? Here's how you do it. Oh cool, I'll go do one right. You know, it's localized for the most part. And the reason it's localized there is that's where Dave and Doug lived exactly. That's where they live. That's where the crop circles started. So yes, they were, Um, they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is that's where stonehenges. Yeah. So a lot of people are like, sure, Dave and Doug lived there, Who cares? They were put up to it, saying that they did it by m I five. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah. All kinds of fields can be used, um for this art, corn oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. Um. I like the corn ones. I think that that makes a nice canvas. I don't know that I've seen a corn one. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I like the corn ones. Well I think they were corn and not signs, right right, surrounded by corn. I tried to make myself go to sleep. I wouldn't allow my hip for campus to form memories of that movie. Uh so, I guess we should cover some of the theories because we covered like a big foot and other things that aren't real to um so, so here's what seriologists believe. Um we mentioned that it's an alien calling card. Perhaps a lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, oh I saw some I heard some strange noises, I saw some weird lights. There's a fair famous video called the Oliver's Castle video where you see these strange lights above the field and you actually see the crop circle on video form, it's a field and then it just depresses into a crop circle. You've seen this, Oh yeah, it's on YouTube. But that guy who made that video came out and said, here's how I did that. It's uh, these computer program ms and it's paint and um it's all fake. But some people say no, no, no, no no. That guy was paid off to say that, or m I five kidnapped his family and made him say it. But it's I mean, it's very cool looking. But that is the you know. One of the points that UM rational people point to is like, if these things are being made, why isn't there a single image anywhere of it happening? Right, Because cameras are ubiquitous video cameras, people look for this stuff. They camp out in fields trying to get those images. Well, yeah, there was a very famous um operation by a group of seriologists who camped out at a field um for several like a week or two I believe, back in the eighties or nineties, and apparently not only did no crop circles form during the time they were camped out in that area, none didn't all of England during that time that they were. They publicized that they were camping out, and then right in the operation ended, a crop circle popped up, like I think a couple of football fields away from where they've been campused. Because Doug in what was his name, Dave Dave were like, all right, they're gone exactly, let's go mess with him. Another one is that UM, a lot of people say that, uh, there's this um, this plasma that can form ionized wind basically, yeah, the plasma vortex theory, and and that it forms a cyclone. It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe, or counterclockwise, one of the two their cyclonic and anti cyclonic. Whichever way that they said the the cyclone rotates the the dog and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated the other way. Then when they were like, yeah, there's anti cyclones, people started making square ones. So every time, like there's been a real um tug of war playfulness between people popping up in the media experts on crop circles saying something and the people making the crop circles um doing the opposite of what those people just said to prove them wrong with their crop circles. Right after that, Yeah, I think the English have a like with banks, you know. I think there's a undercurrent in England of like cheeky mess with the establishment sort of. Yeah, subverse of art and hoaxes and pranks, and it seems like I admire anything. It's kind of neat. Another theory is that down draft from like a helicopter and airplane, a small airplane might push it down into these perfectly shaped geometric patterns. But they've tried to recreate that, and of course that's not possible. No, it's not possible, but that is a theory. Again, there's the the cyclone theory. Um. This was another thing in this article that got me. Probably the most scientific theory says that crop circles are created by small currents of swirling, ring wind called vortices. That's not the most scientific theory. The most scientific theories that humans are making the crops circles. Like what is going on with this article. It's just whacky to me, But that is a theory. That's a theory that some people put out. They say, um, when the when that um crop circle in the sixties in Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's a cyclone. They call it a willy nilly. That was my Australian accent to know, they call it a willie willie. Yeah. Um, And that was something that they said that it was possible. It was that. They also said it could be a lot of things. Probably wasn't a UFO, but that win theory has been around for a very long time. Uh. And a guy named Dr Terence Meaden, who's from the Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. Yeah, he says that, Um, there's this thing called the plasma vortex theory. He says that dust particles get caught in charged air that's spinning and not only can they make crop circles these, this dust can glow and that accounts for the lights. There's the UFO. So he's using pseudoscience to debunk even further pseudoscience. Yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't say Doctor Terrence Meeting, formerly of the Tornado and Storm Research right. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. Um. Supposedly there have been strong magnetic fields measured inside crop circles and people that go to visit them report feeling tingling sensations all over their body. Um. I think this is explained as easy as if you get someone that believes in a electromagnetic radiation of a crop circle and stick them in the middle of one, they're gonna feel a tinkling sensation. That was another thing that I ran into. I couldn't find any um evidence to back that statement up, Like, who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these these fields and is it being are they are they reproducible? The findings um. They was another crop circle called the Julius set It's a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's amazing from what I could find. It's the largest ever. It was like, um three hundred meters nine hundred feet in diameter. That's enormous, and it's four hundred and nine circles. Um. Just basically look up the Julius set Um. It's very awesome. But it was right next to Stonehenge. Like, there's plenty of images of this crop circle with Stonehenge in the background, and apparently a lot of women who went to visit it um found that their menstrual cycles sync up, and then some women who had already been through menopaud started menstruating again. Both are things that can happen, can they without you know, aliens taking part? Did that happen? Though? Like? Who who documented this? This is the thing Like people are just saying stuff and there's you can say whatever you want and it doesn't it doesn't count necessarily, at least not if you're trying to explain something thing. Yeah, I think both of those things can happen. Like I'm a forty and you know, like I think there are limits to science, and there's stuff that exists beyond sciences capabilities to explain things right now that there are things that will understand more clearly that appear to be superstitious. Now, trop circles to me, are not one of them. They they they're just not that's because it's art. Uh. In the there was a biophysicist named Dr William Levin Good who um discovered that crop circles were damaged, uh and as if they had been heated by a microwave oven. Um. So he says, I think they're being heated from the inside by some kind of microwave energy. And uh, there's a god named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon, a professor of physics, who said, Yeah, you can build something called a magnetron using uh stuff from like a household cooker and its well VOT battery, and you can essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves. So, yeah, that might be possible that they have been heated by microwaves, because that is another way that you can make a crop circle. Um. He says that these crops usually have joints in the stocks like a corn stalk does, and if you heat it up it expands. Yeah, and it's gonna fall over. Um, that would be funny if there's a bunch of platform and it popped. But um, he says, I'm not saying this is how they do it. But using GPS coordinates and a computer and a design program, you can actually use one of these magnetrons to do this, and that is something that possibly could happen. Again, the clearest theory is that humans are doing it. And we'll talk more about evidence that seriologists point to and evidence that skeptics point to, and then how you make an actual crop circle. Right after this m hm, so Chuck, there's a couple of pieces of evidence that seiologist point to. They're very rarely, if ever footprints found around a crop circle explain that they're walking between the planted crops. Yeah. If you look at any picture of a crop circle, any picture of any crop circle ever made, you're going to see, um, little lines that go all along the field. Those are left by the tractor, their tractor tracks. Yeah, And crops are planted in rows exactly, so you can just move in and about them, and you know why they're planted in rows so you can move in and about them without stepping on the crops exactly. Um And like we mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came out in and said, hey, we did this BBC. Come along, let's film a little documentary and I'm gonna show you how to do a rope and plank uh crop circle. And apparently one of the guys had racked up a bunch of mileage on his car. I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for a good story. And his wife was got onto him and it's like, hey, what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And that's why he came out and said, now, I haven't been cheating on you. This is why there's all this extra mileage, and I'm gonna go public with it. So well, they were the only three people in the world who knew about that for a while. Apparently they went public because the government like people had bought into this lock stock and barrel like there was it was just UFOs possibly that we're doing this like right, like smart people were talking about this. The media was covering it like are these UFOs and these guys are just sitting back laughing. And apparently the Queen had a book on our summer reading list that was released by her press people that um included like some crop circle X where it's like UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world. What was going on? So the Queen was even mean this and these two guys and the guy's wife are just sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. Uh. And then apparently the British government was about to conduct an investigation and these guys were like, we don't need to let taxpayers waste their money on this, so let's go forward. And they came forward in like September, and apparently within days they were on Good Morning America showing the world how to do this stuff. And a lot of people started doing it after that because they're like, this is kind of fun and I'm an artist as well. Uh. And here's how you do it. Well, there's some different ways you can get a magnatron apparently, but the most conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank um. So you're gonna choose a spot, you're gonna choose a field, you're gonna create your little design This could be a circle. It could be the mental brought set or the Julia set. Yeah, whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah, because you know it is math and you have to work it out and you have to have a pretty good eye for or brain for design. I guess two, draw something on a page and make it hundreds of feet across. It's like these are talented people. You're gonna get to your field and you basically, uh, you basically act as a human compass, not like a math compass that you used to draw a circle, not a compass to show you which way north is. And you're gonna put one person in the middle and that's gonna be he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope and you're gonna mark off your four uh opposite uh marks as the circle. And you're gonna give the guy in the center a rope, give someone on the outside a rope, and they're just gonna walk in a big circle as he holds that rope, and that's gonna make essentially a near perfect circle. In theory, it forms the diameter of the circle. Yeah, if you're taking your time, then you're gonna have a pretty good looking circle. Right, and then after that you start just moving inward from the outside in, just stomping the the uh, the grain down, yeah, with your big snowshoe like things, and there you have a crop circle. Yeah. And you can, like I said, you do one for three ft going this way, and hey, I'm gonna jump around and turn the other way and lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears that Steiny the weirdos of the world. How does that happen? Yeah? And the whole key apparently is planning it out ahead of time and then just translating what's on paper into real life. You know. Basically all it takes is a little bit of multiplication, some ropes, poles, and a couple of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crop circle if you know what you're doing. Yeah. You could also use a gardener lawn roller, um or the traditional rope stop stalker, right, and there you have it. There's a group called circle Makers dot org and they were very much inspired by Doug and Dave. Think Dug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But these guys, um, they their their websites still up. It's not nearly as active as it was like five ten years ago, but they were getting paid by companies around the world to make crop circles. Um Like they they made a Nike crop circle. They made um like a Swedish furniture stores crop circle. Not d they make the Swish They made a foot like a footprint, like a huge footprint. Um and uh. They just did tons of them and got paid apparently like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each one they did for them. So these guys spent their early two thousands making bank running around doing crop circles. At the same time they're they're teaching people how to do it, and simultaneously, seriologists are still investigating this and so they they they seriologists came up with they're also called croppies, we should say crop ease, came up with some steps you need to take when you're investigating a crop circle. Are we gonna go over these? Sure? Uh. They talked to eyewitnesses and say, did you see her hear anything weird because there's a crop circle? And they'll say, yeah, actually, come to think of it, I did hear something weird? Am I going to be on the news? Right? Um, they check out the weather patterns UM in the area of the previous night, because that's it always happens overnight, which UM enthusiasts will say, you know this is they're doing it under under nightfall too not be caught as aliens, and they're sending secret messages, and rational thinking people say, no, they're artists. Are doing it under nightfall to not get caught. Same we can keep the hoax going. Uh, what else do you do? Uh? Supposedly they will bring out machines to actually measure soil and use like X ray diffraction analysis and electromatic electromagnetic energy readings. They're analyzing all of this information and I don't I don't know what they come up with. I like, clearly they've been forced to say, yes, some of these are hoaxes, like the alien smoking pot right, cannot be explained by seriologists. Um. There was a very there was a famous one that said, UM, we are not alone spelled out all in one word basically but in all caps, we are not alone. And a lot of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you were not alone? If these are messages from aliens? And do they just happen to speak English. Yeah. So, um, there's a lot of a lot of points that skeptics point do the ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these um. And there was a guy named Joe Nicol and Uh he writes for UM, the Committee for Scientific and Instigation si C s I UM and they he basically came up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One is that there was an escalation in frequency as they became more and more popular, which is kind of a weird thing. Uh. They the geographic distribution of him was again concentrated primarily in this region of England, even though you'd find him elsewhere, Brazil, Japan, all over. Uh. You can also explain that by the fact that people were inspired by other crop circles. Um, there is an increasing complexity, which means that they're getting better at it exactly. Um. And then there was the like they called the Shynus factor, which was they were only done at night, knowing had ever seen a crop circle formed. That one guy's YouTube thing UM not outstanding well, which was faked exactly unless he was paid off to say it was faked exactly. And it's pretty tough to dis prove that. Yeah, I think, like I said, I think of people, Um, just look at this as really cool public displays of art, because they're amazing. It's really neat looking what people are able to accomplish with their hands and feet. They they somebody redid the Nasca hummingbird, you know, the Nasca lines. Um they did like kind of a more stylized version of that. Again, the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight up pot leaf of course. Um, someone did the moth Man, the West Virginia moth Man, the Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah, like, people got really good at this. Um and and like you said, I mean, if you look at it as art, it's pretty pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a fun conversation to over here at an English pub is a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of uh, what kind of circle they can make next. I bet that's a lot of fun to listen to. And you know, a rural county in England in a pub, I'd love to be in on one of those. We'll go to Wiltshire, Yeah maybe I will. Ah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? So that's crop circles. The mystery continues. If you want to learn more about crop circles, you can type that word into how stuff works in the search bar, or don't, and then it'll bring up this weird, weird article. Yeah. Uh, and since I said search bars, time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys and Jerry, I was writing to make a comment on something Chuck said on the last listener mail animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that the listener suffered from mental illnesses that were practically ignored by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting that that was quite a shocker. Oh, yeah, that's right, I remember that. Yeah, this girl had had I believe, doctor in psych psychologist, psychologist parents who kind of just ignored her her mental issues, which I thought was weird. He said. I don't know if it's just the country where I live, Chile, but we have a saying for that in Casa day Herrero coucio depato. Jerry, do you know what that means? She says, no. That literally translates into in the black Smith's Home stick knives. It alludes to what happens when an expert on something tends to neglect his field of expertise once he gets home. Yeah, it's like here, we say, the cobbler's children have no shoes. Yeah exactly. Um yeah, interesting. I bet every country has their own. Say it makes more sense than the knives thing. Yeah, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm not Chilean. The doctor thinks that a sick child is just fine. The electrician that has a mess of cables on appliances, an accountant that can't control her own expenses, a chef that orders fast food, etcetera. Maybe they're just tired of doing that same thing over and over again, they just want to stop and rest when they get home. Or maybe they're just jerks. Who knows, but apparently it happens often enough that the situation got its own saying around these parts more than one stay classy, best Witches. Matt, Thanks Matt, and Matt was super excited that this was gonna get on listener to mail because he's been a listener from the get go. He says, all right, Matt, way to hang in there. All I had to do is right in. Yeah, you're bad to get on. At some point and Cassa de Herrero Cucio de Polo. I'm gonna get that tattooed above my waistline in the Blacksmith's Home Stick Knives. I don't get that one, all right. Thank you for confounding us, Matt. That's good stuff. If you want to try to confound us, you can do so via Twitter at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of i Heeart Radios. How Stuff Works from more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm