What's the deal with crop circles?

For a while in the 1980s, people were fascinated and confused about what exactly crop circles were. Now we know that they aren't signs left from aliens, but art made by humans. Learn all about these stunning, large form art installations in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. 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.

(00:21):
Let's good man. I got on my snow shoes and
I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. Hey,
run into snow shoes. Well, it's sort of a large snowshoe.
I could see that though. Yeah, that would definitely work longer. 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,

(00:42):
did you ever have the Led Zeppelin box set from
my college roommate did? Yeah, so you're familiar with the
crop circles and the suggestion that by Led Zeppelin that
it was their zeppelin that was responsible for all of them?
Was that what that was? Yeah? And pick up on
that because on the cover of the box that there's
like this awesome, very real life crop circle formation and

(01:07):
then the shadow of the zeppelin floating over it. Oh,
I don't think I noticed the shadow ever. 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
where the e where the A went. They didn't want

(01:27):
people to think it was lead Zeppelin 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.

(01:49):
This is really strange topic, frankly, because it's been out
for about a quarter of a century how crop circles
are made, who make 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,

(02:12):
that's the that's the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're
responsible for like of 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 is because the stuff that crop circles are

(02:33):
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

(02:55):
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 the
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,

(03:16):
no, no no, they're being paid to say that there's aliens.
In fact, that's something that you run up against with
conspiracy theories. Those just admitting that you're responsible just 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

(03:38):
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 exist did in southern England, even though

(04:02):
they're they're you know, they've had something like Japan and
the United States, some other parts of Europe, but yeah,
ninety percent 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. So there crop circles.

(04:24):
If you're a seriologist, you will point to the sixteenth century,
maybe when somebody'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

(04:44):
did find in the seventeenth century in the s 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 under dan how
this became some sort of weird pseudo proof that they
had crop circles back then, because if you look at

(05:06):
the wood cut, it is satan with a scythe and
he is clearly cutting down corner 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
corn stock that has laid down but not damaged supposedly, right,

(05:26):
they yield the pressure without breaking. So this is this
is just complete who to me? And there's even more
so the there's an explanation on the wood cut itself.
Well it's a story. Yeah, And 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,

(05:48):
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 screen 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

(06:11):
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 cape Run 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. And

(06:32):
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

(06:52):
circle and the circonference was you know, I mean, it
could have just been a windy spot where some stuff
was knocked down, right, 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 um, so that

(07:15):
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 of the media and

(07:37):
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 Circle, Dave crops Are, No, I'm sorry,

(08:02):
his buddy's his 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

(08:23):
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 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

(08:47):
maybe nobody noticed because they made him 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

(09:08):
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. Well 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.

(09:31):
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,

(09:54):
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

(10:15):
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 pattern. 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

(10:38):
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

(11:00):
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 trading 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.

(11:21):
Um So, there's 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

(11:44):
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,

(12:08):
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

(12:31):
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

(12:52):
he believed that he believed it was I thought, he
said he was debunking. No, no, he he confounded debunking.
He created this bunk he did bunk um. And the
thing is like 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,

(13:12):
and then his I think the real giveaway though, is
his work is not discussed at all, and 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 publish his initial findings in like a
respected math journal, it hasn't. If this guy had discovered

(13:34):
a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be 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

(13:56):
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, they're several hundred feet right, maybe
a hundred feet it says, sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah,

(14:20):
I don't understand that. That's that's called like stepping on
a piece of wheat, Like, how can a crop circle
be several inches across? There was some stuff in here
that I couldn't find any support for anywhere else. Like,
here's the sentence for you under the title who makes
crop circles? The first sentence is the answer of who

(14:41):
or what is creating these crop formations is not an
easy one to answer. It 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,
how becas this can account for every single one of

(15:02):
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 a

(15:23):
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 have 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 where the crop circles started.

(15:47):
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 David 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

(16:11):
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. Yeah, yeah, I like the corn ones. Well,
I think they were corn and that signs right. I
surrounded by corn. I tried to make myself go to sleep.

(16:32):
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

(16:52):
supposedly say oh I saw some I heard some strange noises,
it 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. Have you seen this?

(17:14):
Oh yes, 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 programs and it's paint and um,
it's all fake. But some people say no, no, no, no no, no,
that guy was paid off to say that, or m
I five kidnapped his family. But it's I mean, it's

(17:35):
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

(17:58):
of seriologists who can thout out of 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

(18:19):
time that they were. They publicized that they were camping up,
and then right when the operation ended, a crop circle
popped up, like I think a couple of football fields
away from where they've been campus and what was his name?
They were like, all right, they're gone. 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,

(18:44):
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 Dollig and Dave started doing crop circles that rotated

(19:05):
the other way. And 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

(19:28):
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 ya subverse of art
and hoaxes and pranks, and it seems like I admire
anything that's kind of neat. Another theory is that down

(19:50):
drafts 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. 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

(20:11):
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 crop 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 crop circle in the sixties in Australia was created,

(20:34):
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
wind theory has been around for a very long time. Uh.

(20:57):
And a guy named Dr Terence Meaden who's um 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 spinning and
not only can they make crop circles, this this dust

(21:19):
can glow and that accounts for the light scene. There's
the UFO. 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 Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. UM.

(21:42):
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 elector a magnetic radiation of a crop circle
and stick them in the middle of one, they're gonna

(22:03):
feel a tinkling sensation. That was another thing though, 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. There was another crop circle

(22:24):
called the Julius set It's a fractal 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.

(22:44):
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

(23:06):
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. Yeah, I
think both of those things can happen. Like I'm a
forty and you know, like I think there are limits

(23:27):
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,
crop circles to me or not one of them? They
they they're just not that's because it's art right. Uh.
In the there was a biophysicist named Dr William Levin

(23:48):
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,

(24:08):
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 bolt 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

(24:28):
crop circle. Um. He says that these crops usually have
joints in the stocks like a corn stock does, and
if you heat it up, it expands. Yeah, and it's
gonna fall over. Um, that would be funny. And 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,

(24:53):
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

(25:14):
actual crop circle. Right after this, so Chuck, there's a
couple of pieces of evidence of seiologists point to they're
very rarely, if ever, footprints found around a crop circle

(25:35):
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, the tractor tracks, and
crops are planted in rows exactly so you can just

(25:57):
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 um. And like we
mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came out in
n and said, Hey, we did this BBC. Come along,
let's film a little documentary and I'm gonna show you

(26:19):
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 on to him and it
was 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

(26:41):
there's all this extra mileage, and I'm gonna go public
with it. So well, they were good. 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 like smart people were talking about this.

(27:02):
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 pressed people that um included like
some crop circle experts like UFO analysis of the crop
circles around the world. What was going on? So the

(27:22):
queen was even meaning 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

(27:47):
on Good Morning America showing the world how to do
this stuff. And then 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 front ways you
can get a magnetron, apparently, but the most conventional way is,
like I said, the rope and plank um. So you're

(28:09):
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

(28:30):
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

(28:53):
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 then 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,

(29:15):
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

(29:36):
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

(29:56):
of boards and you can make a pretty awesome crops
goal 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 uh Doug and Dave. I think

(30:17):
Doug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. But
these guys, um, they their their website 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

(30:40):
Swedish Furniture stores crop circle. Not did they make the
Swish they made a foot 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 the early two thousands making bank running on doing

(31:00):
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 the 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?

(31:26):
They talked to eyewitnesses, 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 gonna 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,

(31:48):
the 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 thing people say no,
they're artists. Are doing it under nightfall to not get
caught same way and keep the hoax going exactly. Uh

(32:09):
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 was I like I clearly they've

(32:32):
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?

(32:54):
If these are messages from aliens? And do they just
happen to speak English? So UM, there's a lot of
a lot of points that skeptics point are 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 Investigation si

(33:18):
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

(33:39):
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 was an increase in complexity, which exactly um. And
then there was the like they called the shy this factor,

(34:00):
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 fake exactly unless
he was paid off to say it was fake exactly,
And it's pretty tough to disprove that. Yeah. I think,
like I said, I think if people, um just look

(34:21):
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

(34:44):
up pot leaf. Um. Someone did the mothman, 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

(35:05):
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 and 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

(35:26):
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

(35:47):
Chilean camouflage. Hey, guys and Jerry. I was writing to
make a comment on something Chuck said and the last
listener mail animal camouflage. At one point, Chuck read that
the listener suffered for mental illnesses that we're practically ignored
by her parents, who happened to be doctors, then commenting
that that was quite a shocker. Oh yeah, that's right,

(36:09):
I remember that. Yeah, this girl had had I believe,
doctor and psych psychologist psychologist parents who kind of just
ignored 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 they
herrero coucio depato. Jerry, do you know what that means?

(36:32):
She says no. That literally translates into in the black
Smiths 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

(36:52):
more sense than the knives thing. Yeah, I'm not sure
what that means, but I'm not Chilean. The doctor thinks
that his sick childless is flying. 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

(37:14):
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 switches, Uh Matt, Thanks Matt, And Matt was super
excited that this was gonna get on. Listen to me
now because he's been a listener from the get go.
He says, all right, Matt, way to hang in there.
All you had to do is right in. You're hard

(37:37):
to get on at some point, and cassa de herrero,
cuci de polo. I'm gonna get that tattooed about my
waits line 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,

(38:00):
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