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I'd heard claims to that effect during my UFO days, but somehow they never seemed to become more than claims. I saw photos of corn stalks scorched by UFO propulsion..somethings, which inexplicably looked like a hot wire laid across them. And the doctors had no natural explanation.
I'd ask for verified results, but I've seen plenty of claims of samples sent to labs where respected Scientists swore that it was something unknown to terrestrial science. And Then I'd need to have to track down the faculty and a list of present and past personnel AND contact them to see whether they had ever had any such samples...
And I do have other priorities. I just know that during my UFO days, none of those claims were verified, and some looked decidedly fishy.
In UFOLOGY, Fakery was almost as rife as in Creationism, and Crop Circles were even worse.
The problem is that there is so much fakery and hoaxing that how can one tell if anything is genuine?
I think this is one area where I'll have to disagree with you considering crop circles have been around for a lot longer than Doug and Dave.
What's unfortunate in many of these cases is that if it is proven to be a hoax even once, then they all become hoaxes - even when, logically, they couldn't have been. It's the kind of logic that debunkers use all the time: If it CAN be hoaxed, it WAS hoaxed.
No doubt that a good number of these circles were done by people. Yet they tried to make crop circles with an entire team of students from one of the Ivy League schools - which one, I'm not sure since my memory isn't as good as it used to be. But they were all engineering grad students that had a lot of high tech at their disposal.
And yet, in an entire night, using GPS and even more old fashioned methods of locating where exactly they are and using those methods to make perfect geometric shapes, they couldn't finish more than a couple of circles in a single night. They certainly couldn't make a massive, elaborate, and often quite perfect crop circle glyph in a single night - and yet that is what is reported.
The fact that no one has seen people actually hoax these things - i.e. no footprints or paths through the high field - seems to work in favor of a possible "unknown" explanation. Which isn't to say that they are necessarily aliens, but chalking them up to tornadoes and dust devils is positively ridiculous. And yet the so-called "authorities" were so desperate to propose literally *any* explanation - as long as it was mundane and uninteresting - that they claimed even the most elaborate and perfect circles were somehow natural in their origins. One would have to be extremely gullible to swallow that line.
A big problem dealing with Ufology is that "the lady dost protest too much." As I said, the "authorities" are almost hellbent on making sure everyone but the true whackjobs believe that every UFO and every crop circle is a hoax, a hallucination, a mistaken identification, or a natural phenemenon. Even resorting to the standard "swamp gas," "weather balloon," and, "Venus" explanations - whether they fit or not.
And that's really the crux of the whole issue - most of the time, their explanations don't even fit the accounts of what happened. They'll blame a sighting on a temperature inversion - and no amount of weather reports and meteorological surveys that show no such inversion existed seems to matter.
Which is just a way of saying that the "avoidance" issue is just as prevalent on the other side of the fence. It's easy to dismiss things as a hoax by assuming - and it is an assumption - that because Doug and Dave hoaxed some of the circles, then they were all hoaxed by *someone* even though no one else has really come forward to claim their own hoaxes. Despite these circles showing up all over the world and despite circles appearing for literally centuries - every last one of them were hoaxes. Really?
All I'm saying is that they mystery is far from being solved. It is still a mystery. As atheists, one has to be careful that we don't end up putting our fingers in our own ears because we refuse to accept anything that can't be explained as natural, mundane, and uninteresting - especially since that approach actually discourages any real investigation. It's like claiming to *know* God created the universe so why bother exploring our origins any further. If we *know* they were all hoaxes, why waste the time and money doing any further investigations on these circles?
To me, the "hoax" explanation is hollow and only explains some of the circles - but not all of them. Most are made by humans - but I very much doubt all of them were. And they certainly weren't caused by the sexual patterns of horny groundhogs - which was a theory making its rounds in the 80s. Which just goes to show you how desperate the "authorities" are in ascribing a mundane explanation to everything.
I have lodged that complaint even with the ancient astronaut hypothesis - any and all speculation by proponents of the ancient astronaut hypothesis is immediately countered by mainstream archaeologists claiming the unknown structure or glyph was used for "ceremonial or religious purposes." Oh? What religion? What ceremony? What gods were they worshiping? In other words, the archaeologists just toss out the same tired line, assuming with no verifiable evidence that everything unknown has something to do with religion. Is there any real evidence of that? Nope, not a wisp. I'm not saying that ancient astronauts have any better evidence because they often don't - and yet, again, the "authorities" appear almost desperate to keep people believing in an unproven assertion that it's just an ancient religion.
Sure, crop circles, UFOs, mysterious structures around the world - all of those things could be nothing. Maybe they were made by horny groundhogs. Who knows? But I'm not going to throw the proverbial baby out with the equally proverbial bathwater just because there were some hoaxes. I think that's a big mistake.
(Sorry, that was 'Spirit') Come on, Infinite Being in a test tube? Ha! Here we are so limited...we don't even know
where the 5000 intricate crop circles came from !!! Below is our message sent in '74 with white background....the
If I take you apart and find no you ... that means you don't exist?
I i was siting on a f1/fo hydrogen pump. would I know I was you?
How far out do we zoom, leaving earth;looking at the earth, until we see "something" and not "nothing"?
10^2's? 3? 6? what? until we see that e are just part of something?
I'm afraid that I can't agree about Doug 'n' Dave, Shirina. I remember the first 'circles' in a limited area of the UK Doug 'n' Dave eventually said they'd done it and this was of course dismissed by the UFO bods. "How could they have done it in different countries?". The copycat effect was ignored. It soon spread and has become an art (or graffiti) form and an advertising medium. Very elaborate figures are made with no great difficulty. I haven't studied the technique as the UFO body - when the whole thing looked too elaborate to be 'made by landing saucers' and became 'message from aliens' until very human square pictures started to appear, then the subject was dropped by Ufologists ("we'll see how this develops") and it developed into a sort of art - form where people get together to do it.
I'd heard claims to that effect during my UFO days, but somehow they never seemed to become more than claims. I saw photos of corn stalks scorched by UFO propulsion..somethings, which inexplicably looked like a hot wire laid across them. And the doctors had no natural explanation.
I'd ask for verified results, but I've seen plenty of claims of samples sent to labs where respected Scientists swore that it was something unknown to terrestrial science. And Then I'd need to have to track down the faculty and a list of present and past personnel AND contact them to see whether they had ever had any such samples...
And I do have other priorities. I just know that during my UFO days, none of those claims were verified, and some looked decidedly fishy.
In UFOLOGY, Fakery was almost as rife as in Creationism, and Crop Circles were even worse.
Ive been to one crop circle a few years back in southern OH. a handful of cars had stopped and people were looking at it. Its hard to explain, but walking around inside the design, the air was almost 'charged', it was a totally different feeling when you were outside the design, I saw compasses spin wildly as well. I didnt really inspect the bent over crops though, its just not something I thought to look at, wish I had today.
Interesting thread. I suppose my stance on this (aliens, crop circles, etc) is pretty much the same as on the god-belief. I don't rule it out, am open to verifiable evidence, but remain unconvinced until such evidence is presented. In the meantime, the balance of evidence seems to point to man-made phenomena (just as it does for the many god claims).
Ive been to one crop circle a few years back in southern OH. a handful of cars had stopped and people were looking at it. Its hard to explain, but walking around inside the design, the air was almost 'charged', it was a totally different feeling when you were outside the design, I saw compasses spin wildly as well. I didnt really inspect the bent over crops though, its just not something I thought to look at, wish I had today.
I know, right? But, I'm sure you're lying, making that up...
it's pure fantasy...
You're probably right...a lot of bored, yet creative people out there...some smokin' reefer.
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Below is our message sent in '74 with white background....the 
