Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with crop circles?

Episode Date: November 13, 2014

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from houseforforks.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. How's it going? Good, man. I got on my snowshoes and I'm walking in a wheat field making geometric patterns. How do you run into snowshoes? Well, it's sort of a large snowshoe.

I could see that, though. Yeah, that would definitely work. Yeah, snowshoes take longer. Yeah, right, but it's easier. You can do something else with your hands while you're using those. That's a good point. So, did you ever have the Led Zeppelin box set from like 1990?

My college roommate did. Yeah, so you're familiar with the crop circles. Oh, yeah. And the suggestion that by Led Zeppelin that it was their Zeppelin that was responsible for all of them. Oh, 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 ever. Yeah, 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, we're the E or 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. Yeah. But that's one of the few suggestions that have been made for what makes crop circles. And this is a 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 Ceres, the guys of agriculture, who are like, no, those people, that's the whole catch. It's a hoax. They're responsible for like 80% of crop circles, which leaves 20% unaccounted 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 said it's the most scientific, most science-based art there is, 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,

what I like to call art. They're not just a bunch of dummies walking around the 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 going to 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 are like, no, no, no, they're being paid to say that.

Right. It is aliens, in fact. That's something that you run up against with conspiracy theories, though, is just admitting that you're responsible. You suggest that somebody's put you up to admitting it. It's disinformation, basically. And that's what a lot of people have said.

A lot of people say it's MI5. And the reason they say it's MI5 is because if you start tracing the history of crop circles, they originated, basically, the hoax did in England, specifically in a couple of counties in England. Yeah, I mean, not only originated, but I think 90% of all crop circles have existed in southern England.

Even though they've had something like Japan and the United States and some other parts of Europe. But yeah, 90% of them are 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 crop circles, if you're a seriologist, you will point to the 16th century, maybe, when somebody's like the first what could be described as a crop circle is accounted for. I couldn't find anything to back that up. But apparently, in the 16th century, that's where the first description came from.

I did find in the 17th century, in the 1600s, there's a woodcut of something called the mowing devil. And 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, 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 woodcut,

it is Satan with a sif, and he is clearly cutting down corn or something, some wheat harvest. Right, but he's cutting it. Yeah, he's not. That's a distinction. Crop circles aren't cut. They're like, it's a corn stalk that is laid down, but not damaged, supposedly.

Right, they yield the pressure without breaking. So this is just complete hooey to me. And there's even more so, there's an explanation on the woodcut itself. Well, yeah, it's a story. Yeah, basically, a man 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 grain, 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 something that does kind of pop up

that's a little less easily explained came along in 1880 in an issue of nature. There was an English man 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. And they say, there's a crop circle. Yeah, maybe.

It's possible. He said that 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 tornadoes or cyclones. Yeah, but what he didn't say was that it was like a perfect circle. And the circumference was, I mean,

it could have just been a windy spot where some stuff was knocked down. Right. Right, yeah, exactly. He didn't say it was in the shape of an Egyptian ock or anything like that. Right, or an alien smoking pot. That's a real one.

That's really? Yes. So those are the earliest evidence of crop circles. And then in the 60s, the first modern idea of a crop circle came about in Australia. And there was supposedly a depression in a bunch of grass, a circular depression. And it had been associated with the UFO sighting.

And 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. But there was a dude who happened to be in Australia at the time when it was being reported on. It was a big hubbub and everything. And his name was Dave. Crop circle?

Dave Crop Circle. No, I'm sorry. His buddy's name was Dave, Doug Bauer. Oh, yeah. And Doug Bauer, when he got back from Australia, he was hanging out with a friend of his one night in 1978, drunk. They'll just come out and admit it.

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? Yeah. 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 1978. Like the first crop circle, the first hoax crop circle, what you call art, was made in 1978. And 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.

Yeah. Because they made them on flat fields. And then they finally figured out, wait, what if we made one on 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 in 1981. Yeah.

And people caught on, obviously, and started making their own crop circles all over England in all kinds of cool designs. By the 1990s, 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 done to 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 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 designs.

Most of the times are circular, but not always. They're all sorts of different shapes now. But they started out as circular. Either singles or doubles or triples or quadruples. And sometimes they're connected. Sometimes they're not. 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 10 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 again, this started really kind of to take off in the 80s and throughout the 90s. And as they became more and more popular and more and more

widespread in the media and among people who watch the X-Files. And again, the 90s were a deeply paranoid decade because of the impending millennial millennium. So I think that kind of really helped the popularity of crop circles explode. Because there are a lot of people who are like, these are signs from aliens.

They're either alien landing, like alien spacecraft landing, and leaving these impressions. And trading. Or else artwork. Right. Or else they're leaving science for us. There's even a movie called Science, a terrible, terrible movie starring Mel Gibson about this very thing.

So there is a lot of people who bought into it like that. And 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 really incredible math and then going out and doing it in crop circle form. Yeah, and some people use that like 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 specifically a man who kind of, I guess, provided a stumbling block to the debunking of 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 these, something new,

then that implied that something extraterrestrial was behind them. Well, his findings have been challenged time and time again. So he believed it. He believed it was, I thought he said he was debunking, no? No. He confounded debunking. He created this.

He bonked. He did bonk. Yeah. And the thing is, the language he's using, the math he's using is real math. Yeah. 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. Right. And then his, I think the real giveaway, though, was his work is not discussed at all in what appears to be normal academic math forums. Right. It's just, it doesn't exist. It doesn't get any recognition.

Even though he publishes his initial findings in a respected math journal, if this guy had discovered a new kind of Euclidean geometry, it would be revolutionary. Yeah. And it's just not discussed. Yeah. So I think that in and of itself is a pretty good example

of how seriologists butt up against skeptics 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, this article is, I don't know if I can recommend people read this one.

No. It seems like it was written by a believer. Yeah. It was pretty bad. But one thing that struck me as odd in this article at least is these things are usually like, they're big. You know? They're several hundred feet.

Right. Maybe 100 feet. It says sometimes they range from several inches. Yeah. I don't understand that. That's called like stepping on a piece of wheat. Right. 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 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. Sure it is. Actually, it's absolutely easy to answer.

There's another sentence too. Even with crop circle makers claiming responsibility for hundreds of designs, hoaxes can't account for all the thousands of crop circles created. Sure you can. 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. 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. I'm Mangesh Atikala. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has

been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in. And let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious

show about astrology, my whole world became crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. It's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed?

What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No.

Listen to Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you mentioned a couple of counties in England, Hampshire and Wiltshire, or where most of these are. Which kind of makes sense if people are saying, hey, mate, I've 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.

Yeah, exactly. That's where they lived. That's where the crop circle started. So yes, they were concentrated there. The other thing, though, unfortunately, is that's where Stonehenge is. 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 MI5. The real story is that Stonehenge is right there. Yeah. All kinds of fields can be used for this art. Corn, oat, barley, tobacco, weeds. I like the corn ones.

I think 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 in their signs, right? Were they surrounded by corn? I tried to make myself go to sleep.

I wouldn't allow my hippocampus to form memories of that movie. So I guess we should cover some of the theories, because we covered Bigfoot and other things that aren't real too. So here's what seriologists believe. We mentioned that it's an alien calling card, perhaps. A lot of eyewitness reports supposedly say, oh, I heard some strange noises. I saw some weird lights.

There's a 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. OK.

But that guy who made that video came out and said, here's how I did that. It's these computer programs, and it's paint. And it's all fake. But some people say, no, no, no, no, no. That guy was paid off to say that. Or MI5 kidnapped his family. Exactly.

And made him say it. But it's very cool looking. But that is one of the points that 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 operation by a group of serialists who camped out at a field for several, like a week or two, I believe, back in the 80s or 90s. And apparently, not only did no crop circles form during the time they were camped out in that area, none did in all of England during that time that they

publicized that they were camping out. And then right when the operation ended, a crop circle popped up, like I think a couple of football fields away from where they'd been camping at. That's because Doug, in what was his name? Dave. Dave were like, all right, they're gone. Exactly.

Let's go mess with them. Another one is that a lot of people say that there's this plasma that can form ionized wind, basically. Yeah, the plasma vortex theory. And that it forms a cyclone. It's cyclonic, which means that it moves clockwise, I believe. Or counterclockwise, one of the two.

They're cyclonic and anti-cyclonic. Whichever way that they said the cyclone rotates, 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, there's been a real tug of war or playfulness between people popping up in the media,

experts on crop circles saying something, and the people making the crop circles, 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 Banksy, I think there's an undercurrent in England of cheeky mess with the establishment sort of. Yeah, subversiveness.

Yeah, subversive art and hoaxes and pranks. Seems like I admire anything that's kind of neat. Another theory is that a downdraft from 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 cyclone theory. 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 wing called vortices. That's not the most scientific theory. The most scientific theory is that humans are making the

crop circles. Like what is going on with this article? Just wacky to me. It is. But that is a theory. That's a theory that some people put out. They say when that crop circle in the 60s in Australia was created, a lot of people said, oh, it's a cyclone.

They call it a willy nilly. Did they really? That was my Australian accent, too. No, they call it a willy willy. A willy willy? Yeah. 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 it wasn't a UFO. But that wind theory has been around for a very long time. And a guy named Dr. Terrence Meaden, who's from the Tornado and Storm Research Organization in England. In Wiltshire. Yeah. He says that 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, this dust can glow. And that accounts for the light scene. There's the UFO. Yeah. He's using pseudoscience to debunk even further pseudoscience. Yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't say Dr. Terrence Meaden

formerly of the Tornado and Storm Research Center. Electromagnetic radiation is another theory. 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. I think this is explained as easy as, if you get someone that believes in electromagnetic radiation of a crop

circle and stick them in the middle of one, they're going to feel a tingling sensation. Yeah. That was another thing that I ran into. I couldn't find any evidence to back that statement up, like who's finding electromagnetic radiation in these fields? And is it being, are they reproducible, the findings? There was another crop circle called the Julius set.

It's a fractal. Yeah, it's pretty cool looking. It's amazing. From what I could find, it's the largest ever. It was like 300 meters, 900 feet in diameter. That's enormous. And it's 409 circles. Just basically look up the 1996 Julius set.

It's cool. 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 found that their menstrual cycles synced up. Yeah.

And then some women who'd already been through menopause started menstruating again. Both are things that can happen. Can they? Without aliens taking part. Did that happen, though? Like who documented this? This is the thing, like people are just saying stuff.

And you can say whatever you want. And 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 40 and I think there are limits to science. And there's stuff that exists beyond science's capabilities to explain things right now. That there are things that we'll understand more clearly

that appear to be superstitious now. Crop circles to me are not one of them. They're just not. That's because it's art. Right. In the 1990s, there was a biophysicist named Dr. William Levingood who discovered that crop circles were damaged as if they had been heated by a microwave oven.

So he says I think they're being heated from the inside by some kind of microwave energy. And there's a guy named Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon, a professor of physics, who said, yeah, you can build something called a magnetron using stuff from a household cooker and a 12-volt battery. And you can essentially use this to create crop circles and shoot microwaves.

So yeah, that might be possible that they've been heated by microwaves because that is another way that you can make a crop circle. He says that these crops usually have joints in the stalks like a corn stalk does. And if you heat it up, it expands. Like popcorn. Yeah, and it's going to fall over.

That would be funny if there was a bunch of popcorn that it popped. But 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. Gotcha. 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. Stuff is true, bro. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in.

And let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. It's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's

Love Is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner?

Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you shouldn't grow. So, Chuck, there's a couple of pieces of evidence that seriologists 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 little lines that go all along the field.

Yeah. Those are left by the tractor. They're 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. And like we mentioned earlier, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer came out in 1991 and said, hey, we did this. BBC, come along. Let's film a little documentary. And I'm going to show you how to do a rope and plank crop circle. And apparently, one of the guys had

racked up a bunch of mileage on his car. Yeah, I saw this too. I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for a good story. And his wife got onto him and was like, hey, what's going on here? Are you cheating on me? And that's why he came out and said, no, I haven't been cheating on you. This is why there's all this extra mileage.

And I'm going to go public with it. So well, it makes for a good story. 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 were doing this. 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 her summer reading list that was released by her press people that included like some crop circle experts, like UFO analysis of the crop circles around the world and what was going on. So the queen was even reading this. And these two guys and the guy's wife

were just sitting back laughing, having the time of their lives. 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 September of 1991. 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. I'm an artist as well. And here's how you do it. Well, there are some different ways. You can get a magnetron, apparently.

But the most conventional way is, like I said, the rope and plank. So you're going to choose a spot. You're going to choose a field. You're going to create your little design. Could be a circle. It could be the Mendelbrot set or the Julia set. Yeah, whatever it is, you want to put it down on paper. Yeah, because it is math, and you have to work it out.

And you have to have a pretty good eye or brain for design, I guess, to draw something on a page and make it hundreds of feet across. It's like these are talented people. You're going to get to your field, and you basically act as a human compass. Exactly. Like a math compass that you use to draw a circle, not a compass

to show you which way north is. And you're going to put one person in the middle, and that's going to be, he's essentially the little point. And then you use rope, and you're going to mark off your four opposite marks as the circle. And you're going to give the guy in the center a rope, give someone on the outside a rope, and they're just going to walk in a big circle

as he holds that rope. Right in the center. That's going to make, essentially, a near-perfect circle in theory. Yeah, it forms the diameter of the circle. Yeah, if you're taking your time, then you're going to have a pretty good-looking circle. Right, and then after that, you start just moving inward

from the outside in, just stomping the grain down. Yeah, with your big snowshoe-like things. Right. And there you have a crop circle. Yeah, and like I said, you do one for three feet going this way, and hey, I'm going to jump around and turn the other way and lay the corn or wheat down that way. It appears to be stymied.

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. 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, or the traditional rope stalker. Right. And there you have it. There's a group called CircleMakers.org, and they were very much inspired by Doug and Dave. I think Doug and Dave kind of became honorary circle makers. Yeah.

But these guys, their website's still up. It's not nearly as active as it was like five, 10 years ago. But they were getting paid by companies around the world to make crop circles. Like, they made a Nike crop circle. They made Swedish furniture stores crop circle. Not like a Nike one would be. Did they make the swoosh?

They made a footprint, like a huge footprint. And they just did tons of them and got paid, apparently, like hundreds of thousands of dollars for each one they did. Good for them. So these guys spent the early 2000s making bank, running around, doing crop circles. At the same time, they're teaching people how to do it. And simultaneously, serialists are still investigating this.

And so the serialists came up with, they're also called crappies, we should say. Crappies came up with some steps you need to take when you're investigating a crop circle. Are we going to go over these? Sure. They talked to eyewitnesses. They said, did you see or hear anything weird?

Right. 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. They check out the weather patterns in the area of the previous night.

Because it always happens overnight, which enthusiasts will say, they're doing it under nightfall to not be caught as aliens and sending secret messages, and rational thinking people say, no, their artists are doing it under nightfall to not get caught, so they can keep the hoax going. Right, exactly. What else do you do?

Supposedly, they will bring out machines to actually measure soil and use x-ray diffraction analysis and electromagnetic energy readings. Right. They're analyzing all of this information. And I don't know what they come up with. Like, clearly, they've been forced to say, yes, some of these are hoaxes,

like the alien smoking pot. 80%, right? Right. 20% cannot be explained. By seriologists. Yeah. There was a famous one that said, we are not alone. Spelled out in one word, basically.

But in all caps, we are not alone. Yeah. And a lot of skeptics say, shouldn't it be you are not alone if these are messages from aliens? And do they just happen to speak English? Yeah. So there's a lot of points that skeptics point to. The ones that do go to the trouble of debunking these.

And there was a guy named Joe Nicol. And he writes for the Committee for Scientific Investigation, PSI, CSI. And he basically came up with four good points that debunk crop circles. One is that there is an escalation in frequency as they became more and more popular, which is kind of a weird thing.

The geographic distribution of them was, again, concentrated primarily in this region of England. Even though you'd find them elsewhere, Brazil, Japan, all over, you can also explain that by the fact that people were inspired by other crop circles. There is an increase in complexity, which means that they're getting better at it. Exactly.

Yeah. And then there was the, like, they called the shyness factor, which was they were only done at night. No one had ever seen a crop circle formed. Right. That one guy's YouTube thing not outstanding. Sure. Well, which was faked.

Exactly. Unless he was paid off to say it was faked. Exactly. Yeah. And it's pretty tough to disprove that. Yeah. I think, like I said, I think if people 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. Somebody redid the Nazca hummingbird, the Nazca lines. They did kind of a more stylized version of that. Again, the pot smoking alien. Somebody else just did a straight up pot leaf. Yeah, of course. Someone did the Mothman, the West Virginia Mothman.

The Shroud of Turin. Nice. Yeah, like people got really good at this. And like you said, I mean, if you look at it as art, it's pretty easy to appreciate it. I bet a fun conversation to overhear at an English pub is a crop circle brainstorming session on what kind of circle they can make next.

I bet that's a lot of fun to listen to in a rural county in England in a pub. I'd love to be in on one of those. Yeah, we'll go to Wiltshire. Yeah, maybe I will. 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. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this 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, I believe, doctor and 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. En casa de herero, cuchillo de pado.

Jerry, do you know what that means? She says no. That literally translates into, in the blacksmith'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. 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, et cetera. 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 wishes. Matt. Thanks, Matt. And Matt was super excited that this was going to get on listener 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 was write in. You're bound to get on at some point. En casa de Herero Cuccio de Palo. I'm going to get that tattooed with both 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.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

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