This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 6, from 1991.
I am a member of the Wessex Skeptics, named for an ancient kingdom in the south of England and at one time ruled over by a famous skeptic, King Canute, who, like skeptics today, is frequently misunderstood and maligned. In vainly ordering the waves of the sea back, and getting rather wet in the process, he was not demonstrating his vanity and lack of touch with reality, but trying to get it through the heads of his sycophantic courtiers that there were limits to even his power.
Wiltshire is a county in the Wessex region, and one that has become very familiar to us over the past couple of summers, as we have investigated the crop circles which have become all the rage there. It is a pretty, rural county of rolling hills and country roads, shared between the farmers and the British Army, and – despite the army – rather peaceful and bucolic. The prettiness and remoteness of Wiltshire and the presence of numerous features in the landscape attesting to neolithic activity – including Stonehenge – seem to have made it attractive to a breed of person favourable to woolly paranormal musings about history and earth energies. It is in the heart of this deceptively quiet countryside that paranormal theoretical entities multiply wantonly, quite without decent necessity, and the bold skeptic venturing here leaves Occam’s razor behind, preferring to borrow his chainsaw.
Here, and in neighbouring Hampshire, where I live, crop circles – although the complexity of patterns makes the term entirely inadequate – have been popping up for more than a decade, allegedly confounding strenuous efforts by experts and ‘scientists’ to explain them. Crop circles are characterised by crisp edges, complex layering of the fallen crop – which may be wheat, oats, barley, rape or even beans – and minimal damage to the plants. The patterns frequently appear overnight, and there are said to be no traces to indicate the passage of anyone – or anything – to or from the circles.
Enormous interest has been generated by these things, and the national newspapers have filled many column-inches with stories about them. The interest was initiated by a few frantic experts, and attracted further ‘researchers’, so that the area around Marlborough in Wiltshire was during the summer crawling with activity from sunset to sunrise. It was getting so that an honest hoaxer could hardly go about his or her trade without disturbance from some ‘circle-spotter’.
These experts fall mostly into one of three groups: CERES (Circles Effect Research), run by Dr Terence Meaden, which subscribes to the theory that some circles are formed by ‘plasma vortices’, spinning masses of ionised air, and the rest are hoax. I will, I am afraid, consistently lapse from correct usage, whereby I should say ‘artifact’ instead of ‘hoax,’ since the latter prescribes the motivation behind the product – our particular interest is primarily in whether crop circles are or are not artifacts, and we know little about possible motivations. The second of the groups is CPR (Circles Phenomenon Research), run jointly by Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado, who seem to believe in no theory, but are firmly convinced that it is a mystery and no explanation is adequate; finally we have the CCCS (Centre for Crop Circle Studies), to which almost everybody else seems to belong.
Although this motley bunch have little in common, they do share one motto, which is repeated so often we recognise it as the territorial call the crop circle enthusiast: ‘no human being could do this’. I am reminded of a scene from Ghostbusters (a marvellous movie, incidentally, and one that I recommend to all without hesitation), when the three heroes, following up an account of an apparition, happen upon a column of books stacked almost to the height of a man amongst the shelves of the New York Public Library. The more scholarly of the trio, a serious parapsychologist, played by Dan Ackroyd, observes ‘vertical book stacking, just as in the XYZ case… ‘ (or something like that), to which his cynical partner, played by Bill Murray, replies ‘Yes, no human being would stack books like that!’
Crop circle investigators actually take this kind of argument seriously. They have all declared the crop patterns impossible to fake. In one case, Meaden declared an eyewitness account impossible to invent, even though it contained no corroborating evidence and no details that did not already exist as speculation in the public domain. These people, who constantly demand open-mindedness from the rest of the world, spend half their lives circumscribing the abilities of the entire human race. We skeptics are often accused of arrogance – this is probably true in some cases, since we are, after all, only human – but the attitude that allows people to make sweeping statements about what other people cannot possibly do smacks of great hubris. Remember, these statements are not based on violations of some law of nature, these are based on the appearance of fallen corn and the field in which it is found. Remember Von Daniken: he didn’t say, “Wow, these ancients were smart – I can’t figure out how they got such a smooth facade on these temples”; instead he said, “I can’t figure out how they did it, therefore they couldn’t have done it, so they must have had extraterrestrial help.”
In most cases the crop circle experts cannot say that they have tried hard, or even at all in some cases, to simulate the circles. So they are actually saying: “I can’t imagine how it is done, because I don’t think any of the methods I can think of could work, so it must be impossible.” Of course, the general public watching on the 6 o’clock news doesn’t get the full, shaky reasoning – they are treated to the ex cathedra statement from TV-accredited experts that these things cannot be artificial.
Mr Andrews and his pal Pat Delgado have been unrestrained in the techniques they bring to bear on the problem. They have used dowsing, like many others in the field; they have invoked mystery upon seeing peculiar marks on photographs of crop circles and hearing unexplained noises. In one example, a ‘mysterious’ white mark in the centre of a circle photo in their first book becomes upon enlargement an even more mysterious white disk. In fact, this feature looks suspiciously like a sheet of paper lying in the centre of the circle. The pair have even used spagyric analysis, a dubious technique involving crystallisation of the residue of organic material after a harsh processing – it was invented three centuries ago, and popularised by Sir Kenelm Digby, the same man who condensed sunlight and invented the sword salve, a curative material applied to the weapon that had inflicted the wound, not the wound itself. With the results of this last method, they claimed to have detected an alteration in the molecular structure of the laid corn, creating alarm that the grain was dangerous and should be excluded from the food chain.
Terence Meaden, on the other hand, is a man who scorns talk of the paranormal, although he does seem to have used dowsing as a diagnostic indicator of a genuine circle, whatever that is. His claims that ‘plasma vortices’ are a reality rest on little published evidence, and what he has published is mostly in his own journal, The Journal of Meteorology or in self-published books. Occasionally Meaden permits himself the luxury of an ad hominem attack on his critics. In the first paragraph of one of his scientific papers Meaden stated:
This has helped to confirm that aside from a low number of obviously faked circles, the evidence is overwhelming in favour of a natural atmospheric origin for the circles effect, and it is certainly the case that all truly open-minded, unbiased people who have properly studied the facts accept that this is so.
Little detailed and comprehensive information about crop circles has been made public, so anyone who lacks the time and resources – and the disciples – to examine them closely and collect measurements is unable to assess the judgments these experts broadcast so frequently. We do not know if the dimensions cluster around certain values, or the dates of appearance around certain days of the week. CERES has publicised an analysis claiming that crop circles cluster around hills – which would be qualitatively consistent with generation of plasma vortices by trailing vortices – but I find this analysis unconvincing.
The Wessex Skeptics first got involved in the whole confusing business last summer. We visited a few crop circles, but not, unfortunately, fresh ones, and quickly realised that we would make little progress in this manner. Although aware that serious criticisms against all theories of non-human origin had been made, we were initially and naively least dubious about Meaden’s theory. However, we quickly lost confidence in it when we got to Wiltshire.
Meaden has a problem not shared by the other experts. His theory, being physical, has to meet natural constraints or so you would think – while the others, having no theories, are not put out by any amount of contrary evidence. As long as some part of their mystery is unassailed, they are happy. We got to Wiltshire, and were stunned by the Alton Barnes pictogram, which was one of the first of the truly complicated shapes to appear – it was many tens of metres long, a string of circles and corridors.
Our astonishment at its appearance was only exceeded by our surprise at Meaden’s declaration that it was genuine. But he had no choice, for he could find no difference in structure between it and the simple circles. We were highly dubious, because we noted that the axis of the pattern was aligned along its length not just to the tram lines-lines made by farm machinery as it runs through the field, but to the seed lines themselves, which are often a mere 10cm apart! This was a characteristic shared by too many other patterns to be a random occurrence, and we could see no strong reason why a powerful plasma vortex supposedly acting over a second or less should delicately orient itself in this fashion.
Fortunately for Dr Meaden, he found a way out of such difficulties. He invented hypotheses, which were posed qualitatively and thus difficult to test. Initially he denied that many patterns were aligned but later claimed that the earth in the tramline was compacted, and had a different conductivity, thus – somehow or other – aligning the vortex, which is, after all, electrically charged.
It seemed to us that the plasma vortex theory required that the patterns should have occurred before the public interest in them. Meaden agrees with us, because he has assiduously sought accounts of crop-circle-like phenomena from historical records. One of his more well-known examples is the mowing devil. Presumably because it is inconsistent with his theory, he ignores the fact that the accompanying picture shows the corn to have been cut.
In our opinion, an obvious place to look for old crop circles would be in aerial archaeological photos – after all, they are collected over a range of seasons in the search for features of similar size, in the same regions of the country. We contacted some aerial archaeologists – the six who replied were unanimous that they could not possibly have missed crop circles, and that they have only been seeing them recently.
We wanted to carry out an exhaustive – and exhausting – look at the thousands of photos that have been taken since the 1930s, but time constraints have thus far limited us to several hundred taken in the right season over a couple of spots which have proven attractive to crop circles over the past ten years. We could not see the recent photos, but found no circles at all – only one circular feature in fact, which turned out to be a barrow. Even this limited survey might crudely suggest that an average season pre-1980 had less than one crop circle per 100 square miles, even ignoring the fact that these sites were recently crop circle-rich. Our preliminary conclusion – which really should be reinforced by a thorough search – is that crop circles, at least in their present profusion, are not old. Ironically, a search such as the one we contemplate is the only approach likely to give Meaden’s theory real support, if crop circles could be shown to have existed before any whisper of media interest had arisen.
In 1990, Meaden was scathing of suggestions that the frequency or complexity of circles might be increasing:
Some commentators query the increasing complexity of these formations. But are they becoming more complicated? Are plain circles being embellished by pranksters? Such facile questions belie the intricate matter which is the circles effect.
He has now accepted this feature, and recognises the need to account for it. Once again, hypotheses – including the solar cycle, the ozone hole, long hot summers and changing agricultural patterns – have been entertained by him and his followers to explain the changing frequency. I am surprised they don’t mention the decade-long reigns of powerful conservative rulers in Britain and the US – but then, perhaps a period of laissez-faire favours the hoax hypothesis!
Lacking a quantitative basis, the theory cannot be tested on these grounds, but we can see that plasma vortices are strange beasts. They can be turned on or off by slight large-scale climatic change, even though they are apparently short-lived micrometeorological phenomena. They are sensitive to crop strains and farming methods. On the other hand, they can strike oats, barley, rape, beans, wheat, at many stages of their life cycles and from May to September, and can even appear in grass, snow and sand!
Impatient with our lack of progress, we finally decided this summer on a high risk strategy. This was to hoax our own circles, and see if the experts could tell the difference. This was high risk, because failure might prove nothing more than our own incompetence, yet discredit the skeptical viewpoint.
First we had to practise the techniques. With the assistance of National Geographic, in England to make a film about crop circles, we rented a field from a friendly farmer (a rare commodity in Wiltshire these days) and made a pictogram. In broad daylight, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. We were buzzed by planes, helicopters and microlites. Even this level of observation did not stop certain members of CCCS declaring it genuine – in fact one gentleman did so when overflying it a couple of days later. Other members, while aware the main pattern was artificial, became convinced that a ring had appeared mysteriously some time later outside our main circle. Furthermore, this ring was said, darkly, to be ‘too narrow to be made by trampling’. In fact, it was made just that way, and only minutes after the main circle. I am still not sure that we have convinced them all that we made it!
What were our techniques? Mostly simple and obvious ones, really. A bit of string held by a central person while another described a circle. Trampling, sticks and rollers to lay the corn. Sighting on a distant object to make the straight corridors. We found that it was not especially difficult to get through the corn without leaving a trail, particularly if you walk along the seed lines and turn around every metre or so to re-entangle the plants by brushing them gently with a stick. We concluded that a garden roller was the best tool, since if used with care it would lay the corn without unnecessary damage. We determined to try again, this time for real.
Fortunately, we were successful, though not at first. Our first attempt was thrilling, and performed without the farmer’s permission (we did send the farmer compensation anonymously a week or two later). We wanted to see if hoaxing was possible under the pressure of fear of being caught; we also wanted to avoid asking a farmer to lie, as he or she would need to do if the test were to be effectively blind to the experts. We picked a field on top of a hill near Marlborough.
It was a beautiful, crisp night, and the sky was clear with a full moon. Every sound frightened us. Many cars passed, causing us to spend much of our time crouching down in fear of detection. We got hot, tired and frustrated. Our chosen field was muddy and had very deep tramlines. We changed our plans, dropping our elaborate pattern and doing just a huge circle with a ring and a small circle some way off. And we were rumbled – a car stopped! Some people got out, but they soon left, and we thought we had got away with it. Only later did we discover we had been spotted. As we squatted in the damp at the edge of the field, waiting for our getaway car, we were filled with undeserved euphoria at our imagined success. It truly was a beautiful night, and we were rewarded for our endeavours by the sound of a female fox screaming its chilling, almost human, cry.
Even though we were discovered by circle watchers, and word got around very fast, we were not stopped or apprehended, which was interesting in itself. Some members of CCCS did not get the news in time, and declared the circle genuine. Many members of the public were impressed, and a few unwitting dowsers found their rods stirring.
Why crop circles should dowse is unclear – something to do with earth energies or ill-defined electromagnetic anomalies, apparently. I have witnessed the replication problems of the dowsing technique at first hand. At Alton Barnes last year, I watched with some amusement as a couple of dowsers compared notes in one of the circles. The woman had found a distinct vortex, and her rods were whirling to back her up, whereas the man had found the same spot to be devoid of activity, and his pendulum hung limply. That dowsing is so heavily implicated in circles ‘research’ is just a symptom of the subjective nature of these investigations.
But I digress. Chastened with failure, not because our circle had failed to meet the experts’ criteria but rather because they were not forced to work blind, we were a bit lacking in eagerness to try again. But the despondency soon passed, and we started plotting again. We were to be filmed for the TV program Equinox, and we decided to get the permission of a farmer this time. We were lucky enough to find just the man we needed – someone who would be willing to dissemble to all and sundry and be convincing with it!
Once again, things started off badly and moved further and further from our well-laid plans. We had scouted the terrain beforehand, checked the tramlines and prepared an appropriate plan. But when we got there, we found that much of the field had, ironically, been laid low by wind damage, and we had to redesign fast. Our problems were doubled when the TV crew did not maintain an appropriate demeanour for the situation; they barged through the corn, interviewing us as we worked and flooding the field in light. Since Wiltshire was infested with circle spotters, we were sure we would be found out. As if to make sure that even if the TV crew failed to give the game away, word would still get out, we accidentally left some string in the field. Fortunately, the farmer removed this the next morning.
We were again despondent; one of us had laid the corn the wrong way, pointing towards the centre of the circle, and the TV crew had trampled through the corn. We were sure that we had made a crude hoax, and that nobody would be fooled by it. Boy, were we wrong! We were still guilty of overestimating the objectivity of the experts.
It took a while for the experts to find it, because it wasn’t visible from the road, but within two weeks we had proven that it was possible to mislead the experts, including some who had so far remained immune from the taint of error. Busty Taylor of CCCS found it genuine, and emphasised the departure of the large central pattern from true circularity as the mark of authenticity.
Terence Meaden, who had publicly resisted the possibility that he could be mistaken in his judgement of circles, not only found our fabrication credible, but that it “fit perfectly the scientific theory I have been putting forward for the last ten years,” and was “100% genuine.” He stressed how many hoaxes he had seen, and marvelled at the classic layering patterns (another mark of authenticity, according to the experts). He was interviewed in the circle, and brought reporters to see it. A medium flown in from Paris by a producer from Paramount found the energies overwhelming – she developed a headache and had to leave. Dowsers’ tools went wild in the circle. Of course, we can’t deny that a lot of psychic energy may well have been trapped in the circle – there was quite a lot of cursing and swearing the night we made it!
This was not the first time the experts had been misled – Delgado and Andrews have several times in the past been wrong in their claims that circles are genuine – but it was the first that we knew of for Terence Meaden, and proved that the features alleged to be impossible to simulate were in fact quite easy to reproduce. We are now of the firm opinion that there is no substance to the experts’ claims that they can distinguish a category of circles for which hoaxing is impossible.
Admittedly, we have never entered a ‘fresh’ circle, one that has had no sightseers. We have been told by Meaden of a complete absence of collateral damage in these cases. If this is true, we could probably not reproduce them with our present techniques. We always found a small number of damaged plants, in which the stalk was bent in more than one place. On the other hand, damaged plants do not prove hoaxing – in one field, for example, we observed that even in stands of fresh corn some of the plants were damaged. Moreover, it is always possible to remove them, if one is sufficiently patient.
So this was the situation at the end of August – we knew that the experts could be fooled, and had as far as we could tell no method for reliably distinguishing ‘true’ circles. We had preliminary evidence that crop circles had not existed for very long. We also knew that our organisational skills needed a little polishing.
Then, on 9 September, the Today newspaper dropped a bombshell on the tightly knit little world of the crop circle experts. It published a story in which two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, claimed not only to have been hoaxing circles for years but actually to have started the entire craze, basing their idea on some UFO hoaxes in Australia in the 1960s. They backed up their claims by making a pattern into which Pat Delgado was lured by the newspaper. He not only fell for it, he raved about it:
In no way could this be a hoax. This is without doubt the most wonderful moment of my career. What we are dealing with here nobody in the world understands. We are left with the fact that these crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is laid down by a high level of intelligence.
When informed of the hoax, he reacted with characteristic humility:
They are to be admired in the way they have conducted their nocturnal escapades which made it look as though there was a real intelligence that we don’t understand. From this simple prank developed one of the world’s most sensational unifying situations since biblical days… this is a lesson to us all that we should look and listen to the beautiful and small things in life.
Thus was exposed by far the most public of Delgado’s errors, and it has cost the credibility of crop circles dearly. This is somewhat paradoxical, of course, since Bower and Chorley’s confession is not necessarily inconsistent with Delgado and Andrew’s postulates of superior intelligence and unknown forces!
The story told by the two putative hoaxers rang true, and the reporter claimed they had a lot of corroborative – although circumstantial – evidence. Several national newspapers and the broadcast media picked up the story, although the TV networks carried it without reference to the article. Consequently Delgado and Andrews were able to walk into a circle they knew the two men had made and declare it, on camera, an ‘obvious hoax’ without Delgado being challenged on his previous statements. Well, yes.
Nevertheless, the wagons were circled to fend off this assault Delgado retracted the statement of complete capitulation attributed to him by the press, prompting Today to respond “come on, Pat, admit you were had”. Andrews continued to assert there were unfathomable mysteries – for example, the alleged impossibility of making a mature rape circle, since the stalks break however you try to bend them. Not so, if you do it right, it takes a little time, but then there aren’t that many crop circles in rape.
CCCS claimed they had filmed a circle in formation, although this is yet to be shown to the world. And George Wingfield, member of CCCS, launched charges of a government cover-up, aimed at discrediting crop circles in the eyes of the public. There was damning evidence for this. The copyright of the first Today story was assigned to MBF services, which people like Wingfield know is a cover for the government secret service (maybe they should have just signed it MI5 – that would doubtless have proved it wasn’t the secret service). Finally, in what sounded like a case of sour grapes, CCCS began to hint that the police should deal with the hoaxers.
The CCCS response prepared for the press is clear about their views concerning hoaxing. They put the following arguments against claims that all circles were artificial:
The crop circle phenomenon has been under systematic study for 12 years, beginning in 1980. Over this period, something like 2000 events have been recorded… Many events have been very complex and very large. Some circular events have been larger than 300 feet in diameter. Some linear events have been as long as 250 feet from end to end. If this is the world of hoaxers, their dedication and energy is little short of marvellous. Simple events would have been enough to satisfy the ordinary malice of hoaxers; the exuberance of what we have seen needs much further explanation.
The first two points are obviously irrelevant to the argument, while the third is more interesting. It is – essentially – claiming an understanding of human nature sufficient to rule out hoaxing, which later is described as ‘far more implausible than any other hypothesis.’
I have spoken briefly with Doug Bower, who seemed a pleasant enough chap, and very amused at the discomfiture of the experts. Bower and Chorley’s comments about the reactions to their circles are illuminating:
We heard this bloke Delgado had reported them… He started saying they had been done by a ‘superior intelligence’ – we liked the sound of thaL We laughed so much that time we had to stop the car and pull into a lay-by because Doug was in stitches so much he couldn’t drive. Even if we were clumsy and caused a mess, they were still so keen on dismissing that humans had done it that they explained it away by saying, ‘Oh, the first onlooker must have done that.’ On the whole, the hoaxers’ story seems credible, although there are details that would bear checking. Nevertheless, if what this duo say is true, then they are responsible for starting what may rank as the biggest amateur hoax in peacetime history. Any offers for candidates who can rival their achievement?
So what is our conclusion about all this? We think there is no firm evidence, and certainly none that has been made publicly available, which is inconsistent with 100% hoaxing. The apparent confession of the initial hoaxers has the potential to clear up much of the mystery, although some may remain – for example, who made the other 90% of crop circles (assuming the reported total of 2,000 is accurate), and how did Doug Bower find a wife who would let him stay out until the early hours of the morning every Friday night for five summers, and never once ask him what he was doing!
Much of the remaining mystery resides in that class of paranormal phenomenon which will be so familiar to you all – malfunctioning cameras, strange noises, unexplained illnesses. None of this evidence is really available for inspection, and most of it is unlikely ever to be explained. We tend to discount it. CERES has collected 20-30 eyewitness accounts; some are not explicit observations of the formation of a circle, others are unambiguous. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine the truth of such claims, and the prior expectation of fabricated stories seems quite high. After all, the media made the subject sensational in 1990, and even offered monetary rewards for explanations of crop circles. They were thus effectively trawling the entire adult population of Britain for accounts of observations, offering fame and fortune to respondents. With tens of millions of people in southern England and ample precedent for hoaxed stories, for example in the field of UFOs, fabricated accounts of crop circle formation seem inevitable.
The burden of proof that crop circles are anything but hoaxes is now well and truly on the shoulders of the experts, but don’t hold your breath. Can we draw any lessons from what appears to have been a decade-long fiasco? Well, we can use it as an illustration of poor investigation. The episode has been a classic display of this, with a long list of errors and weaknesses, amongst which are:
- Appeals to authority
- Unchallengeable statements
- Use of subjective techniques to gather evidence
- Publication through the mass media, avoidance of the
- Unusual scientific channels
- Untested assumptions of competence
- Ad hoc bandages for defective theories
- Allegations of cover-up
- Ad hominem attacks on critics
and so on, and so on.
Mostly the crop circle experience has just been a bit silly. However, there are worrying aspects, not the least of which has been the role of the media
The broadcast and print media have carried frequent items about crop circles. Delgado and Andrews and Meaden have appeared on TV and radio, usually on different programs, and almost invariably they are up against no one more qualified than an ill-informed interviewer who seems to know nothing about science and allows them to present themselves as thoughtful, knowledgeable and careful investigators. Rarely have critical scientists been brought on, and when they have it is often to criticise Meaden, who considers himself in the scientific arena.
Delgado has said ‘it is as though orthodox physics and science have been on trial for the last ten years and have failed to produce an answer.’ Well, if this is a trial of science, it is a trial in absentia, and it is not surprising that there has been no answer. I see no indication that there has been any attempt to apply the scientific method, no rigorous testing of hypotheses. Instead – and this applies to all the major protagonists – there has been a haphazard accumulation of what might loosely be called ‘data,’ and the construction of vast and shaky edifices of speculation. This applies even to Meaden, whose latest concoction is a theory that megalithic circles were constructed to immortalise crop circles. He now invokes this as proof of crop circles in prehistory! Empty of content as this theory may really be, it has turned out very popular. Recently, when I was putting our viewpoint to a farmer, she silenced me with a completely unexpected ‘well, why is Stonehenge round, then?’
What could the media have done? They certainly couldn’t force scientists to investigate crop circles, in which most of them took no real interest. But they could have found some to challenge the quality of the experts’ evidence and question glib references to electromagnetic forces, dowsing and mysterious energies. In talking to one journalist, I got the feeling that this omission might not always be malicious, that journalists could not identify the matter as a pseudoscientific one and that they had little choice but to accept the experts at face value. They are actually glad of conflicting views; it makes for good entertainment.
That, of course, is the other problem. Rarely do the media examine issues like this thoughtfully, and they do not keep stables of their own experts in science and pseudoscience as they do in economics and politics. Skeptics must not only investigate the issues, they also have to work hard to get themselves and their viewpoint noticed. But it is possible. I was lucky enough to be on TV suggesting hoaxing as an explanation last year the evening before Delgado and Andrews were taken in by a hoax during ‘Operation Blackbird’, their surveillance effort. And when Bower and Chorley broke their story, we were able to seize the chance and put our point across in a handful of newspapers and on BBC local TV.
Far more daunting is the challenge to get thoughtful coverage of the issues. Too often, one has but a brief moment to summarise a complicated position. How the British public will ever come to understand and respect the scientific method without detailed exposure of the issues is unclear to me. And they need this understanding and respect for the scientific approach. Probably, like me, you feel that environmental issues are important. If so, you may agree that the Green movement is doing a lot of good work bringing attention to the issues. Unfortunately, in Britain, green matters, like health, seem to attract and nurture careless and wishful thinking, along with an anti-scientific attitude. Holders of such views, some of whom have seen crop circles as a cry from Mother Earth, ignore the facts that, although science and technology may have facilitated and sometimes brought about environmental abuse, along with their benefits, they have also given us the power to know what is happening to the environment and – perhaps – to correct it.
My heart sinks when I think of the damage that I fear has been done to the public understanding of science by media coverage of the crop circle fiasco. It sinks further when I think that in one hundred years’ time, some convinced patron of the paranormal will write whatever passes for a book, and a chapter will be devoted to the Wessex Crop Circle Enigma of the twentieth century. These circles mystified scientists, the author will say, and have never been satisfactorily explained, even to this day. I find my only consolation in the hope that the growing and vigorous skeptical movement that started at the same time – speaking in quarter centuries – will have made its mark, and there will be plenty of late 21st century skeptics to say just where the author has gone wrong.
Notes
The other members of the Wessex Skeptics involved in the investigations were: Robin All en, Bertrand Desthieux, David Fisher, Chris Nash, Matthew Trump. With thanks to: Paul Adams, Debra Chesman, Chris Cutforth, Kate Fielden, Mike Hutchinson, Martin Pitt, Juniper, VECA.
Since this article was written, the Wessex Skeptics have been contacted by Dr Meaden, who has informed us of a change in his position; he no longer believes that the pictograms are genuine products of plasma vortices, and now thinks that all but a subset of the simpler patterns are the result of human activity. A survey of aerial photographs would be a promising line of investigation. Dr Meaden is also now of the opinion that information apparently obtained by dowsing is unreliable.
