This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 4, from 1992.
In the Eighteenth Century, the golden ball atop the spire of St Lawrence’s Church in West Wycombe overlooked the antics of the notorious Hellfire Club. On the night of Saturday 12 July however, this icon gazed down on misdeeds of a different kind. Teams of crop circle hoaxers, enticed by the prospect of winning £3000 in a competition organised by The Cerealogist, The Guardian and the Koestler Foundation, had converged on a nearby field and were feverishly manufacturing a complex formation designed by the experts to test their abilities.
One did not need to be a cynic to suspect a tawdry Public Relations exercise designed to discredit the hoaxing hypothesis and claw back some of the credibility lost by cerealogists – circle researchers – during the hoaxing debacle of 1991. An exercise of this kind could never shake the arrogant cerealogical conviction that ‘real’ circles cannot be faked. The recognition of such circles is profoundly subjective, and researchers have more than shown themselves able to see whatever they need to see in any circle: each entry could easily be denigrated on ad hoc grounds. There was no reason to believe that experienced circlemakers would be present: most of the entrants were new to hoaxing, and several were committed to non-hoax explanations. Nevertheless, a reporter from The Guardian idiotically announced that any failure to duplicate the set features amounted to a disproof of the hoaxing hypothesis.
Suspicious of the motives of, and unwilling to indulge the whims of, researchers who had reacted with such disgraceful petulance to the hoaxing events of 1991, Doug and Dave, the artists involved with the Today newspaper, declined to participate; as did we in the Wessex Skeptics. We decided, however, to drop by the site the next day and savour the atmosphere. It was worth it. For the organisers, the competition backfired in almost every possible way. The hoaxers did supremely well. Hardly any noise or light, for which points would have been deducted, had been generated by the twelve teams. From the air, many of the patterns were exquisite. The mutterings of one or two researchers to the effect that the patterns of swirled crop were, er… sort of, er… too ‘mechanical’, were belied by the dark expressions of those who sensed the hoaxers had done too well for the cerealogists’ good. To top it all off, the coverage in the press – the cerealogical equivalent of the scientific literature – was skeptical and unsympathetic; rationalising cerealogical comment was conspicuously absent.
Still, the day was not a total disaster. Many cerealogists were able to gather their dowsing rods and stride purposely off to see the ‘real’ circle that had appeared in a nearby field, dismissing all this hoaxing business, which no serious scientist takes seriously anyhow. My enduring memory will be of a green cerealogist who, after berating human beings for all the ills they had visited on Mother Earth, said that, if people were making all the circles… well, that was just bloody typical.
