Are Crop Circles Just A Hoax? Investigating The Ancient Alien Mystery | Our History

[Music] what force or unseen hand in the night creates crop circles this australian farmer is convinced they're made by the ufos he saw taking off from these reed beds can he be right tremendous our fields of energy as yet unknown to science generated within the crop circles there are fashions in mysteries as in everything else in the early 20th century spiritualism was all the rage in the 1950s there was a veritable plague of flying sorcerers then in the 1980s reports of a strange new phenomenon came flooding in from the english countryside farmers were amazed and usually annoyed to discover huge circles of flattened corn each year more and more crop circles were reported 20 in 1986 300 in 1989 and twice as many only a year later crop circles were turning up all over the world here in the far east in the paddy fields soon all the remaining crops were in danger of being flattened too this time by investigators and inquisitive tourists from the controls of his plane busty taylor has harvested more crop circles than anyone alive every day through the english summer he scans the broad acres for fresh formations across the ancient chalk downs of wessex and the fertile pastures of the thames valley he's logged and photographed each puzzling pictogram [Music] he's seen the whole range from simple rings to ever more intricate designs and he's garnered all the explanations from mating hedgehogs to aerobatic helicopters from extraterrestrial parking lots to unknown forces of the earth and wind he's seen symbolism in king arthur's west country mathematics wrangled in the cambridge corn and even humor to celebrate a cycle race [Music] this man george pedley has been haunted for nearly 30 years by something that he saw here it happened deep in these isolated reed beds in australia's tropical northeast george believes he had a fleeting glimpse of a ufo taking off the reed beds rang with an unearthly sound the experience left a mark on him and on the landscape at first he thought the hissing sound was coming from his tractor i remember standing over there beside the tractor looking in and trying to convince myself that i didn't see it okay well it looked like a flying saucer object uh let me see it for very long it just disappeared moments later a mat of reeds several feet thick shot to the surface of the lagoon it looked like a gigantic nest the reeds were flattened into a clockwise swirl 30 feet across george called in his neighbor albert panissi grows sugarcane on this land he too was amazed by the circle especially its strength it was two feet thick and easily supported his weight i think it could help at least 10 or 12 men there's george and i discussing the reeds and how they were turned into a pontoon it was very thick the region you couldn't go you couldn't walk through them anyway to this day both george and albert remain convinced that extraterrestrials visited tully and left the evidence in the reeds but what george saw a ufo take off from the lagoon so i suspected it was a ufo that made the circle and then you'd hear people saying well it could be caused by a helicopter upside down spoonbills tramping around and making a circle or alligators mating with grabbing each other's tails and swinging around well some of the questions were put to me yeah every day of every summer the circles are sought out by those who believe that the rings have special powers [Music] they come from around the world to the fields of britain as though drawn by a magnetism they can't resist dowsers leyliners communers with nature all seeking forces they believe emanate from the depths of the earth [Music] seven and strangely all the all this all the spirals in all the circles all have seven coils going along very slowly using my hands as uh sensors for any engine and i feel a tremendous [Music] tingle there but it wasn't bent off [Music] yes they're tingling like mad there i think we'll stop there you'll never find and there's that one just takes them off because those energies are very very strong and really quite uncomfortable [Music] okay lynn your aura should have expanded by now so we'll just see how far it's expanded [Music] there we are that's the difference [Music] so [Music] in the 1930s a teenage girl was missing her lessons kath's skin had been kept off school that summer with scarlet fever one afternoon she walked out into this field she sat for a moment under the hedge that day too was thundery cath's skin only revealed what she had seen when crop circles began appearing by the dozen half a century later lovely hot salty day and you know sort of day like this today as if there's a storm coming but in front of me there was this great big field of wheat i was chewing a bit of wheat just as i am now and all of a sudden i saw a blessed great whirlwind right in the middle of the field and it was throwing up stuff about 30-40 feet up and all of a sudden it dissipated and all the stuff fell down to the ground and i was fascinated by this and it was amazing it was a whacking great circle a flattened down corn and i had sandals on so i felt that the corn was ever so hot to my feet and all around you know how you have a pack of cards and and they all fall against each other well the corn was like that in a clockwise direction and all the ears of corn were sort of intertwined all the way around made a lovely sort of periphery it could only be very strong pressure to press all the corn down so hard onto the ground and in that particular pattern it was all the letters in the paper about these marvelous uh circles appearing all over the country and and some were obviously man-made and uh it's when they started off about aliens that i got annoyed because i thought well i've seen the blooming thing made so i know it's nothing to do with aliens and foreigners and it would be interesting to know how they are formed what makes it whether it's an electric current whether it's something actually in the ground that performs differently according to weather conditions i don't know but if you find out you let me know this lady's story is especially valuable it's one of only a handful of eyewitness accounts dating from before the 1980s the earliest studies of such basic crop circles were made by meteorologists they had no reason to suspect hoaxes and wondered if the phenomenon was caused by whirlwinds dr terence meden investigates unusual weather phenomena his reports come from people like farmer tom gwinnett tom says he too has seen a crop circle forming but his experience was accompanied by eerie effects his car cut out there was a humming sound and he saw sparks dancing in the air as i came back up the road the car had the headlights on the car and ignition everything cut out so i heard this humming sound coming from the opposite side of the road in one of our fields and i just couldn't make it where it was so he walked up not a lock and it was only very low i mean like a single sewing machine in the distance more or less you know and it was here there was like occasional small red sparks not anything as you could just in the dim light you could see these sparks well the next morning i went around i stopped at the gate and there was a perfect circle in the field front circle she was about 10 foot across that was that for the meteorologist terence meden tom gwinat's experience was the evidence he'd been looking for dr medan believes that a rare combination of temperature and landscape can set up a very localized whirlwind or vortex which spins till it drops leaving a circle of flattened corn this is quite a perfect situation for circle formation in the sense that i predicted that they could happen that is to say there is a hill of some importance just there to the west and the conditions being quiet that night i'm sure that the hill itself provided the obstacle that made ali vortex i was very pleased to have tom's telephone call telling me about his observations very few people have been fortunate enough to see this and tom is such a credible witness he's a good countryman a good observer and has has no reason to to court publicity at all my theory does very well for the ordinary crop circles indeed there's no competitor at all no one else has come along with any other suggestion at all if my theory is not right what's it going to be is it going to be the fairies within sight of york's ancient minster agronomist dr john graham has been called in to give his verdict on the latest crop circle he's an expert on how cereal stalks bend and break and he's travelled the length of britain investigating the natural the unnatural and what some would claim is the supernatural having had a look at everything around me here looking at the nature of the damage to the plants in this circle which is only a very approximate circle and considering that we're on a very visible site next to a major main road we're about half a mile away from an agricultural college i think it's fairly likely that we've got a fairly routine hoax here one of the things that i do look at though when i'm looking at a circle to see what i think has been going on is to actually look at the precise nature of damage to the plants and if we actually look at a plant from this circle here you can see that the damage to it has occurred in the form of a very precise kink down at the base of the plant that's usually indicative that a fairly major force has been applied to the plant and it's collapsed under the weight and that would typically be occurred by somebody making a circle artificially it's possible that this could have occurred naturally but according to the wind tunnel test which i've done you would need a wind speed in excess of 150 miles an hour to cause this damage and in a normal english summer that doesn't normally occur if this damage had taken place naturally i think we'd see something looking much more like this down here where the plants have actually bent right over in the soil and there is no actual mechanical damage to the plants themselves that would indicate to me a far greater likelihood of a natural occurrence whereas something like this is almost certainly as a result of a mechanical force applied by a human agent i think the more important factor is what force is actually being applied to the plants in the first place we've already talked about hoaxes and the hand of mankind seems to rear itself very very frequently just to prove to you arleigh this is what we used to get up to at night now i'm going in here and i'm going to start making a circle for you right i'll be interested i'm sure you will [Music] now we used to lay the stick down there like that look artist doug bauer claims he was behind the first hoaxed crop circles in britain unknown to his wife he and a friend decided to try to fool people that ufos were landing all they needed to flatten the corn was a plank and a rope [Music] to begin with their designs were simple but they soon progressed to ever more complicated patterns [Music] well this was the most difficult part of all when when we decided to do these these designs was how to create a completely straight line in the dark across a cornfield it was no good following the tram lines because they would say that human beings were doing it and we didn't want them to believe that so i punched a hole in this baseball cap threaded some wire through it and this little ring that you can see here and you walk into the field and against the evening sky which is then not quite dark in the summertime you can get a silhouette of a tree on the horizon or perhaps the farmer's cottage he might be in bed with the light still on and you could center this through this ring walk straight towards it and lo and behold you've got the lovely straight line that you could wish for and then of course as as the foot marks were placed into the corn in the straight line we would come behind it and tread it down four feet wide so all our corridors were created in that way well the so-called die-hards the so-called professionals wouldn't believe our story at all no do you believe me eileen oh yeah look how it's growing yes it is increasing by eight foot every time you go around yes so i wasn't up to anything at night as you see only there you were what you're doing now no one suspected hoaxers when more than 90 circles appeared in wales the mountainsides were too inaccessible the lines of rings stretched for hundreds of meters but when excited researchers contacted the landowner about the phenomenon sir andrew duff gordon had disappointing news well they were very disappointed when i told them that uh they were man-made um and i told them the reasons why we've done it uh which is because we have such very wet springs in wales uh we couldn't burn the heather that year and so we decided to try and experiment and cut some circles on the hill well the young grace need young heather to feed on when they're very small and uh you cut if you can't burn the heather which is obviously the best way of doing it you have to uh cut the heather to hope to regenerate the young heather coming up which is much more palatable to the small grass i did think it was very funny considering i made the marks or surrender you know cut them for his grouse like i did think it was very funny then but you know with everybody was saying you know oh you know it was all ufos and all those sorts of things like you know it was quite different [Music] many crop circle groups believe that there are still mysteries to solve these investigators hope to discover whether grain gleaned from the flattened wheat has in some way acquired special properties [Music] how much did you say we needed sheila [Music] eight ounces the ultimate test is to bake bread from these ears and compare it with loaves made from corn conventionally harvested from outside the circle to carry out the experiment they've turned to the british baking industry's own research laboratories on the outskirts of london whatever its hidden properties the grain must be turned into bread by conventional methods each loaf is baked to the same recipe to ensure the test is fair two of the harvesters have come to take part in the experiment i have a background in science and i've always been interested in food chemistry so i'm rather interested to see whether the whatever force created the crop circles has in fact altered anything in the wheat well they smell good and they look normal oh yes this is standard commercial type breakfast they're comparing the taste of three loaves one commercially produced one from outside the circle and the other from right in the middle make sure you're testing the chrome not just this is outside the crops that's outside the process [Music] i wouldn't recommend this as a the bread from inside the crop circle proves to be far from magic it has none of the qualities of a good english loaf in texture and especially in taste hmm you find a different chaser yeah it is there's a musty aftertaste you must have to taste and there's a real bite to the top nothing can even feed the ducks with this i believe that crop circles began as a rare and little understood natural phenomenon which was then adopted by mystics and hoaxers but as much more complicated designs appeared i began to joke that they were hoaxes made by feeble-minded extraterrestrials well there's still a couple of questions left unanswered how do the hoaxes get away with it and why aren't hospitals overflowing with them peppered with buck shot by angry farmers [Music] but nothing will put off the truly committed hoaxers [Music] strangely they too feel the circles have life-enhancing powers but they're certain these come not from other worlds not from paranormal forces but from long nights drawing their vast pictures on the sleeping fields of england oh there's just such a thrill out of it um to see people's face the next day when they can sort of view these formations being able to sort of enter them dousing and getting healed and all these sort of fantastic things like that when you when i knew that i was there last night and it was calm and you're in a totally different world it's so peaceful out there and the shapes that you're sort of creating they sort of come from within it's just a good feeling and it's such a challenge to be able to dream up of these complicated designs and then to see them on paper all nicely drawn to scale then that's the challenge to get it in the field and exactly right and i get a good buzz out okay well i'm quite impressed by the um interest that my circles and other well possibly human-made circles cause now the experts go around and they have their fancy techniques a lot of the times i can end up fooling them into believing that they are actually genuine formations even though on a couple of occasions i have told them a couple of days afterwards that i actually made it and i offered them a few ideas as to how i'd done it and even putting measurements down and drawing diagrams for them they won't believe it [Music] well i was so amazed at the aerial photographs they look totally different from what i'm viewing on the ground and to see them they really are beautiful [Music] you

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Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022