Crop Circle Theories

[Music] this summer mysterious circles appeared again in fields of crops all over the West Country there's still no universally accepted explanation for these beautiful mysteries although they've been many contenders from electrified whirlwind to intelligences from outer space as the phenomenon has grown summer after summer so too has the intensity of the battle between the competing explanations and at the heart of that battle lies a struggle for the soul of science itself [Music] for most of the year the Westbury white horse is the major tourist attraction in this part of Wiltshire but then as summer comes a new tourist attraction springs up crop circles these circles up to 300 feet in diameter appear mysteriously often a dead of night they're remarkable geometric symmetry draws in thousands of visitors [Music] many are driven to do more than just look they measure and record every detail of the circles [Music] throughout the summer months new circles appear their imprint becomes even sharper in a ripe and brittle crop [Music] for some visitors crop circles are a source of creative inspiration [Music] the corn spiral dance was inspired by the crop circle that Silbury Hill in 1989 and the dance itself has a particular form it's a very processional form it was so is it has symbols in it of the crop itself of corn but it also has a section in it which is very unstructured and that lacquer structure which mirrors really some of the energy that is often felt in these crop circles are very spinning energy very much mirrors the situation that we have this challenge of these crop circles we don't really understand them we don't know what they're bad so we have the challenge between if you like the the scientific form that we use doing that and the metaphysical or the spiritual others come into crop circles for psychic communion a very strong eighty being coming through there with a silvery suit and three fingers and a very rather interesting cummerbund that I see this one has gone on as well and this this band I've had another another at Earth the spiritual energies that have come through because they firm the density of the earth you know the frequency of the earth is far too much for them to handle it appears this cummerbund around the what we would know as the emotional center kind of balances out there the frequencies of their system the circle phenomenon is comparatively recent ten years ago crop circles were virtually unknown a handful of historic references have been unearthed like this 1678 tract which attributes a circling hartfordshire to the devil and some people remember seeing circles in the middle years of this century my family farmed near Winchester in Hampshire for thirty years and we've had circles but never more exotic patterns occurring in cornfields virtually throughout that period but the phenomenon only began to take off in 1980 when a photograph in a Wiltshire paper of a circle near Westbury Whitehorse sparked off circle spotting the number of circles record it has grown dramatically every year since then by 1990 over 2000 had been spotted all over the world but they remain overwhelmingly a Wiltshire phenomenon over 50% of all the circles found since 1980 have been in Wiltshire the circles have become part of local culture and commerce the business for the pub it was lucky that it happened around this area and loads of people coming down got calls like a cocktail doing which is quite good to make sure sea corn circles oh he's down kid No [Music] most of the dancers at the Beck Hampton barn dance are local farmers for them the circles have proved a mixed blessing it was a Wednesday when they appeared in that first weekend there was probably five or six hundred people went down into them at that stage I endeavoured to stop them by putting a sign up saying please keep out you're damaging the crop that didn't work at all I was trying to encourage them to go up on the hill behind to view them from up on the hill but they needed the need was to get in the circle and to feel any vibes that there might have been so rather than discourage them I put a caravan down a little chute which was the early way into the field so that was that was a fortunate point from my point of view of controlling people coming into the field and people were very willing to come down pay to go and see them and they were satisfied I was satisfied so yes I mean about five to seven thousand people I suppose came through my last summer crop circles have become big news far further afield and we'll check that's all me so I know the Lord works in mysterious ways as well as an archers storyline they've appeared on album covers and circles provided the basis for a surprise bestseller which sold over 50,000 copies what consumes people with curiosity about the phenomenon of the circles is what's actually making them could be win conditions and whether weather can play some interesting tricks I think if it was aliens why aren't they speaking to us in English and what worries me about the circles is they're there to kind of hieroglyphic there's two to symbolic which you know which makes me think that you know there's wegg's well it seems to me it's possible that it is a signature of some visitation to our planet that's a possibility well they're not one of the people upstairs I think somebody somebody's having a game we did a project on it and now class reckoning is Hedgehog but I think they were about it sure it wasn't very cool one attempt to resolve this mystery have reignited a smouldering dispute between two fundamentally opposed ways of interpreting the natural world I think what's interesting about crop circles are they are the latest in a long line of phenomena which characterized battles between science and parasites and those number of examples of these kinds of phenomenon phrenology UFOs and parapsychology now looking back after these controversies are settled is often very hard to see what all the fuss was about and it's often very hard to see what distinguishes the two sides one from another but at the time of the controversy the battle really rages and is extremely virulent in form and that's where we are now with crop circles as I'm sure you've all seen before is that since the 17th century the prevailing way of interpreting the natural world has been that of Orthodox science we have got in essence if I do it with two we have got Newton's vision refined and developed by 19th and 20th century physics views the world as a system governed by implacable natural laws accessible through the operations of logic and reason Newton's Cradle simple example of the idea of the third law of motion so if you actually try and generations of school children have learnt the fundamental approach of Orthodox science to natural phenomenon action hypothesis verified and refined through the collection of data by experiment leading ultimately to proof science looks at the natural world because that's its job and of course it will be looking at objects and phenomena which para scientists are also interested in I think the difference is in the logical approach which scientists take if there is a phenomenon like your corn circles like dowsing or something the scientist will say well now does this in any way fit in with a pattern of what we know and understand the former hypothesis could it be such and such a thing what tests have we to make and are there any sort of null tests on on on other manifestations so it tries to take a logical approach to things try this does it work try that does it work and that this is a natural logical way of going about things but there's another approach to understanding natural phenomena although its roots go back to before Newtonian science it's primarily a reaction against the domination of a mechanistic approach most people these days consider para science to be things like parapsychology astrology graphology palmistry all of those studies which are outside of the accepted norms of the establishment academic view of science so what we're talking about really are people who study things that don't fit in with the classical Newtonian reductionist mechanistic view that the Western world has held the last 300 years we're all interested in mystery we all prefer to think that there are mysteries out there that that science can't boil down to boring equations and in some ways I think this has grown in the past 20 or 30 years and in in many ways I date it to the 60s to to the beginning of the realization that experts that scientists had somehow got something a bit wrong and that something was largely I reckon nuclear power that the reassurances and the promises given about nuclear power turned out in a way to be wrong and it was from that that I sort of doubt about the expert about whether to believe him or not has been creeping in more and more what's very commonly in episodes of this kind is that the different parties involved are very keen to appropriate the phenomena for themselves over which they're arguing they want to define to colonise the phenomena for their own purposes now in situations where the stakes are very high where this involves a battle for turf it can be very important to knock out the other side but completely this may account for the particular virulence of a particular episode of particular controversy over a new kind of phenomenon the worldview that we were brought in up in basically said we know everything there is it's a clockwork universe we can explain it all we can predict it all there's no mystery left and crop circles have been a very public very obvious mystery there's a lot of magic around them and people love mystery and magic the public understanding of science is very important and maybe things like this phenomena like the crop circles are a very good way for scientists to get into the business of public understanding of science the the trouble is that you find yourself in what you might call very mixed company and it's all very well on a program like this discussing fairly seriously what's what's happening but you do find yourself amongst people who use terms very loosely you know energy and ley lines of all this sort of rubbish and the discussion becomes very very difficult because they are convinced of a deep psychic significance in these things and they're unbel and the conversations with people like that who well emotionally involve they may say become really rather pointless so there's a balance again that you have to strike you have to say I would like to enter into a serious discussion and we will use the corn circles as an example of the scientific method on the other hand if you find yourself in a kind of a seance with people who are completely hooked on the unn then it's a fairly profitless business scientists of ID with para scientists in analyzing the complex patterns of corn within the circles and their remarkable sharp-edged symmetry no blade of corn has remained unexamined in each side's attempt to produce a universally accepted explanation compatible with their own particular worldview for many adherents of para science the basis of an explanation starts with the circles geographical location in the 1960s Neolithic monuments like Silbury Hill came to be seen as embodiments of mystical power hippies flocked to the sites dotted throughout Wiltshire and their belief that powerful but inexplicable spiritual energies flow from such sites has since taken root in a wider community dowsing an ancient craft still used by many farmers to locate sources of water has become a popular way of trying to locate spiritual energies the traditional Hazelwood twig has been replaced by metal Rob's doubters believe they'll cross over or open out when held over sources of water or energy when I talk about energy I don't mean it in the sense of raw electricity or something like that which can be picked up on a meter I'm looking at it from the point of view that we are like a battery and our hands show a plus and minus in effect or and we are picking up that energy which we believe to be a electromagnetic or allegis acid and too many dowsers the mysterious crop circles are potent sources of such energy are now walking into the energy field here and as we come into the energy field the rods automatically open like that now you may feel that having all watched the Paul Daniel show that this is a very easy bit of magic to detect so I'm going to show you that it isn't an involuntary reflex of my hands I've got here two holders made out of barrows and in this way I shall actually be touching the rods at all as I come in and I step gently back again out of the energy field there's a bit of a wobble on them obviously because of the wind but if we walk gently into the energy field here like that you'll see that exactly the same thing in fact happens so that dowsing is a reality it works many doubters believe that the energy coming off crop circles flows from invisible lines of energy known as ley lines which crisscross the globe linking spiritual centers they find crop circles to be in alignment with the ley lines and they believe there's some causal connection between the two ley-lines I believe to be some form of energy in this context I believe them to be lines of geomagnetic force linked to the Earth's magnetic field it's believed that some of the standing stones actually act as receptors if you ride to this energy and the people you know ancient ancestors Neolithic past and perhaps people who have certain psychic gifts are able to use this area to actually enhance their psychic abilities the mystery of the circles has attracted nothing like the same interest from Orthodox scientists most seem to have found the phenomenon not worthy of the effort of explanation but one lonely voice has been arguing his case for 11 years now against the intuitive explanation of douses and in favor of a scientific analysis so I am indeed fighting for science against the irrationalities of the paranormal people Terence Medan is an academic physicist by training who's been obsessed with the circles ever since he first came across them a local will Sherman he spent nine years abroad teaching solid-state physics in the universities of Grenoble in France and Dalhousie in Canada in 1974 he inherited his father's motor business and returned to Wiltshire with his young family to run it today his son runs the business of restoring classic cars while Terence Medan runs a different scientific concern from above the garage I'm returning to Britain I decided that I would create a business in metrology is one of the easiest subjects for a fully qualified physicist to handle and I had always maintained a deep interest in metrology meetin's Business Toro comprises a scientific monthly the Journal of meteorology and a meteorological consultancy selling advice to insurance companies his expertise in this field led the government to Commission him to write a report assessing the risk of tornado damage to the sighs well nuclear reactor a tornado is just one dramatic and destructive variety of a common phenomenon the atmospheric vortex a mass of swirling spinning air meetin's background in the study of vortices immediately suggested a cause for the mysterious circles which he first learned about from a photo in the wiltjer times in 1980 now that attracted my attention at once because the circularity and the spiral lie of the corn made me think at once this is the sort of thing that and that's miss Farah cortex could make now primary difficulty is that in the Fairweather whirlwind the inflow of air is such that the motion is upwards and such motion could never of itself create a crop circle which is clearly made by downward flow so I suppose that if a fair-weather whirlwind had been involved something must have happened to it to cause it to temporarily give the dangler Chabert Terrence meetin spent the next few summers patrolling high vantage points around the White Horse looking for circles his growing databank suggested a connection with wilchester POG rafi as circles tended to form at the foot of Hills research also suggested they formed in calm weather conditions this indicated to Medan a possible mechanism for his vortex meetin's diagram shows how a rising wind can affect calm air in the leaver Hill and generate an upward spinning air column as in a tornado the complex interaction between the upward flow and its spinning component can become unstable and created down flowing system the bulge in the column if the spinning Bulge reaches the ground a spiral centered mark is carved in the crop I mean I could over simplify it by saying that the air is rushing in so efficiently that it is coming in faster than it can get out and there's needs there a kind of bulge in the middle and then this this bulge releases its tension by breaking away and down raise in fact but that on its own doesn't account for the circles characteristic sharp edge according to meetin the spinning component of the vortex lays down the corn in a spiral but the electrification of the air by spinning creates a state known as a plasma a quasi solid with a defined shell this gives the vortex in effect the cutting edge which lays the crop precisely Mead and christened this phenomenon of plasma vortex according to Medan this theory explained all the occurrences of the single simple circles that had first caught his attention but here we've got the standard evidence 40 cent of a vortex implied by the center here is axial symmetry the whirling vortex that made the circle came down and in a matter of probably less than a second it's spun out this little circle but by 1983 circles weren't always single however Terence Medan felt the basic hypothesis of a plasma vortex could still explain new larger groupings of circles it seems highly probable that quintuplet sets of circles cannot be formed in any other way except by the breakup at the moment of impact with the ground of the vortex which was bearing within itself for smaller vortices presenting a refined hypothesis was one thing but Medan encountered more difficulty with the next stage of the scientific process verifying it up until this summer he'd made a start by collecting together a body of eyewitness reports of circles being formed which he believes vindicates his case it was very much like cutting a flan that was the thing has struck me cutting a flan out of a tin with one of these flam cutters that go round the line started at about one o'clock and rotated back to the start position took about four seconds to cut the circle down we bought ourselves in a circle being pushed and from inward going outward we started noticing little spirals little vortex like fog though like fog not too dense almost like four misty appearance and they were shimmering and this was sort of wrapping around the cord that's sort of anger going round like that anti-clockwise and swirling and swirling around the corn and the corn dropping Orthodox science doesn't believe that such I witness reports however convincing and accurately remembered and reported can be a substitute for controlled experimental verification in laboratory conditions up until now Terence meetings gas resources made this impossible but this summer helped finally began to arrive but not from fellow scientists in Britain professor Yoshihiko oats Kiev Waseda University in Tokyo and his team of researchers have proved one of Tarrant Smeaton's most invaluable allies OTE brings resources and vital credibility to meetin's hitherto isolated research program a distinguished radiation physicist out school studies for lightning mysterious lights in the lower atmosphere he believes that ball lightning or as he calls it plasma fire is electrified air like meetin's plasma vortex but ball lightning leaves no trace which are cancer otsuki's interest in crop circles in crop circles there are very nice mark patterns in crop circle so this is very nice for the research works of plasma abadox or the natural plasma fire but despite many attempts outski has been unable to prove the existence of ball lightning in the laboratory until recently pumping microwaves into a specially built apparatus he believes he has artificially created ball lightning what's most encouraging for Medan is that the plasma fire leaves marks when a plate of aluminium dust is placed in the apparatus for dust marks read crop circles but despite this circumstantial support for the plasma theory the phenomenon has still not yielded up its mystery this summer has seen new and increasingly complicated patterns in the crops which has kept the controversy vigorously bubbling over over the last two years crop circles have begun to grow increasingly and spectacularly complex in 1990 one third of the circles in Wiltshire were these complex shapes so-called pictograms by this year the overwhelming majority of the circles in Wiltshire were pictograms this has caused a new controversy to blow up over meetings explanation that casma vortices are responsible about the crop formations is that they started in a very small way 10 years ago and they have been growing in elaboration you can trace patterns of development over the succeeding years in the last two years they've become enormous they've become immensely complicated and nature as a whole doesn't perform like this in the sort of way with this sort of thing now if this is a say let us argue a wind formation some a very strange sort of thumb the winds shall we let's say call it the plasma vortex effect now if the plasma vortex effect is a crew hypothesis it should have been going on for thousands of years there should have been formations like this all over England and the world seen by people and recorded for hundreds of years and yet there's no evidence at all that this is the case so we are dealing with something is quite different from a natural effect nature and this is why I think we have to move into a new paradigm which involves intelligence something purposive and something quite different from what we are used to in the late 20th century in 1990 a new organization was set up to monitor the circles and look for new explanations welcome to summer conference the Center for crop circles studies or C CCS which now has nine hundred and fifty members is the brainchild of two men Michael Greene the Chairman's and archaeologists working for English heritage Ralph Noyes the secretary is the retired undersecretary from the Ministry of Defence both had developed a fascination with the circles but found themselves dissatisfied with meetings scientific explanation I think the decisive moment for me was the moment in 1986 when these circles which had begun to group themselves of the quite interesting patterns for the first time put a ring around themselves we had a ring circle Terrence I think found is very surprising and he had to elaborate his model quite a bit and I began to feel we really have got a most interesting race between a good scientist and a developing phenomenon in 1989 we had right at the end of that year a very big rotational event divided into four quadrants in each of which the grain was combed out in a linear manner turning at right angles and each quadrants and I said to myself and to friends that cannot be simply an empress very vortex however elaborate Terence is making it let us have a look at this thing see CCS acts as an umbrella organization for all those who lean towards a para scientific explanation some continue to believe the circles derive from spiritual force fields like ley lines but influential members at the or of the organization are developing an alternative theory that the circles are the work of non-human intelligences scientifically a lot of people are looking for messages in the corners if we're nowadays I'm tempted almost a corny messages now I think one has to put one's self in the shoes if that's not too far-fetched a term for an intelligence coming from outside how would you try and communicate with a skeptical unbelieving human public one of the ways I think I would try would be not bid to write great big letters we are here we love you across the middle of the fields of England and I think a one positive way if they're timeless way is to use something which they call in the East a mandala now this is a symbol of reality a symbol of being a symbol of God and most of the formations that we've been looking at this yeah and here are in fact great symbols in the sense those who believe this theory argue it hasn't been arrived at lightly as well as rejecting the plasma vortex hypothesis si si si s examines other possibilities like electromagnetic or agricultural change they believe that such phenomena cannot on their own explain the circles and are forced to conclude a nonhuman intelligence can be the only possible explanation when this para scientific theory began to surface Terence Medan immediately dismissed it he explained pictograms scientifically making only a relatively minor modification to his theory he suggested that sunspots solar storms which caused intense electrical activity in the upper atmosphere and which have an 11-year cycle that peaked in 1990 were exaggerating the unstable behavior of his plasma vortices I'm merely suggesting that in addition there could be earth circulating currents induced by the upper air currents which in turn affect locally the electric field of the earth and hence play a role to in the stability or instability of the vortices that make the circles meetings modification failed to convince the para scientists who argued that while violent solar events may well wreak havoc on earth it's inherently implausible that they could affect designer damage science and para science continue to be locked in conflict leaving many locals have experienced crop circles at first hand uncertain what to think Terrence Medan and CCC s field officer - Sir Richard Andrews both try to wind farmer Robin Butler over to their understanding of the cause of pictograms he's had 27 simple circles before but this is his first pictogram yes it seems in the dark from the dowsing point of view but when we have a three line layers we call it goes across the portion of the dumbbell at 90 degrees to this pattern yes it seems we get boxes so these are sort of the things that we're beginning to learn which is helping us both yes the apparent inability of both science and para science to prove their case conclusively and the strange and sudden complexity of the pictograms however has encouraged a third theory to emerge with particular force over the last couple of years I think the cause of crop circles is human beings I think every single one has been made by a so called hoaxer who's gone out and done it at dead of night or whatever if you do something they like that sort of thing I make militant myself and I would like to grab a bus or something like that I'm certain someone stands in the middle with it with a piece of wood and a rope and goes right I mean I I was born on a farm it's brought up on a farm on my life 100% country hate town but never in this world is that little green men there for you come round the other pair is they they can't beautiful men it must be big large country men the young farmers now they know exactly ones that are what they're doing so they do minimum weather damage and that's a bit unfair I better go away before I say any more but originally the circles are rings here in this photograph are not Hawk Singh but the other extra pattern will be for hoaxing this I think it's impossible to create such a very complicated patterns by plasma vortex this summer has for the first time seen the emergence of admitted hoaxes into the open Doug Bower and Dave Chorley were discovered by today newspaper they claimed to have invented the whole phenomenon in 1978 and they've made contradictory claims to varying numbers of circles others began hosting for the first time this year a group of physicists from Southampton University calling themselves the Wessex skeptics set out this summer to show how easy it was to make a crop circle [Music] we were straight last year nine sit which was 1990 of course they're an enormous number of pictograms and we found it very difficult to believe that those were produced by a natural phenomenon doesn't mean more arrived we just found it very difficult to believe now given that we were told that the structure of the pictograms think the way the crop was laid out was laid down in the pictogram you know the detailed way in which it fell was identical to the simple circles we of course were led to the conclusion if the pictograms were not a natural phenomena and then there was no reason to suppose the circles were either the wessex skeptics attracted the opposition of both beaten and CCC s who accused them of interfering with their attempts to solve this mystery I consider these hoaxes a complete waste of time it costs a lot of people a lot of money photography flying aircrafts and of course time is the essence of our research CCGs has been set up to solve the problems of the called circle in the sense that we will look into the hopes and problem and we will find ways of beating it there being so many done this year we know you've made some and we suspect you've made others you've not told us about you've seen the ones we've made we made them in Chris Cutler's home I assume we've been there or somebody in your group has been created that you've given us giving us criteria you made any or not Chris cut force farming these haven't made any other than those yes I've made some yeah however the point is we are now learning we are now learning you admit you make circles we have never made any ourselves we're finding maybe you should try to make circles we think you've made more than you've told us don't you think you should try to make some and and see whether you can duplicate the effects you think you see but the skeptics persist they believe creating circles is a good way of testing the validity of the rival theories if the theory is good in their view it ought to be able to distinguish a naturally created circle from a man-made one equinox filmed the making a circle in the field belonging to an organic farm run by Martin Pitt just outside more breh they created one main circle with three satellite circles placed away from the tractor tramlines extremely ambitious in the sense that we decided to make off fairly large we decided to make one who was look as though it was made by a plasma vortex we had all sorts of fantasy stuff got a lot of organisation and we started designing in a couple of days before then things started to go wrong when we first came into the field realized that I original site rather ironically was wrecked by wind damage so he had to move to a different site he had to redesign it and we had to reassign walls at those short notice so there's a certain amount of clay often we went into the field but the surveying was fairly successful and we we then just reverted to a very crude technique of rolling and trampling just to actually produce something that might look good from the air we don't really know six days later the hoax was discovered independently a field officer from the center for crop circle studies busty Taylor doused it to find out if it was genuine and then he gave his opinion we have a pretty complex one here and it's absolutely amazing what this is telling us here we have the opposite rotation which he had in 1989 we have the quarter sections appearing the Tattler section is appearing it's really a cracker terrence meetin also discovered its existence independently and he too verified it the circle formation on martin pits land consists are all of simple round circles which pleased me very much to see because they were so typical the ones I've been looking at all these years they didn't have those complex strange shapes which so many other systems have had this year and last year but in detail they had a lot of a complex structure a kind of petal effect a braiding and plaiting and the layering which showed the difficulty but any hooks that would have to manage to contrive to follow if he wished to copy it in fact it was a system that was too hard to copy and yet was of a simple variety nevertheless genuine in every way admittedly the wessex skeptics were able to make their circle with the permission of the farmer who cleared away damning evidence of human involvement like two forgotten balls of string so they haven't quite proved their case about how easy it is to make the circles and convince experts of their authenticity in any event neither duper's nor Diouf attach too much significance to the success of this particular hoax so you are telling me Vance the circle or not and his farm a hoax circles made by the Wessex skeptics I have to admit that some people at least if they are scientifically trained are capable of perpetrating at least one hoops that does not however negate all the positive evidence which has been gathered over the last 10 years in favor of genuine circles when a scientific theory is complete then it would be possible to distinguish between hoaxes circles and genuine circles but we are not yet quite about stage the theory is undergoing development and modification according to the incoming data prior to the fact that we are producing books with photography showing the lay of the corn it would be possible for individuals to go out and recreate surface it is it isn't off the cars it's on the cars that is highly possible but not all of them know way too many some hundred and fifteen back Hampton last year that's a lot of work all night worldwide how do they do that it's just one of those things that you will get people doing that things I regret it the farmers definitely regard it and I just wish they'd come to their senses and realize it is a waste of time unfortunately hopes hypothesis suffers from from from weakness that the plasma vortex Theory doesn't suffer from the plasma is that the people who propose that don't claim that all circles are caused by husband vortices so they don't have to go out and select every single circle and prove it now there's no way we can prove that every circle is being made by hoaxes of course not we can simply throw doubt or examine the ability of the people who claim to be other distinguished classes of patterns and say one is artificial and one is natural we can test that ability of course that's a very difficult test to do in principle it can be done that won't proves that they're that they're natural or artificial after all it's no it's quite possible that people may be able to simulate what is also a natural phenomenon isn't there's no reason why they can't in principle do that all sides are still assessing the implications of a summer of hope Singh the keys for all circles being hoaxes is still not proven if hoaxes are making all the circles they've been working quietly and consistently for over a decade they've remained undetected despite nights like the 16th of July this year when in Wiltshire alone three massive formations were made so the cognoscenti of the circles remain convinced that they can't all be hoaxes the degree of organization and mentality required is for them beyond belief nor does the hoax theory account for eyewitness reports of circles being formed although anecdotal evidence is always open to doubt so all sides are still working on their theories as the battleground turns to bread [Music] is this very large story about hoax going to do as damaged or made benefit us well it's going to do some damage to the subject in the short term because any serious research organization like a university department who might have been interested may think some might have been quite soon in giving us a bit of funding for a search it's going to shy off for the moment until this flurry has passed any sensible university is going to keep itself rather well away from the field but in the long run and quite quickly I think this is going to benefit is enormous Lee because it is brought out into the open what the discussion is all about either this thing is terrence meetings vortex and the rest is hoax or it is something more as well and after a summer of many hoaxes terrence Medan has refined his theory still further we are now quite a certain that all the most complex systems the pictograms are definitely fakes because these are the very systems the complex systems which were always going to be difficult for a scientific theory to grapple with we are really only left with the simple circle cases as being those which are likely to be quite genuine the theory already describes these very well and we are likely to go into next season more strongly placed than ever before however probable or improbable impartial observers may find each or all of the competing explanations conclusive proof of any of them is still lacking Terran Smeaton hasn't yet achieved such definite proof in its absence Orthodox science has failed to prevent other explanations rushing in to claim the territory and next summer battle is likely to be joined again and will continue until one side or the other lands a knockout blow at last it's being realized that the burden of proof must surely lie on those who think crop circles are made by agents other than man the analogy that I like to give is that I have never seen a car being made in a factory I don't know that cars are made in factories yet surely the burden of proof is on someone to persuade me that cars are not made in factories because I've seen plenty of evidence that they can be made in factories what is needed in in order to reach forwards and approach the answer more quickly is of course moving film of some of these events as they occur that's what we're really after it's clear in my mind that whatever is making these formations is not amused by humanity human individuals trying to catch it out it may be they be more amused if we actually try to reach out and contact them I think after the of the summer the debate over crop circles is still very much open and I would expect that to remain the situation until with some marked redistribution of resources between the different parties if one or other party to the dispute is able to recruit some further allies to inside if for example one party is able to recruit the assistance and methods of a particular sub discipline then we might begin to see some closure on the debate and of course it has to be said that it's much more difficult for the para scientists to recruit that kind of extra resource but until the situation does show a change of resources I think things are very much open it is you could say very much a field open to anyone [Music]

Channel: Steve Haskett

Views: 20,942

Rating: 4.5957446 out of 5

Keywords: crop cicles, wiltshire, paranormal, science, hoax

Id: HEClOdfojHA

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020