Date: Thu Sep 16 1993 09:32:02 Subj: Hoaxing How-To 1/4 UFO - Squaring up the corn circles

Date:   Thu Sep 16 1993  09:32:02
From:   Sheppard Gordon
Subj:   Hoaxing How-To 1/4
UFO                            -------------------------------

Squaring up the corn circles Are they sent from space or are they
made by earthlings? Matt  Ridley enters the great crop circle debate
07/18/92
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  London

I HAD NEARLY finished the 'Q' when I slipped, put my foot on
the garden roller and fell clattering back into the corn. The noise
echoed across the field, to be followed by my sister's stifled
laughter. The dark shadow of an invigilator twitched as he noted
the disturbing sound in his pad. As chance would have it, I had
fallen just where the tail of the Q was to be. Getting back on my
feet, I tidied the edges of the corn and squared off the end: a
perfect Q.
Just an everyday tale of a crop-circle maker. But this was no
everyday crop circle. This was The Daily Telegraph's crack team
entry for the great crop-circle competition of 1992, our chance to
win #3,000 from the German magazine PM, the Guardian and the
paranormal Koestler Foundation. We were one of 10 teams chasing
this prize in a soggy wheat field in Buckinghamshire.
As organisers gathered in a small tent in a muddy field near
West Wycombe, which Edward Dashwood had lent for the occasion, the
rain lashed down outside; the talk was all of genuine "formations"
that had appeared this summer. Had everybody been to see the giant
snail? Some of the Avebury pictograms were different from usual
this year. The Earl of Haddington's prediction that an eagle would
appear this year had come true.
I asked Lord Haddington what he thought was causing the
circles. "There is a pattern," he replied, "and I think I know what
they are going to do next. It's all building up to something
gigantic in the year 2000."
"Armageddon?" I asked.
"I do hope not."
Just then an explosion rent the sky and a huge fiery wheel began
spinning and flashing in the dark. It was a nearby steam funfair
with a Ferris wheel and fireworks.
It was 10pm. The time had come to begin. We had five hours of
darkness in which to do our work. We strode off confidently into
the field. There were four of us, all beginners at this game.
Berkeley Cole, my brother-in-law, works in films and was
dressed in an ankle-length trench coat. He carried two bamboo
poles, and a rope and roll of baler twine. Mary James, my sister
and an antiquarian book dealer, was wearing a hat with the legend
"Discover Oklahoma's Natural Resources". She carried a metal spike.
Johnny James, her husband and a surveyor, bore two wooden planks. I
brought up the rear wearing camouflage trousers so the leprechauns
would not spot me, with The Daily Telegraph's shiny green plastic
garden roller, designed for filling with water and rolling the lawn
(we had not filled it with water lest it be too heavy).
A young tawny owl was squeaking like a rusty gate in the nearby
wood. The rain had stopped and a sliver of moon was visible just
above the gold ball of St Lawrence's Church. I recalled that in the
18th century Sir Francis Dashwood - ancestor of the farmer in whose
field we stood - had called meetings of his Hellfire Club there,
and in caves in this very hill. Had they conjured restless spirits
from the underworld who might even yet be abroad in these troubled
pastures?
My reverie was interrupted as I barked my shin against
something hard in the corn. I leant down and felt it. A bar stool.
Brilliant. I wished I had thought of that. One of our rival teams
had decided to enter the crop leaving no traces by using bar stools
as stepping stones. It was an act of consummate genius. I knew one
hoaxer, Fred Day of Didcot, who used to get into the corn on
stilts, but that took practice and I always found that you could
leave remarkably little trace if you simply stepped very carefully,
placing your feet between and parallel to the rows of corn.
We reached our designated patch, No 5. We had spent the evening
in the local pub drawing up our own design, incorporating symbols
and letters that we hoped would get the world guessing about which
planet we came from. Mary went first with our only invention, a
steel post sharpened at one end with a ring near the top, to which
a rope could be attached, and a bar across the middle for pushing
it into the ground with the feet. It was actually fairly
impractical, but because it looked like a cross between Neptune's
trident and a Jesuit crucifix, we thought it would suit the
occasion.
She thrust the spike into the ground, attached some ordinary
baler-twine and played it out until she reached the first knot.
Then, with the string taut, she walked in a tight circle, leaving a
neat ring of flattened corn in her wake. Meanwhile, I had begun
spiralling out from the spike with the garden roller. The wheat
made a satisfying squelch as it went down.  Soon I had reached
Mary's ring and we had a neat disc of spirally flattened corn.
Johnny began to tidy the edges with a plank. Mary played out
the string until she reached the second knot and began to mark out
the outer ring. I followed with the roller, which was not proving
very neat because its protruding axle left a ragged edge. Our
rivals, once more, had a better idea: sections of plastic
drainpipe, attached to broomsticks.    Then Berkeley and I made the
ellipse around the outer ring. In the pub beforehand we had
carefully calculated that, if one person walked clockwise round the
ring holding one end of a rope while the other walked
anti-clockwise holding the other end, the path of the second person
would describe an ellipse {see diagram on page II}. To our
surprise, it worked. Now we had a perfect giant eye, with eyelids,
iris and pupil.

Next came the letters. In between the lids and the iris, we
carefully spelled out the letters F C Q V, which we thought would
get everybody guessing. It didn't: even though the Guardian
published a huge photograph of our device rather than the winning
entry, it was from an angle where you could not see the letters.
Read on to find out what they mean.
We then went to another part of the field and Johnny made a
separate small circle, just to prove that the "tight security"
imposed by the organisers was loose. The whole performance had
taken us about two hours, which demolished one argument of the
mystical fraternity straight away. They nearly always claim that
making crop circles takes so long that nobody could possibly have
made them all.
What exactly they mean by "all" varies. Early in 1991 they were
claiming that more than 800 had appeared in 12 years. By the end of
the summer the figure had mysteriously increased to 2,000 and by
1992 to 2,000 a year. I have not seen any evidence for even the
first of these figures.
This year there have been some actual counts. Between 40 and
80 have appeared, depending on whom you believe. That is less than
an hour's work for each of 10 teams of hoaxers, given that most
crop circles are simple discs which take 10 minutes or so to make.
In the morning we came back to admire our handiwork. The circles
and the ellipse looked great, but the letters were a bit
disappointing: the C was too big and you could see where I jumped
clumsily from the F to the C. But we knew we were not going to win.
Unlike the other teams we were not trying to recreate the
elaborate pattern we had been asked to make by the organisers. We
thought it was too difficult. The winners, a team of engineers from
the Westland company led by Adrian Dexter, proved us wrong.
They had left no trace of how they got into the middle of the
corn, their edges were neat, their lines straight and their corn
laid as if by machine. It makes you trust their helicopters.
If, as I had suspected, the whole competition was a set-up to
show how incompetent hoaxers of crop circles were, it had
backfired.
I first thought it might be a set-up when I saw the list of
judges. The chairman and his team were all card-carrying believers
that they were in the presence of an extra-terrestrial or psychic
phenomenon.
But they must have been stung by the events of 1991, a year
that saw a number of hoaxers, including the original pair who
started it all, owning up to having made circles that the "experts"
had first judged to be genuine. The reaction of some of these
experts was, to put it mildly, shabby. Instead of thanking the
hoaxers for starting the industry that made them famous, they
heaped abuse and ridicule on them, using their ready access to the
press.
TERENCE MEADEN, who had done a superb job for years  persuading
journalists that his "vortex of ball lightning" explanation was
"scientific", was so furious at being trapped into calling a circle
genuine on live television, when it had been made the night before
in front of the cameras, that he appeared to sicken of the whole
business and retired to write books about the meaning of Stonehenge.
I rang Doug Bower, the true founder of crop circles, to ask if
he had entered the competition.
"Not after the way they treated us last year," he replied. "We
came forward and explained how we had made about 20 of these things
a year. And all the experts did was to lobby the newspapers to say
we were liars and fools."   So I rang Chris Nash at the "Wessex
Skeptics", who fooled Meaden last year, to see if they were in the
competition.
"No. It's all back to front," he said. "There's no point in
testing whether people can make crop circles. We know they can. The
only test worth doing is a test of the so-called experts, to see
whether they can tell a hoax from a genuine one. It's a test
they've failed every time so far."

So was it a set-up by the believers to humiliate the hoaxers?
The Guardian reporter was plainly a believer. "At most, 20 or 30
per cent of them are hoaxes," he assured me earnestly in the crop
at midnight. "So you rule out categorically that they are all
hoaxes?" I asked. "Oh no, I rule out nothing. I have an open
mind."
Rupert Sheldrake, organiser of the competition, had one too. "I
believe crop circles are a spontaneous phenomenon. I find it very
hard to believe they are all man-made. The competition may prove
that it is easy to tell the fakes from the real crop circles." So
you rule out the idea that there are no real ones? "Oh no, I have
an open mind."
The wonderful thing about crop circles is how everybody behaves
true to type. The believers are either be-kaftanned earth mothers
or gently dishevelled and rather upper-class fogies with names like
Montague, Wingfield, Michell and Martineau. The sceptics are
sensible northerners with monosyllabic surnames.
Ken Brown is a particularly interesting sceptic, because he
started as a believer. Living in Wiltshire he took an interest in
crop circles because he thought they might herald the second coming
of Christ. But he examined a few circles and found all sorts of
evidence that they were made by people trampling through the crop.
When he took this evidence to fellow believers they appeared
uninterested.
Brown heard tales about a strange buzzing sound that could be
heard when crop circles formed. One evening a crop circle believer
and a medium confronted the sound, saying: "If you understand us,
stop" (it did) and "Please will you make us a circle" (one appeared
500 yards away that night).
Brown thought this intriguing and he grew even more intrigued
when he learnt that a tape recording had been made elsewhere of the
buzzing sound. He got hold of a copy and listened to it. It was the
song of a grasshopper warbler, a small bird.
Nor are the believers and the hoaxers the only people acting
true to type. The Americans are now getting involved and they are
doing exactly what a student of Americana would predict: they are
putting their faith in technology. A solemn team of them called
"Project Argus" invaded the winning entry at West Wycombe, barring
entry with a sign declaring a scientific experiment in progress.
Earnest young men bent over the flattened corn, collecting
samples for spectroscopes, waving Geiger counters and generally
promising miracles of empirical investigation. The aim is to
compare the results with those from a "genuine crop circle". I have
news for them. If they measure enough variables they will find a
difference eventually.
THE MEDIA, too, have behaved true to type. The truly astonishing
story of crop circles is the way the press appears to have been
brainwashed.  With a few brave exceptions, it has wholly and
uncritically swallowed everything the believers tell it.
When Pat Delgado, a self-appointed crop circle authority,
pronounced Bower's circle genuine for the newspaper Today, all the
"quality" papers (except this one) reported not the hoaxers' story
but its refutal by the "experts".
"Crop circle hoaxers are fakes, say experts," read the Times's
headline. According to the Independent, "Spinning vortices of wind
- rather than the nocturnal habits of a couple of pranksters - are
the cause of many of the crop circles seen in Britain, scientists
said yesterday."
This worship of the expert is absurd. There is no such thing as
a crop circle scientist. The chief believers first appeal to
people's love of mystery by saying the phenomenon lies outside
conventional science and then promptly assuage the media's thirst
for bogus expertise. They form committees, hold conferences, and
parade their credentials.
Credulous reporters continued to quote the experts even after
these very experts had been duped into pronouncing as "genuine"
circles that were known to be man-made. The "experts", in effect,
have achieved a piece of nimble "burden tennis" - ie, they have put
the burden of proof back in the hoaxers' court.
Ah yes, they said, some may be hoaxes, but can you prove they
are all hoaxes? This is like saying, some cars may be made in
factories, but can you prove they are all made in factories? To
which my answer is no, I cannot - but can you prove that any cars
are not made in factories?

The burden of proof is surely on the believers to produce
evidence that one - just one - crop circle was produced by an agent
other than man.
It is at this point, usually, that a glint of triumph enters
the believer's eye and he lays his trump card: motive. Why would
people creep out at night and make these circles? Some do it for
money: a few farmers have amply repaid the investment of damaged
crop by charging sightseers #1 a time to visit a circle. Bower and
Chorley did it for fun.
The Wessex Skeptics did it to test the experts. The large and
soon-to-be-revealed cell of hoaxers near Avebury may even include
people who make circles to help recruit mystics into their cults. I
first did it to prove it could be done (I have only made three in
my life).
YES, but would it not require a gigantic conspiracy of silence?
No, because the media mostly ignore confessed hoaxers. And never
forget the copy-cat effect. As Steve Donnelly wrote in The Skeptic
magazine recently, the first person to put ground glass in a jar of
baby food in a supermarket a few years ago was copied by a rash of
emulators.
Surely it is not implausible to suggest that people all over
the country have seen the circles and gone out to copy them. It's
neat to see your graffito writ so large. And never forget that
"there's nowt so queer as folk".
So what did our symbol mean? We considered writing the words
morphic resonance on the field, since this is Rupert Sheldrake's
pet theory (it holds that a sort of collective memory in the ether
enables people to learn to ride bicycles or make crop circles more
easily because other people have learnt the same skill before -
nice idea, no evidence).
But after practising with just the word "morphic" in a field
in Northumberland, I realised it would be tedious in the extreme.
Next we considered writing the Japanese for "aliens". but
decided our calligraphy was not up to it. So we eventually settled
on the all-seeing Cyclopean eye and Mary's suggestion of F C Q V,
which stands for "Fay ce que voudras", a Rabelais quote in old
French that the Hellfire Club chose for its motto: "Do what you
want." I guess it was too obscure.

--- Maximus/2 2.01wb
 * Origin: UFOria (Clifton, VA) 703-803-6420 (1:109/369)