Doug's Darkworld

Ah, crop circles. I remember when crop circles were the latest greatest thing and there was speculation among all sorts of people as to what was going on. Even the tech people at the dot com I worked for were intrigued. Then two people admitted they had hoaxed the whole thing, the case was solved, and the whole business dropped off the radar. OK, it wasn’t that simple. The only people who believed the hoaxers were the people who already thought the circles were hoaxed, the people who thought there was something to the phenomena continued to be intrigued, and crop circles continued to appear, more intricate and mysterious every year. What the hell is going on here?

Honestly, beats me. There’s a veritable crop circle industry at this point, and even competitions to create the best designs. There’s no doubt that the vast majority of crop circles are created by human beings. Images like the 2004 circle above may appear fiendishly complicated, but people have shown time and again that the most complicated crop circles can be made by small numbers of people with the simplest of tools and a basic understanding of geometry. It’s not rocket science, and as far as I can tell from my readings, there’s nothing here that particularly needs explaining.

In other words, to me the biggest mystery is how did this get associated with UFOs in the first place? There’s apparently never been any UFO sighting connected with any particular circle or circles. And if there’s some sort of message in the circles, no one has ever figured it out. The designs all seem to quite clearly come from human cultural references, sometimes subtle mathematical ones, but there’s yet to be a crop circle that screamed, or even whispered, that it was conceived by a non-human mind. It’s another aspect of the same problem we have with all sorts of “contact with aliens” scenarios, you’d think they would have something novel to say? Instead we have things like the Urantia papers, purportedly from aliens, that contains 700 pages devoted to discussing the life of Jesus. Somehow I’m having a hard time believing that aliens are an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists.

The point here is that UFOs and aliens seem to be perversely intertwined with modern culture to the point where anything out of the usual may get linked to UFOs somehow. At least in a lot of people’s minds. And with that thought, I thought about the association that some people make between UFOs and the pyramids. Followed by, I bet there’s been “pyramid” crop circles. Took exactly ten seconds to find one. Ah ha, proof that aliens are behind both crop circles and UFOs! Hardly. Proof that crop circles are just another expression of the human mind.

Or going at this from another direction, it’s been pointed out that a lot of crop circles clearly illustrate classic geometric theorems. Well, new geometric theorems are still being discovered, I mean, new things in mathematics are discovered all the time, it’s hardly a static science. So it would seem to reason if there were anthropomorphic aliens who had been using math for thousands of years longer than us, it wouldn’t be too hard to express a mathematical law or geometric theorem in a  crop circle that humans had never seen before. And so far, if aliens are making crop circles, they have been using only mathematics and geometry that humans are already familiar with.

To me, this pretty much categorically rules out anything other than human agency behind crop circles. Sadly this sort of train of thought leads to the same station in regards to all evidence for alien intelligence. Be it aliens from other stars, inter-dimensional beings, Gods, supernatural beings … none of them ever seem to have imparted any previously unknown knowledge to humans. It just wouldn’t be that hard for an advanced alien intelligence to send us a message that  unmistakably did not come from a human mind. And alas, crop circles seem to fail this test too. In fact it would be almost impossible for a true alien intelligence to send us a complex message that didn’t contain undeniable evidence of completely non-human culture and thinking.

So if there’s aliens among us, they are sure keeping their heads low.

(The above image was apparently released into the public if what I read on Wikipedia is any indication. The whole crop circle thing has actually turned into an industry, albeit a small one. Farmers make good money charging people to look at crop circles on their land, $10 a head in some cases. And they have every right to, crops circles are vandalism and the crops in the circle are basically ruined, not to mention more  get ruined when people flock to see them. So they have to recoup their losses. In any event, so much money is involved in crop circles now, that I noticed most crop circle images are copyrighted. The aliens are trying to teach us about capitalism?)