It sometimes is suggested that crop circles could be made by our advanced technology. Lasers and masers and satellites all sound sexy, but could they deliver? A few years ago I got this report. It may be that we’ve improved upon the technology since then (hello you techies out there), but since we’ve been getting circles for decades in the modern era and at least hundreds of years before that (see my movie), these things could not account for the historical phenomenon.

On satellite imaging:

The main problem with using satellite imaging for catching circlemakers in the act is the resolution of the cameras. Here is a photo taken by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI), flying aboard NASA’s EO-1 satellite. The photo is of the path of a tornado in May 2002.

The path of the tornado (going left to right in the middle of the photo) is much wider than the typical crop circle, yet look how small it looks.

The other problem is that these satellites must travel at several thousand miles per hour to stay in orbit. They take pictures of the ground in wide but thin chunks as they fly by. They don’t take pictures like your camera does. The time that would be spent by one of these satellites looking at any particular field in the middle of the night would be around 1/30th of a second. Weather satellites don’t move around so fast and do take pictures in something approximating the way your camera does, but they are further out in space and can’t take close-ups of the ground.

This is part one. I’ll do another post later to deal with other aspects of how our technology can’t account for the circles.

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