Tag Archives: phenomenon

Crop Circles

Crop Circles Go Way Back

 

Anybody who knows crop circle lore knows about this, but, since many of you aren’t circle historians, I’m passing along what always is cited as the first irrefutable evidence of the appearance of crop circles, way before the modern era.  Someone sent me this post about it from the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forum :

Crop circles are not a new phenomenon. There are 17th Century woodcuts that record the observation of what appears to be crop circles. One such woodcut, entitled The Devil Mower, appeared in a Hertfordshire newspaper dated 22 August, 1678. The article described the apparition overnight of a strange design in a field of oats, so neatly pressed that “no mortal man was able to do the like”, which was attributed to “the devil or some infernal spirit “. By convoluted logic this apparition confirmed the existence of God, since, it was argued, if devils have a Hell then there must be a Heaven and a God.

mowing-devil-illustration

Here is what it says:

Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a Poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats: upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore That the Devil should Mow it rather than He. And so it fell out, that very Night, the Crop of Oat shew’d as if it had been all of a flame: but next Morning appear’d so neatly mow’d by the Devil or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like. Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away. Liscensed, August 22nd, 1678.

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Crop Circles

Can Satellites Make Crop Circles?

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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.

tornado path

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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