Crop Circles with Chelsey Weber-Smith

Welcome to your rune about I'm Sarah Marshall with me today is our hoaxster and chief

Chelsea Robertsmith and today we're going to talk about crop circles, serial exists and extra terrestrials and we won't meet any extra terrestrials but we will meet a lot

“of British people and I think that's even more exciting in a way. Chelsea, how are you doing?”

You know I am I am of England so I can confirm that we are freex from another planet that planned it being England. Here I want to try my my crop circle noise. Yeah. Wait. Wow. Did that sound cool? Yeah. That sounded great. Is that supposed to be a flying saucer landing? Yeah. Flying up okay landing or sucking up a nice person. I was going to say sucking up a baby but don't know how often they abduct babies. I haven't heard that specific one

but that would be cool you know. Yeah. I mean not for well I don't know. I think the baby would have a great day. That would be a good children's book. It would be like babies day out but he goes to space. Yeah we're like an 80's buddy movie where the aliens are the buddies and they're like

“how do we get this baby? We got to watch this baby all day. I was trying to beam up that beautiful”

woman. It's actually the forgotten sequel to flight of the navigator. Yeah. It was destroyed by Disney. Chelsea what are your associations with crop circles? Is this something that you grew up watching cheesy 90's TV about it all? Oh I mean definitely I feel like I caught a few like fox specials on it. That's supposed to be what I did. But I was just thinking before this about how weird it is that me of all people has not done you know a deep dive even of my own for fun

into crop circles. So I'm really coming in pretty fresh. I have like UFO alien abduction knowledge definitely but just not crop circles. And I know like I know like the skeleton of the story but I'm excited for it to be filled in with blood and crops and guts and muscle by you. And as we like to we are coming back to the corn because corn fields are one of the one of the notable fields in which these crop circles are made. Yes and first sort of turning up historically. And

much like UFO abductions which you just mentioned. This is a phenomenon that like growing up and watching these kind of history channel type shows about you would have thought had been around for like way longer and then it turns out that there's a very distinct point in time actually where we started seeing what we might call a classic presentation of them. And in this case

it's 1981 which is amazing because when we did the cornmases one the companion to this episode

you taught me that cornmases started in like the 1990s and I was shaken shaken to white core. Yeah and of course like there's you know beautiful historical hedge mases and things like that and different kind of iterations of these ideas but like yeah these specific things that feel timeless to us sometimes are of our own lifetimes. I know. Maybe for some interesting specific reasons and can you talk just a little bit about kind of the point in time at which the classic

idea of the UFO abduction begins? Yeah yeah let me just like tap into my memory here. I mean we started really like seeing UFOs around the 1940s around World War II. There's a really great book by Carl Young. It's called the Flying Sausers, a modern myth of things seen in the skies. Carl Young's contribution to UFO stuff has been really overlooked. It has been because it really was the book for me that inspired my podcast American hysteria because it was this look at like how

we externalize our anxieties and fears into these vessels like for example UFOs right or Satanists in the case of what you and I talk about right so it's like yeah that happened during kind of the war years when we were afraid of like being bombed on our own territory and things like that so

“it we started to see these things and what I love to always mention about UFOs I think it's so cool”

and so interesting is that the first or one of the very very first UFOs that was seen was described

not as a flying saucer but as an object that moved like a saucer skipping across the water and

Don't they have flat rocks? I mean it's it's wasteful let's say that it's indulgent and wasteful

“but I think that that's just a great example of how our perceptions can really be changed”

based on what we're expecting to see and I just think that's yeah so fascinating and sort of like the way words changed definition. Absolutely. What about the kids? They could cut their feet on all the saucers and you know I mean in terms of of duckions it's so like married into the movements around recovered memory therapy a lot of people would have something they barely remembered like some maybe sleep paralysis experience that they just can't quite explain they

go and see a therapist that had their own belief in alien abduction and you know the rest of history

there's this the the ability to influence someone into believing something different about

what had happened to them and kind of extrapolating that experience. It's a great we have a two-part

“episode on it called alien abductions I think I don't know something like that that sounds right it's”

one of my favorite episodes that you've done that I've heard because you've done many many many shows thank you and in this case it would it be correct to say that this phenomenon kind of began or like that there are sort of these scattered stories that people you can tell people are starting to kind of hear about maybe from disparate parts of the country or even the world but you know we now have newspapers that are capable of having you know like a wire service that picks up a

local story and takes it national in a way that technology is aiding and news is starting to travel

a bit faster and that often they they're these we see this in the satanic panic too that there are elements of a bigger story that coalesce at one point that's like a flashpoint appears or the you know these things that people in the culture are talking about and thinking about sort of get melted into a crucible yeah and then form this overarching narrative and it seems like in this case there were like a couple of people who experienced or told the story in a way that made it make sense to people

in a way that could then be replicated yeah well you say more well it would it be fair to say that the classic UFO abduction story for Americans was started by this one couple yes I know he came forward with an abduction story yeah and in a story in a case it also involves a lot of hypnosis and recovered memory type stuff yes yes and I mean as you mentioned like this this flashpoint you know

“Betty and Barney Hill this was in I believe early 1960s they're driving along a road they have”

a strange experience they can't explain of missing time and through from there they start to you know or at least Betty begins this kind of therapy and the recordings of a therapy are wild where she is kind of like remembering this abduction and from there there's the movies that came out of it and it just becomes you know like you said like it is this flashpoint that then is absorbed into all of our psyche and we start to view things through this like previously available story

that we can then synthesize our own experiences with so I think that that's yeah and I will say I have I'm not here to say aliens aren't real so yeah I may be a skeptic but me neither I just don't think that they're recreationally sexually assaulting us and it's interesting to me that that became the dominant narrative for Americans and like the 60s and 70s that is very true yeah that's very much a part of this right and it's like well we do have a culture that like really

represses you know the kinds of crimes that we're saying aliens are carrying out you know and that that doesn't mean nothing in my opinion no it's interesting because there's like different schools of thought like John Mac is so interesting he was a Harvard professor who was eventually totally like disgraced quote unquote by like the institution because he interviewed a bunch of abductees and believed what they were saying and generally I think John Mac is pretty cool I don't

believe in a lot of the things that he talks about but he's created like a really nice space for people who have these you know these experiences that aren't you know we don't understand but a lot of the people that he interviewed and like it seems like the interviews that were most important to him had more to do with aliens showing us environmental destruction and like leading us toward a better way which is much nicer than the narrative of like you know experimentation

yeah which is kind of the premise of James Cameron's The Abyss yeah that's true yeah yeah

they've come all the way here like surely there only goal wasn't just to like fuck with us yeah I mean unless they're like teenage aliens who are just being incredibly extravagant with a few little but even though I mean maybe maybe yeah maybe okay but to tell us about like have you ever found

“a crop circle creepy I mean yeah I think so I think they're really creepy well I do a nice”

I'm a really scared of aliens okay I'm a little bit scared of aliens yeah if I'm in the right mood and I and I start picturing aliens all gut scared of aliens yeah totally totally and by that of course I mean the little the little gray guys with the big heads which are again another classic 60's presentation to my end-extending yes definitely and I think Barney and Betty Hill were a big part of that too because they saw gray aliens but I feel like for me I watched Mars attacks too

young and the rest is history you know I've never seen that because when it came out I was like

hell no I'm I'm a baby I can't possibly see the scary movie literally I have no idea how I got my mitts on it but I might still not be ready it's fucking scary although I would like to see all

“of Sarah Jessica Parker's oof she's good at it for sure I think it's a good movie it's fun it's a”

lot of fun but very scary for a child and it really cemented my fear as did those like like I think the like shaky cam videos of UFOs are scary yeah well there's something inherently scary about a shaky camera arguably because that is a pruder film really put the kibash on the shaky camera party yeah but also because you I I'm sure that there's like hey it's like it's jarring you know you don't know what you're supposed to be looking at and it's you know the image is shaking

around and also you have the reasonable expectation that you're gonna you're about to see something scary because that's usually the context there yeah totally so you could like I mean if you showed me a really shaky cam quarter recording of a child's birthday party I would be pretty terrified yeah I mean I guess that's the the Blair Witchy and sort of ideas like you know it's like

“riding through the dark woods with the handicap yeah I mean I guess that's what happens in science”

yeah yeah and science is really good I mean it's yeah and like the end of it is crazy science is scary they do they have to show too much of the aliens at the end and you're like well

that might have been too much of the aliens no it was too much I think they should never have

shown the aliens is my opinion and it shouldn't have ended with him becoming a Catholic priest again yeah spoiler well the aliens have something to tell him about the lord I think but I mean but the idea that we think aliens are coming to tell us to not fuck everything up is really nice and that's if I if I am to believe in an alien or sort of like the story of aliens making meaning in my life like that's the kind of alien that I like to imagine and it

kind of maybe fits with crop circles because the idea behind crop circles which people start talking about in the early 80s in which really pick up traction in the late 80s and which there are still many many crop circles there are still people who love crop circles and study them and have theories

about them but they really had their first like top of the pops heyday and the late 80s and

basically they are their circles made in the crops it's exactly what it sounds like it's a fairly precise circle made by bending but not breaking like corn or wheat or some kind of cereal grain and they started showing up not just specifically in England but specifically in Hampshire and Wiltshire you know okay okay which is also great that the aliens have come all the way across the universe to have sure specifically it's an honor you know only to the south of England and the

a lot of the story takes place therefore around stone hangs which as you can imagine is very exciting to paranormal type research circulators yes and stone hangs is also relatively close to Southampton which in American is where Jack Dawson wins the tickets on the Titanic thank you for translating that and we're gonna watch some unsolved mysteries featuring a lot of English farmers okay we have what I think it's fair to call hot fuzz accents and I'm so excited to just share

this little moment in time with you this is from season two of unsolved mysteries so

twin crop circles is that nice yeah I guess that that's not true because we're just twins with

the episode about crop circles all of unsolved mysteries that's so pretty good where twins would die hard we'll take it everybody can say that hey that's true I do think it's funny how like everyone who can remember the 80s is starting to act like the people I remember watching in a documentary about the roaring 20s when I was an apo as history yeah I have to let people know

“it was ap I'm proud of it okay you should it was hard it is hard I only lasted one year and I was like”

nope I'm gonna smoke weed that was my one ap class I was like that is enough I am ready for regular placement made everything a lot easier after that yeah I also learned because I've been rereading the Ramona books because they're so good that when Ramona Quinnby's dad goes back to school he goes to PSU and I went to PSU wow that must have felt really good and I really think that that should be on their website that it's where Ramona's dad went I think it should be on your website

that you went to the same school as Ramona's dad yeah you're right I should I should put that on there jam it in she warn it in somewhere that'll just be what I start off with perfect the unexplained stonehead the great megalithic monuments of the victim I use stonehead is only

“one of hundreds of such monuments scattered wherever it's stacked described stonehead for centuries”

these populations have baffled scientists and laymen alike but recently scientists have identified another phenomenon that may relate to the mysterious British monuments which includes queen to a queen to circulate there is a photograph was taken recently in England it shows circles and wheat fields seem simple enough but in fact they are not simple at all no no one knows how these enigmatic circles got there voted gently from unbroken stalks of wheat and corn they

may just represent one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the century but maybe not nearly 95% of the circle to show within 30 miles of stonehead and all the rest are near other stone monuments similar to stonehead or the circles caused by something we can explain like whirlwind or they caused by something we cannot get what began to understand really you don't think it's whirlwinds charity down a farm 2 hours drive from London England in the early morning

hours of June 15, 1970 the 87-year-old farmer Chris Woods slowly drove a tractor through one of his wheat fields I'm 37 what is it me just after sunrise he saw something in the field that he had

never seen before he couldn't explain a huge circle had appeared in the wheat it's really

really amazing you know how the actual crop was laying on the ground and it is so so perfect really he looks exactly like Prince Charles the circuit just would found that morning has never been explained during the last 12 years more than 750 large perfectly symmetrical circles some of them as big as $100 a diameter have formed overnight and seemingly random fields of wheat corn and other crops

“the question no one can answer is how did the circles get there honestly there are a lot”

sloppy you're looking then I remember hold on to that observation the first year for one time was in 1980 fasty tail there it's being an unusual evening it's all last sort of flight the nights and we were flying around and as the aircraft banged around to the right I looked into the wing tip and there below me was this beautiful quaintupal it's set a large circle with four smaller ones around it I'm about what was the site and I questioned myself and what on earth did that

we were at a harvest in it was the last day of harvest we went out over the cobones in the morning the our last field and we come across this circle there was no real damages that's the corn was flat there so weird for them which is odd strike the crown was flattened down

I've been here since October 1957 and the first circles we saw were I would say 17273

that was a small circle of eight four yards across and then we saw another one the following year about the same size and as the years have gone on we've seen them 12 yards across with the small ones either side of them he said the 70s they are very en diameter the smallest we've had

from a centre where it's flattened the edges are very distinct the most wonderful thing about it is when you actually go at the night before and then the following morning when you get up early in the morning in the first light of day and suddenly there is the circle you just can't believe it

“all right let's pause a moment okay what are your thoughts so far well I think part of it is”

definitely that I maybe I think I'm understanding right that he one of the witnessers is talking about like the early 70s was that right so I didn't know that it was going on for such a long time I think I thought that it was like a phenomenon that happened over like the course of a few months and then that was kind of it so yeah at least for the initial you know the what the ones that sparked this

this idea this thing and then yeah the other thing is I always think of or we always hear maybe

that crop circles are like these incredible mathematical feats that are so perfect and yeah I just the the video that we just saw they definitely didn't look very perfect to me oh sick burn yeah well it's funny to call something a symmetrical or a perfectly symmetrical circle because like

“I didn't major in geometry but I'm pretty sure circles are symmetrical by definition that's why”

they're circles yeah um it's true and you're right some of them are you know they certainly not perfectly symmetrical they're but they're like you know they're they're very good of course yes yeah and so in terms of media coverage with the started showing up in the news in 1981 or it started getting public attention but then when people kind of looked back on their experience there's people as we see in these interviews remembering encountering them in the early 70s

um and a case that people also point to as evidence of these being patterns made perhaps by UFO's landing and taking off is a story out of Queensland Australia on a sugar cane farm in 1966 where a bunch of cane was flattened and some farmers had witnessed some UFO type phenomena

“I think flashing lights was one of the things that people talked about or at least one person did”

okay interesting and so again it's like one of these things where there's like if you're reading news from around the world which people are able to at this point they're these ideas that kind of are shifting around in people's minds or aliens are visiting different parts of the world

that could happen um and they went to Australia first yeah yeah but what do you make of the fact

that this is all happening around stone hanks I mean it's very convenient for this uh the story that whomever whether they be man or alien you know is is cooking up here um I've been a stone hanks and uh it is very much a tourist trap at this point so it's hard to feel very mystical there I think they're like fun through it gatherings that maybe can can give you that experience but it's really uh it's very big parking lot at this point I remember going in like 2005 and being very

offended that they were selling rock candy and thinking about it now I'm like I want to eat the stone hanks rock candy yeah I mean that's just good branding you know it is but I mean I think it makes sense that people would be more likely to be able to view this through a mystical lens because of the proximity to one of these like deeply mysterious aspects of Europe yeah

right and it does kind of lend some like second hand credence to the idea of like oh well like

yeah it's a magical place where there's energy so of course the aliens are showing up there or as Robert Stack or whoever was working their ass off writing this voice over for him says at the end perhaps the ancient druids saw circles left by the aliens and were inspired to make stone hanks which is well quite a fun idea that is a fun idea and quite the jump as well also I mean many people first smarter than me have pointed out that these sort of carrots of the gods ideas which

by the way the guy who were at that book just died like in the past year I think no RIP but you know that there's like an intrinsic racism to them because the ideas that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have figured out how to build the pyramids so the aliens must have helped them the aliens must

in conversation with carriers of the gods but I like that when we're imagining the druids

we're like no they did that themselves the aliens just kind of gave them the idea yeah it was more of an homage totally yeah totally one cool thing about the area is that there is a formation not a formation actually a man-made piece of art which is probably from the Bronze Age so from pre-Roman Britain called the Uffington White Horse which is this giant ancient

“picture graph of a horse made by I think it's actually building a transition to the landscape”

and exposing the the white chalk underneath and keeping it free of vegetation I'm going to send you

send you a picture of that so you can see it oh very cool it's not great that's really cool and

does definitely kind of hard in too props are girls I whoa what I'm looking at people is this yeah like a very kind of spindly version of a horse 360 feet long oh gosh meters yeah and it kind of reminds me of like if you connected the the connected the dots of a constellation like it it's giving you know big dipper vibes totally or like you know probably a better one to compare it to but it's giving big cave painting totally totally and there's going to debate over whether it's maybe

some other animal but I mean in any case it's just this big beautiful piece of art made out of make sure and I guess something I would I would suggest is if humans could make that then why can't they make circles and some corn yeah completely agree the point if humans want to make that then why wouldn't they want to make circles in the corn because one of the things I remember learning actually about cave paintings and my art history classes is that some of them were actually

executed in a place that it would be very difficult to get to to paint in order to view the painting which just kind of suggests you know the importance of the act I think in a way the fact that it wasn't casual yeah in some of these cases at least and that this the sort of human drive to create I mean I would certainly call all of this art yeah is deep seated and kind of hard to explain often and in the ways that we can maybe explain other human behaviors with more of a

cost benefit analysis kind of a thing yeah and how nice is that I mean I guess it's the same kind of thing of like why do we like across time and culture create religions you know it's like there's a bonding aspect right it's like bringing people together around shared ideas and shared reality I guess you know it makes sense that you bring people together to understand the world in

“different ways by making art about it that's what we do now that's what we're doing right now”

and this gorgeous tapestry are we the crops are we wish to see in the world I think we are I think we goddamn are okay let's look at let's look at some of our serialicists here in this episode let's skip to eight minutes and 45 seconds and we're gonna watch some on the same thing right

crops are called researchers yeah same unsolved mysteries segment and we're gonna hear first

from Professor Archie Roy of Glasgow University there are quite a number of them there is the frankly unacceptable one oh she circles being formed by hundreds of hedgehogs all marching around and circles what another one is that they are they's the British X-Body fox flying sources another is that they are due to the down drafts of helicopters or that they are caused by we're willing to solicitably that they are hoaxies by human beings I like to be certain

“no sometimes yeah I think that it's very reasonable for a person who's one of these I'm pretty good”

because they look so good but I don't think that they hoax theory can be held very strongly because there are so many of these circles now in eight and nine years logged about seven hundred 250 this year this summer alone they are having to be spent by a very big team of people making those circles is getting quite enormous I simply don't see the hoax theory as a very strong contender as part of a televised experiment British military personnel attempted to create an

artificial crop circle right and that's what the military is doing and yeah I mean I guess the

good you can tell me whether it's crop circles that is mechanically made or it is a naturally

“created they made a pack band when we examine and that's so cute the portion of plan that just”

comes out of the ground must be softened bent over and then hardened up again so not only is a mystery in the circle itself but what is it that is softening the plans bending it over and then hardening up a skinny little mask real mystery it's in price yeah if the circles are not a hoax okay let's pause so this is interesting too because now we're seeing so many crop circles proliferating in the late 80s and the you know naturally occurring observation that maybe this is

just a human created hoax and then the crops are coolologists are saying no no no even if some of

these are hoaxes I can tell which ones of them are hoaxes because they are different okay okay maybe that accounts for the sloppiness that I noticed in the previous video well I mean if you were committed to crop circles being alien created then he could certainly say that sure and I'm committed to that let's see okay of another you know so much fun stuff on this one yeah oh god the cat was scratching his ear and his foot was bonking the glass I was horrified that there was some

but your door yeah I thought someone was knocking on the window within that creepy way Mendo oh

that's scary that's really scary you know I stay up and I read my stories about froggers

meaning people that are living in people's houses without them knowing that's my bedtime story and the other night there was all these scratching sounds and I was so freaked out and I was like where are they coming from but then I figured out that there is a possum in our compost bag outside so it was really a great a great surprise and it all ended up really good because he was a beautiful boy oh I don't know I don't know if he was boy but well you know possums actually can see 27,000 genders

yeah in May we all like mantis shrimp okay I'm gonna read you from of course that most wonderful publication skeptical inquire from the winter 1992 issue and of course our Palagio nickel I knew I knew it was gonna be saw some people acting silly across the pond and said I'm and I'm gonna get in on this one god I love skeptical inquire I do get the the digital magazine

“I don't I should get a you should okay so the seriologist we heard from talking about the”

difference between man-made and authentic crop circles was Pat Delgado and he at the time this issue of skeptical inquire has come out has just co-authored a book with another seriologist Colin Andrews about crop circles and they're also heavily featured in this unsolved mysteries episode is Joe Nichols in it? Joe Nichols is not in the unsolved mysteries episode for some reason because he was in the one that we did when you were on our show doing spontaneous human

combustion so I thought maybe they would have brought it back. Yeah which I loved doing that one and was fun and I was very glad that they had him on but no this one is skeptic free and there were three books on crop circles that came out in 1989 alone according to this article wow which really also speaks to how well publishing was doing yeah yes so this article gets into the idea that they're like a weather phenomenon and there's another theorist who's put together the idea that

they're coming from a phenomenon similar to globe lightning but involving plasma somehow I don't understand you know that all the words that but it's interesting how you know there's patterns that start emerging and what people also point out is that there's more and more with each passing year like expedientially so and they're increasing in complexity okay perhaps because the aliens are you know trying to communicate more and more complex messages with us or perhaps because you

know it's things escalate when there's a fat and perhaps this is a human driven fat because it's getting a lot of attention well unlike the aliens I would think would be smart enough to know that

“we are not getting it you need to make it simpler not harder right and and what are we supposed”

to be getting from it and they're like do your math homework there are also people studying crop circles who think that quite a lot of the crop circles are based on human driven hoaxes but again there's this continued belief that even if some of them are imitations it's like a copycat crime

was that number was a lot higher than I was expecting and I understand why people would

“would think that at least some of them are legit because they're happening in different locations too”

so that also you know it always makes it a little less easy to designate something as a hoax.

Yeah and we have one of the academics that we heard from arguing that it would be too huge a team of people required to do all of this and what occurs to me is that if it is a human driven hoax then these people don't have to be communicating about it yeah you know it's something more like a meme and the way that you know trends spread today which we can observe very easily on social media where people don't have to talk to each other in order for an idea to catch on as

long as it's picked up by media outlets because then it can spread quickly and easily and of course much quicker and easier now than it did back then but in the closing narration of the segment Robert Stack is like even more crop circles have been reported since we aired the segment

including outside of Britain for the first time and it's like yeah yeah because you aired

“because you aired it that's why that happened I does also like it reminds me of the whole conspiracy”

theory thing where it's like you know how could so many people be keeping a secret at the same time and it is kind of like how could so many people be making crop circles and also keeping it quiet and maybe they're not you know maybe it's just not getting any coverage because they're telling guys at the pub and in the next day the guys are like well I'm not like calling the news about it I'm just gonna slap Tommy on the back and buy him a beer because that was a lot of fun.

Let me read this quote from the skeptical inquire a few would have underestimated the seriologist will to believe had they known of the crop messaged incident of 1987 the messaged written in the typical flattened crop style and with the words all run together read we are not alone Delgado told readers of flying saucer review at first sight it was an obvious hoax but prolonged study makes me wonder of the crop circles he said maybe these circles are created by alien beings

using a force field unknown to us they may be manipulating existing earth energy or the beings may be tristural ones laboring by the sweat of their brows that's chronicle again of course the message is really fun and also when the aliens have written you are not alone like let's use our heads everybody that's a great point Sarah very good point unless the aliens are like baby there are aliens that are alien to both humans and us yeah wow they're alien aliens or

it's bullshit or that yeah so we also have the issue that they happen overnight right they happen unobserved because if you could catch an alien doing it then you could you know have an alien and so farmers you know will wake up and come out in the morning and see a crop circle and say well we got damned and this article continues not only does the circle forming mechanism seem to prefer the dark but it appears to specifically resist being seen as shown by Colin Andrews

is Operation White Crow come on you guys wow this was an eight night vigil maintained by about 60 serialicis it cheesefoot head a prime circles location he's beginning in 12th 1989 yes winner of the most English location no word cheesefoot head it it sounds lovely I have to say gorgeous hey I mean in Portland there's cornfoot road by the airport again gorgeous yeah gorgeous I hope

I never get cornfoot though not only did the phenomenon fail to manifest itself in the field

under surveillance but although they had already been almost a hundred formations at summer with yet another 170 or so to occur not a single circle was reported for the eight day period anywhere in England then a large circle in ring the very set that being swirled in the same direction seemed to play a joke on meeting by upsetting his hypothesis because interestingly researchers will hypothesize that will it always goes clockwise and then the next circle will be counterclockwise

and things like that keep happening okay a large circle in ring was discovered about 500 yards away on the very next day then we have another quote unquote top secret operation operation black bird

“another surveillance operation using um I believe the help of the actual military including”

their infrared surveillance equipment putting it to good use I see and things are really escalating

and say that they were the ones who did the first crop circles in 1978 nobody noticed them

“for three years and they got the idea when they were at the pub having had a few beers”

and had heard about the case out of Australia where the idea was that the cane had been bent down by a flying saucer and thought that they would make a circle out in the field for a laugh and so they did and then they they just kept doing it and we're going to watch some news coverage about it from the time because I just really love that this is where the story is leading us now yeah and it's just so interesting that it wasn't the first yeah well and then of

course there's like the question of like what is art art is intent what are crop circles right

are crop circles intent where did those initial ones come from and were those previous attempted

hoaxes where were they accidental or you know because it's like the thing is like grass or corn or whatever especially old dead corn can get pushed down by all sorts of things for all kinds of reasons and a lot of these phenomena only become phenomena when people start looking for them yeah and I would also venture to say that if you're just walking through your field and seeing a bunch of corn push down without the aerial view you're not seeing that it's forming like a

truly meaningful pattern like I'm sure you could see that it is circle-esque but beyond that it'd probably be hard to like fully actually visualize what you're seeing as something that fantastical right exactly because they're designed to be seen from a distance from a hill so vantage is important but ideally aerially which is how we get to see them now because of course

“there are still many lovely crop circles to this day that's why and I don't know who else”

making them but I'm glad that they are hats off to you on this week of our award April Fool's Day. I have my fingers crossed that somebody is going to write in and say I like to listen to your shows while I'm making crop circles oh man that would be so cool I would love to meet somebody that did this maybe we should do this yeah maybe we should be the change we wish to see although I would also like to know about best practices for doing crop circles in a way that doesn't

interfere with anybody's crops ironically yeah because I don't want to I don't want to I don't want to take away any income from our already you know underserved farming community yeah but you know crop circles cornmases what about a crop circle cornmase I feel like we could hit up some local hats you know like some of the the seasonal Halloween farms and see if they'd be interested yeah what about a crop circle cornmase with aliens in it that would be so yeah that would be sick

okay we're on to something here I mean we've long discussed having a farm in which there is a haunted house so maybe this is the yeah the obvious extension of that point yeah there's there's there's a lot of potential because there's a lot of pumpkin patches and there's a lot of haunted houses but there aren't that many haunted pumpkin patches at least that I've seen now it's usually like the cornmase down the way right or well oh no a lot of times the cornmase itself is not haunted

which I always feel is quite tragic yeah it's just a regular cornmase but I mean maze can be haunted

by the spirits of the people who got frustrated when or the people who check their boy friends who were too dumb to figure it out amongst the corn okay let us watch coast to coast let's get some breaking news oh fine a coast coast breaking news it's 1991 and Britain has been haunted by crop circles for 10 years yeah this is not art bells coast to coast tragically this is just a normal

“new show okay for Southeast New England I know bummer sorry that's why we're not listening”

to the chase by Georgian Marauder right now okay oh I love this theme song wow good evening experts are tonight divided over claims by two men from Hampshire that they're responsible for the southspamest crop circles how exactly and dubbed by say they created the strange patterns with nothing more than a wooden board and a length of rope I remember this men decided to reveal their hoax when they heard the government was planning to

finance research into the circles but some scientists remain convinced the circles are not man-made I should be talking to one such expert in just a moment oh there he is again but from grambald

hoax is of all time the pair who both live in Southampton claimed to have made more than 200

“corn circles throughout the south of England and that's what I call success according to them”

the hoax began as a bit of harvest fund 13 years ago since then the patterns have become more elaborate many thought they were made by alien spacecraft some scientists have devoted their life work to the search for a natural explanation others have written best setting books on the subject Mr. Chollian Mr. Bar say everyone was conned and the newspaper which published their story

says it's spent a week verifying their claims for the first three years nothing happened to

storm we realized that we were putting them in fields so the public couldn't see and we then had to find a slope or a dip in the land at the motors could see so we were able to decide it on the punch bowl that she's put it on the Peter's throat she's fed hen and it was only a few hours before the first reports were coming through about the circle that was found in the punch bowl that she's for her

the middle scornful of the self-styled expert who camped out at known circle sites in the hope of filming the unexplained phenomenon but can understand anybody of that intelligence walking

“and making something of flattened corn and shapes and corn was quite honestly”

had it been an ordinary layman and goner I think we'd have trusted eight within the year the men say they planned their designs with geometric precision today and how they did it how they did it carrying the tin all day you said I mean true watch this time by the world and each corn step matters more than regular stuff. There is about this great job here just to Chollian Mr. Bar went to work firing out woods to make their crops. So they're showing

them doing it the secret they say is flattening the corn halfway up the stem it's just like

a throw been a piece of wood basically. By day with a battery for them normally they did it by

the dead of night next day they returned to join the actual work. That's some wire that he's using to hold a some string to kind of make sure that everything is geometrically correct cool I don't fully understand it because I'm not good with with a little bit of spatial stuff but in the chimney it's to help make the crop circles okay and when you get at one of these fields at midnight in the morning we would rather be at one of these fields

and have a week away and then say the fryns or something because anyone that's not been in one at midnight in an English country and you're doing a few beers and cheese rolls absolutely wonderful absolutely wonderful. But the circle guru to not so easily put off Colin Andrews who studied them for years was convinced this was not like the other. No here's Colin Andrews who studied them for years. Later way we can see that everything we can ever see

with a hose. The plants are broken, they are rough, the grain is on the floor and he's just free here with forever. It's extremely ragged, extremely ragged and it is obviously a hose. So into hoax or an unexplained phenomenon it seems tonight the issue is far from settled.

Well, exactly the other basically is almost all the corn has been harvested. This final

circle if it is to be that lacks the precision of many of the others. It looks as if the controversy is far from over Grand Bound Coastal Coastal Coastal Coastal Coastal Coastal Coast. We're back from watching that demonstration corn circle expert Patrick Delgado from Olsford in Hampshire. Mr Delgado you are not convinced them by the hoaxes. No I'm not except I'm convinced that it's a horn circle expert. It's the no way at all deep in your heart of

hearts that they could be telling the truth. I don't think you're telling the truth. They've endeavoured us. I suppose they've done their very best. Just say you think that some of them

“are just as bad feels like a smarter. But what I think today, out of that farm I had a look at it”

along with Colin Andrew and all I could see was that the crop had been pushed down and there were things about it that I could see that it was man-made. Now I'll go see with respect you do have a bit of a vested interest in keeping all this going because you make money out of writing for the shit. You'll make it yourself very merciless. What do you think of our crops circle guys? I mean what fun? What fun? I do think it's just I you know I love a hoax that doesn't have a ton of

baggage you know and aside from the maybe the people who spent a lot of time investigating this and the the resources spent by the government you know it's not a it's not something that's really causing a ton of harm it's causing wonder I like wonder I like when two guys hang out and do

and like wait for a response right like that's always something I think is so interesting about

people that create hoaxes is like that between the time you commit the act of the hoax and then

“the time in which the hoax is discovered and the coverage of the hoax starts like I think that”

that just must be such an interesting feeling to be waiting for that I mean we all have felt it a little bit when we're like doing a prank of some kind between like laying the prank and waiting for the person to you know interact with the prank in some way but um I just can't imagine doing something I I have too much too bad of anxiety to to actually do something like this but I do appreciate that they came out and stopped a bunch more uh government funds being

dedicated to understanding it that feels like they were like okay this is gone too far so I

think that's cool yeah and it does feel very in keeping with a pattern that we've seen many times now in the conspiracy theories of today where you know information comes out that should really be bunk the phenomenon or like kind of provide answers to this mystery that people have been trying to solve and the very people who've seen most invest in solving the mystery like no no thank you yeah yeah and I mean it's I understand that it's a really really hard

if you've dedicated that much time in your life to just fully I mean it's like your books or it's circulation it's like you know there are times like with with our shows that new information comes out and I'm like that but I said is no longer true and it doesn't feel good I don't like it and if you know I had written entire books about a subject it would be you know it it's pretty difficult to to fess up to that and so I get it yeah exactly and that if there if there

is something mysterious happening out there or if extraterrestrials are trying to contact us to help us which is a very hopeful idea then that's not negated by the fact that equally miraculously two guys are having a laugh because also it's nice to think that like you know aliens aren't putting so much energy into making art in Hampshire and like coming all the way here to not give us any particularly useful message just like give them some circles they love circles

yeah it's just the sidewalk truck of the great beyond you know it's uh I don't know I do think that there would be easier ways to communicate I mean unless we just cannot speak

“any kind of overlapping language so they're trying to talk to us in math which I think is what”

people think about this as like a very crude interpretation that would be nice well and one of the questions that people also have is like wow some of these cross circles are like pretty mathematically sophisticated like Shirley doesn't that point to extraterrestrial intelligence and it's like yeah maybe it points to nerds maybe but also maybe the people who do it like are really into math and also by the way the reason that they come forward about this at all is that Doug Bower's wife

grows suspicious that her husband is fending so much time out on Friday nights interestingly they these cross circles only tend to appear on Saturday mornings at least the ones that these two guys make because this is the night that they go out to the pub and there's a lot of mileage on the car and so she thinks he's having an affair wow and so he has to come clean wow and tell her that

he's been making crop circles that is amazing the theater of heterosexual monogamy strikes again

that's so cool oh and so they didn't really come out because of the government funding they came out because he didn't want to get yelled at by his wife again let's call it a little bit of both yeah and they just ended what the story ends in is you know a phenomenon that has outlived its creators

“and also that I think took off because it wasn't entirely created just by these two guys right”

they were acting off of stories they had heard elsewhere some of which also I think we're probably inevitably human created as well although of course you know there's there's lots of things that happen when people aren't looking that we don't necessarily understand intuitively in the natural world and that we can only find the answers to by by studying more but I just I love that clip where they're talking about it being just delightful and fun and you have a couple of beers and

cheese rolls and you're out in the moon light in the wheat field with your rope and your piece of

topic show it's fan fiction it's the next heated rivalry it is fan fiction and how incredible to

to be like this generation of like a straight married couple that just has no idea what the other one is doing like this is like this man's entire life at this point it feels like and she just has no idea you would think he would come home and be like like honey look at the look the one I made tonight but nope it's just for him it's just for him and his buddy yeah well that's the direction that we hope that marriage can move toward if we're gonna keep it around as an institution

“if you if you're gonna marry someone you should know about each other's crepes or goals I think so too”

but you know everyone's also entitled to their secrets and their private thoughts and their private

life I guess so I also respect it in a way that's true too but if I'm gonna marry someone for love

I want to be making cropped circles with them not every night but you know at least once unless there's hair to the dark or something and like maybe she could just come out one night and just be like I want to know what you do I want to know about like what really lights you up I think that could have been nice but yeah and she could just as I feel about baseball come have a beer and read the New Yorker yeah yeah and be supportive that way but maybe she was

no fun at all so it's hard to say or maybe she was super fun like another one was fun yeah maybe everyone's gay in the story maybe she is fun and gay what do you think she would be doing with her best friend on Friday nights you know we have no data on her we have no data but just if I'm gonna imagine something out of nowhere let's say line dancing it was 1991 after all what immediately jumps to mind for me is looking at tide pools yeah looking for like little

critters and tide pools well we aren't in the ocean yeah exactly and then maybe they like play a little like they like create a little family of all the different creatures and then they they like take pictures of them like the caughtingly fairies you know the thing about weathering heights is that it's made me want adaptations of all these sort of prestige costume drama novels where everyone is wearing latex and having sex the whole time and so when he said tide pools I was

like did they see any tide pools in persuasion and I was like sexy persuasion that could be good that could be really good yeah well anyway um so this is this is a this is a tail of of British people and the things they do and I find it as with the caughtingly fairies as you guess mentioned very very very charming and nice and great that um the mode of that no one predicted who was in the sort of paranormal research area when this phenomenon started was that that the people

who did it whether alien or not we're doing it for fun I know for friendship and fun is the mode of fun in friendship and doing and making something under the moonlight and I was looking at some red at discussions of crop circles and you know which I love to do for any kind of paranormal thing

and one of the questions was what happened to crop circles and the answer is we still have them

“they're still around but they're just not a craze the way they were back then you know I think”

that the debunking of them certainly became something people could point to as an answer although that didn't stop us from growing up watching creepy segments on history channel shows about crop circles and what did they mean despite the fact that we already know but also we don't know who's made all of them over the years and the question of how an idea like this spreads around and why and whether they're kind of different human motives that we can see in the

people who create them is all very interesting and I would like to know more about all of that you know the story is by no means sewn up yeah and one of the jokes that people made in this thread which I feel is somewhat true although I don't not not totally true is that kids today don't have to bend over corn in order to hoax adults they can just do it on their phones they can like use a i to do it at this point yeah but I just know that there are pranksters out there right now hanging out

in the corn in the moonlight and if you haven't tried it maybe this is the night what a beautiful thing

“to do I I really want to give this a shot yeah I think that you know the main thing really makes”

sense putting it like that and it's just like there are still a lot of mysterious elements to this which is really fun you know I think it's nice when we talk about something like this and it doesn't end up being tidy because you know both of us love some paranormal stuff right in our lives

at this specific time period and why around stone hangs and it's funny to realize that the

answer is because these guys lived near stone and they could only get so far in a night it's like such I mean okay so there are two possibilities here you know it would be like either they had heard about farmers finding these patterns of bent over crops and then they were like okay like we could do something like that or they just came up with it as an idea and if they just came up with it as an idea that's really really brilliant and really very very very cool

well we know they'd heard about this the story in Australia but I don't think that there was any media super locally about this kind of thing I think that kind of thing that once it became a phenomenon

“farmers locally were like yeah I kind of remember something like that yeah you know yeah but I think”

that they were inspired by like new stories from elsewhere in the world okay see and then there's

the mystery right it's like who are the originals and I think you know if I was gonna go full skeptic I would say that there was something explainable that happened that wasn't actually creating such perfect shapes and that it was like a memory of like yeah I saw these really strange like patterns of my crops being bent down but from that point like it wasn't necessarily that they had this evidence that it was so perfect but then you know you can extend that out into being something

else I don't know I'm not sure yeah I mean there's more meat on the bone because the Australian ones were like seen from above uh no they were noticed by I think it was just one that was noticed by a farmer okay all right but again it's like something that sort of solidified into this thing that could be understood and replicated right in these cases around stone hanks where it's like it's a circle in the corner the way yeah typically and also what do you think about making a perfect circle

if you have rope it's like the same mechanism by which you know you draw a circle with a compass thing geometry class yeah totally yeah and that that was something I was thinking he's like how could you really possibly achieve this and it's like actually it's what you use a string so many things that were like how could you possibly achieve this complicated like outrageously difficult act and it's like well you just tie a piece of string to something and walk around yeah duh and it's like

it's hardening to be like you know what we actually underestimate people with our theories because there's smart they know things we know different things from each other things that would seem magic to somebody else yeah it doesn't have your your background of knowledge even if it's maybe something that seems pretty simple to you and we like to have fun in ways that kind of leave behind something beautiful or at least mysterious it's like who why do we make that horse I suspect

it was fun yeah yeah exactly and it does make sense like it you can really account for the different ways that the circles looked meeting like the like you know the one guy was like well these stocks are bent down in a different way and and that would be because people were hearing about these crop circles and kind of different technique and had a different technique they like looked at that and the person was like how could this ever be made and they're like well I'm a smart person

“who understands math and I could make this but of course you have to come up with your own technique”

they're probably not doing the same technique as our two best friends with the rope and the thing because they're hearing about it they're not typically seeing it the people who are replicating these yeah perhaps and so if it makes sense it's just like a meme there's more than one way to bend a corn and every corn is a glamorous woman every corn is a glamorous woman thank you for bringing that back up just in case it was out of any one's head since last time we're back in the

corn yeah and I also I do feel bad for these guys who saved so much of their identity and being crop circle researchers and yeah having it be not some guys but like isn't it exciting to

find out an answer and the answer is that it was two guys having some fun I love that the answer

was guys having fun that's like never the answer yeah let's enjoy this one yeah the answer to the deelt love past mystery wasn't some guys had fun no it wasn't it was an avalanche yeah not fun not fun

“at all um but yeah I I think it is it does just remind me of a meme you got to temple it and everyone's”

gonna do something different with it and so it goes on and on and on yeah and it's like if you I do feel that it's always a good idea a lot of skeptics don't do this and if only for self preservation

leave the door open that there were some aliens what of the aliens were inspired by those guys having fun there you go and they were like we could have some fun I hate my wife and they went to their own planet and made crop circles there and drank alien beer which to them was because beer

“yeah just it's just it's plasma I don't know yeah I don't know I think the leaving the door open”

for wonder is never a bad thing I think making a career out of a mystery might be a might be shaky

ground because you know ever I also respected I like people who are passionate about things and really go for it so everyone in this story has a passion yeah and it worked out better for some worse for others and I just wish everyone the best I like that some people just thought to enjoy themselves in a way that nobody could have necessarily imagined you know I love it when any of us think of something that we want to do and we know it's something that we want to do

and not what we've absorbed from like cultural messaging that we should be wanting to do

“because it's just you know who would have thought of that and where did that idea even come from”

and then you're doing it I would love to hear that conversation where they came up with the idea

in the pub like that would be some precious audio to me I know that it's like we've made way too many TV shows about too many historical events but this one probably doesn't need to exist yeah I could be just like with everyone from HotFast. Danny Kelly, be perfect. it's already called sweet circles. sweet Kelsey you do you do a very mysterious show called American hysteria what topics have you covered lately over there so at the point that this

episode will be out for all of you I will have just put out our two-part series on the cultural history of dinosaurs and their relationship to American popular culture as well as American culture in general and how we interpreted the discovery of fossils to mean so many different very American things they were used to bolster popular support of capitalism is one of the things

incredible how we made that work I know right yeah life finds a way what topics have you covered

that perhaps someone who likes crop circles would enjoy well you know that alien abduction series

“we mentioned I think the episode that you did of spontaneous human combustion is a really nice”

companion to this as well I mean gosh it's like we've just done so many things around the paranormal I am both a skeptic up the paranormal and a believer in the paranormal so anytime we get down delve into those topics is a lot of fun I believe the paranormal deserves you know adequate research yeah you know yes definitely definitely and also space for the mysterious because when we lose the mysterious things get pretty stale and you're not out in the moonlight with your boys so

stay curious people stay by curious everybody I yep and that was our episode thank you so much for listening thank you for being here thank you for being an April Fool a wise fool a fool for love we of course have a wonderful bonus episode to share with you and this month it is the Orker report with our Deepsea correspondent Brianna Bowman there's been a lot of work in news in the last few years and don't worry this bonus is two hours long and we had such a good time making it for you

and if any of you want to hear more about fishery science specifically let us know Brianna's very excited to share more of that with us we were putting together another listener episode I don't know if you caught the one that we put out last holiday season but it's one of my favorite things that I have I can't really say made lately because I told Miranda to make it but I got to listen to all of the voice memos that you sent in about where you're from where you call home and it

meant so much to me to get to help stitch that all together and to hear from you all and so I decided

and I went through a few prompts before I realized I kept coming back to the same basic theme which is that I want you to tell me about what you love whether it's a hobby or a person or a place or an inanimate object I'm not going to do a full lies in maneli impression but I am thinking

“that a fact that you think more people should know I talked in this recent bonus episode I think”

about something I learned on an episode of all of geez it has never left my mind because that

when sharks eat something they can't digest they can just reverse their stomachs like a tote bag that they're trying to get muffin crumbs out of and I just think that's great I want everyone to know that not everyone wants me to tell them that but that's okay so something that you love whether

it's a feeling a place a thing the moment when you take the first bite of a a really good apple

a particular moment of the day anything and everything I guess want to hear about it and so do the rest of us so you can send a voice memo trying to keep it about three minutes or less I know that's a very short amount of time but we want to listen to as many of these as we can we do

always listen to every submission that we got but we want to fit in as many as we possibly can and you

can send those to [email protected] that's our email address for these submissions it's a step for drives reference sloppyandalive [email protected] and we will listen to them and enjoy them and we're going to keep those submissions open until I don't know let's just say through April if you're listening to this and it's no longer April technically it's over but

“listen I'm not huge on rules so take that as you will so that's what we're putting together and we're”

so excited to share it with you and we're so excited to keep heading into the spring you should know that Miranda Zickler is our producer and our editor and that Nikola Ortiz is our administrative assistant and I am so thankful to them both and Chelsea Weber Smith was our guest go listen to American history that's Chelsea show you can listen to it wherever you find good podcasts it is this shows sassy outdoor sibling we're the indoor one and I love getting to make shows with Chelsea

I love getting to share our tween fixations with you and that's it thank you so much for listening

“I can't wait to hear from you and if you want to send something in but you don't get it together”

to do it into much time passes and you overthink it like I would that's okay I can still appreciate your thoughts from far away and I'm so thankful for them too see you in two weeks [Music]