I was watching the movie Signs and this question came to mind.
shareit was something that seemed cool at the time, i spent a few years of my childhood in a rural town in upstate NY, i remember my brothers friend doing it, a piece of wood with rope on it!
shareit seemed like a lot of work
sharethere was a lot of buzz around UFOs and these kinds of things around the 80s and 90s, maybe because of programs like unsolved mysteries (a favorite of mine) and xfiles, so i think that created a lot of buzz! i remember my brothers friend spending 5 or 6 hours out on some field doing a crop circle and nobody even noticied it!
sharelol
shareI didn't know that they had stopped. I've heard about them, but the only "experience" I've had with them is an episode of Midsomer Murders (series 4, episode 3). I always believed they were a prank, though.
shareI remember watching "Sightings" -- it's like 'Hard Copy' but for the strange and abnormal-- and it showcased a segment about crop circles. I think they did explain how anyone can create them with a plank of wood and some rope; however, they found discrepancies, which might differentiate "fake" from "authentic": samples of wheat from some crop circles were magnetized, whereas other wheat samples from other 'circles were not, which may conclude the magnetized wheat were [possibly] of alien origin and the ones that weren't magnetized were perhaps fake/hoaxes.
Interesting, though. But yes, I haven't heard much about the above since it was aired and broadcast in the 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVSQuNBreQc&ab_channel=BBC
shareHaha, that clip was awesome, especially the question-line "Is it real or man-made?"
I was a young teen when I watched that show. Thought it was "real life" but also questionable at the same time. I actually started to watch the first few episodes of the show a couple of years ago (I cannot recall the website I watched it from), but I could totally see the interviewees reading from a script. It was so obvious! I then started looking through IMDB, and they had the interviewees listed as actors instead of the normal "as person/self" [I don't remember the proper designation the site listed them as].
With that I presumed, either the people on screen "represented" the real people, or rather most likely just actors playing their part. I can assume the same can be said about magnetic wheat straws?
Tangent:
I remember coming home from school and watching 'Sightings' (1991) when I got home cause the "Syfy" channel had it playing. What's interesting is that this show first introduced me to Osama bin Ladin (a few years after 1994 -- Clinton "okayed" a bombing that killed a bunch of people attending a wedding, the family of Osama, and a couple of years before 9/11). So a young kid, prolly junior high school age had been suffering the world wide web, and in doing so engaged in a mutual relationship with Osama's people [Alkidia]. The FBI soon was involved, and shut down that communication (I don't remember what the context was about them talking to each other online was about -- I'm pretty sure it wasn't terror-related, and most likely Alkidia trying to create "relationships" within the United States. The segment ends with a huge disclaimer [i.e., "trigger warning", rebranded for the current youth].
Then some time passed, and I remember seeing tv news broadcasts about terrorists bombing U.S. embassies (around 1998ish), and that this "Osama bin Ladin" was the key mastermind be hide it. And well, I guess we can all understand what happened in 2001.
The pranksters were alien shapeshifters. They've now returned to their home world.
sharePenalties increased for trespassing, destruction of crops
Farmers might have drones or other surveillance equipment now
The fad is passé, the gig is up, the prank just doesn’t pop anymore.
As I remember it was started by a couple of guys in the UK as a joke but was then blown up by the tabloids and taken seriously by some people - it became part of the Von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods, trend.
When they stood up and announced it was us, plus some planks and string, a lot of people didn't want to believe them. I'm guessing it popped the bubble of that particular silliness and it dropped completely out of the mainstream.
Yeah.
Doug Bower and Dave Chorley were their names. They made hundreds of them in the south-west of England over a 15 year period. Eventually, they demonstrated on camera exactly how they did it, pointed out (with photographic evidence) that most of the ones they had been responsible for contained a double D (Doug & Dave) signature somewhere in the design... and some people still chose not to believe them.
'No human being could possibly... cyclonic winds... alien visitors.' They. Just. Showed. You.
Apparently, about thirty crop circles still get made every year in the UK even now. But they no longer hit the news. And I think most of the people who do it are reasonably open about doing them because they're proud of their work.
They've become very elaborate because people can map them out using computers now, although I'm told the builds themselves are largely still done with planks and string.
If it was pranksters, maybe they got tired of the UFO's getting all the attention and recognition for the circles.
Maybe they were like, "We do all the work, and some damn UFO gets all the credit for this. I wish we could be the famous ones." Then the other prankster was like, "Yah, but if we say it's us, then we're going to be considered trespassers and caught for vandalizing people's farm land." Then the other prankster is like, "Crap, why bother making the damn circles then."