When I did geometry in high school one of the exercises we had to do was create various geometric patterns using just a compass, straightedge, and pencil. It is not hard to create interesting looking patterns using just these three things.

I don't imagine the pattern making would be too difficult, though getting specific plants to stand up and others to lay down may be a challenge. More complex patterns would require more planning, but the principle for drawing a bisected circle, or perpendicular lines are the same on a small piece of paper as in a large field as long as your tools grow in scale.

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None to speak of

I've always wondered why we have not seen a botched or incomplete example. Do the media exclude those, or are there no examples. A storm had to come up at least once during construction. I have always been impressed with their beauty, but as a farmer myself, a little ticked off.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

I don't wish to be rude - but have you done ANY, and I mean ANY research? 5 seconds with Youtube and I've found videos from the ground showing how they do it, time lapse videos from above showing how they do it.

What's easier - to hold one end of a rope and walk in a circle....or try and walk a path on a GPS screen that you've had to pre-program to be an exact circle, that will end up being less accurate than the rope anyway.

Well, to be fair, I *think* tashirosgt is saying GPS would be good for planning out reference points for whatever pattern you were going to do. In that case, no pre-programmed exact circle is required.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

Still entirely un-necessary. Superb crop circle designers have been around longer than consumer GPS.

Yes, Doug, I agree.

I'm still not 100% sure why this is such a hot button item for you, tashirosgt. None of us are denigrating GPS or surveyors. Have you looked at the various crop circle references provided in this thread, and if so, do they address your questions?

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

I have been thinking about this.
The method/tools of/for flattening the crop is an independent issue from point coordination issue be it ropes or GPS, so let's not mix them up.

Let's say you wanted to make a crop circle in a land that you own consisting of a single circle of 19 meters diameter.
If you were 2 people one person could hold a vertical pole and the other would flatten the crop keeping track of the radius with a 9.5 meters rope attached to the pole. The formation would look very precise from a distance.

Now lets try doing this with GPS or any other electronics which gives you an xy coordinate.
You select the center, read the coordinates, calculate the 4 quadrants of the circle in your head or with a calculator. Then you figure you have an infinite number of points left to calculate to pinpoint every point on the circumference. Then you go home disappointed.

I think there is a reason why the prank is called crop circles and not crop squares, triangles, ovals, ...

Circles are the only shapes readily spanned by centered ropes.

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"They reasoned that an object situated at the center and related equally to the extremes in every direction can have no impulse to move in any specific direction. In fact, they compared the situation of such an object with that of a man violently but equally hungry and thirsty, standing at the same distance from food and drink and unable to decide in which direction to move." - Aristotle

I suspect no one draws attention to them. Including, probably, the farmer. It would be interesting, I think, to see one of the so-called "experts" examine one and give a detailed list of what's different from it than from "real" ones. Then have an independent observer take the list of what's different and compare it to a "real" one with sufficient data on the point.

I think he's saying it's necessary for the more complex ones. The recent one of the phoenix, for example. Now, I think a couple of minutes of actually looking at pictures of ones from before the common availability of hand-held GPS (the first person I knew who had one got his in about '98, but I think he's an outlier) would show that there were some amazingly complicated ones then. I suspect someone could work out the design of, oh, the jellyfish with a compass and enough time, and if you can do it with a compass, you can do it with boards and rope.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The point about circles being the favorite pattern is a good one. I don't know whether it is ease of construction or some kind of tradition that "one ought to have circles in a crop circle."

As to researching claims about how people make crop circles, people keep bringing this up as if their Youtube browsing has closed their mind to the methods that are used. If this is so abundantly explained on the web, please refer me to an article that explains how people made a crop circle that required a large number of reference points (as opposed to footage of people walking around wtih a board anchored to a stake pressing down vegetation) and accomplished this task overnight. There are certainly articles about people making complicated crop circles in daylight and taking several days to do it. There are articles about people making simple circles with boards and ropes. There are articles by people who claim to have found circles where the stalks of plants could not have been bent by a board.

(Nobody in the thread has yet clarified the question of whether crop circles appear in tall crops, where ropes are difficult to use for the purpose of establishing reference points.)

The question of why there aren't obvious errors in crop circles is interesting. Comical errors sometimes occur when surveyors lay out figures for serious purposes. Detecting errors is complicated by the fact that there are probably photographs of crop circles on the web that have been photo-shopped.

I don't have an axe to grind about how people make crop circles. This was the topic of a previous post. ( Once threads get beyond a certain length, I suppose that most people don't read through them carefully. I know that I don't.)

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

Why are you not looking for any of this stuff yourself?

I think the main reason for having forums is so that you can ask people questions. As to whether a poster is obligated to do preliminary research, I haven't seen that as a requirement. I treat the forum as conversation. I ask people questions that pop in my mind when I have conversations. I do the same here. It's fine if other posters want to produce thoroughly researched and judiciously worded manifestos, but I don't think that should be the only content of a forum.

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

It is, however, irritating--in person or on the forum--when responses that are detailed and clearly researched are responded to in turn with, "Well, I don't believe you. Show me that I'm wrong." There is an implied contract to an intellectual conversation that both sides have to work at it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

OK, some quick research shows that people use GPS. http://orbsandghosts.com/photos/sara...n-crop-circle/

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

I bring your attention to the words "cut it" as well. This is the first I've heard the term "crop circle" used to apply to something wherein the grain isn't just pushed down.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Same here, and I CSP-doodled many crop-circle-looking designes in the pages of my notebook while not listening to my geometry teacher.

How might one get specific plants to "stand up," other than simply by leaving them alone? Wheat gel?

Getting them to lay down is a piece of cake - a 2-1/2' x 6' stomping board with guide ropes for the stompers works wonders.

Exactly, and that's one of the nice things about rope - it's cheap, and easily bought in lengths massive enough for massive drawings.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

mugaliens: With the stand up/lay down I was referring to the plants between the 'circle' elements rather than the plants within the circle itself. The ones inevitably tripped on or tromped over on accident.

Apologies for any confusion.

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None to speak of

I concur, and would emphatically empasize (in case people didn't get this loud and clear earlier): Using a GPS for crop circles is ridiculously unnecessary given the fact that randomly picking one spot in the crop, then using the rope and board trick has produced all the crop circles known to man.

Most of those generating the crop circules don't view it as UFO hoaxes, either. They view it as art, and have walloping good laughs at those who come along later, all excited at the ET aspects of their very terrestial handiwork.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

I don't think randomly picking a single point is sufficient to generate circles like the "Quetzalcoatl Headdress" on http://www.earthfiles.com/ . Several reference points would be needed.

As to the Sarah Palin crop circle, the relevant point is that complex designs can be laid out using GPS. If patterns in crops are to be disqualified as crop circles because they are "cut", then perhaps we need to set forth all the conditions for a "true" crop circle. Must it be created at night? That would disqualify the construction at http://scottflansburg.com/Scott_Flan...op_Circle.html

Nobody has answered the question of whether "true" crop circles appear in tall crops. Based on the remarks about this crop circle (or pseudo-crop circle, depending on one's definition) http://www.circlemakers.org/greenpeace.html , a change of methods is required when working in tall crops, although the circlers don't reveal exactly how they did this circle.

Having looked in to GPS further on other forums ( http://forums.gpsreview.net/viewtopic.php?t=14350 ), I think the correct argument against GPS doesn't have to do with the alleged superior simplicity of using ropes. It has to do with the fact that inexpensive GPS units won't do the job. Returning to the question of the original post, the thread on the GPS forum suggests that attempting to set reference points with GPS over the course of an evening would create random errors in their location of roughly 10 m, even if they were set relative to an arbitrary set of initial reference points. So the question now is whether the reference points in "real " crop circles (however that is to be defined) show this kind of error? Is that too large an error relative to the large size of the circles?

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

The pattern in post number 43 must have been produced using GPS Guided Tractors. They have been around for about three years only.

You have not yet clarified how can a GPS device help you outline a single circle.

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"They reasoned that an object situated at the center and related equally to the extremes in every direction can have no impulse to move in any specific direction. In fact, they compared the situation of such an object with that of a man violently but equally hungry and thirsty, standing at the same distance from food and drink and unable to decide in which direction to move." - Aristotle

Then you just measure off the other reference points relative to the original one. You don't need anything that wouldn't be familiar to an ancient Egyptian to construct any two dimensional shape, just some stakes, rope, a tape measure, and if orientation is significant a compass.

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"Any Sufficiently Analyzed Magic is Indistinguishable from SCIENCE!" -Agatha Heterodyne

"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." -Florence Ambrose

A crop circle is, generally, a circle or pattern based on circles in flattened grain. At least this is my understanding. When it was formed is not relevant.

Well, first off, I'm not actually sure what you mean by "tall crops." You see, one of the "crops" around here is Christmas trees, and I've not heard of a crop circle in them.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I'm not dogmatically asserting that GPS is used in making crop circles, however "crop circles" are to be defined. I am, however, (stubbornly!) refusing to let weak arguments asserting its non-use go unmolested.

To repeat the geometric discussion yet again, I don't disagree that one can lay out geometric patterns with ruler and compass or boards and ropes or threads and popsicle sticks. The only question is what is the practical difficulty of doing that in a field of crops, particularly in a field of tall crops? The fact that a person can do this on a piece of paper isn't an argument that this is a simple field method.

To repeat the "why would it be easy to use GPS to guide a board in a circle?" issue yet. again. I didn't say it would easy to use GPS to guide a board in a circle. My thought was that you could use GPS to locate reference points like where the centers of circles go.

(I know, nobody reads all the posts in a long thread.)

I do agree with the point that tractor based GPS systems are expensive and not likely to be affordable to a club of amateur crop circlers. So, let's assume that any GPS used by the club would be an inexpensive hand held unit. To me, the reason that the circlers wouldn't use GPS is that such units are too inaccurate. The only loose end in this argument is the question: "How accurately are the reference points in crop circles placed?". Some crop circle designs are apparently intended to have symmetries. How accurately are these realized?

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

Because it is much easier and far cheaper to use simple tools for the job. What more is there to understand? You go into a field, place your post, set up the rope and have at it. There is no mystery here.

Use the same logic of hanging a picture on the wall. You do not need a gps to locate a place to hang a picture, nor do you need a nail gun to drive the nail in, nor do you need a laser guided level to make sure it is hanging straight.

I'm getting the impression that you think that it must take an incredible amount of technology to make a crop circle. Just like anything in the real world, all it takes is planning and preparation.

Use a larger pole. How simple is that? And from the article that you posted here, it did take some extra work, but all it required was a little more brute strength. All else was done with pre-planning, poles, ropes and boards.


Because it would be more accurate to just use ropes and poles. From the link you posted here, it should be obvious that the accuracy just isn't there, unless you want to spend thousands of dollars on a GPS device.

Probably within inches. Seriously, as long as you have two reference points to start with, you can easily map out your design. You could probably test it on your own back yard. Get some rope, a few poles, and a GPS unit. Try some small simple circles that are 10 feet apart using the rope and pole method. Then try it with a GPS unit. I'm willing to bet that the rope method will be far more accurate than using a gps unit.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

I have the same reaction to the "simplicity" of dragging a few hundred feet of rope around by poles as I did in my previous posts - possible, not simple, the crop circlemakers do have great skill if they can do it, easier just to walk to the reference points with GPS.

As to the last part of the post, I'm glad someone finally agrees that the lack of accuracy of GPS may be the argument against it. I haven't found any crop circle researchers who quantify how accurately reference points within crop circles are set. ( It would be a hard theory to research since you must infer the reference points and their intended relation.) The argument that ropes and poles are more accurate than GPS isn't relevant unless the reference points in crop circle patterns are actually set with the greater accuracy.

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

Naturally. By "reference point" I was referring to a starting point, from with other reference points would be created.

1. Not man-made (then it's just art).

Do UFO's only land at night?

You mean like trees? Amazon jungle? How about one that's 10 miles in size, and it appears overnight. Now that would be something...

Bingo. Once a starting reference point is set, however, standard surveying techniques (an extension of HS geometry, really) are more than sufficient for establishing, with extreme precision, the additional reference points needed to produce any of the designs to which you linked.

No, they don't.

Yes, it is.

I would add that you only mentioned "inexpensive GPSes." Surveying GPSes includes a base unit which acts as both the starting reference point as well as the differential GPS transmitter. With this setup, the accuracy of slave units is on the order of a fraction of an inch.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

The only skill that is needed is high school geometry, some trigonometry, and a lot of pre-planning. There is no mystery here.

They shouldn't have to. Simple high school geometry, some trigonometry, and a lot of pre-planning is all that is needed for a very accurate design.

The methods used are the same methods that have worked for millennia. Setting up reference points is not that complicated. As mugaliens said in the previous post, all that is needed is the use of standard surveying techniques, if that.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

The fact that complex crop circle patterns were being made by people long before commercial consumer GPS units existed is NOT a weak argument.

You are being desperately obtuse and intentionally argumentative.

Can you make your POINT so we can see what it is that you are trying to get at here.

Who said anything about mystery? I'm not talking about armchair geometry. I'm talking about tramping around in a field. OK, let's go through this again. I agree that reference points can be set with stakes and ropes. And, in case there is any doubt about this, I'll say that I agree that reference points can be set with stakes and ropes. The question remains: why set a reference point with stakes and ropes if you can simply walk to it with a GPS unit. An, in case your going to say (again) that setting a reference point with stakes and ropes is just high school geometry and simpler than using GPS, I'll say again that I agree that you can set reference points with stakes and ropes. But I don't agree that setting a reference point with stakes and ropes is simpler.. And I'll repeat my example again. Suppose your reference point is set by two known distances from two known points A and B. How shall we set this point? Yes, it's just a matter of high school geometry to set two stakes and A and B, have two ropes of known length attached at A and B, have two people pull the ropes taut and walk to each other. (Or have one person grab the ends of the two ropes and maneuver till both are taut.) But how is this simpler than having one person walk to the ccordinates of the reference point with a GPS ? - no stakes no ropes.

Returning to the only relevant point, is GPS accurate enough? If you have two reference points that are hundreds of feet apart, it might not matter, from the point of view of the areial view of the pattern, if the reference points were 5 ft in error. If someone is going to comment (knowledgeably) on whether crop circle reference points require a certain accuracy then someone is going to have to investigate the accuracy of the reference points. in some crop circles.

It seems to me that "skeptics" have memorized a certain explanation of how crop circles are created that is based on how early circle makers worked. This explanation has become the stock answer and no use of new technology is allowed by the mental rules of this game. That would explain, for example, why there are no remote controls on televisions. There first televisions that I saw had no remote controls. Why would you bother to have a remote control on a TV? Controlling a TV is simple. Even a person without a high school education can do it. You just walk over to the TV and press a button to turn it on. Then you press other buttons to change the channels and set the volume. Why are you trying to make this so complicated? People who watch TV's don't use remote controls. You can control a TV without them. Try it in your own living room, you'll see. Having a remote control for a TV is as unnecessary had having a remote control to unlock your car or something like that.

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"Never let the task you are trying to accomplish distract you from the study of computers."

Hi Tash, then explain the the expulsion cavities in the main stem of the wheat.
Could not be caused by ' treading '. And the cause of batteries drained at
the site, and helicopters loosing power of flight while over the site, must give us pause.
Nokton.

Because it will be quicker, faster, and cheaper to do it using basic trigonometric techniques with ropes and bearings etc.

Why are you so obsessed over this? What point are you trying to make, exactly. And why, exactly, shouldn't this thread be moved to ATMS.