It is also my understanding that crop circles are generally made to straddle tractor tracks, so they can go to and fro without leaving obvious marks that are anything by the intended design. You couldn't plan that with a GPS unit.

Also, as I asked before, can you please define "tall crops"? My second thought, after our Christmas tree farms, was bamboo.

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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, lets see how easy it is to use a GPS. Say, for example, that I use a starting GPS coordinate of

Latitude, Longitude
44.070748,-100.371094

to set up my first reference.

Now, if I want to set my second reference point 100 feet at a 45 degree angle from my starting point, can you tell us what the next GPS coordinates must be to set up our next reference point?

Again, depends on how much you want to pay for that accuracy.

Depends on how complicated the design is. If it's just a few circles, than I can't see where it would matter. If it's some of the more complicated ones that have been linked to in this thread, then yes, 5ft will make a huge difference. If your first reference is off by a wide margin, then the rest of the design will surely fall apart.

No, you don't have to investigate the accuracy of the crop circles. What type of accuracy are you looking for? Feet, inches, millimeters?

It's not that new technology isn't allowed. It's the cost of doing it. Why spend thousands of dollars on fancy equipment, when I can go to Home Depot and buy the basic equipment needed for about ten dollars?

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

Well, Metricyard, I could ask you why are you so obsessed, too. (Don't know what ATMS is, so I can't comment on that. Acronyms everywhere these days. )

GPS units can display Cartesian coordinate systems too, so I don't think a person with a calculator would have a hard time finding the second reference point. ("It's just high school math", to coin a phrase.) Nowadays they can have a calculator or portable computer that would compute all the reference points quickly and show them on a map.

One of my interests in the thread is trying to find a reasonable explanation why crop circle makers do or do not employ GPS. Some people assert that its easier to manipulate several hundred feet of rope and use poles and stakes rather than simply walk to a location with a GPS unit. I'm willing to listen if someone explains why the ropes and poles are simpler, but I see no reason to take it as self-evident.

My own beliefs (and I don't say that I am sure of them) is that modern crop circlers do not yet make much use of GPS because they don't trust its accuracy. I believe that some modern circlers do use GPS to do a sanity check on parts of crop circle patterns. I believe that this is not a common skill. The main obstacle to doing it is understanding and arranging a reliable method to transform coordinates from a design "on paper" to the coordinates that GPS shows for the location of the crop field. A person with that knowledge and a portable computer or a programmable calculator can do this.

I see no reason that crop circle making is exempt from the trends that govern any other human activity. As time progresses, people use improved technology. This even happens in sports like golf where there are rule systems that attempt to limit technology. Another thing that interests me about this thread is that it shows me that "skeptics" can be as dogmatic as "believers". . I think that valid skeptical explanations of phenomena have to keep up with modern technology and actually refer to data, such as how accurately reference points are established in crop circles.

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

Gillianren,
By "tall crops" I mean:
a) crops that above the typical crop circle makers eye level
and/or
b) crops that interfere with letting a rope drag across them so much that maneuvering the rope requires keeping it taut.

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

As in corn/maize? So far as I know, people just don't make crop circles in it; the act of pushing them down at all would doubtless be difficult no matter how you laid out the circle.

Besides, my understanding of the rope/board method is that you lay out the circle and push it down at the same time, which is surely more efficient.

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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 see no evidence for that assertion...do you have any to present?

The "how" behind the building of crop circles has been fully established. As other posters here have stated...there is no mystery. There also is no evidence nor any "need" for your GPS "idea" yet you can't seem to let it go.

If you have some evidence to present, then present it...otherwise, you just keep saying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Didn't say there was a mystery. Didn't say it can't be done with boards and ropes. Only said GPS might be simpler. I think my comment is justified given how this suggestion is treated as heresy.

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

Gillanren,

If people don't make circles in tall crops then I agree this supports the idea that ropes and sticks are used.

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

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

I'm repeating myself here. Furthermore, we know that Crop Circles have been made for far long than GPS has been available to the general public. We have documented accounts of crop circle makers ( including the two guys who made > 200 of the damn things) telling us HOW they did it. (clue, they didn't use GPS)

IF you want to draw an Arc, you use a compass. A rope is a compass.

Are you really trying to tell us that you don't understand why it's easier to walk 20 metres by holding one end of a 20 metre rope, accurate to a centimetre, than walking and watching Sat-nav...not yet...walk a bit more...oops...gone to far, back up...THERE we go, which may be accurate to a few metres.

And tall crops? Are you kidding me? If you're flattening a circle, you don't care - because you flatten the crops as you go. And if you need to measure a new distance, you do it between the crops.

AGAIN - I ask you - GET TO YOUR POINT.

A crop circle out of a "tall crop," by which we apparently mean corn, would be difficult anyway, as anyone who knows anything about the stuff would know. It doesn't bend terribly well.

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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!"

djellison,

Aside from the points that I already made, what point were you talking about?

I've used 200 ft surveying tapes and "chains" and dragged them around in fields. I've also used hand held GPS units. I've done this with two and three man surveying crews. It's often easier to walk 200 ft or so with at GPS unit to a point that its to try various ways of locating it with angles and measurements or the intersection of two tapes. If you want a straight line of points spaced at 50 ft intervals, by all means use a tape. If you want a point thats 150 ft from point A and 128 ft from point B, use GPS, when it is accurate enough for that purpose. Ropes might be easier to manipulate than tapes and the metal bands that surveyors call "chains", but I'm not going to believe that they are easier than GPS on the basis of some armchair speculation that they "ought" to be. (And crop circle makers don't always flatten all the crop between two reference points, so the height of the crop is relevant.)

Nor am I going to take a 1991 description of crop circle making as the authoritative statement about how crop circles are make 18 years later - anymore than I take an MS-DOS 5.0 manual as a guide to current operating systems. Are you saying that people don't use improved technology as it becomes available? It's a feeble argument to keep saying that using only ropes and boards is simple. As I pointed out previously, it's simple to control a TV by walking up to it and pressing some buttons.. That doesn't prove people don't use remote controls. Simple tends to be replaced by simpler.

Saying ropes and boards are less expensive than GPS has some relevance if the circlers are unusually poor. But the usual behavior of people who have hobbies is that they began to buy all sorts of expensive equipment. So nowadays we have hunters with night vision goggles, woodworkers with laser guided saws, drivers with GPS units that tell them "turn right" or "turn left"., everyone and his brother with a portable computer. But the crop circle makers? Oh no, they wouldn't have anything but the simple boards and ropes. Just plain simple people with their simple boards and ropes. Right.

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

My point is this.

So what if they do?

Those that make them don't tend to own up to it. So you will never know which of your much loved reference points have and have not been made by GPS, thus you will not be able to any analysis.

Again - I'm left wondering - what point are you trying to make here.

I'll repeat what I said before - I don't think anyone here has actual experience with making a crop circle, either with or without GPS. It might be more fruitful to actually ask the people who have done so. I included several links in post 22 that might lead you that way.

That's just a suggestion, not a demand. If everyone would rather just keep going round in circles with this discussion (pun intended), please don't let me stop your fun.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Oh, I see now....you don't have a point to make. Thanks for clearing that up.

Seeing as how that would be "pointless" (pun intended), I think i'll decline.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Ah, R.A.F! - acerbic as usual. But I agree wtih Swift (and presumably you) that the thread is going around in circles.!

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

COUGH!

I'm sorry, Swift - did you say something?

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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.

Not me, nope. Sorry about your cold.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Hi dejellison, couple of years or so ago, MIT students given the task of producing
crop circles. Ropes and bearings not involved, science was involved.
They did reproduce a scenario where planks and ropes could not answer to.
Furthermore, the expulsion cavities in the wheat, and the loss of electromagnetic
power at the site, followed the scenario experienced on other sites.
Do we just dismiss and ridicule what we fail to understand?
Nokton

By failing to consider mundane, ordinary, reasonable, non-anomalistic explanations for crop circles - then the above is EXACTLY what you are guilty of.

Ah, no worries. Probably just hay fever...

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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.

Hi, dejellison, value your opinion. But in my mundane consideration, please explain to
me the expulsion cavities in the wheat stem of genuine crop circles, not evident in man
made circles, made by ropes and planks of wood, and why it is a matter of record, that
genuine crop circles can drain batteries, distort video footage, and effect the instruments
on a helicopter, and almost bring it down.
Nokton

Nokton, show the record, and we might be able to talk. However, these "myserious properties" have been shown to happen, if you believe "cereologists," in crop circles known to have been produced by the old, faithful rope-and-board method.

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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!"

Bingo.

I imagine that for a set of crop circles that are just circles scattered 'randomly' across a field, a GPS unit would work for finding the starting point of each circle, but then why not choose locations randomly? Or choose them by adding two lengths of rope together, plus an otherwise unused portion of rope? Create two circles, then with a person at the center of each, use two ropes of a given length (or combined lengths) to find a center point for a third? Whether or not the circle builders would use one is up to them.

For more complex circles such as this and especially this a consumer level GPS would not be sufficient. Their margin of error is simply too great. In a design like that an error of more than a few feet would become so compounded by the end of the pattern building process that the entire thing would be a loss.

In addition to machine error, the human error is huge with GPS, even for people familiar with the units. For huge shapes with no simple geometrical basis (such as the Sarah Palin circle) a gps guided tractor will do the job--they are given borders to clear within (much like coloring a picture in a book); but for circles done manually I do not think GPS units would be sufficient. Drawing a picture with pen and paper requires a different set of information than coloring in an already existing picture. The two are related, but not closely enough for as much carryover as what you (seem to be) hoping for.

IMHO, using a GPS unit would add trouble to the crop circle making process by making it overly complicated. The only thing I would use it for would be if I needed my circle to occur at a specific spot (say, directly between two towns or something) in an otherwise landmark free area. But once I got there, GPS off and rope out.

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None to speak of

Hi Gillianren, hope we can talk. What I was refering to was a study by MIT students
on reproducing a crop circle. The subject was broadcast on a cable science programme.
'Treading' wheat with planks does not create expulsion cavities in the wheat stem found
on some sites, nor the iron particulates found there, or the battery sapping radiation.
Indeed, during the programme, a helicopter was almost brought down by lack of power
whilst overflying the site.
Gillianren, I believe nothing that I am not prepared to evaluate and understand within
the confines of reason and logic.
For so long in mankinds history, what we dont understand, we make up an explanation
that is spiritual in meaning, or worse, we have to dream up ideas to support them.
Sincerely hope we can have contact.
Peter

If you provide more detail so that I can look into the subject myself, I'll consider talking about 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!"

Gillianren, am somewhat surprised at your response. Have given you details of students
endeavour to reproduce the remarkable qualities that some crop circles have, qualities
that at this time defy current understanding.
Ok Gillianren, will source from the net the detail you say you want, and advise you of
it. But have a feeling, the most convincing evidence would not satisfy you.
Your statement that you would consider talking about it, tells me much about who
you are, and where you are coming from.
Nokton

Hi, Gillienren, check out, cropcircleresearch.com. And, createdreams.com.
Hope you have an open mind, a closed one denies the possibility of true understanding.
Would enjoy discourse with you, as the walrus said, of many things, of ships and sails
and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings.
Nokton

Gillian.

The first one told me the page does not exist. The second one links to a different site which does parties.

Look, the reason I asked for more detail should be quite obvious. "Some MIT students did this experiment which didn't work" is not enough information on which to base a reasonable assessment. When? Where? Under what supervision? Did the people who found the "mysterious" properties know in advance that the circle was made by these students? And if this one didn't have electromagnetic effects, well, can you present evidence of one which did? Determined to have by someone without a vested interest? This is really basic stuff.

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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!"

Related entry from wiki.

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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