Now even ET is making crop circles (with a little help from GPS and MICROWAVES)

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 8:21 PM on 2nd August 2011

UFO fanatics clinging to the belief that extra-terrestrials are responsible for crop circles sometimes like to echo the X Files catchphrase: ‘The truth is out there.’

But, as it turns out, the answer might actually be much closer to home - inside your kitchen in fact.

Because, for example, this 200ft image of a pipe-smoking alien – carved into a Wiltshire field – could have been created using an ordinary microwave oven, according to scientists.



A handheld device called magnetron – made using parts from the common household cooker and a 12-volt battery – may have ushered in a new generation of crop circles.

Professor Richard Taylor, a physicist, claims to be able to reproduce the intricate damage inflicted on crops using such a gadget developed by his team at the University of Oregon.

He believes similar advances have been made by others – despite avid UFO spotters insisting that the growing phenomenon is beyond scientific understanding.

Prof Taylor said microwaves – the radiation waves that are capable of heating food when utilised in an oven - cause crop stalks to fall over and cool in a horizontal position.

The technique could explain the speed and efficiency of the artists and the incredible detail that some new crop circles exhibit, such as the alien, which was created two weeks ago alongside an ancient white horse at Cherhill, near Stonehenge.

Dispensing with rope, wooden planks and bar stools that have traditionally been used to create such designs, Prof Taylor suggested these spectacular patterns could also be carved with lasers.

And he believes the satellite Global Positioning System could track the markings.

Mathematical analysis of some of these ever-more complex designs has revealed the use of constructions lines, invisible to the eye, that are used to design the patterns.

Writing in Physics World, he said: ‘Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily.

‘This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.’

Physics World editor Matin Durrani said: ‘It may seem odd for a physicist such as Taylor to be studying crop circles, but then he is merely trying to act like any good scientist - examining the evidence for the design and construction of crop circles without getting carried away by the side-show of UFOs, hoaxes and aliens.’

But as fascinating as the patterns are to scientists, farmers find crop circles infuriating.

Tim Carson, who owns the land where the recent alien design appeared, has had 125 circles on his land since 1990.

The price in ruined crops is particularly steep this year because of soaring fuel and fertiliser costs, and a 25 per cent drop in wheat yields due to the drought.

‘I’m beginning to get a bit tired of it all,’ said Mr Carson.

‘Each circle costs me £1,000 in lost income. This year, I decided to destroy circles as soon as I found them, but that means losing more crops. And, whatever you do, the circles affect the growing next year, as the thick mat of crops covers soil, compromising its quality.’

Every year, 50 to 60 circles materialise in the rolling chalk downlands of Wiltshire.

In the rest of the world put together, only 40 to 50 appear annually.

And, in recent years, a booming tourist trade has developed. From Belgium, Holland, America, Norway and Australia, crop-circle enthusiasts come in their thousands — each with their own theory, each rushing to a new site as soon as it is reported.

This week, within hours of the first reports of a new circle on Windmill Hill — near the neolithic stone circle at Avebury — a Dutch tour party of nine people rushed to the spot.

‘There are heaps of biophysical anomalies here,’ said the tour leader, Janet Ossebaard, 45, author of Crop Circles: Scientific Evidence.

‘This wasn’t made by people, otherwise you’d see damage from board marks [where hoaxers lay planks to flatten the wheat]. It’s been hit by a plasma vortex.

‘You can see the burn marks on the crops and cavities,’ she says, holding up a grain stalk, which does indeed have small holes in it.

‘We also found a half-fried caterpillar. This is a vortex that has been intelligently guided — not by hoaxers, nor the Army [which is heavily represented in this part of Wiltshire].’

Crop circles have been reported in England since 1678, when a Hertfordshire news pamphlet referred to The Mowing Devil, a creature that cut a farmer’s oat crop into a series of concentric circles.

In the 19th century, occasional circles were recorded and the first-known photograph of one appeared in Sussex in 1932.

But it wasn’t until the early Nineties that Wiltshire crop circles started multiplying at an extreme rate.

In 1990, Led Zeppelin released an album, Remasters, with a picture on the cover of an elaborate crop circle created on Mr Carson’s land.

Il y a aussi Jean Pierre Petit qui délire bien dans le genre.

Je ne vois pas beaucoup de différence, c'est juste une façon de sauver la théorie micro-ondes pulsées peut-être pas produites par un truc humain.

Physics could be behind the secrets of crop-circle artists
1 August 2011 | Source: Physics World

In this month’s edition of Physics World, Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, takes a serious, objective look at a topic that critics might claim is beyond scientific understanding – crop circles.

As the global crop-circle phenomenon grows alongside advances in science and technology, Taylor notes how physics and the arts are coming together to produce more impressive and spectacular crop-circle patterns that still manage to maintain their mystery.

Today’s crop-circle designs are more complex than ever, with some featuring up to 2000 different shapes. Mathematical analysis has revealed the use of constructions lines, invisible to the eye, that are used to design the patterns, although exactly how crop circles are created remains an open question.

According to Taylor, physics could potentially hold the answer, with crop-circle artists possibly using the Global Positioning System (GPS) as well as lasers and microwaves to create their patterns, dispensing with the rope, planks of wood and bar stools that have traditionally been used.

Microwaves, Taylor suggests, could be used to make crop stalks fall over and cool in a horizontal position – a technique that could explain the speed and efficiency of the artists and the incredible detail that some crop circles exhibit.

Indeed, one research team claims to be able to reproduce the intricate damage inflicted on crops using a handheld magnetron, readily available from microwave ovens, and a 12 V battery.

As Taylor writes, “Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily. This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.”

Matin Durrani, Editor of Physics World, says, “It may seem odd for a physicist such as Taylor to be studying crop circles, but then he is merely trying to act like any good scientist – examining the evidence for the design and construction of crop circles without getting carried away by the side-show of UFOs, hoaxes and aliens.”

Making a crop circle

Even the preliminary stage of crop-circle construction – mapping the proposed design – is not an easy task. The appearance of the first Triple Julia formation in July 1996 was pre-empted by a single Julia formation several weeks earlier. This "warm-up" design took a team of 11 surveyors five hours just to measure out, and a surveying company later estimated that one of its engineers would have required at least five days to map out each of the three intertwining patterns. But once their maps are complete, crop-circle artists face a still more difficult problem: how do you imprint patterns in crops that are a challenge even to draw on paper?

Traditional circle-makers employed "stompers" (wooden planks attached to two hand-held ropes), string and garden rollers, plus bar stools to allow artists to vault over undisturbed crops. Despite their primitive appearance, stompers are a surprisingly efficient tool for flattening crops, especially when driven by skilled hands. However, modern designs have evolved beyond the traditional requirement that stalks be flattened rather than broken: formations now feature stalks that are carefully sculpted to create intricate textures within the geometries. For example, the stalks in each of the circles of the Triple Julia pattern formed a spiral. Multiple layers of bent stalks can also be woven together, creating shadowy textures that evolve over days in the sunlight due to the stalks' phototropic responses.

Hence, to imprint their vast pictographs before sunrise, today's artists have to work in co-ordinated teams. One such team is known as the Circlemakers, and when – in a rare breach of secrecy – it allowed BBC filmmakers to document its construction of a 100-circle roulette pattern in 1998, team members were observed physically implanting circles at the remarkable rate of one every minute. Circlemaker Will Russell summarized their motivation: "To push the boundaries of what people think is humanly possible", while his colleague Rod Dickinson stressed that this rate was sufficient to imprint the Triple Julia pattern in one night.

Despite such claims, the larger scale and higher precision of the Triple Julia design would have made it significantly more challenging to create than the Circlemakers' roulette. There are further signs that traditional physical imprinting techniques are reaching their limits. One of 2009's pictographs required three nights to complete, and its pattern progression is shown in figure 4. If artists want to maintain the movement's secrecy and anonymity, it is clear that they will need to exploit more efficient construction methods.





Biophysical speculations

Intriguingly, experiments carried out by biophysicists raise the possibility that some circle-makers may already be changing their methods. Independent studies published in 1999 and in 2001 reported evidence consistent with what you would expect to see if the crops had been exposed to radiation during the formation of patterns. The patterns studied date back to the mid-1990s, and include the original Triple Julia. Figure 5 shows the results of an investigation of "pulvini", the visco-elastic joints that occur along wheat stalks. Eltjo Haselhoff, a medical physicist, found that pulvini on bent stalks within a 9 m-wide circle were elongated compared with undamaged crops in the same field. Although several well-understood factors can cause pulvini to swell, including gravitropism (the directional growth of stalks in response to gravity) and "lodging" (bending of stalks caused by wind or rain damage), Haselhoff dismissed them based on the magnitude of the increase, and its symmetric fall-off from the circle's centre to its edge.

Haselhoff's findings built on the earlier research of William Levengood, a biophysicist at a Michigan-based crop-seed consultancy called Pinelandia Biophysics Laboratory. Levengood, who found similar results on 95% of 250 crop formations in seven countries, proposed that the elongated pulvini were a result of superheating from electromagnetic radiation. Such radiation, he theorized, would cause stalks to fall over and cool in a horizontal position. He found further evidence for superheating in changes in the crop's cellular structure and in the numerous dead flies stuck to seed heads in the formations.

Levengood and Haselhoff both followed up their work by removing crop seeds from the field and placing them in growth chambers controlled for light, humidity and temperature. They found that while seeds taken from the surrounding crop grew at normal rates, seeds from the formations grew up to four times slower in 90% of the measured formations.

Although both researchers' findings were published in Physiologia Plantarum (W C Levengood 1994 92 356 and 1999 105 615; E H Haselhoff 2000 1 124), a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the science of plant growth, their results failed to bring the crop-circle debate to a close. The authors' own speculations did not help matters: Levengood interpreted his results as evidence of Meaden's plasma vortex theory, while Haselhoff proposed that the sources of radiation were the mysterious balls of light that some observers have reported hovering over formation sites. Under the circumstances, scientists' reluctance to explore such controversial findings has outweighed their curiosity, and neither Levengood nor Haselhoff's work has ever been reconfirmed or disproved by subsequent studies.

Consequently, their research merely fuelled the long-running discussions about human hoaxers, atmospheric effects and, of course, extraterrestrial artists. Last June I entered the debate by suggesting in Nature (465 693) that terrestrial artists would not need to bend any laws, but they would need mathematical skills to plot today's epic designs and scientific awareness to exploit technological advances. This suggestion was met with anonymous hate-mail from UFOlogists and others accusing me of spreading misinformation as part of a massive cover-up operation. I surfed the conspiracy websites to find out who I was supposedly conspiring with and found that the most likely culprit was a collaboration between the UK, German and US secret services!



Although aliens and government conspiracies cannot be excluded with 100% surety, Occam's razor (which states that explanations involving the fewest assumptions are the most likely) supports the human-artist scenario. Might some artists therefore be supplementing physical implantation techniques with microwaves?

Intriguingly, a group of crop-circle enthusiasts called the BLT Research Team claims to be able to replicate the observed changes to pulvini using 30 s exposures to microwaves generated by magnetrons from readily available microwave ovens. Today's magnetrons are small and light, and some require only 12 V battery power supplies. Haselhoff and Levengood used the Beer–Lambert principle, which relates the absorption of radiation to the properties of the material, to model the radial dependence of the pulvini swelling. For a typical 9m circle, Haselhoff's model indicated a radiation point source placed 4 m above the circle's centre. Once superheated with this source, the stalk orientation could be readily sculpted, speeding up circle creation. Although this appealing hypothesis fits the published facts, biophysicists will clearly need to expand on these preliminary experiments if such speculations are to become accepted.


Still seeking solutions

Determining the technology behind crop-circle making has implications beyond mere curiosity and art appreciation. Traces of some patterns ("ghost formations") can still be seen in the subsequent year's crop, suggesting long-term damage to the crop field consistent with Levengood's observations of stunted seed growth. Crop formations are harvested every year, and so these damaged crops are entering our food chain. Intriguingly, Levengood's results showing stunted growth came from crop circles that appeared early in the season in immature crops prior to anthesis (flowering). However, he also reported that if the seeds were instead removed from circles etched in mature crops, then the growth rate was increased fivefold. This observation led Levengood to develop and patent Molecular Impulse Response technology, which accelerates crop growth by applying electrical pulses.

Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily. Researchers studying modern pictographs have to take to the air to photograph the latest patterns before they disappear forever under the harvester's blades. This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history. Can you unlock the secrets to their success?