Video Review Guide

The Mystery of the Crop Circles

1996, Color, 48 minutes, Discovery Channel Circlevision Production

Crop circles came to attention of the media in 1978 in England, and since that time have become widely known world wide, from Japan to the United States (for examples, see the Crop Circle Connector). The video explores the efforts to explain the crop circles, and generally works to debunk them as any sort of extraterrestrial or supernatural force. Interestingly, they were initially thought to be hoaxes, but as they came to be looked at by tabloids and television, they took on characteristics of a collective behavior phenomenon. Several groups began to study the circles, making wide claims of microwave energy, radiation, and chemical soil changes. Most claimed that they were beyond the realm of hoax. Societies that studied the circles arose, even to the point of publishing a "scholarly" journal, Cerealogy, named after the fact that most circles were found in wheat, barley or other cereal grain fields.

The initial hoaxers, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward to claim their work, even providing drawings and detailed descriptions of many circles and methods of making them. They have a range of ingenious tools like the baseball cap surveying tool for making incredibly straight lines. Hoaxers express amusement that even mistakes they made were assigned significance by the "scholars." The video shows a circle making contest, with some of the best hoaxers in England making circles. The perpetrators explain in detail how they do circles, demonstrate the techniques, and even discuss and show an associated UFO hoax. The hoaxers were often themselves former "believers" who took up circle making to show themselves that the phenomena were very "earthbound."

Of special interest in the video are crop circles experts and believers who, when faced with the evidence, still have a hard time accepting the hoaxes. Shown are major figures like Jon Michell and Rupert Shelldrake. Also of note are comments that believers seem to have an intense need to make crop circles something special and that they tend to see what they expect to see. You might also like to see what Carl Sagan had to say about the circles.

Questions

1. In what ways are the crop circle believers violating Occam's Razor?
2. Even the video makes some claims about the collective mind of humans with a discussion of crop designs as similar to entoptic phenomena. What are they? Do you believe that? What are problems with it? Could it be an effort on the part of video makers to leave believers some "dignity?"
3. Why do you think some believers continue to believe in spite of solid evidence of circles being hoaxes?

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larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
08/18/98