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Scientific Research on Crop Circles

gs21stc said:
My conclusion is that the evidence is good, but not strong enough.
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There is a major flaw with your evidence which I thought of after I made my last post.

Every year, the crop circles which are made up to the month of May are man-made (i.e. will require the access to footpaths) and any crop circles after that are not made by humans.

There is no way that your evidence will be able to falsify this claim. That is why you will require that the rights of way be closed until the end of the year to at least counter the above statement.
 
gs21stc said:
I think that there definitely is something natural about the simple circular ones. I do not believe in plasma vortex (Levengood). What I do believe is that the Ball of Light hypothesis (Haselhoff) might have some truth to it because there is a real and enigmatic phenomena which resembles it, Ball Lightning. I still do not fully understand the mechanism for the natural origin of the simple circles described by mhaze.
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Why do you even consider theories about non-human origin of crop circles when it is well known and documented that humans produce lots of crop circles every year, and the theories that describe a non-human origin are not able to explain such simple facts as to why crop circles have been practically unknown before the 1970's, when it became fashionable among humans to produce crop circles?

Whether it be plasma vortices or balls of light, there is no good reason to expect that these phenomena should not have existed 50 years ago.

I also do not understand why you think a "ball of light" would be likely, when as you rightly point out, the Ball Lightning is hardly understood at all. It seems strange to use something mysterious as an explanation to a natural phenomenon, because as long as it is mysterious, there is nothing to connect it to what you want to explain.

Finally, all the data that exists on the anomalies of crop circles are really invalidated because no attempt has been made to control for human-made circles. As long as researchers are not able to distinguish between circles with human and non-human origin, it seems safe to assume that all circles are of human origin.
 
gs21stc said:
The percentage that pedestrians killed by vehicles in London is definitely testable if you know for sure what causes the death of the pedestrian on the road when it is reported. You simply dismiss the ones where they were not killed by vehicles.
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You totally missed my point. YOUR proposal was to test your theory on FMD restrictions by closing the countryside for years. My point being that it's totally unfeasible and a pointless discussion.
If the roads are closed to traffic for a short period of time, and you don't see any pedestrian deaths, will you conclude that they can only die from vehicles? How about the other factors you have dismissed before? Are they not real?
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Quite ironic that you bring this up, when your counter to my argument was to insert irrelevant data to the discussion, just the sort of data that I'd removed, i.e. the Hampshire crop circle that was 1. done by a commissioned artist and 2. in a county that had no FMD restrictions in 2001.
I think there is a delay (about a month) in the appeareances of the crop circles in 2001 compared to previous years. There is certainly reason to suspect that the closing of rights of way is affecting this. However, if they were closed just for a bit more, eg. until the end of the year and you don't observe crop circles, that would lend more credibilty to that theory.
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Since this is not going to happen and since we're testing a past event, this line of discussion is totally pointless.
My conclusion is that the evidence is good, but not strong enough.
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And your alternative explanation is? Please provide supporting evidence, as well.
 
gs21stc said:
There is a major flaw with your evidence which I thought of after I made my last post.

Every year, the crop circles which are made up to the month of May are man-made (i.e. will require the access to footpaths) and any crop circles after that are not made by humans.
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I never made that claim. I would never make that claim. And the data I have (collated by croppies) does not make that claim.

Stop putting words in my mouth.

There is no way that your evidence will be able to falsify this claim. That is why you will require that the rights of way be closed until the end of the year to at least counter the above statement.
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Of course the evidence cannot falsify that claim, I never made that claim, you did.

As far as I'm concerned ALL circles are manmade, there is sufficient evidence for that conclusion.

YOU have no evidence to the contrary.
 
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Na.
Capsules aren't space ships.
The Shuttles, the aborted Buran, those are space ships.
Some means of manuvering in atmosphere and landing in a reuseable condition.
 
EHocking said:
I never made that claim. I would never make that claim. And the data I have (collated by croppies) does not make that claim.

Stop putting words in my mouth.
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You are misunderstanding me. I did not say you made that claim. I am just saying that some random crop circle supporter can make that claim and you wouldn't be able to counter it with your evidence.
 
steenkh said:
Finally, all the data that exists on the anomalies of crop circles are really invalidated because no attempt has been made to control for human-made circles. As long as researchers are not able to distinguish between circles with human and non-human origin, it seems safe to assume that all circles are of human origin.
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They certainly did measurements on known man-made circles. No anomalies were found in those circles. Since there is no known alternative explanation for crop circles which are not made by planks and ropes, the only thing we can conclude from the data is that some known man-made crop circles do not show the anomalies observed. The next step is to see whether or not we can explain the anomalies in the context of crop circles made with planks and ropes.
 
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I have recently investigated the idea that the sun has caused the pattern in the node length expansion of the plants. This site presents a good model of it: http://www.ufologie.net/htm/cropnic.htm

Haselhoff presents an equation which represent a ball of light directly above the circle:

NL-N0 = A/(h2+d2)1/2
where A is proportional to the intensity of the ball, h is the height of the ball directly above the centre and d is the distance of the plant from the centre of the circle. This explains Levengood's data quite well, as seen it Ball_of_Light.pdf in the OP.

The person who proposed the moving sun and shade model did not present an equation to describe it. I have to work it out myself (not simple) and I think this is correct:

NL-N0 = B ln {[(b2+(c-d)2)1/2-(c-d)]/b} + K

where B is proportional to the intensity of the sun directly above the circle, c is the radius of the circle, and b is the height of the circle. The value of the constant K is dependent on b and c. This equation does show and inverse relationship between the node length expansion and the distance from the centre of the circle. However, I couldn't use this equation to test Levengood's data because he doesn't have the measurement for the radius and height of the circle.

I don't think that the sun and shade model can definitely explains Levengood's data, but will not rule out the possibility that this model is correct.
 
gs21stc said:
You are misunderstanding me. I did not say you made that claim. I am just saying that some random crop circle supporter can make that claim and you wouldn't be able to counter it with your evidence.
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That means that the FMD evidence cannot prove conclusively that all the 'real' crop circles created in 2001 requires the rights of way to be open to the public.

EHocking said:
As far as I'm concerned ALL circles are manmade, there is sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
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There is evidence that humans can make crop circles, but there is no evidence that all crop circles are made by humans. You can extrapolate the man-made hypothesis to all crop circles since we do not know of any other way that crop circles can be made. However, you have to realise that this is only an assumption, not proof.


EHocking said:
YOU have no evidence to the contrary.
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You cannot use that to justify the robustness of the FMD evidence. The only way to elevate the strength of this evidence is for the rights of way to be closed longer, at least until the end of the year. If you cannot see this, there is nothing I can do.
 
gs21stc said:
There is evidence that humans can make crop circles, but there is no evidence that all crop circles are made by humans. You can extrapolate the man-made hypothesis to all crop circles since we do not know of any other way that crop circles can be made. However, you have to realise that this is only an assumption, not proof.
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A perfectly reasonable assumption, in my opinion. And, I might add, in Occam's.
 
arthwollipot said:
I still see no reason to assume that the simplest of crop circles are less likely to be human-created than complex ones.
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If the phenomena presented by mhaze is true, then we have to assume that there is a natural explanation for the simple crop circles. There is definitely no reason to believe that the simple ones are less likely to be created by humans than the complex ones unless we see an overwhelming quantity of crop circles created in the way mhaze described.
 
gs21stc said:
If the phenomena presented by mhaze is true, then we have to assume that there is a natural explanation for the simple crop circles. There is definitely no reason to believe that the simple ones are less likely to be created by humans than the complex ones unless we see an overwhelming quantity of crop circles created in the way mhaze described.
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Forgive me that I've not studied mhaze's claims. I've never seen the point when human creation is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Does mhaze have documented evidence of a crop circle being created in this way? Or just looked at an already-formed circle and said "it could have been done like this"?
 
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arthwollipot said:
Does mhaze have documented evidence of a crop circle being created in this way? Or just looked at an already-formed circle and said "it could have been done like this"?
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I don't know. I have requested it, but haven't received the information.
 
gs21stc said:
I don't know. I have requested it, but haven't received the information.
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Okay. Depending on how long it's been since you've requested it, it may be that mhaze does not have such documented evidence. That wouldn't surprise me, since no-one else in the world has such documented evidence.

So on the assumption that the evidence does not exist that these circles were created by something non-human, why is there any reason to accept the hypothesis? Especially when the hypothesis involves previously-unknown physical phenomena? This is a classic case for Occam's razor and the most parsimonious explanation, which is that humans created them.

This does not rule out the possibility of non-human-created crop circles, but it's sufficient for most reasonable people to dismiss the idea, simply because it is more probable that humans created them than that they were created by previously-unknown physical phenomena for which there is no evidence.
 
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