Yahoo News Gets Crop Circle Story Half-Right
Yahoo News is feeding readers a link to a new video it calls “The elaborate hoax behind crop circles.” The link points to a slideshow of aerial crop circle photography that purports to put the entire phenomenon to rest in under two minutes.
“It’s been known since 1991,” the video explains, “that crop formations are man-made when the original pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, confessed to creating hundreds of circles.”
The video does not, however, address the work of investigators, like Nancy Talbott of BLT Research, who continue to study the phenomenon and who’ve documented crop circle characteristics that cannot be accounted for by men walking through wheat fields with boards strapped to their feet. Those characteristics include:
- Abnormal enlargement of cell wall pits in the bract tissue of crop circle plants
- Lateral and longitudinal enlargement, and bending and stretching of plant stem nodes in crop circle plants
- Stunting and malformation of seeds in crop circle plants
- Crystal growth in crop circle soil that, under laboratory conditions, could be achieved only at temperatures that would incinerate all plant matter
- Magnetic anomalies inside crop circles.
While the crop circle phenomenon is one of the “muddier” topics in ufology, it is by no means the closed book that Yahoo News claims. In addition to Talbott’s ongoing work and that of others, the Deputy Director of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), Lachezar Filipov, was actively studying the formations as recently as last year.
Yahoo News also neglects to point out that Bower and Chorley were paid rather handsomely for their admission by the British tabloid, Today, and were unable to account for crop formations that had been reported years prior to their alleged hoax activities. In subsequent public appearances and during debates, they also strayed somewhat from their original story.
The question, as in all of ufology, is not whether any examples of the phenomenon are man-made. Without the slightest doubt, the vast majority of them are. The question ufology asks is whether there exist any crop formations that can’t be explained. That's the question, contrary to what Yahoo News would have readers believe, that has yet to be answered.
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