Crop circles 2013: more false reporting of facts from the British press  

One has come to expect by the year 2013, that “crop circles” will be generally misrepresented by major British newspapers, in order to deceive the British public into thinking that “nothing really is going on”. One of the more transparent efforts of that kind appeared in the Mail Online on July 31, 2013 (see www.dailymail.co.uk). Its title was “Worst crop circles ever! What happened to the patterns that delighted and baffled the world?”:  

The Daily Mail is generally regarded as a sensationalist newspaper, specializing more in entertainment than real news. Also it has been a poor year for new crop circles in England, with about half the number appearing as in previous years. Similar numbers as in previous years have been appearing however in European countries such as Holland, France, Italy, Switzerland or the Czech Republic. Two crop pictures were cut out by English farmers, before any photographs could be taken.  

With those caveats in mind, let us look at how the Mail Online presented the 2013 crop-circle season to its millions of (largely British) viewers. What they did was to choose the three worst crop pictures of 2013, shown at the top of the slide below, to suggest that these ridiculously bad patterns were representative or even the best of what the whole season had to offer:  

Also shown in the slide above are seven other crop pictures of 2013 from England, Italy or Switzerland. All seven of those are quite respectable efforts in an artistic sense. Some even contain clever codes, or possibly useful scientific information.  

One image (shown at centre left) describes how a certain low-energy nuclear reaction, S + D + H > K, may be useful for producing clean electrical energy. The next image, a collection of nine concentric rings, describes a Schwarzschild wormhole. Another complex image (shown at centre bottom) shows a clever code for “1947”, the year of a Roswell UFO crash. It appeared on the same day July 7 that Google ran a video game to recall that crash. Yet another image (shown at bottom right) describes a Grand Sextile alignment of five planets and the Moon, which occurred on July 29, 2013.  

It has been a somewhat poor season for new crop pictures, but the authors of that Mail Online article totally misrepresented the facts of this matter. Surely they would have known what the true facts might be? It is not really worth discussing here the textual content of that article, or its various debunking claims, which seem far more fiction than fact.  

As noted in the slide below, the British press has gained a terrible reputation for misreporting or other inaccuracies, so much so that the UK government set up a “Leveson Inquiry” to probe its practices, and to suggest further means of regulation:  

If the citizens in a democracy do not know what is true or what is not, how can they effectively exercise their vote? How can farmers know whether crop circles are made by paranormal forces, or else by hoaxers with rope and boards, if all they can read in the British newspapers is disinformation?  

Thus far Leveson has not considered inaccurate or biased reporting by British newspapers on the Internet, only in printed paper form. As more and more people begin to get their news from the Internet, perhaps it will be time to consider some kind of regulation there as well, at least for major newspapers which are supposed to report information in factual form? The good British people should at least be made aware that what they are reading is not even close to any sort of truth, and that many serious efforts are being made to deceive them. 

P.S. The London Times seem to have joined in this disinformation campaign, by showing a famous and beautiful crop picture called the “heart” from 2000, after many people had walked through it, then claiming that it was a “crap circle” from the summer of 2013 (see www.thetimes.co.uk). Once again, this is factually untrue in every possible respect. The original field image from 2000 is shown here, as well as on many postcards or calendars (see www.lucypringle.co.uk). When so many powerful news agencies lie to the British public in such a fashion, one can only wonder what is going on?

P.S. I worked five years in Cambridge 1982-87 at a leading laboratory for medical research, and have certain standards of ethics from working on a subject where reporting facts falsely is strictly not allowed. The opinions expressed here are only my own, and may not reflect the views of Crop Circle Connector.

P.S.S. A third London newspaper, The Express, has now joined two others (the Daily Mail and London Times) in debunking crop circles for the summer of 2013 (see www.express.co.uk). Very little of what The Express writes there is factually true:  

Given that three different London newspapers are all telling the same false stories, all at once, one must consider the possibility of some behind-the-scenes instruction to do so from government authorities?  

The truth of the matter is that beautiful crop circles, made by non-human intelligences, are still appearing regularly in England, for example on August 1, 2013 near Milk Hill or Stonehenge. Yet British farmers are being encouraged by peer pressure into cutting new crop pictures out, as soon as they appear. If they truly understood the long-term consequences of their actions, they would not touch one plant stem.

Appendix 1. Presentation of false information in the “Science” section of certain British newspapers 

From July 31 to August 2, 2013, six factually inaccurate stories were written in London newspapers about “crop circles”, while one reasonable story was written by BBC Wiltshire. The authors of those factually inaccurate stories were Steve Nolan (Daily Mail Online), Simon de Bruxelles (Times of London), Jane Warren (The Express), Daniel Johnson (The Telegraph), Christopher Howse (The Telegraph) or Louis Jani and Richard Gray (The Telegraph):  

 

What I find disturbing is that several of those stories appeared in the “Science” section of London newspapers. Many editors have begun to worry whether reporting false science will cost credibility (see www.citybeat.com).  

Even as a “quadrupole radiation” crop picture appears near Stonehenge on August 1, 2013 (see stonehenge), or a “niacin vitamin B3” picture near Roundway (see rumours 2013), the British newspapers tell us an old time-worn story about “fakers with rope and boards”. Yet professional physicists Richard Taylor and Michio Kaku had concluded by 2011 (see phys.org) that real crop pictures are made using microwave radiation, not with rope and boards! Thus the London newspapers do not report on any real news about crop circles. Furthermore, what they do report has nothing to do with real science, even if that part of the newspaper is called “Science” on the letterhead at top.

Appendix 2. A wonderful optical illusion appears in crops on August 6, 2013 at Monument Hill, far beyond what any human crop artist has ever accomplished 

During 2006 we saw a “stereoscopic” crop circle at Savernake Forest as described by Peter Sorensen (see time2011l). Clearly no human crop artist could have done this.  

More recently on August 6, 2013 we saw another optical illusion in crops, which was so clever that many people at first dismissed it as a “design fault” or “technical error” (see comments). Not until we saw long-range aerial photographs of that crop picture taken by Frank Laumen (see monument hill 2013), did we realize what it really meant.  

A first slide below shows the general nature of that optical illusion. A cube-like shape was drawn in crops, so as to create the illusion of a “square pyramid” as seen at a certain perspective from the air:  

This was done to match the square-pyramidal shape of a distinctive “monument” nearby on top of Monument Hill, only a few hundred meters away. Clearly the ideal cube-like shape of that crop image had to be distorted in some way, to give the impression of a “pyramid”, but how was that accomplished?  

Arvy'das Kizevicius, a skilled graphic artist, studied this problem carefully, and seems to have provided a plausible solution. In his slide below, the actual crop circle geometry is shown in white, while idealized cubic geometry is shown in green. Five blue rays show how much angular distortion of each cubic vertex, away from perfect hexagonal symmetry, was required to create the illusion:

Arvy finds that angular distortions close to 0o, 3o, 6o, 9o, 12o or 16o for a series of six cubic vertices were used by an unknown crop artist to create this wonderful 3-D illusion. Once again, this seems to be so far ahead of what any human crop artist has done in Wiltshire as to be laughable.

Red Collie (Dr. Horace R. Drew, Caltech Ph.D. 1976-81) 



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Mark Fussell & Stuart Dike