Crash Course on Crop Circles: The Sequel

In which we dig a little deeper, ask more questions, get less answers, and look at lots of pictures. 

Two important points to start with:

1) The hoaxers are very real and also very talented, and they’ve pulled a lot of very funny pranks on the crop circle community. 

2) There’s still a number of deeply weird and unanswered questions regarding crop circles, and the hoaxers themselves even admit that.  As usual, if you’re comfortable with logical and binary solutions, Brainsturbator is a hot paperclip under your toenails.

We’re going to seriously consider the possibility of communication with aliens, the possibility of building up an entire culture as a psychology experiment, and the possibility of space weaponry like SDI already existing for decades.  If that sounds like fun, God help you.  At least you came to the right place.

About that Mandelbrot One...

This is a doozy on two fronts.  For one, it marks a point in the chronology of Crop Circles where the complexity started to increase dramatically, from ambiguous circular glyphs (such as those depicted in the alphabet images) to more intricate mathematical symbols.  For two, the response people have to this is a good index of how strong their bullshit detector is.

For most folks, this is fairly conclusive proof that crop circles represent some sort of higher intelligence at work.  After all, the symbol to the left is the Mandelbrot Set of fractal geometry, named after the great French mathematician and philosopher who discovered it in 1978.  The Mandelbrot Set is the sum total of all possible Julia Sets --- meaning every possible curve within 2-dimensional space is contained somewhere within this glyph, provided you have a computer to plumb it’s depths. 

Check out Miqel’s beautiful page for more info.

If that sounds like a good way to spend an evening at home—and hot damn, are you ever right about that—then check out this old fractal freeware.

What’s tricky about this mystery is that it’s much weirder than it looks.  The Mandelbrot Set actually predates Bernard Mandelbrot by a good 750 years.  A Benedictine monk named Udo of Aachen beat him to it doing theological math for decades on end.

Why didn’t it catch on then?  As this article notes:

...there were also contemporary reasons why Udo’s knowledge didn’t make it into the mainstream. His basic belief - that salvation and damnation could be determined in advance - was heretical, and his use of Arabic numerals was thought a bit of a black art.

Ah, Catholics....it gets better, though:

“Initially, Udo’s aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person’s soul was composed of independent parts he called “profanus” (profane) and “animi” (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic, the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary numbers of modern mathematics.

In Salus, Udo describes how he used these numbers: “Each person’s soul undergoes trials through each of the threescore years and ten of allotted life, [encompassing?] its own nature and diminished or elevated in stature by others [it] encounters, wavering between good and evil until [it is] either cast into outer darkness or drawn forever to God.”

When Schipke saw the translation, at once he saw it for what it was: an allegorical description of the iterative process for calculating the Mandelbrot. In mathematical terms, Udo’s system was to start with a complex number z, then iterate it up to 70 times by the rule z -> z*z + c, until z either diverged or was caught in an orbit.

Below the description was drawn the first crude plot of the Mandelbrot, which Udo called the “Divinitas” ("Godhead"). He set it out in a 120x120 frame he termed a “columbarium” (i.e. a dovecote, which has a similar grid of niches) and records that it took him nine years to calculate, even with the newly imported technique of ‘algorism’, calculation with Arabic numerals rather than abacus.

”It tends to be taken for granted,” Schipke says, ”That the Mandelbrot is too calculation-intensive to be done without computers. What we have to remember is the sheer devotion of the monastic life. This was a labour of faith, and Udo was prepared to work for years. Some slowly-converging pixels must have taken weeks.”

Brother Jacques Vallee Discusses the Crop Circles

“The key to investigating anomalies often lies in asking the right questions rather than pondering a long list of assumed answers and fighting over hypotheses. The crop circles that have adorned English fields in the last couple of decades are a good example of this principle.”

1. Is there a change in the nature of the formations over time?
2. What is it, exactly, that happens to the vegetation inside the affected areas?
3. Is there anything special about the location of the phenomenon?

The answers are as follows:

1. The early formations were simple circles, then circles with satellites. In later years more and more sophisticated and precisely-drawn geometric figures appeared.
2. Vegetation is bent because the nodes are exploded. The stalks are not broken and indeed the plants are often reported to start growing again.
3. All the significant formations were observed in an area in close proximity to major research facilities of the British defense establishment, often in controlled airspace.

The answer to question (1) provides the first clue: If you are trying to calibrate a beam, drawing a pattern on a wheat field can yield precision information within the diameter of one stalk over hundreds of feet, an ideal test situation. The answer to question (2) narrows down the type of energy that can be responsible, because the amount of heat radiation that needs to be coupled into one node of a stalk of wheat to vaporize the water content is a known quantity, as laboratory tests in France and in the United States soon established. The answer to question (3) points to the likely authors of the tests.”

----all from this report by Jacques Vallee, courtesy of Brainsturbator Library

Another Look at the Circlemakers

“What is suspicious about the two older men’s [the Circlemakers ]"confession" is that it appeared simultaneously on the front pages of international papers and on CNN the same day. Any published author familiar with the difficulty of getting media attention will know that it takes a very powerful public relations firm to get a story to the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Le Figaro, and many other papers the same day. Where did the two pensioners get the kind of clout that would spin their claim around the planet? The result was instantaneous: The press and, more importantly, most scientists lost all interest in the story for 10 years.”

---Jacques Vallee again.  Forgivez-moi.

Now that we’ve figured it all out, let’s tear that down again.  Courtesy of the Circlemaker’s website --- which is excellent, even the people they make fun of will enjoy, and learn from, their resources --- we have the following slice of history, which you might find most illuminating:

29 July 1880

The storms about this part of Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour’s farm on Wednesday evening (21st), we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots.

Examined more closely, these all presented much the same character, viz., a few standing stalks as a center, some prostrate stalks with their heads arranged pretty evenly in a direction forming a circle round the center, and outside these a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered,

I sent a sketch made on the spot, giving an idea of the most perfect of these patches. The soil is a sandy loam upon the greensand, and the crop is vigorous, with strong stems, and I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were suggestive to me of some cyclonic wind action, and may perhaps have been noticed elsewhere by some of your readers.”

For a richly detailed and interesting criticism of Circlemaker’s claims, we recommend this article right here.

Another Gallery—Fractal Archetypes

Art and Artifice, by Circlemaker Rob Irving

As Arthur C. Clarke observed, the incomprehensible magic of one period becomes the productive science of the next, despite the kicking and screaming of sceptics. This mutation is the raw material of change.

The recognition of false phenomena invites such crucial (and truly sceptical) questions as “What if it were real?” or “What is it about us that makes placebos so effective?” It encourages the discontinuous, paradigmatical leaps of scientific advance. These are often only achieved, noted the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, by irrational, counter-inductive and ‘unscientific’ methods. Whilst early modern science brought liberation and enlightenment, he believed it now inhibits freedom of thought: too many scientists today are devoid of ideas, full of fear, fixated by the status quo.

Paradoxically, just as we are beginning to realise the value of play in human development, the wider opportunities for it are diminishing. Rather than seeing value in error, we emphasise its correction, and to venture beyond accepted boundaries is to risk being labelled a fool. But in order to develop we need the constant stimulus of new ideas, even if this means we have to conjure them out of nothing. The artist fulfills this function, as do potty geniuses, pious imaginists and ‘cranks’.

----download the full article in PDF

PART ONE PART THREE PART FOUR