You're Wrong About
Sarah is a journalist obsessed with the past. Every week she reconsiders a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.
You're Wrong About
Crop Circles with Chelsey Weber-Smith
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What do men really get up to at the pub? For this April Fools' Day episode, Sarah tells urban legend correspondent Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria the history and the mystery behind crop circles, those sophisticated patterns left imprinted in corn and wheat fields said to be made by alien beings. For years, no one could find a rational reason for their mysterious existence as they spread across various countries; that is, until a pair of surprising culprits finally came forward to reveal their master prank. Digressions include Ramona Quimby’s dad’s alma mater, sexy adaptations of costume drama novels, and the unrivaled power of shaky cam footage.
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Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler
"Every Corn is a Glamorous Woman" is a semi-original song by Magpie Cinema Club (it's just "Rockabye")
More You're Wrong About:
YWA - Crop Circles
Sarah: There's more than one way to bend a corn. And every corn is a glamorous woman.
*singing*
“Every corn is a glamorous woman.”
Sarah: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. With me today is our Hoaxster in Chief , Chelsey Weber-Smith, and today we're going to talk about crop circles, cereologists, and extraterrestrials. And we won't meet any extraterrestrials, but we will meet a lot of British people, and I think that's even more exciting in a way.
Chelsey, how are you doing?
Chelsey: You know, I am of England, so I can confirm that we are freaks from another planet. That planet being England. I want to try my, let me try my crop circle noise. *makes whistling noise*
Sarah: Wow.
Chelsey: Did that sound cool?
Sarah: Yeah, that sounded great. Is that supposed to be a flying saucer landing or flying up?
Chelsey: Yeah. Landing or sucking up a person. I was going to say, sucking up a baby, but I don't know how often they abduct babies.
Sarah: I haven't heard that specific one, but that would be cool.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: I mean, not for, well… I don't know. I think the baby would have a great day. That would be a good children's book. It would be like Baby's Day Out, but he goes to space.
Chelsey: Yeah. Or like an eighties buddy movie where the aliens are the buddies and they're like, “How'd we get this baby? We got to watch this baby all day. I was trying to beam up that beautiful woman.”
Sarah: It's actually the forgotten sequel to Fly to the Navigator. It was destroyed by Disney.
Chelsey, what are your associations with crop circles? Is this something that you grew up watching, cheesy, nineties TV about it all?
Chelsey: Oh, I mean, definitely. I feel like I caught a few Fox specials on it, as most people did. But I was just thinking before this about how weird it is that me, of all people, has not done a deep dive even of my own for fun into crop circles. So I'm really coming in pretty fresh.
I have UFO alien abduction knowledge definitely, but just not crop circles. And I know the skeleton of the story, but I'm excited for it to be filled in with blood and crops and guts and muscle by you.
Sarah: And as we like to, we are coming back to the corn. Because corn fields are one of the notable fields in which these crop circles are made.
Chelsey: Yes.
Sarah: And first started turning up historically. And much like UFO abductions, which you just mentioned, this is a phenomenon that like growing up and watching these kind of history channel type shows about you would've thought had been around for way longer. And then it turns out that there's a very distinct point in time actually, where we started seeing what we might call a classic presentation of them. And in this case, it's 1981.
Chelsey: Which is amazing, because when we did the corn mazes one, the companion to this episode, you taught me that corn mazes started in the 1990s, and I was shaken to my core.
Sarah: Yeah. And of course, there's beautiful, historical hedge mazes and things like that, and different kind of iterations of these ideas. But yeah, these specific things that feel timeless to us sometimes, are of our own lifetimes.
Chelsey: I know.
Sarah: Maybe for some interesting specific reasons. And can you talk just a little bit about kind of the point in time at which the classic idea of the UFO abduction begins?
Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah. Let me just tap into my memory here. I mean, we started really seeing UFOs around the 1940s around World War II. There's a really great book by Carl Jung, it's called, The Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
Sarah: Carl Jung's contribution to UFO stuff has been really overlooked.
Chelsey: It has been, because it really was the book for me that inspired my podcast, American Hysteria. Because it was this look at how we externalize our anxieties and fears into these vessels.
Like for example, UFOs, or Satanists, in the case of what you and I talk about. So it's like, yeah, that happened during kind of the war years when we were afraid of being bombed on our own territory and things like that. So we started to see these things.
And what I love to always mention about UFOs, because I think it's so cool and so interesting, is that it was either the first or one of the very, very first UFOs that was seen was described not as a flying saucer, but as an object that moved like a saucer skipping across the water, and newspapers printed it incorrectly. And from then on, what did we see?
Sarah: Who’s skipping all these saucers? Don't they have flat rocks?
Chelsey: I mean, it's wasteful. Let's say that. It's indulgent and wasteful. But I think that that's just a great example of how our perceptions can really be changed based on what we're expecting to see. It’s so fascinating.
Sarah: And sort of the way words change definition.
Chelsey: Absolutely.
Sarah: What about the kids? They could cut their feet on all the saucers.
Chelsey: And you know, I mean in terms of abductions, it's so married into the movements around recovered memory therapy. A lot of people would have something they barely remembered, like some maybe sleep paralysis experience that they just can't quite explain. They'd go and see a therapist that had their own belief in alien abduction. And you know, the rest is history.
There's this ability to influence someone into believing something different about what had happened to them and kind of extrapolating that experience. We have a two-part episode on it called, Alien Abductions, I think. I don't know. Something like that.
Sarah: That sounds right. It's one of my favorite episodes that you've done that I've heard. Because you've done many, many, many shows.
Chelsey: Thank you.
Sarah: And in this case, would it be correct to say that this phenomenon kind of began, or like that there are sort of these scattered stories that you can tell people are starting to kind of hear about maybe from disparate parts of the country or even the world, but we now have newspapers that are capable of having a wire service that picks up a local story and takes it national. In that way technology is aiding, and news is starting to travel a bit faster.
And that often there we see this in the Satanic panic too, that there are elements of a bigger story that coalesce at one point that's like a flashpoint appears or these things that people in the culture are talking about and thinking about, sort of get melted into a crucible.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: And then form this overarching narrative. And it seems like in this case, there were a couple of people who experienced or told this story in a way that made it make sense to people in a way that could then be replicated.
Chelsey: Yeah. Will you say more?
Sarah: Would it be fair to say that the classic UFO abduction story for Americans was started by this one couple?
Chelsey: Yes. I know who you’re talking about.
Sarah: Who came forward with an abduction story. And in a case that also involves a lot of hypnosis and recovered memory type stuff.
Chelsey: Yes. Yes. And I mean, as you mentioned, this flashpoint, Betty and Barney Hill, this was in, I believe, early 1960s. They're driving along a road. They have a strange experience they can't explain of missing time. And from there they start to, or at least Betty begins this kind of therapy. And the recordings of her therapy are wild, where she is kind of remembering this abduction.
And from there, there's the movies that came out of it. And it just becomes, like you said, it is this flashpoint that then is absorbed into all of our psyches and we start to view things through this previously available story that we can then synthesize our own experiences with.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: And I will say, I'm not here to say aliens aren't real. I may be a skeptic.
Sarah: Me neither. I just don't think that they're recreationally sexually assaulting us. And it's interesting to me that that became the dominant narrative for Americans in the sixties and seventies.
Chelsey: That is very true. Yeah. That's very much a part of this.
Sarah: Right. And it's like, well we do have a culture that really represses the kinds of crimes that we're saying aliens are carrying out. And that doesn't mean nothing, in my opinion.
Chelsey: No. And it's interesting because there's different schools of thought. Like John Mack is so interesting. He was a Harvard professor who was eventually totally “disgraced”, quote unquote, by the institution because he interviewed a bunch of abductees and believed what they were saying.
And generally, I think John Mack is pretty cool. I don't believe in a lot of the things that he talks about, but he's created a really nice space for people who have these experiences that we don't understand. But a lot of the people that he interviewed, and it seems like the interviews that were most important to him had more to do with aliens showing us environmental destruction and leading us toward a better way. Which is much nicer than the narrative of experimentation.
Sarah: Yeah. Which is kind of the premise of James Cameron’s, The Abyss.
Chelsey: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yep.
Sarah: Which I really love actually, as something for aliens to do. Because you have to ask, if they've come all the way here, surely their only goal wasn't just to fuck with us.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: I mean, unless they're teenage aliens who are just being incredibly extravagant with fuel. But even, I mean, maybe.
Chelsey: Hmm. Maybe.
Sarah: But okay, tell us about, like, have you ever found a crop circle creepy?
Chelsey: I mean, yeah. I think so. I think they're really creepy.
Sarah: Oh, nice.
Chelsey: I'm really scared of aliens.
Sarah: Okay. I'm a little bit scared of aliens.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: If I'm in the right mood and I start picturing aliens, I'll get scared of aliens.
Chelsey: Yeah, totally. Totally.
Sarah: And by that, of course, I mean the little gray guys with the big heads. Which are again, another classic sixties presentation, to my understanding.
Chelsey: Yes, definitely. And I think Barney and Betty Hill were a big part of that too. Because they saw gray aliens. But I feel like for me, I watched Mars Attacks too young, and the rest is history.
Sarah: You know, I've never seen that, because when it came out, I was like, hell no. I'm a baby. I can't possibly see the scary movie.
Chelsey: Literally have no idea how I got my mitts on it.
Sarah: Yeah, I might still not be ready.
Chelsey: It's fucking scary.
Sarah: Although, I would like to see all of Sarah Jessica Parker's oeuvre.
Chelsey: She's good in it, for sure. I think it's a good movie. It's fun. It's a lot of fun, but very scary for a child. And it really cemented my fear, as did those shaky cam videos of UFOs are scary.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, there's something inherently scary about a shaky camera, arguably, because the Zapruder film really put the kibosh on the shaky camera party.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: But also because, I'm sure that it’s jarring, you know? You don't know what you're supposed to be looking at, and the image is shaking around. And also, you have the reasonable expectation that you're about to see something scary.
Chelsey: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Because that's usually the context there.
Chelsey: Yeah, totally.
Sarah: So you could like, I mean, if you showed me a really shaky camcorder recording of a child's birthday party, I would be pretty terrified.
Chelsey: Yeah. I guess that's the Blair Witch-ian in sort of ideas. It's like running through the dark woods with the handy cam.
Sarah: Yeah. I guess that's what happens in Signs.
Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Signs is really good. I mean, it's insane. Like the ending of it is crazy.
Sarah: Signs are scary. They have to show too much of the aliens at the end, and you're like, that might have been too much of the aliens.
Chelsey: No, it was too much. I think they should never have shown the aliens, is my opinion. And it shouldn't have ended with him becoming a Catholic priest again.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: Spoiler.
Sarah: Well, the aliens had something to tell him about the Lord, I think. But the idea that we think aliens are coming to tell us to not fuck everything up is really nice. And that's if I am to believe in an alien or sort of the story of aliens making meaning in my life, that's the kind of alien that I like to imagine.
And it kind of maybe fits with crop circles because the idea behind crop circles, which people start talking about in the early eighties and which really pick up traction in the late eighties, which there are still many, many crop circles. There are still people who love crop circles and study them and have theories about them. But they really had their first top of the pops heyday in the late eighties.
And basically, they're circles made in the crops. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a fairly precise circle made by bending, but not breaking, corn or wheat or some kind of cereal grain. And they started showing up not just specifically in England, but specifically in Hampshire and Wilshire.
Chelsey: Oh, okay. Alright.
Sarah: Which is also great. The aliens have come all the way across the universe to Hampshire, specifically.
Chelsey: Oh, it's an honor.
Sarah: Only to the south of England. And a lot of the story takes place therefore around Stonehenge, which as you can imagine, is very exciting to paranormal type research circulators.
Chelsey: Yes.
Sarah: And Stonehenge is also relatively close to Southampton, which in American is where Jack Dawson wins the tickets on the Titanic.
Chelsey: Thank you for translating that.
Sarah: And we're going to watch some Unsolved Mysteries featuring a lot of English farmers who have what I think it's fair to call hot fuzz accents. And I'm so excited to just share this little moment in time with you. This is from season two of Unsolved Mysteries, so 1988 or 89, I think.
Chelsey: Our birth year.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: We were older than corn mazes, but we're the same age as our twin crop circles.
Sarah: Isn't that nice?
Chelsey: Yeah. I guess that that's not true because we're just twins with the episode about crop circles of Unsolved Mysteries.
Sarah: That's still pretty good. We're twins with Die Hard.
Chelsey: We'll take it.
Sarah: Not everybody can say that.
Chelsey: Hey, that's true.
Sarah: I do think it's funny how everyone who can remember the eighties is starting to act like the people I remember watching in a documentary about the roaring twenties when I was in AP US history. I have to let people know it was AP. I'm proud of it.
Chelsey: You should.
Sarah: It was hard.
Chelsey: It is hard. I only lasted one year, and I was like, nope, I'm going to smoke weed.
Sarah: That was my one AP class. I was like, that is enough. I am ready for regular placement.
Chelsey: Made everything a lot easier after that.
Sarah: Yeah. I also learned, because I've been re-reading the Ramona books because they're so good, that when Ramona Quimby's dad goes back to school, he goes to PSU and I went to PSU.
Chelsey: Wow. That must have felt really good.
Sarah: And I really think that that should be on their website. That it's where Ramona’s dad went.
Chelsey: I think it should be on your website that you went to the same school as Ramona’s Dad.
Sarah: Yeah, you're right. I should put that on there.
Chelsey: Jam it in, shoehorn it in somewhere.
Sarah: That'll just be what I start off with.
Chelsey: Perfect.
*recording*
“Stonehenge, the great megalithic monument in southern England. Stonehenge is only one of hundreds of such monuments scattered. For centuries, these puzzling formations have baffled scientists and layman alike. But recently, scientists have identified another phenomenon that may relate to the mysterious British monuments. Wheat circles.”
“This photograph was taken recently in England. It shows circles in wheat fields. It seems simple enough, but in fact they're not simple at all. No one knows how these enigmatic circles got there. Molded gently from unbroken stalks of wheat and corn, they may just represent one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the century.”
“Nearly 95% of the circles occur within 30 miles of Stonehenge, and all the rest are near other stone monuments similar to Stonehenge. Are the circles caused by something we can explain, like whirlwinds? Are they caused by something that we cannot even begin to understand?”
Sarah: Really, Chelsey, you don't think it's whirlwinds?
Chelsey: That’s not a good explanation.
*recording*
“Charity Down, a farm two hours’ drive from London, England. In the early morning hours of June 15th, 1988, 37-year-old farmer, Chris Woods slowly drove a tractor through one of his wheat fields. Just after sunrise, he saw something in the field that he had never seen before. He couldn't explain it. A huge circle had appeared in the wheat.”
“It's really, really amazing. You know how the actual crop was laying on the ground. And it was so, so perfect, really.”
Sarah: He looks exactly like Prince Charles.
*recording*
“The circle that Chris Wood found that morning has never been explained during the last 12 years. More than 750 large, perfectly symmetrical circles, some of them as big as 100” in diameter have formed overnight in seemingly random fields of wheat, corn, and other crops. The question no one can answer is, how did the circles get there?”
Chelsey: Honestly, they're a lot sloppier looking than I remember.
Sarah: Hold onto that observation.
Chelsey: Alright.
*recording*
“The first circle I found was in 1985 at seven o'clock in the evening.”
Sarah: Rusty Taylor is being interviewed.
*recording*
“It was the last sort of flight of the night and we were flying around, and as the aircraft banked round to the right, I looked into the wing tip and there below me was this beautiful quintuple set. A large circle with four smaller ones around it.”
Sarah: The mommy and the babies.
*recording*
“So I questioned myself. What on earth did that? We were at harvesting. It was the last day of harvest. We went out there with the combines in the morning to cut our last field and we come across this circle. There was no real damage as such the corn was flattened down. It was just odd, strange.”
Chelsey: It must be so weird for them.
Sarah: The corn was flattened down.
*recording*
“Well, I've been here since October 1957, and the first circles we saw were, I would say ‘72, ‘73, and that was a small circle about four yards across. And then we saw another one the following year about the same size. And as the years have gone on, we've seen them 12 yards across with the small ones either side of them.”
Chelsey: He said the seventies?
*recording*
“They vary in diameter. The smallest we've had would be about five meters. The largest would be, I suppose, 15 perhaps. They have a neat, perfect pattern from a center where it's flattened. The edges are very distinct.”
“The most wonderful thing about it is when you actually go out the night before to look for a circle, there's nothing there. It is just a lovely field of growing corn. And then the following morning when you get up early in the morning in the first light of day and suddenly there is the circle, you just can't believe it.”
Sarah: All right, let's pause a moment.
Chelsey: Okay.
Sarah: What are your thoughts so far?
Chelsey: I think part of it is definitely that I think if I'm understanding right, that one of the witnesses is talking about the early seventies, was that right?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Chelsey: I didn't know that it was going on for such a long time. I think I thought that it was like a phenomenon that happened over the course of a few months and then that was kind of it. So at least for the initial ones that sparked this idea, this thing.
And then the other thing is, I always think of, or we always hear maybe that crop circles are these incredible mathematical feats that are so perfect. And the video that we just saw, they definitely didn't look very perfect to me.
Sarah: Ooh. Sick burn. Yeah. Well, it's funny to call something asymmetrical or a perfectly symmetrical circle. Because I didn't major in geometry, but I'm pretty sure circles are symmetrical by definition. That's why they're circles.
Chelsey: Yeah. That’s true.
Sarah: And you're right, some of them are certainly not perfectly symmetrical. But they're very good.
Chelsey: Of course. Yes.
Sarah: Yeah. And so in terms of media coverage, this started showing up in the news in 1981, or it started getting public attention. But then when people kind of looked back on their experience, there's people as we see in these interviews, remembering encountering them in the early seventies.
And a case that people also point to as evidence of these being patterns made perhaps by UFOs landing and taking off, is a story out of Queensland, Australia on a sugarcane farm in 1966, where a bunch of cane was flattened and some farmers had witnessed some UFO type phenomena. I think flashing lights was one of the things that people talked about, or at least one person did.
Chelsey: Okay. Interesting.
Sarah: And so again, it's like one of these things where if you're reading news from around the world, which people are able to, at this point through these ideas that kind of are shifting around in people's minds or aliens are visiting different parts of the world.
Chelsey: That could happen.
Sarah: And they went to Australia first.
Chelsey: Yeah. You know, it could happen.
Sarah: But what do you make of the fact that this is all happening around Stonehenge?
Chelsey: I mean, it's very convenient for this story that whomever, whether they be man or alien, is cooking up here. I've been to Stonehenge and it is very much a tourist trap at this point, so it's hard to feel very mystical there. I think there are fun Druid gatherings that maybe can give you that experience, but it's really a very big parking lot at this point.
Sarah: I remember going in 2005 and being very offended that they were selling rock candy. And thinking about it now I'm like, I want to eat the Stonehenge rock candy.
Chelsey: Yeah. I mean, that's just good branding,
Sarah: It is.
Chelsey: But I mean, I think it makes sense that people would be more likely to be able to view this through a mystical lens, because of the proximity to one of these deeply mysterious aspects of Europe.
Sarah: And it does kind of lend some secondhand credence to the idea of, oh, well, yeah, it's a magical place where there's energy, so of course the aliens are showing up there. Or as Robert Stack or whoever was working their ass off writing this voiceover for him says at the end, “Perhaps the ancient Druids saw circles left by the aliens and were inspired to make Stonehenge.” Which is quite a fun idea.
Chelsey: That is a fun idea, and quite the jump as well.
Sarah: I mean, many people far smarter than me have pointed out that these sort of chariots of the God's ideas… which, by the way, the guy who wrote that book just died like in the past year, I think.
Chelsey: Oh, RIP.
Sarah: But you know that there's an intrinsic racism to them. Because the idea is that that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have figured out how to build the pyramids so the aliens must have helped them. The aliens must have created Mayan civilization.
But not to say that Robert Stack is necessarily in conversation with Chariots of the Gods. But I like that when we're imagining the Druids, we're like, no, they did that themselves. The aliens just kind of gave them the idea.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: Bit was more of an homage.
Chelsey: Totally. Yeah. Totally.
Sarah: One cool thing about the area is that there is a formation, not a formation, actually a manmade piece of art, which is probably from the Bronze Age, so from pre-Roman Britain, called the Uffington White Horse. Which is this giant, ancient pictograph of a horse made by, I think it's essentially building a trench into the landscape and exposing the white chalk underneath and keeping it free of vegetation.
I'm going to send you a picture of that so you can see it.
Chelsey: Oh, very cool.
Sarah: Isn't that great?
Chelsey: That's really cool. And it does definitely kind of harken to crop circles. What I'm looking at, people, is this very kind of spindly version of a horse.
Sarah: 360 feet long.
Chelsey: Oh gosh.
Sarah: 110 meters.
Chelsey: Yeah. And it reminds me of if you connected the connected the dots of a constellation. Like it's giving Big Dipper vibes, for sure. There's probably a better one to compare it to.
Sarah: It's giving big cave painting.
Chelsey: Totally. Totally.
Sarah: And there's debate over whether it's maybe some other animal, but I mean, in any case, it's just this big, beautiful piece of art made out of nature.
Chelsey: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And I guess something I would suggest is if humans could make that, then why can't they make circles in some corn?
Chelsey: Yeah. Completely agree.
Sarah: And more to the point, if humans want to make that, then why wouldn't they want to make circles in the corn?
Because one of the things I remember learning, actually, about cave paintings in my art history classes is that some of them were actually executed in a place that it would be very difficult to get to, to paint in or to view the painting. Which just kind of suggests the importance of the act, I think, in a way, the fact that it wasn't casual.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: In some of these cases at least. And that this sort of human drive to create. I mean, I would certainly call all of this art.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: It’s deep seated and kind of hard to explain often. And the ways that we can maybe explain other human behaviors with more of a cost benefit analysis kind of a thing.
Chelsey: Yeah. And how nice is that? I mean, I guess it's the same kind of thing of like, why do we across time and culture create religions? There's a bonding aspect, right? It's bringing people together around shared ideas and shared reality. I guess it makes sense that you bring people together to understand the world in different ways by making art about it. That's what we do now. That's what we're doing right now. And this, oh my God, gorgeous tapestry.
Sarah: Are we the crop circle we wish to see in the world?
Chelsey: I think we are. I think we, god damn are.
Sarah: Okay. Let's look at some of our cereologists here in this episode. Let's skip to eight minutes and 45 seconds, and we're going to watch some.
Chelsey: On the same thing, right?
Sarah: Crop circle researchers. Yeah. Same Unsolved Mystery segment, and we're going to hear first from Professor Archie Roy of Glasgow University.
*recording*
“There are quite a number of them. There is the frankly unacceptable one. Circles being formed by hundreds of hedgehogs all marching around in circles.”
Chelsey: What?
Sarah: That’s the most British explanation.
*recording*
“Another one is that they are the pad marks of flying saucers. Another is that they are due to the downdrafts of helicopters, or that they are caused by whirlwinds. Or that they are hoaxes by human beings.”
“I think that it's very reasonable for a person to say that they look so artificial, but I don't think that the hoax theory can be held very strongly because there are so many of these circles. Now in eight or nine years, they've logged about 700, 250 this summer alone.”
The amount of time would have to be spent by a very big team of people making those circles is getting quite enormous. I simply don't see the hoax theory as a very strong contender.”
“As part of a televised experiment, British military personnel attempted to create an artificial crop circle.”
Chelsey: What? That's what the military is doing in England.
*recording*
“Something mechanical is used to flatten the crop very quickly.”
Sarah: I mean, I guess the military maybe doesn't have anything better to do.
Chelsey: And may that be true.
Sarah: Honestly, good use of military, crop circles.
*recording*
“…that is mechanically made or it is a naturally created one.”
Chelsey: They made a Pac Man.
*recording*
“When we examine a naturally made crop circle, the portion of plant that just comes out of the ground must be softened, bent over, and then hardened up again. So not only is a mystery in the circle itself, but what is it that is softening the plant, bending it over, and then hardening up again is the real mystery.”
Sarah: This guy’s got a skinny, little mustache.
Sarah: Vincent Price. Yeah.
Sarah: Okay, let's pause. So this is interesting, too, because now we're seeing so many crop circles proliferating in the late eighties, and the naturally occurring observation that maybe this is just a human created hoax. And then the crop circle alleges are saying no, no, no. Even if some of these are hoaxes, I can tell which ones of them are hoaxes because they are different.
Chelsey: Ah, okay. Okay. Maybe that accounts for the sloppiness that I noticed in the previous video.
Sarah: Well, I mean if you were committed to crop circles being alien created, then you could certainly say that.
Chelsey: Sure. And I'm committed to that.
Sarah: Let's see. Okay. I have another, you have so much fun stuff on this one.
Chelsey: That's scary. That's really scary. You know, I stay up and I read my stories about Froggers. Meaning people that are living in people's houses without them knowing. That's my bed time story. And the other night there was all these scratching sounds and I was so freaked out and I was like, where are they coming from?
But then I figured out that there was a possum in our compost bag outside. So it was really a great surprise. And it all ended up really good because he was a beautiful boy. I don't know. I don't know if he was a boy.
Sarah: Well, you know, possums actually can see 27,000 genders.
Chelsey: Yeah. And may we all.
Sarah: Like mantis shrimp. Okay, I'm going to read to you from, of course, that most wonderful publication, Skeptical Enquirer, from the winter 1992 issue. And of course our pal, Joe Nichol.
Chelsey: Ah, I knew it was going to be.
Sarah: Saw some people acting silly across the pond and said, I'm going to get in on this one.
Chelsey: God, I love Skeptical Enquirer. I do get the digital magazine.
Sarah: I don't, I should get it.
Chelsey: You should.
Sarah: Okay. So the cereologist we heard from talking about the difference between man-made and authentic crop circles was Pat Delgado. And he, at the time, this issue of Skeptical Enquirer has come out, has just co-authored a book with another cereologist, Colin Andrews, about crop circles. And they're also heavily featured in this Unsolved Mysteries episode.
Chelsey: Is Joe Nichols in it?
Sarah: Joe Nichols is not in the Unsolved Mysteries episode for some reason.
Chelsey: Okay. Because he was in the one that we did when you were on our show doing spontaneous human combustion. So I thought maybe they would've brought it back.
Sarah: Yeah. Which I loved doing that one.
Chelsey: That was fun.
Sarah: And I was very glad that they had him on. But no, this one is skeptic free. And there were three books on crop circles that came out in 1989 alone ,according to this article.
Chelsey: Wow.
Sarah: Which really also speaks to how well publishing was doing. So this article gets into the idea that they're like a weather phenomenon. And there's another theorist who's put together the idea that they're coming from a phenomenon similar to globe lightning but involving plasma somehow. I don't understand.
Chelsey: Yeah. That.
Sarah: All the words in it, I don't know that. But it's interesting how there's patterns that start emerging. And what people also point out is that there's more and more with each passing year, like exponentially. So, and they're increasing in complexity.
Chelsey: Okay.
Sarah: Perhaps because the aliens are trying to communicate more and more complex messages with us.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: Or perhaps because things escalate when there's a fad, and perhaps this is a human driven fad because it's getting a lot of attention.
Chelsey: Well, and the aliens I would think would be smart enough to know that we are not getting it. You need to make it simple or not harder.
Sarah: Right. And what are we supposed to be getting from it?
Chelsey: And they're like, do your math homework.
Sarah: There are also people studying crop circles who think that quite a lot of the crop circles are based on human driven hoaxes. But again, there's this continued belief that even if some of them are imitations, it's like a copycat crime in a way. And that they're all based on something real.
Chelsey: I mean, it is a lot of crop circles. That number was a lot higher than I was expecting, and I understand why people would think that at least some of them are legit because they're happening in different locations, too. Also, it always makes it a little less easy to designate something as a hoax.
Sarah: Yeah. And we have one of the academics that we heard from arguing that it would be too huge a team of people required to do all of this. And what occurs to me is that if it is a human driven hoax, then these people don't have to be communicating about it.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, it's something more like a meme and the way that trends spread today. Which we can observe very easily on social media where people don't have to talk to each other in order for an idea to catch on, as long as it's picked up by media outlets. Because then it can spread quickly and easily, and of course, much quicker and easier now than it did back then.
But in the closing narration of this segment, Robert Stack is like, even more crop circles have been reported since we aired the segment, including outside of Britain for the first time. And it's like, yeah, because you aired the segment. That's why that happened.
Chelsey: It does also remind me of the whole conspiracy theory thing where it's like, how could so many people be keeping a secret at the same time? And it is kind of like, how could so many people be making crop circles and also keeping it quiet? And maybe they're not. Maybe it's just not getting any coverage because they're telling guys at the pub, and then the next day the guys are like, well, I'm not calling the news about it. I'm just going to slap Tommy on the back and buy him a beer because that was a lot of fun.
Sarah: Let me read this quote from The Skeptical Inquirer, “Few would've underestimated the cerologist’s will to believe had they known of the crop message incident of 1987. The message, written in the typical flattened crop style and the words all run together read, ‘We Are Not Alone’.”
“Delgado told readers of Flying Saucer Review at first sight. ‘It was an obvious hoax, but prolonged study makes me wonder of the crop circles’. He said, ‘Maybe these circles are created by alien beings using a force field unknown to us. They may be manipulating existing earth energy. Or the beings may be terrestrial ones, laboring by the sweat of their brows’.” That's Joe Nichol again, of course.
Chelsey: The message is really fun.
Sarah: And also, wouldn't the aliens have written, You Are Not Alone? Like let's use our heads everybody.
Chelsey: That's a great point, Sarah. That's a very good point. Unless the aliens are like, maybe they're aliens that are alien to both humans and us.
Sarah: Yeah. Wow. They're alien aliens.
Chelsey: Or it's bullshit.
Sarah: Or that, yeah. So we also have the issue that they happen overnight. They happen unobserved. Because if you could catch an alien doing it, then you could have an alien. So farmers will wake up and come out in the morning and see a crop circle and say, “Well, I'll be god damned.”
And this article continues, “not only does the circle forming mechanism seem to prefer the dark, but it appears to specifically resist being seen, as shown by Colin Andrews' Operation White Crow.” Come on you guys.
Chelsey: Wow.
Sarah: This was an eight-night vigil maintained by about 60 cereologists at Cheesefoot Head, a prime circles location. Cheesefoot Head getting June 12th, 1989. Winner of the most English location award, Cheesefoot Head. It sounds lovely, I have to say.
Chelsey: It's gorgeous.
Sarah: Hey, I mean, in Portland there's Cornfoot Road by the airport.
Chelsey: Again, gorgeous.
Sarah: Yeah. Gorgeous. I hope I never get corn foot.
Though not only did the phenomenon fail to manifest itself in the field under surveillance, but although there had already been almost a hundred formations that summer with yet another 170 or so to occur, not a single circle was reported for the eight-day period anywhere in England.
Chelsey: Hmm.
Sarah: Then a large circle and ring, the very set that being swirled in the same direction, seemed to play a joke on him by upsetting his hypothesis. Because interestingly, researchers will hypothesize that, well, it always goes clockwise. And then the next circle will be counterclockwise, and things like that keep happening.
Chelsey: Okay.
Sarah: A large circle in ring was discovered about 500 yards away on the very next day. Then we have another quote, unquote, “top secret operation”, Operation Blackbird, another surveillance operation using, I believe, the help of the actual military. Including their infrared surveillance equipment.
Chelsey: Putting it to good use, I see.
Sarah: And things were really escalating. And so in 1991, something really fun happens. Which is that two guys come forward and say that they were the ones who did the first crop circles in 1978. Nobody noticed them for three years. And they got the idea when they were at the pub, having had a few beers and had heard about the case out of Australia, where the idea was that the cane had been bent down by a flying saucer, and thought that they would make a circle out in the field for a laugh. And so they did. And then they just kept doing it.
And we're going to watch some news coverage about it from the time. Because I just really love that this is where the story is leading us now.
Chelsey: Yeah. And it's just so interesting that it wasn't the first.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, and then of course there’s the question of like, what is art? Art is intent. What are crop circles?
Chelsey: Right.
Sarah: Are crop circles intent? Where did those initial ones come from? And were those previous attempted hoaxes?
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: Or were they accidental? Because it's like the thing is, grass or corn or whatever, especially old dead corn, can get pushed down by all sorts of things for all kinds of reasons. And a lot of these phenomena only become phenomena when people start looking for them.
Chelsey: Yeah. And I would also venture to say that if you're just walking through your field and seeing a bunch of corn pushed down without the aerial view, you're not seeing that it's forming a truly meaningful pattern. Like I'm sure you could see that it is circle-esque, but beyond that it'd probably be hard to fully actually visualize what you're seeing as something that fantastical.
Sarah: Exactly. Because they're designed to be seen from a distance, from a hill. So vantage is important, but ideally aerially, which is how we get to see them now. Because, of course, there are still many lovely crop circles to this day.
Chelsey: That's wild.
Sarah: And I don't know who all's making them, but I'm glad that they are.
Chelsey: Hats off to you on this week of our Lord April Fool's Day.
Sarah: I have my fingers crossed that somebody is going to write in and say, “I like to listen to your shows while I'm making crop circles.”
Chelsey: Oh man, that would be so cool. I would love to meet somebody that did this. Maybe we should do this.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: Maybe we should be the change we wish to see.
Sarah: Although I would also like to know about best practices for doing crop circles in a way that doesn't interfere with anybody's crops, ironically.
Chelsey: Yeah. Because I don't want to take away any income from our already underserved farming community.
Sarah: Yeah. But, you know, crop circles, corn mazes… What about a crop circle corn maze?
Chelsey: I feel like we could hit up some local haunts, you know. Like some of the seasonal Halloween farms and see if they'd be interested.
Sarah: Yeah. What about a crop circle corn maze with aliens in it?
Chelsey: That would be so cool.
Sarah: Yeah, that would be sick.
Chelsey: Okay. We're onto something here. I mean, we've long discussed having a farm in which there is a haunted house, so maybe this is the obvious extension of that plan.
Sarah: Yeah. There's a lot of potential because there's a lot of pumpkin patches and there's a lot of haunted houses. But there aren't that many haunted pumpkin patches, at least that I've seen.
Chelsey: No, it's usually like the corn maze down the way.
Sarah: Right.
Chelsey: Or, well, I know a lot of times the corn maze itself is not haunted, which I always feel is quite tragic.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: Just a regular corn maze.
Sarah: But any maze can be haunted by the spirits of the people who got frustrated or the people who took their boyfriends who were too dumb to figure it out.
Chelsey: Amongst the corn.
Sarah: Okay. Let us watch Coast to Coast. Let's get some breaking news.
Chelsey: Oh, fun. A Coast to Coast. breaking news.
Sarah: It's 1991 and Britain has been haunted by crop circles for 10 years.
Chelsey: Hell, yes. Okay.
Sarah: Yeah. This is not Art Bell's Coast to Coast, tragically. This is just a normal new show for Southeastern England. I know, bummer.
Chelsey: It's all right.
Sarah: That's why we're not listening to The Chase by Georgio Moroder right now.
Chelsey: Oh, I love this theme song.
Sarah: Wow.
*recording*
“Good evening. Experts are tonight divided over claims by two men from Hampshire, that they're responsible for the South's famous crop circles.”
Chelsey: How exciting.
*recording*
“Dave Chorley and Doug Bower say they created the strange patterns with nothing more than a wooden board and a length of rope.”
Chelsey: I remember this.
*recording*
“The men decided to reveal their hoax when they heard the government was planning to finance research into the circles. But some scientists remain convinced the circles are not man-made. I should be talking to one such expert in just a moment. But first, there is this report from Graham [inaudible].”
Chelsey: Oh, there he is again, little mustache guy.
*recording*
“If their story's true, Dave Chorley and Doug Bower are probably the most successful hoaxes of all time. The pair, who both live in Southampton, claim to have made more than 200 corn circles throughout the south of England.”
Sarah: And that's what I call success.
*recording*
“According to them, the hoax began as a bit of harmless fun 13 years ago. Since then, the patterns have become more elaborate. Many thought they were made by alien spacecraft. Some scientists have devoted their life's work to the search for a natural explanation, others have written best-selling books on the subject. Mr. Chorley and Mr. Bower say everyone was conned. And the newspaper, which published their story, says it spent a week verifying their claims.”
“For the first three years, nothing happened at all. And we realized that we were putting them in fields that the public couldn't see. And we then had to find a slope or a dip in the land that the motorists could see. So we decided on the punch bowl at Cheesefoot Head on the Petersfield Road. And it was only a few hours before the first reports were coming through about the circle that was found in the punch bowl at Cheesefoot Head.”
The men are scornful of the self-styled experts who've camped out at known circle sites in the hope of filming the unexplained phenomenon but can't understand anybody of that intelligence walking and making something of flattened corn and shapes in corn fields.
“Quite honestly, had it been us ordinary layman and gone, I think we'd have sussed it out within a year.”
“The men say they planned their designs with geometric precision.”
Chelsey: What a fun hobby for you and your best friend. And each corn step matters more than a regular [inaudible].
Sarah: That's true. Yeah.
*recording*
“Mr. Chorley and Mr. Bower went to work, spiraling outwards to make their crop circles.”
Sarah: So they're showing them doing it.
*recording*
“The secret, they'd say, is flattening the corn halfway up the stem.”
Sarah: So just like rope and a piece of wood, basically.
*recording*
“Working by day was a luxury for them. Normally they did it by the dead of night. Next day they returned to join the experts.”
We’d infiltrate their ranks when they came up. We’d come up the next night…”
Sarah: That's some wire that he's using to hold some string to kind of make sure that everything is geometrically correct. I don't fully understand it because I'm not good with visual spatial stuff, but it's to help make the crop circles.
*recording*
“And when you get at one of these fields at midnight or two in the morning, I would rather be eating one of these fields and have a week away and then say the France or something. Because anyone that's not been in one at midnight in an English country and you're doing on a few beers, a couple of cheese rolls, absolutely wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
But the circle gurus are not so easily put off. Colin Andrews, who studied them for years, was convinced that this was not like the others.”
Sarah: Oh no. Here's Colin Andrews who studied them for years.
*recording*
“Straight away we can see this is everything we could ever see with a host. The plants are broken. They're rough. The grain is on the floor. No {inaudible] here whatsoever. It's extremely ragged. Extremely ragged, and it is obviously a hoax.”
“So is it a hoax or an unexplained phenomenon?”
“It seems tonight that the issue is far from a settled one. Except that it basically is more crop circles. This year, almost all the corn has been harvested. This final circle, if it is to be, that lacks the precision of many of the others. It looks as if the controversy is far from over. Graham Bow, Coast to Coast, Sussex.”
“Well back from watching that demonstration, corn circle expert Patrick Delgado from Oxford in Hampshire. Mr. Delgado, you are not convinced then by the hoaxes?
“No, I'm not. Except I'm convinced that it's a hoax.”
Sarah: Corn circle expert.
*recording*
“Is there no way at all, deep in your heart of hearts, that they could be telling the truth?”
Chelsey: Does he think they're not telling the truth?
*recording*
“They've endeavored. Yes, I suppose they've done their very best.”
Chelsey: Just say you think that some of them are hoaxes. That feels like a smarter angle.
*recording*
“And what I've seen today out of that farm, I had a look at it along with Colin Andrews, and all I could see was that the crop had been pushed down and there were things about it that I could see that it was manmade.”
“Now you see with respect, you do have a bit of a vested interest in keeping all this going because you make money out of writing books.”
“Or you're making it sound very mercenary.”
Chelsey: Yeah. No shit.
Sarah: What do you think of our crop circle, guys?
Chelsey: What fun. I do think it's just, you know, I love a hoax that doesn't have a ton of baggage. And aside from maybe the people who spent a lot of time investigating this and the resources spent by the government, it's not something that's really causing a ton of harm. It's causing wonder. I like wonder. I like when two guys hang out and do something together.
And it just seems like it must have just been really exciting to do this and wait for a response. That’s always something I think is so interesting about people that create hoaxes is that between the time you commit the act of the hoax and then the time in which the hoax is discovered and the coverage of the hoax starts, I think that just must be such an interesting feeling to be waiting for that.
I mean, we all have felt it a little bit when we're doing a prank of some kind between laying the prank and waiting for the person to interact with the prank in some way. But I just can't imagine doing something. I have too bad of anxiety to actually do something like this. But I do appreciate that they came out and stopped a bunch more government funds being dedicated to understanding it. That feels like they were like, okay, this has gone too far. So I think that's cool.
Sarah: Yeah. And it does feel very in keeping with a pattern that we've seen many times now in the conspiracy theories of today, where information comes out that should really debunk the phenomenon or kind of provide answers to this mystery that people have been trying to solve. And the very people who've seemed most invested in solving the mystery are like, no, no, thank you.
Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, I understand that it is really, really hard if you've dedicated that much time in your life to just fully, I mean, it's like your books are already in circulation. It's like there are times with our shows that new information comes out and what I said is no longer true and it doesn't feel good. I don't like it. And if I had written entire books about a subject, it's pretty difficult to fess up to that, so I get it.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. And that if there is something mysterious happening out there, or if extra-terrestrials are trying to contact us to help us, which is a very hopeful idea, then that's not negated by the fact that equally miraculously, two guys are having a laugh.
Because also it's nice to think that aliens aren't putting so much energy into making art in Hampshire and coming all the way here to not give us any particularly useful message. Just give them some circles, they love circles.
Chelsey: Yeah. It's just the sidewalk chalk of the great beyond. I do think that there would be easier ways to communicate. I mean, unless we just cannot speak any kind of overlapping language. So they're trying to talk to us in math, which I think is what people think about this as like a very crude interpretation.
Sarah: That would be nice. Well, and one of the questions that people also have is like, wow, some of these crop circles are pretty mathematically sophisticated. Like, surely, doesn’t that point to extraterrestrial intelligence?
Chelsey: Yeah, maybe it points to nerds.
Sarah: Maybe. But also, maybe the people who do it are really into math. And also, by the way, the reason that they come forward about this at all is that Doug Bower's wife grows suspicious that her husband is spending so much time out on Friday nights.
Interestingly, these crop circles only tend to appear on Saturday mornings, at least the ones that these two guys make. Because this is the night that they go out to the pub and there's a lot of mileage on the car. And so she thinks he's having an affair.
Chelsey: Wow.
Sarah: And so he has to come clean.
Chelsey: Wow.
Sarah: And tell her that he's been making crop circles.
Chelsey: That is amazing. The theater of heterosexual monogamy strikes again. That's so cool. Oh man. So they didn't really come out because of the government funding. They came out because he didn't want to get yelled at by his wife again,.
Sarah: Let's call it a little bit of both. And what the story ends in is a phenomenon that has outlived its creators. And also that I think took off because it wasn't entirely created just by these two guys, right? They were acting off of stories they had heard elsewhere. Some of which also I think probably, inevitably human created as well.
Although of course, you know, there's lots of things that happen when people aren't looking that we don't necessarily understand intuitively in an actual world, and that we can only find the answers to by studying more.
But I just I love that clip where they're talking about it being just delightful and fun. And you have a couple of beers and cheese rolls and you're out in the moonlight in the wheat field with your rope and a piece of wood.
Chelsey: What if they're gay? I know that's the obvious joke to make. What if they're gay? This would be a great cover.
Sarah: It's not a joke. It's fan fiction. It's the next Heated Rivalry.
Chelsey: It is fan fiction. And how incredible to be this generation of a straight, married couple that just has no idea what the other one is doing. Like this is this man's entire life at this point, it feels like. And she just has no idea. You would think he would come home and be like like, “Honey, look at the one I made tonight.” But nope. It's just for him. It's just for him and his buddy.
Sarah: Yeah. That's the direction that we hope that marriage can move toward. If we're going to keep it around as an institution, if you're going to marry someone, you should know about each other's crop circles.
Chelsey: I think so, too. But you know, everyone's also entitled to their secrets and their private thoughts and their private life, I guess. So I also respect it in a way.
Sarah: Yes, that's true, too. But if I'm going to marry someone for love, I want to be making crop circles with them. Not every night, but you know, at least once. Unless they're scared of the dark or something.
Chelsey: And maybe she could just come out one night and just be like, I want to know what you do. I want to know about what really lights you up? I think that could have been nice.But
Sarah: Yeah, and she could just, as I feel about baseball, come have a beer and read The New Yorker.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: And be supportive that way.
Chelsey: But maybe she was no fun at all, so that's hard to say.
Sarah: Or maybe she was super fun.
Chelsey: Too fun.
Sarah: Everyone was fun. Yeah. Maybe everyone's gay in the story. Maybe she is fun and gay.
Chelsey: What do you think she would be doing with her best friend on Friday nights?
Sarah: You know, we have no data on her.
Chelsey: We have no data.
Sarah: But just if I'm going to imagine something out of nowhere, let's say line dancing. It was 1991 after all.
Chelsey: What immediately jumps to mind for me is looking at tide pools.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: Looking for little critters and tide pools.
Sarah: Well, we are near the ocean.
Chelsey: Yeah, exactly. And then maybe they play a little, they like create a little family of all the different creatures, and then they take pictures of them. Like the Cottingley Fairies.
Sarah: The thing about Wuthering Heights is that it's made me want adaptations of all these sort of prestige costume drama novels where everyone is wearing latex and having sex the whole time. And so when you said tide pools, I was like, did they see any tide pools in Persuasion? Then I was like, sexy persuasion. That could be good.
Chelsey: Yeah, that could be really good.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, anyway, so this is a tale of British people and the things they do. And I find it as with the Cottingley Fairies, as you just mentioned, very, very charming and nice and great that the motive that no one predicted, who was in this sort of paranormal research area when this phenomenon started, was that the people who did it, whether alien or not, were doing it for fun.
Chelsey: I know. For friendship.
Sarah: And fun is the motive. Fun and friendship, and doing and making something under the moonlight.
And I was looking at some Reddit discussions of crop circles, which I love to do for any kind of paranormal thing, and one of the questions was, what happened to crop circles? And the answer is, we still have them. They're still around, but they're just not a craze the way they were back then.
You know, I think that the debunking of them certainly became something people could point to as an answer, although that didn't stop us from growing up watching creepy segments on history channel shows about crop circles and what did they mean. Despite the fact that we already knew, but also we don't know who's made all of them over the years.
And the question of how an idea like this spreads around and why, and whether they're kind of different human motives that we can see in the people who create them is all very interesting. And I would like to know more about all of that. You know, the story is, by no means, sewn up.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: And one of the jokes that people made in this thread, which I feel is somewhat true, although I don't not not totally true, is that kids today don't have to bend over corn in order to hoax adults. They can just do it on their phones.
Chelsey: They can use AI to do it. Yeah.
Sarah: At this point, yeah. But I just know that there are pranksters out there right now hanging out in the corn in the moonlight. And if you haven't tried it, maybe this is the night,
Chelsey: Ah, what a beautiful thing to do. I really want to give this a shot.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: I think the meme thing really makes sense putting it like that. And it's just like, there are still a lot of mysterious elements to this, which is really fun. You know, I think it's nice when we talk about something like this and it doesn't end up being tidy. Both of us love some paranormal stuff in our lives.
Sarah: And that we have an answer to some of it, which is, why did it show up in Southern England?
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: At this specific time period. And why around Stonehenge. And it's funny to realize that the answer is because these guys lived near Stonehenge and they could only get so far in a night.
Chelsey: It's like such, I mean, okay, so there are two possibilities here. You know, it would be like either they had heard about farmers finding these patterns of bent over crops, and then they were like, mm-hmm. Okay. Like, we could do something like that.
Or they just came up with it as an idea. And if they just came up with it as an idea, that's really brilliant. And really very, very, very cool.
Sarah: Well, and we know they'd heard about this story in Australia, but I don't think that there was any media super locally about this kind of thing. I think it's the kind of thing that once it became a phenomenon, farmers locally were like, yeah, I kind of remember something like that.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: But I think that they were inspired by news stories from elsewhere in the world.
Chelsey: Okay. See, and then there, there's the mystery, right? It's like, who are the originals? And I think if I was going to go full skeptic, I would say that there was something explainable that happened that wasn't actually creating such perfect shapes, and that it was a memory of like, yeah, I saw these really strange patterns of my crops being bent down.
But from that point, it wasn't necessarily that they had this evidence that it was so perfect, but then you can extend that out into being something else. I don't know. I'm not sure.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, there's more meat on the bone.
Chelsey: Because the Australian ones were seen from above.
Sarah: No, they were noticed by, I think it was just one that was noticed by a farmer.
Chelsey: Okay. All right.
Sarah: But again, it's something that sort of solidified into this thing that could be understood and replicated. In these cases around Stonehenge where it's like it's a circle in the corn or the wheat, typically.
And also, when you think about making a perfect circle, if you have rope, it's like the same mechanism by which you draw a circle with a compass in geometry class.
Chelsey: Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And that was something I was thinking. He is like, how could you really possibly achieve this? And it's like, actually, you use a string. So many things that were like, how could you possibly achieve this complicated, outrageously difficult act? And it's like, well, you just tie a piece of string to something and walk around. Yeah. You're like, oh yeah. Duh.
Sarah: And it’s heartening to be like, you know what? We actually underestimate people with our theories because they're smart, they know things. We know different things from each other. Things that would seem magic to somebody else who doesn't have your background of knowledge. Even if it's maybe something that seems pretty simple to you.
And we like to have fun in ways that kind of leave behind something beautiful or at least mysterious. It's like, why did we make that horse? I suspect it was fun.
Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it does make sense. Like you can really account for the different ways that the circles looked. Meaning, the one guy was like, these stalks are bent down in a different way. And that would be because people were hearing about these crop circles.
Sarah: And had different technique.
Chelsey: And had a different technique. They looked at that and the person was like, how could this ever be made? And they're like, well, I'm a smart person who understands math and I could make this. But of course you have to come up with your own technique. They're probably not doing the same technique as our two best friends with the rope and the thing.
Sarah: Because they're hearing about it, they're not typically seeing it. The people who are replicating these.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: Perhaps.
Chelsey: And so it makes sense. It's just like a meme.
Sarah: There's more than one way to bend a corn. And every corn is a glamorous woman. Rock brain.
Chelsey: Every corn is a glamorous woman. Thank you for bringing that back up, just in case it was out of anyone's head since last year.
Sarah: We're back in the corn. Every corn is a glamorous woman. Yeah. And I also, I do feel bad for these guys who staked so much of their identity on being crop circle researchers and having it be some guys. But like, isn't it exciting to find out an answer? And the answer is that it was two guys having some fun. I love that. The answer was guys having fun. That’s never the answer.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: Let's enjoy this one. Yeah. The answer to the Dyatlov Pass mystery wasn't some guys had fun.
Chelsey: No, it wasn't.
Sarah: It was an avalanche.
Chelsey: Yeah. Not fun. Not fun at all. But yeah, I think it does just remind me of a meme. You got a template and everyone's going to do something different with it, and so it goes on and on and on.
And I do feel that it's always a good idea, a lot of skeptics don't do this, and if only for self-preservation in the future, just leave the door open for all possibilities. Like you and I. We're going to leave the door open that there were some aliens.
Sarah: What if the aliens were inspired by those guys having fun?
Chelsey: There you go. And they were like, we could have some fun. I hate my wife.
Sarah: And then they went to their own planet and made crop circles there and drank alien beer. Which to them was just beer.
Chelsey: Yeah. It’s just plasma. I don't know. I think that leaving the door open for wonder is never a bad thing. I think making a career out of a mystery might be shaky ground. But I also respect it. I like people who are passionate about things and really go for it.
So everyone in this story has a passion. And it worked out better for some, worse for others. And I just wish everyone the best.
Sarah: I like that some people just thought to enjoy themselves in a way that nobody could have necessarily imagined. I love it when absolutely any of us think of something that we want to do, and we know it's something that we want to do and not what we've absorbed from cultural messaging that we should be wanting to do. Because it's just, who would've thought of that? And where did that idea even come from? And then you're doing it.
Chelsey: I would love to hear that conversation where they came up with the idea in the pub. Like that would be some precious audio to me.
Sarah: I know that we've made way too many TV shows about too many historical events, but this one probably does need to exist.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: And it could be just with everyone from Hot Fuzz.
Chelsey: There you go. It'd be perfect. It's already cast.
Sarah: It's called, Wheat Circles.
Chelsey: Wheat. There we go.
Sarah: Chelsea, you do a very mysterious show called, American Hysteria. What topics have you covered lately over there?
Chelsey: So at the point that this episode will be out for all of you, I will have just put out our two-part series on the cultural history of dinosaurs and their relationship to American popular culture, as well as American culture in general, and how we interpreted the discovery of fossils to mean so many different very American things. They were used to bolster popular support of capitalism is one of the things.
Sarah: Incredible how we made that work.
Chelsey: I know, right?
Sarah: Yeah.
Chelsey: Life finds a way.
Sarah: What topics have you covered that perhaps someone who likes crop circles would enjoy?
Chelsey: Well, you know that alien abduction series we mentioned? Those are great. I think the episode that you did of Spontaneous Human Combustion is a really nice companion to this as well.
I mean, gosh, it's like we've just done so many things around the paranormal. I am both a skeptic of the paranormal and a believer in the paranormal. So anytime we get to delve into those topics is a lot of fun.
Sarah: I believe the paranormal deserves adequate research.
Chelsey: Yeah.
Sarah: You know?
Chelsey: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And also space for the mysterious, because when we lose, the mysterious things get pretty stale, and you're not out in the moonlight with your boys. So stay curious, people.
Sarah: Stay bi-curious everybody.
Chelsey: Yep.
Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being an April fool, a wise fool, a fool for love. We, of course, have a wonderful bonus episode to share with you. And this month it is the Orca Report with our Deep Sea correspondent Brianna Bowman. There's been a lot of Orca news in the last few years, and don't worry, this bonus is two hours long and we had such a good time making it for you.
And if any of you want to hear more about fishery science specifically, let us know. Brianna's very excited to share more of that with us. We are putting together another listener episode. I don't know if you caught the one that we put out last holiday season, but it's one of my favorite things that I have, I can't really say made lately, because I told Miranda to make it. But I got to listen to all of the voice memos that you sent in about where you're from, where you call home, and it meant so much to me to get to help stitch that all together and to hear from you all. And so I decided that we should do that again.
Summer is approaching, this will be our last episode for June. And I went through a few prompts before I realized I had kept coming back to the same basic theme, which is that I want you to tell me about what you love, whether it's a hobby, or a person, or a place, or an inanimate object.
I'm not going to do a full Liza Minelli impression, but I am thinking that a fact that you think more people should know. I talked in this recent bonus episode about something I learned on an episode of Ogies that has never left my mind, is that when sharks eat something they can't digest, they can just reverse their stomachs like a tote bag that they're trying to get muffin crumbs out of. And I just think that's great. I want everyone to know that. Not everyone wants me to tell them that, but that's okay.
So something that you love, whether it's a feeling, a place, a thing, the moment when you take the first bite of a really good apple, a particular moment of the day. Anything and everything, I just want to hear about it and so do the rest of us. So you can send a voice memo, try and keep it about three minutes or less. I know that's a very short amount of time, but we want to listen to as many of these as we can. We do always listen to every submission that we get, but we want to fit in as many as we possibly can.
And you can send those to sloppyandalive@gmail.com. That's our email address for these submissions. It's a Stepford Wives reference, sloppy and alive, S-L-O-P-P-Y-A-N-D-A-L-I-V E@gmail.com. And we will listen to them and enjoy. And we're going to keep those submissions open until, I don't know, let's just say through April. If you're listening to this and it's no longer April, technically it's over.
But listen, I'm not huge on rules, so take that as you will. So that's what we're putting together. We're so excited to share it with you, and we're so excited to keep heading into the spring. You should know that Miranda Zickler is our producer and our editor, and that Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant, and I'm so thankful to them both.
Chelsey Weber-Smith was our guest. Go listen to American Hysteria, that's Chelsey's show. You can listen to it wherever you find good podcasts. It is this shows Sassy Outdoor Sibling. We are the indoor one, and I love getting to make shows with Chelsey. I love getting to share our tween fixations with you.
And that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to hear from you. If you want to send something in but you don't get it together to do it and too much time passes and you overthink it like I would, that's okay. I can still appreciate your thoughts from far away, and I'm so thankful for them, too. See you in two weeks.