shedoesnotcomprehend:

nostalgebraist:

I know that all the evidence about crop circles indicates that they are made by people (they’re more common in areas with higher population and easily accessible areas, they started appearing much more often after the public got interested in them, those two guys revealed that they made a bunch of them and explained their process, etc.)

But what I want to know is how random people manage to pull it off

Like, I know there are professionals who make them for commercial clients, etc., and they have a lot of resources.  But if you’re just some (drunk?) friends making a crop circle for fun one night, how do you make it look good (from above)?  Do you have one person on a really high ladder giving orders?  Are there are a bunch of “shitty” crop circles out there, made by people who don’t know what they’re doing?  And how do the good techniques spread from place to place, given that there don’t seem to be in-depth public resources about it?  Is there an underground network of crop circlers out there, swapping tips?  Has any journalist gone looking for it?

I was under the impression that they were pretty straightforward to make? Shove a peg into the ground, tie a rope to it, use that as your radius, trample down corn within that circle, bam.

This of course won’t get you the way fancy ones with complex fractal patterns, which I assume is what those professionals are up to.

(And yes, I would assume there’s plenty of shitty crop circles, which don’t make the news because “some of my crops were trampled down in a vaguely circular patch” isn’t really all that newsworthy.)

Ah, yeah – a number of people have said things like “they don’t seem that hard to make,” and I think I’m conflating crop circles in general with “the fancy ones,” which are the ones I always see pictures of in the media

There are so many “fancy” crop circles out there that I guess I figured some of them were of unknown origin?  For instance this site has gallery of really impressive crop circles from every calendar year since 1994, and talks about them as though the artists are unknown (although that may just be willful blindness, or playing up the mystique to get people to buy their books).  OTOH there are plenty of circles out there that don’t look as difficult to make (I feel like that site answers my question about “shitty” crop circles in the affirmative, e.g. check out #22).

(via condensed-theorem-shop)