What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

[Red Dragon]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

Aliens - REAL- The border patrol is not that good.

Atlantis - REAL- They have a TV show and everything!

Bigfoot - REAL- My uncle has 2 Big feet!

Chupacabra - NOT REAL - They just need some legends of there own.

Dark Side of the Oz - NOT REAL- The Wizard of Oz made sure of that

Ghosts - REAL - They're to many TV shows about them

Kraken - REAL - Giant squids have been found so why not?

Loch Ness Monster - NOT REAL - His name is CHAMP, he lives in Lake Champlain!

Moon Landing - REAL - People are just jealous that USA got up there first.

Psychics - REAL - You must not watch Psych!

Werewolves - REAL - You have see "Werewolf syndrome"

Vampires - REAL - Duh! VAMPIRE BATS!!!!

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

Add crop circles to that list. There's a program on the Discovery Channel about it right now, and the stuff sounds interesting. They're going to try to recreate them scientifically, as they say that there are light levels of radiation in some crop circles, which couldn't be done with just a plank on a string.

So, crop circles: Are they caused by real phenomena (spelling?) or are they a hoax? Or both?

[Roneatek]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

Hoax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circles

These guys make circles professionally for buisinesses who want to advertise:

http://www.circlemakers.org/

Still, there are a very small few that cant be explained yet.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

I wound up only seeing the first 20-30 minutes of the program due to being forced into back-up duty for delivering "meals on wheels", but my grandma says that it was possible to replicate a crop circle and leave low-level radiation, but it essentially takes so much effort to do so that you'd have to wonder how many people would really go through the trouble to go beyond just pressing the wheat. I say some are hoaxes, but others have more to them than meets the eye.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

What I didn't like about the whole crop circle thing is when somebody revealed how they could be made everybody was all "Well, that settles it." Just because something can be faked doesn't mean all are fake. Someone can dye their hair red, that doesn't prove that all redheads dyed their hair. Ya know what I mean?

[Roneatek]

Re: What do you believe (NOT A RELIGIOUS TOPIC - more like a survey) *UPDATED*

Quoted from the wiki article, picked out the juicy bits:

In 1991, more than a decade after the phenomena began, two men announced that the phenomenon of crop circles was an idea thought up one evening in a pub in Southampton, England in 1978. World War II veteran Doug Bower and his friend Dave Chorley revealed that they made their crop circles using planks, rope, hats and wire as their only tools. Bower and Chorley stated to reporters that a small group of people can stomp down a sizeable area of crop in a single night. "Stomp" does not mean using the feet: simple tools to make crop circles have been demonstrated. [2].

The pair became slightly frustrated that their work had not received as much publicity as they had hoped. In 1981 they created a crop circle in a highly visible area called the Winchester Punchbowl - an area surrounded by roads from which a clear view of the field is available to drivers passing by.

Bower's wife had become increasingly suspicious of him due to noticing particularly high levels of road mileage in their car. Eventually, fearing that his wife suspected him of something else, Bower confessed to her what he had been doing and subsequently informed a British national newspaper.

Dave Chorley died in 1996 though Doug Bower has made the occasional crop circle as recently as 2004 — over ten years after he revealed it to be a hoax. Bower has said that, had it not been for his wife's suspicions, he would have taken the secret to his deathbed, never revealing that it was a hoax.

And heres the part on so-called "real" crop circles:

Most critical observers, and the scientific mainstream, are convinced that crop circles are sniggles or hoaxes engineered by humans, and indeed more and more crop formations have been claimed by their makers. This explanation, supported by the documentation produced by some crop-circle hoaxers, has the advantage of not requiring the assumption of the existence of flying saucers or other as-yet-unobserved phenomena. However, there are many contending hypotheses which assume that at least some crop circles are not the products of mundane hoaxers; these hypotheses vary in their degree of scientific rigor, but all fall to some extent outside the mainstream.

One modern belief, is that crop circles are created by flying saucers landing in fields and flattening a neat circle in the crop. However, the increasing complexity of formations from the 1980s on make this conjecture seem unlikely.

Some enthusiasts suggest that crop circle may be cymatics, the visualisation of vibration or sound.[citation needed] According to this hypothesis, the complex patterns are two-dimensional geometric or visual representations of sound frequencies, with higher sound frequencies producing more complex shapes similar to both mandalas and crop circle designs.

Another hypothesis is that a man-made satellite in Earth orbit is using some kind of beam (e.g., microwaves) to create the designs.[citation needed] Heating stems of wheat with a short intense burst of microwave energy can produce wilting similar to that in a crop circle. Flattened stems often have the bend just below a stem-node, and also may feature blackened burn holes indicative of intense heating. Microwave heating has been shown to be capable of producing these effects. It is postulated by believers of this theory that the U.S. Pentagon's "Star Wars" program has a satellite capable of delivering such a microwave beam.[citation needed] However, there is a reasonable counter-argument to this stating that there were no traces of supposed radiation detected in the crop circles.[citation needed] Crops that were bent using the microwave technique showed all signs of various radiations and moisture differences. The original crops in the crop circle showed no abnormalities compared to normal crops, except for being mysteriously bent.[citation needed] Furthermore, the "Star Wars" theory leads to the question "Why would a US military satellite be making patterns in crops across the world?" Such activity would be either a matter of official policy (in which case the question "why?" remains) or random acts by (bored?) military personnel, which would be tantamount to firing a major and highly secret weapon near populated areas, and would surely subject the perpetrator(s) to harsh disciplinary action.

Often touted as evidence for the mystic origin of crop circles is the coincidence that many circles in the Avebury area of southern England occur near ancient sites such as earth barrows or mounds, white horses carved in the chalk hills, and stone circles. Other ideas on their formation have been proposed include tornadoes, freak wind patterns, ball lightning, and something called "plasma vortices".

A number of witnesses claim to have observed circles being created, saying that it takes a few seconds and the corn falls flat like a fan being opened – though these accounts are always anecdotal and have never been supported by any evidence beyond the claimants' assertions.[citation needed] Crop circle enthusiasts claim that there are other features of crop circles that undercut the hoax theory. They say that bends in the corn in many circles occur just below a joint, while the flattening of the corn by hoaxers produces a crack at any point in the stem, and some scientific studies on apical nodes bear them out.[citation needed] Also they say that flattened corn often lies in groomed layers, rather than random crushings. While there have been cases in which believers declared crop circles to be 'the real thing', only to be confronted soon after with the people who created the circle and documented the fraud[citation needed], the bending issue remains in dispute.

Just too many proven instances of circles being hoaxes for me to believe that they are "real".