On a cold morning in 1976, there was something noticeable in the field. It is impossible to make it out from the view of the ground, all that is visible is just stalks of crops smashed to the ground. To get a better understanding of what is really happening, a bird’s-eye view is needed. Now there is an easily noticeable pattern in the fields. A group of colliding, strange shapes that make little sense. This strange pattern in the fields would go on to be widely known as the first Crop Circle. The artists who made the circles remained anonymous for years. In this time, a variety of hoaxes about how crop circles were created arose. Later the artists Doug Bowers and David Chorley came out as the artists of many early crop circles, but conspiracy theories persisted and continue to the modern-day. Theories include circles being made by aliens and being made by psychics. This psychic theory is visible in the video “Proof on who made crop circles!” uploaded by the YouTube Channel The Mysterydecoder. The video is narrated by Ken Peters and written by Sherry Wang according to its description. The main claim of the video is that crop circles are warnings from the psychics from the future sending messages to the past to warn us of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. The video uses many claims to make this point though they have many faults and discrepancies to them. The claims made in the video are rooted in pseudo-scientific ideas that do not have enough backing from credible sources to be plausible explanations for the appearance of crop circles around the world.

1. Underlying Premise: Psychics are real and have extrasensory abilities

Though it is never directly stated in the video, it is clear the writers of this piece believe psychics are real. Though this is a claim that can not be completely disproven, it is highly unlikely that psychics are not real. This can be seen in the work of James Randi. Throughout the latter part of the 20th-century, there was an ongoing craze in pop culture with psychics and their special abilities. Many were enamored by these psychics, one, in particular, being Uri Geller. According to the article “The Unbelievable Skepticism of James Randi” written by Adam Higginbottom for The New York Times, Geller said his psychokinetic powers allowed him to “bend spoons, he said, using only his mind” (Higginbottom). James Randi, who was a magician himself, had a disdain for people like Geller saying  “That’s why they call them con men. Because they gain the confidence of the victim — and then they fool ‘em” (Higginbottom). Over the years Randi would do a lot to disprove Geller and one of his most infamous time catching Geller would be on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Randi made sure that Geller’s tricks would not work by giving Johnny Carson’s Prop men (Higginbottom). Randi has worked very hard to disprove just one psychic, but just one is not enough to get conclusive evidence about psychic abilities.

Randi has worked to disprove more than just one psychic. According to Higginbottom’s New York Times article “For almost 60 years, [Randi] has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity, and no one had ever received a single penny” (Higginbottom). This is done through The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) and The Million Dollar Challenge. The challenge is simple if a psychic can prove they have Extrasensory Abilities, then they get a million dollars. There is always room for the people setting up the challenge to cheat, but the scientists working on the tests avoid cheating. In Chris French’s article “Scientists put Psychic’s Paranormal Claims to the Test” from The Guardian, French writes, “[The Claimants] will be fully involved in drawing up and approving the final protocol and can insist that the conditions are to your liking, provided that the agreed protocol is well controlled from a scientific perspective” (French). The scientists make sure the claimants have an equal say in how things will work, to make sure they can work to the best of their abilities. French also says in his article The Million Dollar Challenge also raises the question of why a very small percent of psychics out of a large amount don’t take the challenge (French). With a very large cash incentive and the ability to control the tests to their liking, it does not make sense for apparent psychics to avoid the challenge. They should want to join the challenge as a chance to prove they have psychic abilities. With this in mind and James Randi’s own background in disproving psychics, it seems safe to say that the existence of people with extrasensory abilities is highly unlikely.

2. Claim 1: “Knowing we only had time to stop by Stonehenge, we wished for a crop circle to appear near us.” (3:47)

The claim is trying to say that due to their wish for a crop to appear while the writer and their group was in the Stonehenge area and a crop circle appeared, that means the crop circle must come from the powers of the human mind. One important thing to remember is correlation is not causation. There could be plenty of other reasons while a crop circle would happen to appear in the Stonehenge area. One reason seems to simply be that crop circles are just more likely to appear in that area. In the study “Spatial Distribution of England’s Crop Circles: Using GIS to investigate a geo-spatial mystery” written by Jeremy Northcote of Edith Cowan University, there is an interesting pattern in the appearance of crop circles across England. In the study, Northcote found that “[t]he concentration of crop circles in the south of England, however, is undeniable. Some 46 percent of crop circles were reported in Wiltshire, and 10 percent reported in Hampshire” (Northcote). If a concentration is that high then it is very likely for a circle to randomly appear there. Wiltshire holds relevance to crop circle history by being the location of the first modern crop circles. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica “Crop Circle” article crop circles first began regularly appearing in Wiltshire’s fields (Gregersen). Since Wiltshire has a very strong connection with the history of crop circles it would make sense that Wiltshire would have the most crop circles in England. Due to Wiltshire’s connection with crop circles and its high concentration of crop circles, if a crop circle appeared anywhere it would make sense for that place to be Wiltshire.

3. “Expert” 1: Robert Van Den Broeke, a self-proclaimed medium and psychic (4:18)

Robert Van Den Broeke is a medium that can communicate with the dead, a viewer of crop circles, and the host of Dutch Television Er is Zooveel Meer. Having “psychic” as a profession would mean Den Broeke is making extraordinary claims, but he has not done too much to outright prove that he should be trusted as a psychic. Since Den Broeke is working in a field that is commonly considered to be pseudo-scientific that means he does not have much trust from the greater scientific community. This would also mean he has been through a lot of criticism for his work and one source of this criticism is Rob Nanninga, the writer of the website Skepsis and his article about Robert Van Den Broeke and one of only a few people who have worked to disprove Broeke, “There Is So Much More: Googling with Robert Van Broeke.” Nanninga found many problems in Den Broeke’s work particularly in his work as a psychic. On Er is Zooveel Meer Broeke acts as a medium to help mourning people reach loved ones that recently passed. Most seemed to be going normally in one episode of the show until Nanninga noticed something writing, “He was a gene burner and tapper. That corresponds almost exactly with the information that Robbert obtained in a paranormal way. Only a typo has crept in unnoticed. Lubbert was no genverbrander but geneverbrander! (usually spelled gin burner)” (Nanninga). Nanninga was able to find a website with the same specific “genverbrander” typo about the spirit Broeke is “communicating with” that Broeke ended up saying on TV. There is also another time where Broeke had information suspiciously similar to what could be found online. In another example when Broeke visited a theater to gain information about it from the spirits, Nanninga writes, “Robbert claimed he did not know what these impressions meant. […] I myself was able to verify it even faster because all the information was on a webpage of the theater” (Nanninga). This is another example of Broeke likely using online information to find information about a place or person he needs. The information about the theater was easy to find, so Broeke could easily have access to it. These examples show that Robert Van Den Broeke was likely using “Hot Reading” a skill in which a medium or psychic finds information about a specific place or person before they give them a reading, to make it seem like they are communicating with spirits. Based on Broeke’s likely use of hot reading, he should not be trusted as an expert.

4. Claim 2: “Hoeven is also the only city I know that has crop circles in sand, snow, and in the fields.” (7:13)

The claim is stating the crop circles in Hoeven, which were discovered by Robert Van Den Broeke according to the video, could not be faked because sand and snow circles are unique to Hoeven. One of the big problems with this claim is that sand circles and snow circles are not unique to Hoeven. An example of a sand circle can be seen in December of 2014 when a sand circle mysteriously appeared on Chicago’s Edgewater beach. Mike Swasko in his article “Mysterious ‘Crop Circles’ appear in Sand on Edgewater Beach” for the Chicago Tribune reported “[b]y about noon Tuesday the drawing had vanished” and a resident of the area “said she woke up early Wednesday to take a peek at the beach from her balcony. Sure enough, a new drawing […] had appeared in the sand below” (Swasko). The fact that a sand circle not only appeared but disappeared and a new design came back to show that sand circles are not a phenomenon unique to Hoeven. Snow circles have also appeared in places other than Hoeven. According to Rob Waugh in his article “Massive owl face appears in the snow as aliens move on from crop circles” for Metro, a snow circle happened to appear in Wiltshire, England. The snow circle was caught by Chris Barrows and it appeared in the shape of an owl with large eyes (Waugh). This shows once again that Hoeven is not unique in the sand and snow circles, they have appeared in other places around the world. Since snow circles and sand circles are not unique to Hoeven, it makes the claim in the video shaky, though does not outright disprove it.

5. Claim 3: “With that approach I’ve found thirty crop circle warnings right before 911, about 911” (10:29) (911 is meant to reference the September 11th, 2001 Terrorist Attacks)

The claim is stating that in the design of many crop circles there are patterns that can be connected back to natural disasters and terrorists, such as the September 11th attacks in this example. Similar to the first claim, this just feels like coincidences, but it can likely be attributed to something different. “The spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena” is the definition of Apophenia according to Robert Todd Carrol, the writer of The Skeptic’s Dictionary (Carrol). It feels like the writers have only found connections between two events that are in no way related. This is not a new thing for crop circle theorists either. According to Benjamin Radford’s article for Live Science “Crop Circle was a Publicity Stunt: Why ‘Experts’ were Fooled” the circle “appeared in a farmer’s barley field in Chualar, Calif., as 2013 ended” and it led to “[s]ome crop-circle experts wrote in-depth analyses that claimed to cleverly decode hidden meanings in the pattern” (Radford). The crop circle turned out to be a publicity stunt by “a marketing team hired by computer-graphics company Nvidia” and the shape of the circle was meant to be “a drawing of the company’s new Tegra K1 processing chip” (Radford). Radford also contributes the reason for crop circle experts finding connections that don’t exist to Apophenia as well. The writers of the video are likely drawing connections between the crop circles they have found and these horrible events in our history due to apophenia.

Everyone’s brain is hard-wired for finding these connections even where there are none. Finding connections for crop circles is probably so easy for these writers because the designs are meant to be vague. According to Rob Irving and Peter Brookensmith’s Smithsonian Magazine article “Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax,” this is because crop circle artists want people to reach their own conclusions about the circles: “And as such, it is often inherently ambiguous and open to interpretation. To the circle-maker, the greater the range of interpretations inspired in the audience the better” (Irving and Brookensmith). Due to making crop circles ambiguous, it makes it easier for people like the writers of this video to find connections when they never really existed. The design of many circles allows them to say a lot, meaning any conclusion about them can be reached.  

Conclusion

The video “Proof on who made crop circles!” uploaded by YouTube channel The Mysterydecoder does not provide plausible explanations to the appearance of crop circles due to a lack of good evidence from credible sources. They used sources that have been proven to use false information and make claims that have other ways they can be explained. Spending a life getting very analytical with conspiracy theories is not a good life. It can lead to missing out on all the brief, beautiful moments of life. From an article in Wales Online, written by Rachel Misstear, Marc Treanor speaks on what it’s like to have a sand circle he created to be washed away: “It’s funny, people often ask if it’s sad to watch them wash away, but part of the joy of this is the impermanence of it. There’s something about that which makes it special, it reflects the bigger things in life” (Misstear). Letting these quick moments pass by because of conspiratorial ideas will only lead to regret in the future. Focusing on life in the present is very important.

Featured Image and Figure 1 taken from video

Video: youtu.be/P55j_B-a8LQ