More on Dave & Doug, elderly circle "hoaxers" -- with ties to top-secret Pine gap spy center in Australia!
Date: 09-11-91 00:30
From: Don Allen
Subj: circle hoaxers
JH> > Shall I laugh at this now or later? :-)
JH>
JH> Go ahead an laugh now. Those guys were hilarious. Also, I
JH> hear that a circle was apparently being formed in Canada at
JH> almost the exact time they were performing in England. ;-)
From what I read on the Internet tonight, the *inference* has been
made in particular to the more graphic crop circles..
Here's something I grabbed off the Net tonight from sci.skeptic (I
knew they would waste _no_ time in "see..I told you that were fake",
and they didn't disappoint me)
*Please note the _Source_ that this article quotes from :-)
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From: aro@aber.ac.uk (Andrew Ormsby)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.paranormal,alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Crop circles are a hoax.
Summary: Bower and Chorley did it.
Message-ID: <1991Sep9.133407.6311@aber.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Sep 91 13:34:07 GMT
Sender: aro@aber.ac.uk (Andrew Ormsby)
Followup-To: sci.skeptic
Organization: CS Dept, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
Lines: 94
Today's "Today" newspaper (a UK national tabloid) exposes corn circles
as a hoax. The story is the lead on page 1, and there is accompanying
information explaining how the hoax is carried out inside.
The perpetrators are Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, both in their
sixties. They've been creating circles for 13 years.
Some quotes from the newspaper articles:
"Corn circle expert Patrick Delgado [author of 'Circular Evidence' and
'The Latest Evidence'] admitted last night 'We have all been conned.
Thousands of lives are going to be wrecked over this'."
"The mystery of the corn circles -- which has baffled experts for more
than a decade -- is today exposed as nothing more than a hoax by two
artists.
"After a week-long investigation, we can reveal that Douglas Bower and
David Chorley, two men in their 60s, have been successfully fooling
the experts for years.
"And last night, they destroyed the myths that have built up around
the strange circles, which have been appearing in corn fields since
the late Seventies.
"Under cross-examination, the two men have told a completely
consistent story of how they made the circles in fields across the
south of England.
"Every part of their evidence has stood up to scrutiny.
"Then TODAY secretly arranged for them to create the ultimate corn
circle design in a field in Kent.
"But the most damning evidence of all came when self-professed expert,
Pat Delgado examined the circle and said: 'In no way could this be a
hoax. This is without doubt the most wonderful moment of my research'.
"However, just hours before Mr Delgado's visit to the field, we had
watched as the two men had step-by-step demonstrated their method of
making the corn circles."
The rest of the article spends some time poking fun at Mr Delgado and
also explains how the two men constructed the circles. Each circle
pattern was meticulously planned in advance. They used two
planks of wood attached to some reins. They used the planks to lay the
corn down delicately in a circular process (starting from the centre
of the circle). They entered fields by following the tyre tracks of
tractors used for crop spraying. They used a wire sight on a baseball
cap to help them produce straight lines by sighting on objects on the
edge of the fields such as trees.
The article goes on to say:
"Amazingly, the entire scam was dreamed up by two men in a pub.
"Doug said: 'I lived in Australia from 1958 to 1966 and during that
time there were a few circles farmers put in crops in Queensland as a
joke."
After meeting in a pub, they decided on making some circles as "a bit
of a laugh". They started off with simple circles and built up from
there once there started to be some publicity.
"Then all of a sudden, we saw an article in the local paper
and then articles in the national papeers and we knew we had done it.
"We heard this bloke Delgado had reported them -- this was the
first time we had heard of him.
"When we heard he had worked at NASA in Australia we were even
more pleased. He started saying they had been done by a "superior
intelligence" -- we liked the sound of that. We laughed so much that
we had to stop the car and pull into a lay-by...".
"The circles at Cheesefoot Head were described as "sensational" in
Delgado and Andrew's book, Circular Evidence. It was important, they
said, theat there were no well-defined tramlines nearby. But Doug and
Dave had simply used their high-stepped loping walk to get through the
corn. Later they became less careful. 'Even if we were clumsy and
caused a mess, they were so keen on dismissing that humans had done it
that they explained it away by saying "Oh the first onlooker must have
done that"' Doug said."
The article ends by saying that the newspaper paid no money for the
story.
-----
Further comment seems unnecessary.
Andy Ormsby
aro@cs.aber.ac.uk
--- End of original article ----------------------------------------------
--- A Followup to the original ----
19:40:29 EDT 1991
From: cook@vcsesu.enet.dec.com (Peter R. Cook)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.paranormal,alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Re: Crop circles are a hoax.
Message-ID: <27178@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>
Date: 9 Sep 91 18:32:39 GMT
Sender: news@nntpd.lkg.dec.com
Followup-To: sci.skeptic
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 16
In article <1991Sep9.133407.6311@aber.ac.uk>, aro@aber.ac.uk (Andrew Ormsby)
writes...
>Today's "Today" newspaper (a UK national tabloid) exposes corn circles
>as a hoax. The story is the lead on page 1, and there is accompanying
>information explaining how the hoax is carried out inside.
I don't believe it. Explain the circles that have appeared
in Asia, Canada, and America.
Peter R. Cook | Disclaimer: "Quoth the Raven, eat my shorts man!"
Digital Equip. Corp. +--------------------------------------------------
Marlboro, MA. | "1984 has past, forget about Big Brother, welcome
508-467-6936 | to the 90's where the government's your mother!"
~ The opinions expressed above are the author's only and do not reflect the ~
~ opinions or anything else of Digital Equipment Corporation. ~
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There's at least 40K more on this thread but I think you get the gist of
it here.
Ok..so let's see how much bashing on the *source* goes on :-)
Don
Go back to Crop circle enigma index page