The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [39]
Carefully they planned each nocturnal excursion, sometimes following meticulous diagrams they had prepared in watercolours. They closely tracked their interpreters. When a local meteorologist deduced a kind of whirlwind because all of the crops were deflected downward in a clockwise circle, they confounded him by making a new figure with an exterior ring flattened counterclockwise.
Soon other crop figures appeared in southern England and elsewhere. Copycat hoaxsters had appeared. Bower and Chorley carved out a responsive message in wheat: ‘WEARENO-TALONE’. Even this some took to be a genuine extraterrestrial message (although it would have been better had it read ‘YOUARENOTALONE’). Doug and Dave began signing their artworks with two Ds; even this was attributed to a mysterious alien purpose. Bower’s nocturnal disappearances aroused the suspicions of his wife Ilene. Only with great difficulty - Ilene accompanying Dave and Doug one night, and then joining the credulous in admiring their handiwork next day - was she convinced that his absences were, in this sense, innocent.
Eventually Bower and Chorley tired of the increasingly elaborate prank. While in excellent physical condition, they were both in their sixties now and a little old for nocturnal commando operations in the fields of unknown and often unsympathetic farmers. They may have been annoyed at the fame and fortune accrued by those who merely photographed their art and announced aliens to be the artists. And they became worried that if they delayed much longer, no statement of theirs would be believed.
So they confessed. They demonstrated to reporters how they made even the most elaborate insectoid patterns. You might think that never again would it be argued that a sustained hoax over many years is impossible, and never again would we hear that no one could possibly be motivated to deceive the gullible into thinking that aliens exist. But the media paid brief attention. Cerealogists urged them to go easy; after all, they were depriving many of the pleasure of imagining wondrous happenings.
Since then, other crop circle hoaxers have kept at it, but mostly in a more desultory and less inspired manner. As always, the confession of the hoax is greatly overshadowed by the sustained initial excitement. Many have heard of the pictograms in cereal grains and their alleged UFO connection, but draw a blank when the names of Bower and Chorley or the very idea that the whole business may be a hoax are raised. An informative expose by the journalist Jim Schnabel (Round in Circles, 1994), from which much of my account is taken, is in print. Schnabel joined the cerealogists early and in the end made a few successful pictograms himself. (He prefers a garden roller to a wooden plank, and found that simply stomping grain with one’s feet does an acceptable job.) But Schnabel’s work, which one reviewer called ‘the funniest book I’ve read in ages’, had only modest success. Demons sell; hoaxers are boring and in bad taste.
The tenets of scepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of a democratic application of scepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to employ the same levels of scepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
But the tools of scepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They’re hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although scepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a sceptic might suggest,