Cautionary Tales When Aliens Landed in Wiltshire | Halloween Season

Pushkin. As darkness falls, late on a summer evening in the English countryside, 12 groups of people make their way towards a field of wheat, carrying planks of wood, ropes and various other implements. The year is 1992. We're in Buckinghamshire, England. The night is cloudy. A shame. What they're about to do in this field, they're supposed to do without being seen or heard. Moonlight would have helped. Some people have come in camouflage. Sensible. But they've got torches strapped to their heads. That'll draw unwelcome attention. There are schoolboys. There's a young American grad student who's working alone. Two women have brought their Pyrenean mountain dog, Yeti, These dogs are huge. They can weigh over 100 pounds. They're bred to protect sheep. But Yeti has been specially trained for the task at hand. That task is making crop circles. Over the previous few years, crop circles had caused a media sensation in England. They'd appear suddenly, overnight, in some farmer's field, elaborate formations made from flattened crops. Newspapers would print aerial photos. So many curious people would turn up to look that farmers began to charge for admission, a way to recoup some losses from the damage they caused. What was making these crop circles? Was it aliens? Or some unusual meteorological phenomenon, perhaps? Or aliens? Maybe it was humans doing it for a laugh, a kind of performance art. Or It could be aliens. And so, a competition, an experiment. Twelve teams will spend the night in a farmer's field in Buckinghamshire, tasked with completing a crop circle between the hours of 10pm and 3am. Not just a simple circle, they've been given a specific design. Concentric rings, a triangle, various lines. Each team has been assigned their own section of field. At dawn, a helicopter will fly over to photograph their efforts from above. Judges will award each team points for how well they've done. The winner will get £ 3, 000, close to $ 15, 000 in today's money. Not bad for a night's work. But the real point of this experiment isn't to crown a winner. It's to see what's possible. The organisers want to find out if humans really are capable of making intricate designs in crops, surreptitiously, overnight, or if other explanations need to be sought, such as aliens. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. In England in the late 1950s, a common weekend leisure activity was to go for a drive. Not to get anywhere, just to enjoy pookling around the countryside in your car. On Sunday afternoons, 12-year-old Colin Andrews would often go for a drive with his dad and mum and younger brother. They lived near Stonehenge, the famous Stone Circle, thousands of years old, and a place of pilgrimage for pagans. neo-druids and various other New Age movements. One Sunday, young Colin, for some inexplicable reason, decided to stay at home instead of joining his family on their drive. It's a decision he would bitterly regret. When his parents and brother got home, they told him what had happened. On a narrow country lane not far from Stonehenge, Over the top of some conifer trees less than a hundred metres away, said Colin's family, a disc-shaped object suddenly appeared, a silvery craft swaying from side to side in the air. They stopped. Colin's dad and brother got out of the car. They watched as the craft began to rise up. Colin's mum had stayed in the car. She was terrified. Get back, she yelled. Suddenly, they told Colin, a narrow beam of white light shot out of the bottom of the craft. It flew away at an extraordinary rate of speed. The 12-year-old was deeply affected to hear of his family's close encounter. I felt somewhere deep inside, Colin recalls, that I should have been there with them. the years passed. Colin grew up, got married, became an electrical engineer, and made a career in local government, where he enjoyed a series of rapid promotions into middle management. But Colin's conventional life was about to be turned upside down. In summer 1983… Colin, now in his late 30s, happened upon a field in which crops lay flattened, mysteriously, in a set of five circles. Crop circles were not yet a media phenomenon. Hardly anyone had even noticed them. Indeed, they weren't even called crop circles. It was Colin himself who would later coin the term. Colin recalls that as he stood in that field... It was like a switch was thrown in my stomach. An overwhelming emotional and spiritual effect, awe and wonder overwhelmed me like a white light permeating every cell of my body. The memories of missing out on a close encounter as a 12-year-old came flooding back. The events felt connected. Colin had a strong sense that he was being presented with an assignment, a mission. Understanding crop circles became his quest. Colin knocked on doors and spoke to farmers. At home, he'd listen to police radio, unencrypted in those days, for reports of UFO activity. Soon he met another man who lived nearby and had also developed an interest in these flattened crops. Pat Delgado was a retired engineer who'd had an interesting career, including seven years in the Australian desert, where he worked at a NASA deep space monitoring station. Pat says, This aroused my interest in unusual or inexplicable phenomena. Whenever they heard of a new circle, Colin and Pat would drive over to take photos. lifting their camera on a metal pole for a better view. They'd take careful measurements using a tape and compass. They'd note the direction in which the crops had been flattened. They'd take samples of soil to send to labs for analysis. At home, in an office he'd made in his garden shed, Colin put up a large map of southern England and plotted the locations of crop circles using coloured pins. he'd sit at his desk and stare at the map, trying to discern a pattern in the pins without success, until one night, something exceedingly strange happened. Colin's shed was highly protected, as was the rest of his home. With his expertise in electrical engineering, Colin had rigged up an elaborate system of burglar alarms with loud buzzers and bright lights. At 4.15 in the morning, they went off, waking Colin, his wife, and all their neighbours. Colin inspected his system for faults, but everything was functioning perfectly. Strange. The next night, at 4.15am, the alarms went off again. And the night after that. And the night after that. This went on for 14 nights in a row, Colin recalls, adding, none of the neighbours were very pleased about what was happening. After yet another 4.15am check that everything was functioning perfectly, Colin sat groggily at his desk and gazed again at the map. Then he had a moment of insight that struck me like a cold wind in the face while standing in the middle of a desert. Colin noticed that the pins could be seen as forming a kind of equilateral triangle. Admittedly, you had to view the sides of that triangle as corridors several miles wide. Colin measured the length of those sides. It was 41.5 miles. All the hair on my neck and arms stood up. says Colin. I realised I had been sent a message. 41.5 miles, 4.15 in the morning, 4, 1, 5. The alarms never went off at 4.15 again. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. In 1989, Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado published a book, Circular Evidence. They set out their photos and measurements and considered all the theories they'd heard put forward for how these circles might form. Lightning? Magnetic field? Static electricity? None could explain everything. Humans? Yes, they'd seen a couple of obvious hoaxes, but... Based on considerable experience, they wrote, we think there are certain aspects of a true circle that could never be produced by machine or manually. Colin recounts his strange experience with the 415 alarms. Even his wife, who is not interested in the paranormal, thought that some entity appeared to be behind these events. So, could the paranormal explanation be... Aliens? Yes, it was possible. Pat Delgado mentions that he's already published his ideas on this question in the worldwide magazine Flying Saucer Review. In the book, he merely concludes that the circles seem to be created by an unknown force field manipulated by an unknown intelligence. Over a pint in a pub, Two blokes called Doug and Dave read this and crease up laughing. Doug and Dave were friends who lived in southern England and met up every Friday night in a country pub for a beer or three and a natter. One night in the late 1970s, the conversation turned to UFOs. Doug remembered reading a story about a tractor driver in Australia who claimed he'd seen a UFO taking off from a field. where the grass had been flattened in a swirling pattern. Doug pointed to a field near the pub. What if we flattened that wheat in a circle, he said to Dave. Would people think a UFO had landed here? An amusing thought after a few drinks. But no, actually, would they? The next Friday, Doug brought along a heavy metal bar. Fortified by ale, Doug and Dave left the pub and sneaked into the field of wheat. They put down the metal bar and pushed it round in a circle. Then they moved the bar outwards and pushed it round again, on their hands and knees, enlarging the circle. Once in a while they'd poke their head above the wheat stalks to make sure nobody had spotted them. After half an hour, they'd flattened wheat in a swirling circle about 30 feet across. Wide enough, they decided. Alas, there was no speculation about UFOs. Nobody seemed to notice what they'd done. Still, Doug and Dave had enjoyed themselves. They were not young men. Dave was in his late forties, Doug his early fifties, but their little escapade had made them feel young again, like mischievous adolescents doing something daft and illicit by the light of the moon. Whenever they emerged from their Friday drinking sessions to find the summer night was warm and pleasant, they'd amuse themselves by making another circle in a field on their way home. They improved their technique, swapping the metal bar for a wooden plank with ropes tied to each end. They'd hold the ropes and stomp down the plank as they walked. That was easier and quicker. They became more strategic, choosing spots on slopes, near public roads, where there was a better chance people would notice the circles, even if that meant driving further afield to find good locations. They made new designs. A big circle with four smaller ones around it. They thought it would look like a four-legged spaceship had landed, Doug told the American author Jim Schnabel for his book Round in Circles. Bingo. At last, one of Doug and Dave's creations made it into the local newspaper, duly accompanied by speculation about extraterrestrials. Dave recalled, we laughed so much we had to stop the car. Doug was in stitches so much he couldn't drive. The national papers picked up the story, then the global media. Doug began to keep a folder of press clippings. He especially enjoyed Pat Delgado's articles in the Flying Saucer Review, explaining how Doug and Dave's creations could only have been made by a higher intelligence. One day, Doug's wife confronted him. She had noticed that when he supposedly went out for a beer with his mate Dave, the mileage on the car went up by a suspiciously large amount. Where was he going? He was seeing another woman, wasn't he? Of course not, said Doug. He showed his wife his folder of press clippings and said, That's what I've been doing with Dave on Friday nights. It's been our secret, but now you know. Doug's wife said, I don't believe you. So the next Friday, Doug's wife came along and watched as her husband and his friend got their crop circle-making equipment out of the car, the wooden plank with ropes, a wooden crosspiece and length of string to position the small circles for the UFO's legs. As the 1980s went by, Doug and Dave saw more and more reports of circles that were nothing to do with them, This epidemic of elaborate crop flattening might have been irksome for farmers, but it was thrilling for a growing band of crop circle researchers like Pat and Colin. They gave themselves a name, seriologists. They held international conferences. A local newspaper, the Andover Advertiser, reported that Colin Andrews had been invited to chair a seriology conference in Japan. but his employer, the local government, wouldn't let him go. I had three days' holiday left, Colin complains, and requested two more days, but I was refused. I think it's a pretty poor show. I consider that the growing scientific interest in the circles should merit the same sort of treatment as, say, a top-class athlete being released by a local authority to compete for his country. By 1991, Doug and Dave were getting tired of making circles. They were both in their 60s now. Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado had published their book, Circular Evidence, which, remarkably, became a bestseller. So many circles were appearing and so many people were curious that it was getting harder not to be caught. One night, as Doug and Dave were about to enter a field, a police car pulled up. They managed to ditch their planks and told the cover story they'd rehearsed. They were amateur wildlife sound recordists. Doug produced his recording equipment. The policeman bought the story. Still, a close shave. This wasn't as much fun as it used to be. Doug and Dave decided it was time to come clean. They phoned the news desk of a daily paper. A journalist found a farmer who was willing to let them borrow a field. As the journalist watched, Doug and Dave created one of their designs in the crop. Then the journalist called Pat Delgado to alert him that a mysterious new circle had been discovered. Pat duly drove over and walked right into the trap. He told the journalist no human could have done this. The journalist introduced him to Doug and Dave. who explained everything. Doug said to Pat Delgado, I'm afraid we've been having you on. Pat was stunned. He mused aloud, we've all been conned. He considered the implications further. If everything you say is true, I'll look the fool. In 1980, a team led by psychologist Craig Anderson ran a classic experiment. They asked students to analyse the results of a personality test taken by two firefighters, one who was good at their job, one who was not. The questions on the personality test were designed to assess someone's propensity to take risks or be cautious. One group of students was given test results showing the good firefighter was a risk-taker, while the incompetent one was cautious. A second group was shown that the good firefighter was cautious and the bad one was the risk-taker. Once the students had turned in their papers, Anderson told them... These two firefighters and their test results were completely fictitious. He'd made the whole thing up. Then came the real point of Anderson's experiment. He said, It's an interesting question though, isn't it? Would people with risk-taking personalities tend to make better or worse firefighters? What do you think? The students in the first group tended to believe risk-takers would make better firefighters. In the second group, Worse, the idea Anderson was studying is called belief perseverance, and it's remarkably powerful. Even when the students knew the evidence they'd seen was fictitious, they couldn't quite bring themselves to revise their beliefs. Pat Delgado had just stood in a crop circle and told a journalist, no human could have done this, then been introduced to Doug and Dave, the humans who did it. Pat called in his co-author, Colin Andrews. Sit down, Pat said. This is bad news. He explained to Colin what was going to be published in the following morning's paper. But then belief perseverance kicked in. The very next day, in yet another farmer's field, the newly famous Doug and Dave had just given a demonstration of their skills to members of the global media when Colin and Pat turned up all guns blazing. This is obviously a fake, Colin told the assembled journalists. We saw everything we'd expect to see in a hoax. It's extremely ragged. There's nothing here to impress us, except two very fit 60-year-olds. Pat Delgado chipped in. Yesterday there were circles discovered on a prairie in Canada. Have these guys been out there? Pat had a point. Doug and Dave might have made some circles, but how could anyone prove that humans made all circles? You couldn't. But you could do the next best thing. Investigate what the best human crop circle makers were capable of and see if their skills left any mystery to be resolved. How might you do that? Maybe a competition? Cautionary Tales will return. Twelve teams signed up to compete in the crop circle-making competition in Buckinghamshire in July 1992. A farmer's field was divided into 12 plots. The teams would compete for a cash prize by making the specified design overnight. A helicopter would fly over the field at dawn to help the judges make their decision. The competition's organiser was Rupert Sheldrake, a singular figure. On the one hand, Sheldrake was a proper scientist, trained at Cambridge and Harvard. On the other hand, for a scientist, Sheldrake's mind was unusually open to unorthodox ideas. He studied parapsychology, for example. The crop circle competition sounded like a properly scientific approach to an unorthodox idea, but many were suspicious of Sheldrake's motives. The design he gave the teams certainly looked challenging. Concentric rings, a triangle, various lines. And again, it was supposed to be hard. The whole point was to find out if there was any aspect of crop circles that humans couldn't make. When Sheldrake invited a group called the Wessex Skeptics to nominate a judge, they refused. They feared the competition would be a tawdry public relations exercise designed to discredit the hoaxing hypothesis. The sceptical journalist Matt Ridley shared their fears. He says, the whole competition was aimed to prove that it was impossible to make complex changes by hand. Still, Ridley decided to enter the competition. At 10pm, the teams made their way to the field. Ridley and his sister, some Cambridge undergraduates, three young engineers from a helicopter company. The owners of Yeti, the Pyrenean mountain dog, harnessed him to a wooden plank. They'd trained him to pull it through the crops, but Yeti had other ideas. He settled down in the wheat and fell asleep. At three o'clock in the morning, time was up. When the helicopter flew at dawn, one of the plots in the field did not look like the others. Matt Ridley had decided not to dignify the competition by taking it seriously. He hadn't even attempted to follow Sheldrake's design. Instead, he'd carved his own cryptic message into the field, a way of poking fun. It was obvious to Ridley that crop circles were a human thing. It was gullible even to ask the question. But the question had been asked. and the other 11 teams had taken it seriously. They'd tried to make Sheldrake's design, and they'd done superbly. The aerial photos show plot after plot of impressively clean lines, sharp edges and neatly flattened crops. The challenging, complex design had turned out to be not only possible for humans to make, but apparently quite straightforward. The judges had a tough task. In second place, the young American grad student, working alone. His name was Jim Schnabel, and he was soon to publish his book, Round in Circles. The winner? The three young engineers from the helicopter company. Before they could pocket their cash prize... They had to recreate the design in daylight so everyone could see how they'd done it. It was, admits Sheldrake, fascinating. They used two sets of lightweight stepladders and a plank to move from one part of the field to another without leaving a trail. They used a telescopic PVC pipe device which pivoted out from a stepladder to measure the concentric wings. They flattened the crops with a roller made from more PVC pipe, with a rope through it. Rupert Sheldrake was careful to keep his mind open. The fact that it is possible to forge a £ 50 note does not prove that all £ 50 notes are forgeries. Logically, of course, quite true. Still, to his credit... Sheldrake didn't shy away from what he'd found. The experiment was conclusive, he wrote. Humans could indeed make all the features of state-of-the-art crop formations at that time. So, there was no mystery, really. No need to postulate any role for aliens. But belief perseverance is powerful. Remember the psychologist Craig Anderson's experiment about the risk-taking firefighters? His students persevered in their beliefs, even knowing that the evidence on which they'd built those beliefs was worthless. Anderson points out that belief perseverance isn't just an academic curiosity. It contributes to real problems, such as vaccine hesitancy. For example, in the 1990s, One academic study presented evidence that a particular vaccine could cause autism. The study was later completely discredited, but for some people, the belief that vaccines might cause autism has persisted. Craig Anderson also conducted a follow-up experiment. He asked some students merely to analyse the results of the firefighters' personality tests, and others... to suggest explanations. For example, risk-takers make better firefighters because they're more likely to be brave. When the students wrote down reasoning, their beliefs were even more likely to stay standing after the supporting evidence was taken away. Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews hadn't just written down their reasoning, they'd published a best-selling book on it. Pat wrote a follow-up book in which he explains his unfortunate... No human could have done this... in Doug and Dave's circle. You see, that was just his initial impression, on a casual walkthrough. He'd not yet had a chance to carry out the usual thorough tests. He later conducted those tests, such as pushing probes into the soil and connecting them to a tape recorder to check for electromagnetic noises. A genuine circle would generate distinctive noise. This one did not. Investigations, Pat adds darkly, revealed that Doug and Dave were but pawns in a plan to discredit the crop circle phenomenon, a well-orchestrated misinformation campaign involving official departments and at least two other countries. Pat recounts more strange incidents with crop circles. such as when 25 sheep were found in a different field from the one they were in the night before, frightened and very nervous as if something had scared them. What could account for the crop circle and the frightened sheep? The Ministry of Agriculture, Pat writes, refused to comment on the possibility of an invasion by beings from another world. Colin Andrews wrote another book too. It's called Crop Circles, Signs of Contact. He looks back on the 1980s, how his whole world changed when he became interested in crop circles. New friends, constant travel, new expenses. My financial situation, he writes, went from secure to drastically insecure. Colin's marriage broke down. One imagines that 14 days in a row of alarms going off at 4.15am can't have helped. On top of that personal trauma, Colin writes, he realised that many of his friends were embarrassed by him. Many co-workers at the local authority were so mortified by his television appearances discussing his research that they made it quite clear they wanted nothing to do with him. With hindsight, he sees the problem. One of the biggest mistakes I made was mentioning publicly the possibility of crop circles being formed by extraterrestrial intelligences. It allowed the media to paint me as an eccentric. People weren't ready. I now know that I offered cutting-edge ideas too soon. Still, those ideas did find enough of an audience for his book Circular Evidence to become a bestseller. Colin earned enough from the royalties to quit his confining job in local government and start jetting off to those international meet-ups. At a conference on UFOs in the United States in 1991... Colin found love again. He moved to Connecticut to start a new life with his second wife. Crop circles continued to appear throughout the 1990s with ever more ambitious designs. Quite a few people, it seemed, shared Doug and Dave's mischievous delight in doing something daft and illicit in the countryside by the light of the summer moon. Still, Colin remained convinced that not all crop circles were human-made. He writes, Hoaxers could not create counterfeit crop circles if they did not have real ones to copy. The argument sounds plausible until you realise that Colin is smuggling his conclusion into his premise. Human-made crop circles are counterfeit only if real ones exist that aren't human-made. It's a bit like saying hoaxers can make counterfeit sandcastles only because they have real sandcastles to copy. It is alternatively conceivable that humans invented sandcastles themselves. In 1999, Collins secured philanthropic funding for a major two-year study of crop circles in England. He wanted to know how many of these crop circles were counterfeit and how many were real. Colin hired private detectives and undercover operatives to infiltrate groups of crop circle makers and learn their techniques. He made a list of telltale signs of human-made crop circles, such as holes in the ground where marker pegs had been driven in and removed. Colin analysed aerial photos. and took readings with a magnetometer. In August 2000, he announced his results. 80% of crop circles made in England over the last two years had been made by humans. But in the remaining 20%, he could find no evidence of human involvement at all. Colin was pleased with this finding. He assumed that everyone would focus on the still mysterious 20%, where aliens might yet be involved. But no. Instead, Colin began to get hate mail from crop circle enthusiasts who focused on the 80%. How dare he say that most crop circles weren't genuine? He must be a disinformer, in the pay of the CIA, or maybe bought off by the Rockefellers. Colin writes... I was stunned by the vitriol that was hurled my way, and I learned a great deal about people during this experience. What Colin learned, at least about other people, is how powerful belief perseverance can be. It staggers me, he writes, to what extent people will go to hang on to their beliefs, even when they're presented with evidence of the truth. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben-Nadav Hafri edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohen Corrin Gileard-Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show... please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it ad-free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com slash cautionaryclub. That's patreon, p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash cautionaryclub. Thank you.