0:00:00
Benjamin Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

Pascual Romero: And welcome back to Scoring the Strange. We are here with you on episode 14.

BR: One after 13.

PR: Yeah, the one after.

BR: So if the last one was unlucky, and I’m not saying it was, but if it was, then we are back to your regularly scheduled Lucky Podcast.

PR: Yes, I remember back when we did episode 13, those were the days.

BR: I remember that fondly.

PR: I remember it fondly. But this week we’ve got some cool stuff going on. We’re going to be talking about a couple of topics that we’re skeptical about, but the main topic is about the Stonehenge surprise and it’s a closer look at the best case for crop circles. It’s an investigation Benjamin did about the crop circles that showed up near Stonehenge in the mid 90s, correct?

BR: That’s right.

PR: So we’ll be hopping into that, but first, Ben, what are you skeptical about this week?

BR: Well this week I I’m skeptical of it’s actually a topic that I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years and it’s on the subject of intuition.

0:01:41
PR: Ah, okay. I had a feeling you were going to say that.

BR: You thought that I might. And I’ve written about intuition, I’ve read a fair amount about it and there’s actually not a lot of skeptical commentary on it. There’s a little bit, Joe Nickell did a piece a few years ago in which he described finding his long lost daughter. In Skeptical Inquirer magazine, he did a column on that and this is sort of an intuition aspect to it. But over the years, whenever I see a news story that sort of has a particular angle to it, in the back of my mind I think, intuition fail.

0:02:19
So that’s what I’m talking about this week, and it’s actually much broader. We should do a whole show on it. There’s so many different angles to it.

PR: You heard that, Celestia. We’re going to do a show on that.

BR: We’re going to do a show on that. But there’s one particular angle that I wanted to touch on, and that is the idea of intuition as confirmation bias. And what occurred to me is that we often think and hear of intuition as being a good thing.

0:02:53
Right? Mother’s intuition. You hear stories of somebody who had a bad feeling about going on a bus trip and the bus later had a crash or a plane crash or whatever else or escaping serial killers because of an uneasy feeling or hunch or something like that. And so that’s all well and good. We can come across those stories fairly often, but we don’t really often see the type 1 and type 2 errors involved in intuition. In other words, it’s a self-selecting group. People for whom intuition failed don’t really talk about it.

0:03:33
You don’t often hear someone explicitly saying, well, I had a hunch X and I was wrong. And so there’s a very, again, there’s a very strong selection bias in terms of the stories that we see and I think it influences how we think about intuition. And I recently thought about that in the case of the young man Otto Warmbier, who, by the time this airs it’ll people probably still remember his case and this is the young man that was imprisoned in North Korea, and was returned eventually in comatose and he later died right and the reason that jumped out at me was not – and to be clear. I’m not victim-blaming here I mean that you know when that when that story first came out hurt so we boy he shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that.

0:04:27
That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the idea of intuition as being something that would warn somebody of something bad that’s going to happen. And so I look at that tragic case and I think, OK, well, hold on here. I mean, for those who don’t know the story, he was doing a tour vacation of North Korea. And he was in a hotel, and he tore down a propaganda poster as a souvenir.

0:04:54
He just took it off the wall, didn’t think anything about it, it was just sort of a fun, stupid prank anyone of us might have done. In this case, it led directly to him being imprisoned and possibly tortured and certainly returned to his home country, comatose, and later dying. So very, very serious consequences. So you have to say, well, hold on here. If intuition is real, if there really is some sort of sixth sense that guides us or tells us this is not a good idea, or this is a good idea, you would think that that would be a case of where Otto Warmbier’s intuition would have been like, not a good idea. Warning Will Robinson, this is not…

0:05:38
Right, but it’s just over and over again. I mean, you look at, you can even take this to, in the corporate world, like Takata Airbags. Right, you had the company, the Japanese company Takata, which manufactured airbags, which was the subject of a massive recall. They actually recently just filed for bankruptcy.

PR: Oh, wow, yeah, and my car actually had one of those.

BR: Mine did as well. And you have to wonder, hold on, why is it that somebody at Takata didn’t have this intuition that something’s wrong with this?

0:06:14
I mean, it’s like, you know, there’s something wrong with these airbags and it could eventually lead to deaths and lawsuits and the collapse of a huge company. Or, you know, United Airlines, there was a case earlier this year where there was the viral video of the passenger being dragged off by the airport security. So again, these are cases where some unintended consequence, very bad happened. And you would think that somewhere along the line, intuition would have kicked in and said, you know what? Let this guy alone. You know what?

0:06:56
Don’t call airport security. Just let that slide, right? And so over and over again, I have to wonder, if intuition is real, why are there so many examples of disastrous unintended consequences? And it’s like every time you hear a disaster or a survivor say, I thought I was going to die. That’s an example of failed intuition.

0:07:17
That’s, that’s, you know, the fact that you’re living to tell us you were sure you were going to die means you were wrong. Your intuition, your, your sincere, deeply held conviction that you were going to die on this, in this, in this, you know, on this, in this gunman’s attack or on this plane crash was wrong.

PR: Intuition sort of follows a lot of our psychology in terms of evolution and survival. We branded intuition when it works.

0:07:48
But in reality, we’re scared mammals that have a sense of dread and fear and alertness about situations. You think about airplanes, for instance, someone might not have gotten on a plane and that plane may have crashed. Now statistically, that’s going to happen at some point. And it has happened a couple of times, and I mean, who knows how true it is when someone says they had a feeling. They may have just been late and not gotten on the plane. But at the end of the day, that feeling is more about self-preservation and I think for the most part, the human brain errs on that side no matter what the human brain always fears something in the back of you know of your head you’re always Imagining the worst scenario when you’re walking down the street at night when you’re you know and you’re… and so yeah If you act on your intuition like you’re walking through a dark alley and you stop and turn around Turns out someone gets mugged there later that night that that’s not because you psychically predicted it happening.

0:08:49
It’s because your survival brain, your lizard brain, is saying, get the hell out of this alley.

BR: Maybe this is not the best place to be.

PR: Because we have a precedence for the danger.

BR: Right. And intuition is a tricky one, because again, there’s lots of different angles into it. And I’m focusing very narrowly on today, just because there’s so many different aspects to it. But one thing that jumped out at me was there’s a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker, who according to the back of the book, I’m reading it here, is the man that Oprah Winfrey called the nation’s leading expert on violent behavior.

0:09:24
And it’s-

PR: Well, since she said it.

BR: Well, yeah, there you go. But, and I’ve read the book, but what’s interesting is that I’m looking at the index and DeBecker has many entries on intuition and basically the premise of his book is that uh… the threat uses you the threat of violence runs every day we can protect ourselves by learning to trust and act on our gut instincts and uh… you know i there’s there’s some truth to that there’s some non-truth to that right around and you know certainly coming from background psychology mean there are ways in which we can we can know something without knowing how we know it.

0:10:05
So you know, we can get nonverbal cues, we can absorb information from around us, and people can mistake that for intuition when in fact it’s just sort of nonverbal cues. But no, that’s the main thing. I just want to touch on one other thing real quickly, which is that there’s a real way in which intuition can kill. And again, this is, we’re looking at the lesser discussed aspects of intuition.

0:10:33
And that happened in the case of the 2009 air disaster, Air France flight 447, which crashed in North Atlantic, killing 228 people.

PR: Yeah, I remember that.

BR: Yeah, it was a real strange case. It just vanished over North Atlantic. And they couldn’t find it for weeks or months or something. It was quite a mystery. And they eventually found out what it was. And what they discovered was that there was a series of mistakes.

0:11:06
But basically, the plane encountered rough weather that caused the speed sensors to ice over and malfunction. So the speed sensors in the aircraft were on the blink, which that by itself is not necessarily a problem. The speed sensors sometimes go on the blink. That was “a” cause of the accident. That was not the primary cause. What they found was that the pilots, they trusted their intuition. And what happened was that they didn’t know how fast they were going. And basically the plane stalled and they found out from the black box. And so what happened was that the trained pilots did the opposite of what they learned in flight school. Because in flight school, what you learned, if you’re in a stall, you aim the nose of the plane down so that we can pick up speed.

0:12:01
But the human instinct, the human gut is to keep those up. It’s counterintuitive. It goes against our intuition to aim a plane towards the ground. And yet that’s exactly what they needed to do in order to save the passengers and save the flight, and they didn’t. And so, actually a similar thing happened in February 2009. There was a commuter flight that crashed near Buffalo, killing 50 people.

0:12:30
And so there’s several cases of these where experienced pilots trusted their intuition and it killed people.

PR: Yeah, I think that’s a really good example of why you can’t always trust your instinct. And I think that’s kind of the point of training, especially when you’re in a situation where you’re responsible for lives and you are, you know, accountable for safety regulations and safety procedures. And that training is meant to basically tamp down… tamp down your intuition. I mean, that’s right. And that’s a lot of anything that you have to be skilled at. You learn to fight your urges, you know, and especially when it comes to dangerous things like flying through the air at hundreds of miles an hour or climbing up the face of a cliff or you know these there’s there’s instinctive things that you don’t you don’t want to do and you don’t want to trust your gut on because your your your human brain is using its own, you know its own reference for these things which is not is not, you know gonna get you out of a situation like, you know, falling out of the sky in an airplane because it’s not something we evolved to, you know, instinctively figure out.

0:13:45
So that is a very kind of chilling but also a strong lesson in why, you know, we should be skeptical of the idea of intuition.

BR: Certainly, either be skeptical of it or more importantly, I think just recognize that for the most part, the only time we hear about intuition is when things turn out great. We don’t hear about it when things turn out bad. We don’t, it’s just, and so I think that, I don’t know that I invented the idea that intuition is essentially an issue of confirmation bias.

0:14:18
I mean, someone else, I’m not claiming credit for that, but I think that’s sort of an underappreciated aspect of the intuition phenomenon. What are you skeptical of this week?

PR: So this week, I’m on a little bit of a lighter note here. It was actually our local news that I caught this through on Facebook. BBC, they’re doing an upcoming episode of their program Watchdog, which is an investigative reporting show.

0:14:46
And they were reporting that ice from three of the UK’s biggest coffee chains was found to contain bacteria from feces.

BR: Now, like human feces or donkey feces? What’s… just want to clarify.

PR: That’s a good question. And actually that’s.

BR: I’m getting ahead of myself.

PR: Yeah, this is where the skepticism comes in real handy. So presumably, let’s say, you know, the reporting presumed that it is human feces.

0:15:15
And…

BR: Okay, so e-coli something like that.

PR: Yeah, and so that’s kind of where, where pretty immediately the skeptic radar goes off.

BR: And just to be fair, if I’m eating ice cream, the distinction whether it’s human feces or rat feces or dog feces, really, you know, none of them are okay.

0:15:36
So… It’s all pretty much… Yeah, just to be clear.

PR: So at both Starbucks and Cafe Nero, a chain in the UK, three out of ten samples tested contained a bacteria that’s known as fecal coliform. Now this is because it has the word fecal in it obviously that’s where the the feces assumption comes from.

BR: To be fair, not an unreasonable assumption.

PR: No, no, no. Not unreasonable, but certainly a little bit misleading if you don’t look into what that means. And this actually, I think it was last year, the same, our same local news channel did their own investigation that went quite viral actually.

0:16:22
It did kind of at least hit the state side viral spread.

BR: It did the story and the shit hit the fan, right?

PR: Yeah, exactly. And they did it on beards. They were like, this is fecal coliform is in beards.

BR: I remember that. That’s right.

PR: And so that was the first time I was introduced to this concept and exactly why you need to be skeptical about it. Not just because I’m a man with a beard and I need to…

BR: Heavily bearded, I have to say.

0:16:49
I’m staring right into that dark abyss of fecal coliformy beard right now.

PR: Yeah. So just to get to the nitty gritty, there’s not much more to this story other than they found it and then they became, you know, is human waste in your coffee and is it in ice? And first off, it’s pretty widely known that ice at any food establishment has a pretty good amount of bacteria. Usually fairly harmless stuff. Fecal coliform, pretty harmless. Now the reason this isn’t a huge deal is because this isn’t necessarily from feces. It may originate from it. It’s definitely in feces. However, it’s everywhere all the time. It’s on everyone all the time. It’s on your hands and your face all the time. That’s why the beard thing was so funny because yes, they tested beards and found it in it, but they also could test a shaven face and get the same results. It’s not as dramatic and you know, whoever has their problem with beards. I don’t know But so it’s not necessarily it’s not literal poop. It’s it’s saying, you know, they’re saying that there’s bacteria on it, therefore it’s gross which is anyone who has even just the slightest knowledge of science knows that everything’s covered in bacteria no matter what you do.

0:18:07
BR: And generally not a problem.

PR: No, and it’s most bacteria is not only, you know, it’s either benign or somewhat beneficial even, you know, so, but yeah, you are covered in this stuff. This particular type of bacteria is very common. It’s all over everything. They use the word fecal and it makes it sound really gross.

BR: It sets the alarms off, right?

PR: Yeah, so what it is is fecal coliform actually covers a number of bacteria and there’s several types. There’s one called Enterobacter, Citrobacter, and these are basically false positive indicators of fecal contamination.

0:18:50
So there’s times when you’re testing for fecal contamination and these benign bacterias will give you a false positive. So if anything, not only is it sensational because it’s nothing to really worry about, but it’s also possibly not even the bacteria they think they’re looking at. Because fecal obviously denotes that we’re talking about feces and there are at least another four or five different types that come from plant materials, paper, and basically you’ll get false positives as regularly as you’ll find the actual fecal bacteria.

BR: Yeah, I think it’s a good example.

0:19:29
One thing that I always sort of look at as a skeptic is, show me the results. If you’re going to make a claim that X is dangerous, or X is bad, or X is contaminating, or whatever it is, my question is, okay, and where are the real world results? You’re saying this is horrible, this is terrible, three in ten of these ice coffees. So where’s everybody getting sick?

PR: Exactly.

BR: Oh, they’re not. Oh, okay, I missed that. Then the question is, so what? You can hype up and sensationalize and make alarmists, any story, using the word feces in it.

0:20:10
At the end of the day, it’s like, and the real world result is people dying? No. People getting sick? Maybe, maybe not, probably not. That’s always… Whenever I see one of those news stories, I always want to write an email to the reporter, so I read your piece there. Interesting. Interesting. So where exactly are the real world, where are the people dropping dead from this? No, no, I’ll wait.

PR: Exactly. And that’s kind of the big takeaway from this is they use some gross words to try to kind of get you worked up about it. But the truth is that, for one, this is not an uncommon thing.

0:20:58
You test 10 ice bins in any given food industry related, it’s not specific to Starbucks. It’s not specific to this Cafe Nero. It’s just a thing that exists in ice because it gets handled a lot. And that’s not to say that the people handling it are dirty. Actually Starbucks did respond to this in saying that they needed to review their sanitation practices which actually was really kind of unfair because they probably don’t. This is going to be, they’re going to test positive for this stuff somewhere in their restaurant every single time. Folks, if you are enough of a hypochondriac or enough of a clean freak that this is going to bother you, I have bad news for you. Restaurants are full of this stuff.

0:21:49
Part of the thing about being a human being in society is that these bacteria are always around us at all times and you are better off educating yourself as to what they are than worrying about how a news organization is reporting on it.

BR: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. I think to my mind, that’s not a science fail, that’s a journalism fail. You know, I mean, the science is not wrong. I mean, I didn’t read the study, but I don’t doubt that at all.

0:22:15
So is this bacteria there? Absolutely it is. And responsible journalists would have said, I don’t have a story here. So moving on. But instead it’s like, hey, you know, you know, what’s in your ice?

0:22:29
News at 11. Yeah, find an angle. Find an angle.

PR: So that’s how that goes, but I think it’s a little unfair to get a company changing policy just for something that, if you actually look under the surface, is absolutely nothing to raise an eyebrow at, but that’s how it is, I guess.

BR: There you go

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0:23:20
PR: So I’m looking at an article that was in the Fortean Times October 2013 titled, The Stonehenge Surprise A Closer Look at the Best Case for Crop Circles. Now I love the words best case because this means this is it like this is this is the one so…

BR: You would think…

PR: You would think it but but so let’s walk me through this let’s look what was what was this and the circumstances around this and why we call it the Stonehenge surprise in the first place.

BR: Yeah it’s as you pointed out it’s it’s touted as being one of the best cases.

PR: Yeah, absolutely.

BR: That’s what I do, right? If I have the choice between a case that there’s really weak evidence for, there’s maybe one eyewitness and he’s 80 and it happened back in 1932 and there’s no evidence, what am I going to do with that?

0:24:25
So, as an investigator, I always want the best cases. And it’s interesting because I’ve been accused, and other skeptics as well, of sort of like intentionally, like, okay, Mr. Radford, you solved all these cases, but they’re weak cases. As if I intentionally choose cases that I know are lame, and then everyone’s like, no! That’s not how that works. And I always choose the best cases because what’s the point in solving easy mysteries right? You know and so you know it’s like the the Nancy Weber case that I wrote about in my book In the Scientific Paranormal Investigation chapter 6 the psychic in the serial killer and had a big back-and-forth with them on a podcast called skeptical and There was a big long thing about that and there’s some stuff on MonsterTalk about it and elsewhere.

0:25:15
But again that’s another case of where I was challenged to solve the best case for psychic detectives. And it took me 18 months and I did. I’m like, alright dude bring it on. But it was one of those investigations that I was drawn to because nobody had really solved the mystery. Sort of like the Pokemon case, or the man see photo of the champ Lake monster, right? Right, you know published in 81 where you know I it was it sort of was on my radar and You know it’s all over the place. It’s being held up as the evidence right and So it’s not like anybody like you know begged me to tackle the case or you paid me or anything, I was just like hey, this is cool. I want to find out about this.

0:26:07
So actually, when possible, I try to do field investigations, but in this case, it was impractical. I’m here in New Mexico, Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, England, and it also happened in July 1996. In fact, it’s 20 years ago, actually tomorrow, from the day that we’re recording this.

PR: Oh, wow. Yeah. Or 21 years.

BR: Yeah, there you go. My math is bad. Long time.

0:26:35
Yeah. 21 years ago this week, and it came to my attention right around, I think, 2012. It was 15, 16 years later, and the crop circle was long gone. At that point, even had I big pharma money, X-Files money to go to England.

PR: Reptilian money.

BR: Right, cash it in. That wouldn’t have helped me out. In a nutshell, what happened was that it was July 7th, 1996, and it was called one of the most complex and spectacular crop circles ever, ever seen.

0:27:15
PR: And I’m looking at a picture of it right now and it is a really impressive crop circle from, and as far as any I’ve seen, that is one of the more complex, symmetrical, and frankly, really cool looking, pretty crop circles. I mean, the patterns are pretty astonishing.

BR: Yeah, it’s what’s called, it’s a fractal. It’s what’s called the Julia set. And I think it was about 500 feet wide by I think 950, 920 feet long.

0:27:45
And this is a spiraling series of circles. And it’s remarkable. I mean, there’s no… skeptic or believer. It’s a remarkable piece. And of course, one of the reasons it was called one of the best cases was that some of the crop circles could arguably be a wind vortex, right? I mean, that’s one of the claims, right? If it’s just a simple round, it could be anything, right? This is clearly made by intelligence. Human, extraterrestrial, this is not an accident.

0:28:21
This is not a wind vortex.

PR: It’s deliberate for sure.

BR: Right. And so not only was it one of the most complex crop circles ever seen to date, it was also unique for several reasons, including that it appeared across a highway from Stonehenge. And that had never been done before. I mean, there were crop circles, of course.

0:28:46
England is full of crop circles, and that’s where they originated. But that was, having one appear across the A303 highway from Stonehenge was remarkable by itself.

PR: Yeah, and that’s, I mean, talk about location.

BR: Right, aliens and or hoaxers know right where to go.

PR: Exactly.

BR: And the other thing that made it unique was that it was apparently, it apparently formed during daylight in less than an hour.

0:29:15
And this is significant because virtually all crop circles occur overnight. Not all of them, but

PR: From a logistical standpoint, that makes the most sense.

BR: Exactly, exactly. That’s when hoaxes are out, for example. And no one has ever seen, no one has ever filmed a crop circle being made other than, of course, by humans. There’s no photographs of a crop circle being formed, there’s no video footage, nothing like that. So almost invariably they occur overnight and they are seen, maybe aliens like the darkness, maybe hoaxers like the darkness, whatever else, but this case was different. In this case it was said that they could pinpoint when it occurred during daylight.

0:30:05
And so, and I’ll get to that in a second. So there were several aspects to the Stonehenge surprise that made it unique in crop circle history. And that’s one of the reasons it was called one of the most complex and most likely legitimate crop circles ever. So basically, what makes it unique are the circumstances around it. At first glance, the circumstances are pretty impressive, right? So the story goes that a pilot flew over the field opposite Stonehenge late one afternoon and saw a normal undisturbed field.

0:30:39
This is how they narrowed it down. This is how they said, this could not have happened the night before. This must have happened during the daytime. And of course, the idea is during the daytime, people would have seen, you know, the hoaxers, crop circle makers would have been seen and all these other things. So, you saw the field and then on the pilot’s return flight less than an hour later, he was stunned to see this huge fractal crop circle being made in the same field. Um, and so this is interesting, right?

0:31:17
Because if the story is true, he said advisedly, if the story is true, then that must, that meant that the crop circle must have been, must have been made between those two flights. Anywhere between 20 to 45 minutes apart. Certainly less than an hour. Now again, if that’s true, then that holds a couple implications. Number one is that it could not be a hoaxer, or multiple hoaxers.

0:31:44
It’s physically impossible for any human to make that large a scale. I mean, I’ve made crop circles, I’ve made several. But even, it’s not physically possible for humans to make that complex a crop circle in less than an hour. It is beyond human ability.

PR: I can certainly believe that.

BR: So that was one of the aspects to it that was sort of putting it on a pedestal in terms of why it’s so bizarre. And so again, given that the overwhelming evidence for what creates crop circles is of course hoaxers.

0:32:27
Sorry to ruin the parade. That’s a simple fact. And so, of course, this is what crop circle advocates have to contend with. And even the staunchest crop circle believer will admit, because they have to admit, that many, if not most, of these circles are hoaxes. I mean, it’s been proven over and over again, this is self-evident. No one disputes that hoaxers are responsible for at least some, if not many, but they say, well, hold on.

0:32:59
There’s always, well, yeah, but what about this one? What about that one over there? What about the Julia set? What about this? What about that? And so that was the overwhelming explanation for it. The hoaxing explanation gained significant credence in 1996 when a researcher named Michael Lindeman interviewed a man named Rod Dickinson—no joke— who confessed to making it, or at least knowing who did. And this guy, Rod Dickinson, said, yes, I know who did it.

0:33:31
He said it was made the previous night by three people in just under three hours. And so that was, he says, you know, I’m not going to tell you who they are, but you know, I know who they are and this is what happened and this is the story. And so his position was that it was there all day, that, you know, it was in fact made at night as virtually all crop circles are, and that therefore the people that claimed it could not have been made at night are simply wrong. And so that was, so I began by looking into the circumstances behind it. So I looked online, I looked in books, I’ve got probably six or eight crop circle books in my home library.

0:34:19
I went online, I mean, just that’s the first step is do the research, find out what are the different versions, what evidence are some people saying and other people are not. And so let me just quickly read to you a couple examples just because it gives a good sort of flavor for the hyperbole surrounding just how solid this is. This is from a book called Crop Circles, Signs of Contact by Colin Andrews. I’ll just read the first couple sentences. He says, one of the most compelling and important moments in crop circle history was the sudden appearance of an incredible formation of Julia Set in a field across from Stonehenge in the span of less than one hour. There has been controversy since it first appeared in 1996.

0:35:15
Naysayers, I think he means me, come forward and claim to know the hoaxers who made this extraordinary formation. However, they do not name names to provide evidence, thus destroying their credibility. I just have to interrupt here for a second because there’s a lot of overlap between ufologists and UFO believers and crop circle folks. Naturally.

PR: There’s lots of lots of people go back and forth.

BR: Yeah, and the fact that That this guy is is shocked that someone would have anonymous source is rich. Yeah If there’s any field in which people rely heavily on anonymous sources, it’s UFOlogy. A little less so with crop circles, but it’s it’s just I’m like wow suddenly the anonymous sources are a problem for you? Okay, just so we’re clear.

PR: I’ll keep that in mind next time you quote another source.

0:36:09
BR: Exactly. So anyway, he goes on to say, also, many of their claims have been repudiated by the facts. One of the most convincing arguments for the Julia sets authenticity is that honest, respectable people have attested to its almost instantaneous appearance. Keep that in mind as we proceed here. These are credible people telling incredible things. Nowhere is this more evident than the accounts of people who would have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by making up such a story.

0:36:34
Says Colin Andrews, author of Crop Circles, Signs of Contact, New Page Books, 2003.

0:36:57
Page 87 if you want to look it up for yourself. So that’s one example. And there’s another one, another piece by a woman named Lucy Pringle. And again, I’ll just briefly summarize it. She says, Lucy Pringle reports, quote, “this event is especially noteworthy for several reasons. A pilot flying a light aircraft from Exeter to Thruxton flew over the field opposite Stonehenge on the afternoon Sunday July 7th with the passenger taking photographs.

0:37:24
Interesting, duly noted right? Good to know. The pilot disembarked, completed the necessary landing and flight forms, refueled and got back. Imagine his surprise when on flying over the same field opposite Stonehenge some some 40 to 50 minutes later, he observed enormous formation, measuring 915 by 508 feet imprinted in the wheat below. A gamekeeper and a guard at Stonehenge both confirmed it had not been there that morning.” End quote from Lucy Pringle. So the way I approach these investigations is typically, again, I spend anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks just collecting resources.

0:38:00
Yeah. I go through books, I go to the library I just I spend a lot of time and you get it all in one place and then I go through highlighter. You can see the notes here highlighting. I’ve got notes in the margins, that’s my modus operandi is you know lock me in a room spread out all stuff from the table highlighters notes and let me go to town for a couple hours, and you nail it all down. And so again, there’s a wide variety of claims that are coming out here. And so I quickly realized that this case essentially was founded on the credibility of eyewitnesses. Because the question of whether the… there’s no question the crop circle appeared.

0:38:49
There’s photographs of it, we see it. So that’s not the issue. The question is, what made it and could it have been there the night before? According to Lucy Pringle and Colin Andrews and many others, absolutely impossible. We’re done here. Go home. This is the best case. I’m not so sure.

0:39:10
So I just want to flag that I’m sure some of our listeners may have recognized the fallacy in Colin Andrews’ statement. He’s saying that, well, that honest, respectable people have attested to its appearance and they have nothing to gain a great deal to lose by making up such a story. Well, the error there, obviously, is that that’s called a false choice analogy. It’s either like, either they’re making it up, that is, they’re lying, or they’re telling the truth.

0:39:45

PR: There’s a little wiggle room between those two.

BR: No, they might be mistaken. So that would mean that they’re not lying, but they’re not telling the truth. They’re simply mistaken. This happens all the time. Apparently this is, well, I think Colin Andrews is familiar with being mistaken, but apparently he’s, apparently when he’s dealing with other people…

PR: They can’t accept that they could be mistaken.

BR: Exactly, exactly.

Celesta Ward: Hey Squares and hey strangers. Celestia here checking in with your weekly skeptical fortune cookie.

0:40:31
Let’s crack into this one. Insufficient facts always invites danger. I wonder how many of you recognize this slightly grammatically askew quotation. It’s from a rather celebrated skeptic and scientific figure, just not one from Earth history. Yeah, this fortune cookie comes to us from that lovable, green-blooded, pointy-eared hobgoblin himself, Mr. Spock. And I grant you, Gene Roddenberry’s campy and swashbuckling Star Trek is not always a completely logical and skeptically sound universe, but it has inspired countless fans to develop a love of space exploration, scientific achievement, and yes, skeptical thought.

0:41:11
Leonard Nimoy’s logical and coolly reasonable Mr. Spock was by far the favorite of budding skeptics everywhere, myself included. Spock issued this warning to Captain Kirk in the season one episode, Space Seed, as the Enterprise came upon a silent drifting ship that appeared to date back to the 1990s. When Kirk asked Spock for theories, Spock, rather skeptically, said “even a theory requires some facts, Captain, so far I have none”. As the consummate science officer, Spock was taking things in the proper order. Make the theory fit the facts, not the other way around. Without facts to go on, theories are just blind conjecture. As he says, insufficient facts always invites danger. By the way, that drifting ship turned out to be the botany bay carrying the megalomaniacal Khan, played in the original series by a dashing Ricardo Montalban, a character so dangerous that his wrath eventually leads to Spock’s death in the 1982 feature film. Oh, sorry for that spoiler, everybody. Well, I’m gonna go enjoy this fortune cookie now, perhaps with a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot.

0:42:19
Meanwhile, you can enjoy more from Ben and Pasquale.

BR: So, Pascual, word around the campfire is there’s something called a skeptic crate. Do you know anything about that?

PR: I do, as a matter of fact. We are going to be putting out a monthly crate.

BR: A monthly crate?

PR: A monthly crate.

BR: I’m intrigued.

PR: Called the Skepti-Crate. And it will be a crate with a few goodies relating to our show, relating to science, skepticism, show topics, maybe some little bonus items that have to do with us as individuals relating to our own work or things that Celestia has done.

0:43:15
BR: I like it, I like it. Tell me more.

PR: So any patron above $5 an episode.

BR: Five bucks? Seriously? Yep, five bucks. Five measly bucks? That’s like 500 pennies or something. Who can’t afford that?

0:43:27
PR: It’s precisely 500 pennies. And you will get a Skeptic Crate once every month. We ship them on the 15th of every month. So once you are within a month of good standing at the $5 or more per episode level You’ll be receiving a skeptic rate every month as a regular. Thank you for your continued support.

BR: It’s bargain at twice the price. Yeah, exactly awesome awesome

PR: And where do we find out more about that? What you want to do is go over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and you can see all the bonuses, you can see how to sign up and you can see all the different perks because not only do you get the Skepticrate, but $5 and up have their own bonus VIP level content and episodes that we put out every month.

0:44:12
BR: Love it. Love it.

PR: So before the break, you mentioned the eyewitnesses. So what’s going on with that? How can we look into this skeptically? What did the investigation entail?

BR: How can we look into that? Well, you know, of course, what you find over and over again in these sorts of skeptical that not always, but often, it does come down to eyewitnesses. If there was clear heart evidence for Bigfoot, then we’d all, if there was a, if we go to the zoo and see Bigfoot, then we’d all agree there’s Bigfoot.

0:44:52
Right? I mean, you can talk about tracks, you can talk about hair samples, videos, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing with ghosts or any of these other things. Like, a lot of it does boil down to, a lot of the so-called hard evidence is often ambiguous. Was this track made by Bigfoot or was it just some hoaxer? Who knows what it was. And so over and over and over again, not all the time, but often enough, it does come down to eyewitnesses. And again this goes, you know, this is straight up, you know, psychology and skepticism. Because we know that eyewitnesses can be mistaken, eyewitnesses can misunderstand things, they can misperceive things, all sorts of problems with eyewitnesses.

0:45:44
This doesn’t mean that eyewitnesses are always wrong. It just means that-

PR: The potential’s always there.

BR: The potential’s always there. And so I took a closer look at each of the witnesses because you can’t just lump them all together. And this is what a lot of the proponents of the Julia Stonehenge Surprise did. They’re like, well all these people say that it wasn’t there. What’s wrong with you man? Did you not see what they said?

0:46:15
This group of people that I’m pointing out in that corner over there, sort of generally in that direction, they all say that. Who are you to challenge that? And so the problem is that’s lazy journalism. That’s poor scholarship. That is not investigation.

PR: It won’t hold up in court, let’s just put it that way.

BR: And it’s interesting because in the previous show we talked about the illusion of corroboration. Here’s another example in which there is an illusion of corroboration.

0:46:46
There’s this idea that several different sets of people, and I’ll talk about in a second, all said the same thing. They all said there was not a pattern in that field across from Stonehenge earlier in that day. They’re all saying the same thing. Well, let’s take a closer look. So the first thing I did was to make a timeline of eyewitnesses and exactly what they said. And I did that by again, culling through all the books that I could find, all the online articles, all the, everything I could find that seemed even semi-credible.

0:47:25
And in this case, that’s determining what’s semi-credible is a bit of a challenge, as you can imagine. But that’s what you gotta do. And so, again, it’s a case of where, what are people claiming? So Colin Andrews, who I mentioned earlier, makes much of the fact that the Stonehenge site, I’ll just quote from his piece here, he says, “Stonehenge is a crossing road from the field, is guarded 24 hours a day by a team of at least three, and often four, professional security guards”. I see some chuckling over there. “These guards can see the field from the patrolled elevated pattern on the northern side of Stonehenge standing zones But they did not see the pattern until after 6 p.m. On the day it happened”. End quote So you may you may be able to guess where I’m going with this. So I have nothing against security guards Cops, you know, it’s it’s that you know, whatever do a fine job. In this case, the security guards at Stonehenge, which is in fact, I mean he’s correct, there are guards there 24 hours a day, as there should be.

0:48:33
Because you know. What were they, let me just ask you Pascal, what do you suppose they were looking at? Now like, let’s say you’re a security guard and you’re hanging out, it’s like you know, 1 in the morning and you’re at Stonehenge along with a couple buddies. Sure, sure. And your job is to make sure that no one comes near Stonehenge, the monument that you’re in front of. So where were you, if you were that security guard, where would you be paying attention?

PR: I would be intently focused on a field across the road.

0:49:04
Yeah, I would be watching Stonehenge. I think that that would probably be the most reasonable thing to do if you’re being paid to watch Stonehenge is you sit there and watch Stonehenge as part of your job.

BR: Part of your job, right. Well, according to Colin Andrews, that’s not what they were doing. According to him, they were probably looking at the fields, the dark fields all around Stonehenge. Because that’s what you do.

0:49:32
PR: Waiting for Germans or something? I don’t know.

BR: Yeah, waiting for the invasion? I mean, come on. So, I mean, look, I mean, the fact is that they were not getting paid to watch over neighboring farmers’ fields. They were getting paid to look at it and they did a fantastic job. And one of the arguments that Andrews and others put forth is that, well, you know, the crop circle must have been done, if it had been in fact done by hoaxers, which he doesn’t think it was, that the guards would have seen lights from flashlights that were creating it.

0:50:02
Well, there’s a couple of problems with this theory. First of all, there’s the A303 freeway. It’s actually between where they are and…

PR: So, we’re not talking a country road now, a little dirt road. There’s an actual freeway through the countryside that divides them. So, there’s some distance.

BR: And at night, I don’t know how it is in England, here in the States, when you drive at night, you put on your lights.

0:50:30
Again, I’ve never driven in England. I’m guessing they do the same over there.

PR: Yeah, any English listeners, please send us an email. If you guys use lights, it would be great to know that.

BR: While you’re driving, yeah.

PR: Seems reasonable.

BR: Yeah, yeah. But my assumption is that because of that, that if any of the Stonehenge guards had in fact seen some lights coming from that direction, they’d think, hey, probably a passing car, probably a passing truck. And they wouldn’t have said, wow, there must be crop circle hoaxers across the way making the pattern. So I mean, come on. So again, the idea that the guards at Stonehenge, I don’t doubt that they didn’t see anything. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. It just means that they were paying attention to Stonehenge and they didn’t happen to notice the hoaxers that spent three hours in the field across the way, some distance away.

0:51:17
PR: Yeah, it seems reasonable that in any situation with eyewitnesses that you can’t, and I see this a lot when you see people who are trying to present lack of eyewitness accounts during the period that something must have happened or in the place that something must have happened. They seem to always put the onus on the eyewitness by saying, you know, they were near there so they should have seen it. But if you’re not looking for something, it seems reasonable that it’s not likely they would have noticed unless, I mean, nobody’s shooting flares off while they’re doing it, you know.

BR: Well, I mean, I remember there’s been times when I’ve driven past on my way to work somewhere or where I go regularly and suddenly there’ll be like a building there and I didn’t see it.

0:52:10
And it’s like, I know they didn’t make that, that building didn’t go up like in two days. So I know that I have driven past it in the previous days and weeks. I just never noticed it being built. It doesn’t mean that I’m absent-minded, it doesn’t mean I’m blind. It just means that I didn’t happen to look. I’m focused on traffic, going from point A to point B, you don’t pay attention to all your surroundings.

0:52:32
PR: I literally had that conversation with my wife about two days ago, driving past a new Taco Bell down the street. I did not notice it until just the other day when I think I finally noticed the sign. I was like, was that always there? She’s like, yeah, it was built a few months ago.

BR: Yeah, and you’ve driven past it and didn’t see it.

PR: I don’t have great Taco Bell radar, I’m sorry.

BR: Me either. It’s just as well. So, again, there’s four groups of people that were claimed to have, who should have seen the hoaxers doing their job, if indeed it was a hoax.

0:53:05
PR: Okay, so we’ve got security.

BR: Right, we have the Stonehenge guards who would have seen it the night before. The second one is the first person who retrospectively claimed to have examined the area where the crop circle appeared was a farmer, was the farmer who owned the field, Mr. Sandell.

PR: I would definitely seek out that eyewitness over someone that isn’t there.

BR: You would think, right?

BR: And so in a book called Crop Circles Exploring the Designs and Mysteries, it says, quote, Farmer Sandell claims to have personally inspected the field that Sunday morning and not noticed anything unusual.

0:53:47
So, you know, superficially, it’s like, okay, well, you know, the farmer inspected the field. He didn’t see, you know, a big crop circle in it. He would have remembered that. It’s like, well, you know, that doesn’t make sense. But then I’m thinking, I don’t think that means what you think it means. I grew up in a somewhat rural part of New Mexico, not far from here in Corrales.

0:54:12
There’s fields.

PR: Lots of fields.

BR: Lots of fields. Not wheat, but lots of other things. Corn, green chili, great green chili. Plug for New Mexico. New Mexico, true.

0:54:21
Yep. Come have a green chili. So I don’t want to claim that I grew up on a farm, but I know something about it.

PR: Yeah, you’ve been around.

BR: I’ve been around a bit. And what happens is that when a farmer says they inspect their fields, that doesn’t mean that they spent hours going back and forth through the field.

PR: Check every stalk of wheat.

BR: Right, right, right. What they usually mean is that they went to a place that’s nearby and convenient, and they checked on the condition of the plants there.

0:54:57
Are they getting too much water, too little water? Are there insects, blight, disease, whatever else? So that’s what they mean by inspect the fields. That does not imply that the farmer spent two hours in an ultralight or a helicopter or personally going back and forth to the field.

PR: Literally with a fine-tooth comb brushing up every grain.

0:55:19
BR: Exactly. Exactly. So, while I don’t doubt for a moment that Farmer Sandell looked at part of his field that morning and didn’t see a crop circle, I have no problem believing that at all. But that just has no relevance to whether or not there’s a crop circle in the middle of it the night before.

PR: Absolutely. When you’re standing on the same plane as a field of plants, I mean, anyone who’s stood in front of a cornfield, for instance, knows that you can’t even, unless you’re looking straight down the rows, you can’t see the separations between each section of the field.

0:55:54
You can’t see the roads that go in the middle of them. Because you’re at eye level, you don’t really have that point of reference.

BR: Exactly. So we have the Stonehenge guards who are said to have surely seen hoaxers had they been there overnight, which upon closer inspection doesn’t really make sense. Then we have the farmer who also was said to have inspected his field the night before, or the next morning, and didn’t see crops. I’m sure it’s true, but it’s also not too compelling. Still not relevant.

0:56:23
Okay. So let’s move on to the other two categories of people that were said to offer eyewitness testimony and evidence of the miraculous nature of this crop circle. By far the most important eyewitness in the case was the pilot who first spotted the crop circle. Keep in mind, again, the claim was that the formation was first spotted by an aircraft around 6 15 p.m. and it was not there around 5 or 5 30 earlier and so therefore it must have the crop circle must have appeared during that time. That’s again that’s where they’re going with it. So if the account is true and the crop circle did not exist at 5 30 in the pilots first flight this should be easily proven by an examination of the aerial photographs. Which ones? Well, as I said, the story was that it was a pilot who had a passenger who was taking photos. Now, this is eminently provable. This is what in science we call falsifiable. Because you have someone who is supposedly taking photos of the area around Stonehenge and the fields.

0:57:40
And if the story is true, again, he said advisedly, then there should be photographs of the field before and after. And the big difference will be, of course, a crop circle. Oddly enough, these photos never seem to have surfaced. Yeah, weird, isn’t it?

PR: Very inconvenient.

BR: It is unfortunate and inconvenient. You would think that, in fact, the photographs would be useful to Colin Andrews or Lucy Pringle or other Crop Circle advocates as solid proof.

0:58:15
Well, here you go. Photographs before, photographs after, case closed.

PR: Probably be worth some money, too.

BR: You would think. You would think. And yet, oddly enough, they have never surfaced. But nonetheless, that’s actually the key to all of these. The biggest key to the eyewitness claims is the pilot. Now of course, a pilot who flies over a field may or may not necessarily look in that field.

PR: Yeah, that’s again with the building analogy.

0:59:00
If you’re not looking for it, there’s no reason to really think you’re going to notice it, right?

BR: Right, right. I mean, I don’t doubt that there was a pilot that flew over the field. I have no problem believing that at all. But the fact that he didn’t see it doesn’t mean anything. It just means he didn’t see it. And of course keep in mind that it’s across the highway from Stonehenge. If I’m a pilot, I’m checking out Stonehenge. Because that’s cool.

0:59:25
There’s rocks there. There’s big rocks. There’s probably dancing druids. Spinal Tap is probably there taping a video. I don’t know. So I’m not going to be necessarily paying attention to what’s in some field, my peripheral vision in some farmer’s field, which looks identical to all the other fields surrounding Stonehenge and Wilshire. I’m looking at Stonehenge. So again, the idea that a pilot or that pilot could not have failed to see a crop circle, even one as remarkable as this, just doesn’t make sense.

PR: Really, I mean, I find it kind of funny that they even use, first off, that they even mentioned that there was a photographer, because if there is no photographic evidence, the presence of a photographer is meaningless.

1:00:13
And just saying that a photographer was there doesn’t add to the story any other than there might be pictures, but if you don’t have them, then who cares? And the pilot, you can’t expect a person to accurately recall a nondescript field at any given time. Now, I’m sure the argument has come up, well, if it was already there, why didn’t he notice it? But there are also a number of reasons that would have happened. I mean, it could have been the angle that he was flying in.

1:00:48
It wasn’t directly in his line of vision. It could have been where the sun was, he may not have even seen, I mean, crop circles look very dramatic from directly overhead, but in any wheat field, it all kind of blends together if you’re looking at it from an angle and if the light’s corrected. And you know, but let’s throw that all out the door, let’s say it should have been perfectly visible. Again, the pilot would have had to have been looking specifically in that direction at the right time. Yeah, flying back in, he did notice it, but that’s not relevant to whether it was there before or not.

1:01:23
BR: You’re exactly right. What’s disheartening to me is that the conversation that you and I are having is apparently one that hasn’t occurred to many crop circle experts, including Lucy Pringle and Colin Andrews and others. We’re just applying basic logic here. It’s just fascinating to me that for as highly touted as this crop circle is, and as esteemed and as such powerful evidence, it’s been so poorly investigated. It shouldn’t astonish me by this point, but it’s just like, come on. Those are the main three. Now, the other question is, the other group of people that supposedly should have seen the crop circle, had it been there overnight, were the motorists on the A303.

1:02:18
This was highlighted… This group is often referenced, but this is highlighted in the press notes for a documentary film called Crop Circles, Quests for Truth by an Academy Award nominated director, William Gizecki. And he said, in the press notes, and I have him right here, he says, “in July 1996, a 915 foot spiral of 151 circles appeared in full view of the busy A303 road Road opposite England’s ancient monument Stonehenge within a 45 minute period one Sunday afternoon.” Okay. So again, you can see a pattern to this as sort of sensational, bold claims. With a few corrected facts and clarified assumptions, his breathless statements can be seen in a bit of different light.

1:03:08
The Julia set did not in fact appear in full view of a busy road. The A303 can be busy at times, but it’s not constantly busy. In any event, the topography is all wrong. Actually, the area where the crop circle was made in the field is in a bowl-shaped area. It’s not visible from the road. It’s not elevated. It’s not on a hill. It’s actually below. And keep in mind, the idea of a crop circle is it’s flattened out. The stuff around it is still sticking up. So unless you’re at a higher angle, a significantly higher angle, for example, from a passing plane or helicopter, you’re not necessarily going to see it. And as I mentioned before, keep in mind that the field where the crop circle is, is opposite Stonehenge.

1:04:02
If you’re a motorist, even if you live in the area, are you going to be looking to your right to see Stonehenge? Or are you going to be looking to see if there’s a crop circle in one of, you know, in yet another empty wheat field? So, come on. So, you know, one by one, the stories fall like wheat stalks to a scythe.

1:04:29
What is sort of lumped together is all these eyewitnesses saying the same thing and they’re all like, well, they’re not really saying the same thing. You’re sort of imposing your worldview on them. And so it just doesn’t make sense.

PR: I actually bothered to just find on Google Earth the area around Stonehenge and the A303 itself, and I just thought, let’s drop a pin down on it and take a look at Street View on A303. Now, what I’m looking at is directly across now. It’s not necessarily the field in question, but what you can see is a set of tracks within about judging from the width, probably less than 20 to 50 meters from the edge of the road.

1:05:17
You can see the set of tracks, and as it turns away from the road here, they disappear right into the wheat field. These are tracks that are right next to the road. Presumably, we’re talking about this giant crop circle is not right next to the road. It’s actually well into the field. And, there’s a perfect, actually, yeah. So what we’re looking at is exactly the field. We can, in fact, the tracks we’re looking at appear to be the farm tracks where they drive into the field.

1:05:48
Now, those tracks you can’t see past the first probably 100 feet. So, you know, which is roughly 30 meters. So we’re looking at a very short distance from the road, we can’t see the tracks that are going directly into the field.

BR: How in the world would you expect someone to see? I mean, you and I are both looking at the same photo here, and it’s entirely unreasonable to assume the drivers going in either direction would have seen this crop circle. It’s too far away, it’s flattened out, and Stonehenge is on the other side.

PR: Yeah, and again, this Google Earth, you can do it yourself. Just look up Stonehenge on Google Maps or Google Earth and drop your pin right just basically on the nearest section of the A303, the closest it gets to Stonehenge.

1:06:46
It’ll be just directly across from it and like I said, you can see the tracks that are actually quite visible on the aerial photograph of the crop circles and they appear to be in the exact same spot. These tracks don’t even read past the first 30 meters. It would be unreasonable to think and keep in mind the Google car, I actually pulled up behind it one time when I was driving around and that camera sits pretty high above the car, higher than your average seating position in a car. So even a person in a semi would have been, it would have been difficult for them to see that far into the field.

BR: If they happen to be, and you know, I don’t know what the speed limit is going through there, but I mean, even, I mean, you can look at the scale on this, right? I’m guessing if you’re going, I don’t know, 50 miles an hour, you pass it within… If you don’t happen to look in that side of the road during the 15 seconds, 20 seconds, I just…

1:07:49
PR: Yeah, it’s pretty… It’s very unreasonable. I mean, just I think that the motorist angle is definitely the weakest, and that one certainly, considering the strongest one is the pilot, which we’ve already pretty well dismantled, you know, the motorists are almost not even worth mentioning because like I just did from my telephone in the span of 20 seconds, I dropped a pin on the spot that I can see cars in this photograph, and I can tell you that those cars cannot see that crop circle. It’s not even implausible – It’s near impossible just because you can tell from the angle. It’s too far off in a field to even consider.

BR: Yeah, and so at the end of the day, there’s an axiom that Forteans and skeptics are fond of saying, and that is that absence of evidence that something is there, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

1:08:53
And that’s often used against skeptics. In fact, fine, we’ll take it.

PR: I’ve certainly been thrown that one.

BR: Right. So, I mean, it’s a true axiom, and this is a perfect example of it. The fact that nobody noticed the crop circle in the field until past six o’clock does not mean that it wasn’t there. It just means that no one noticed it. And so, at the end of the day, I mean, the simplest explanation for the fact that a pilot, Stonehenge guards, farmers, and A303 motorist didn’t report it prior to that time, prior to 6 p.m., was they didn’t notice it because most people don’t spend their time looking at empty fields across from Stonehenge, right?

1:09:36
And the simplest explanation for the circle itself is that it was made at night by the three hoaxers who admitted to making it, albeit anonymously. So the fact that the hoaxers didn’t come forward and identify themselves, as an investigator, I’m not fond of anonymous sources. You take them with a grain of salt, and it’s not like they’re on my side, so therefore, no, I take everybody to the grain of salt. But in this case, their explanation exactly fits all the circumstantial evidence. And so the lesson that I take from it is don’t assume that someone would have figured this out. I see this over and over again when I’m investigating these sorts of mysteries.

1:10:20
I say, well, I said, what am I going to do with this? This is touted as one of the best cases for crop circles. I’m like, surely somebody smarter than me has looked at this, right? And there’s dozens and dozens of books and all these experts and all these websites and all this stuff, and it’s all noise. It’s all cut and pasted from other people. It’s all people who just repeat second and third hand stories.

1:10:49
And there’s so little actual evidence investigation. I just see this over and over again. The level of scholarship is astonishingly low. I’ve said this before, it’s not that I’m the smartest guy in the room. It’s just that I just took the time to do it and to get all the information and look at it analytically. That’s one of the lessons I take from it is don’t assume that just because this is a well-known case, or this is well-known evidence, whether it’s the Mansi Lake monster photo, or it’s the Pokemon mystery, or it’s the Stonehenge surprise, or whatever it is, just because it’s on TV, just because it’s in books, inside of websites, doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody has made any legitimate, critical effort to solve it.

1:11:36
It just means that people will latch onto it and spin it for their own mystery mongering men’s so that’s that’s  what that’s… I enjoy talking about this case because it’s a It’s a fun case. It’s well known You know I think I solved it a lot of people may not think so and as always my answer is if I’m wrong, you solve it. If you think I got something wrong. You got a better explanation that fits the facts, I’m happy to hear it. Anyway, that my friends is a Stonehenge Surprise.

PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’d like to find out what that is and how to become one, head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange.

1:12:29
Patronage starts at just a buck and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons.

BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support, you can head over to iTunes and give us a review. Every five star review gets us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

PR: So that about does it for this week’s episode. Ben, what do we have on the burner for next week?

BR: Next week I want to talk about being pedantic.

PR: I know we’ve both been accused of that.

BR: Yes, yes. But I think there’s a place for a pedantry. And it can be irritating, I admit that. Yeah. But I think that there’s a there’s a hidden value in in in pedantry, and so I want to talk about that

PR: Awesome looking forward to it So from strange studios, that’s a fond farewell from us. See you next week.

BR: Bye. Bye.