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Volume 19: Number 2: Article 1
Balls of Light: The Questionable Science of Crop Circles
Francesco Grassi, CICAP — Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal via Pascoli, 1, 35125, Padova, Italy
Claudio Cocheo, Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri—IRCCS, Centro di Ricerche Ambientali via Svizzera 16, 35127 Padova, Italy
Paolo Russo, CICAP — Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal via Pascoli, 1, 35125, Padova, Italy
Three papers published by W. C. Levengood (1994), W. C. Levengood and N. P. Talbott (1999) and by E. H. Haselhoff (2001) suggested the involvement of some kind of electromagnetic radiation during the creation of crop circles. Here we discuss the methods and conclusions of the three articles, pointing out the misrepresentation of the experimental protocols, the misleading application of statistical procedures, the arbitrary discarding of unwanted results and the weakness of the proposed physical model to the suggested hypothesis. In particular, we show that Haselhoff's conclusions are unsubstantiated and do not prove the involvement of an electromagnetic radiation source in the creation event.
Keywords: crop circles, balls of light, electromagnetic radiation, statistical models, stem node elongation
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