Forum

- 1 May 1991

Crop Rectangles

A strange phenomenon is again manifesting itself in the pastoral areas of our borough. October has once again brought appearances of what we Mt Eden Skeptics call “Crop Rectangles” — bare, rectangular patches of earth amongst the normally verdant parklands. They have no reasonable explanation, but they do have a common, peculiar feature, which leads us to believe that they are associated with some sort of meteorological cult.

We have not actually observed the ritual because of the awkward hours involved, but early on Saturday mornings, one of the cult plants three sticks at each end of the rectangle, and 9 times out of 10 it starts to rain, far beyond the statistical expectation.

As good skeptics, we have applied dispassionately critical thinking to this phenomenon — there may be a connection via the piezoelectric effect as banging stakes into the Earth’s crust may affect cloud formations.

Certainly it calls for a series of double blind tests. If the dozen or so cult members could be fooled into using placebo ceremonial equipment, say a slightly larger white ball and a round stick instead of a flat one, then these changes, along with others — for example, using dancers who aren’t necessarily virgins as these appear to be — could isolate the influences.

Any real investigation would require hundreds of tests, some lasting up to 5 days, and so far we haven’t found any researchers willing to take it on. Being given up to 75 descriptions per hour of essentially the same dance routine plus several descriptions of the same seagull seems to have kept volunteers firmly in their armchairs.

Our instinctive reaction to this cult and its routines is that the members really do want it to rain. Their tiring, repetitive dances will be cut short, the secrets of the ceremony will remain with the dancers, and they will be able to hide away in their sanctuaries, taking communion and watching the deserted crop rectangles on telly.

Peter Lange

We have such cult members here in Christchurch, but their success rate in inducing rain is far less than Auckland cultists.

Timely Comments

Two comments on Owen McShane’s review of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time March 1990:

John Boslough in his Beyond the Black Hole: Stephen Hawking’s Universe (London, Collins 1985) quotes Hawking in a personal conversation: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe. There must be religious overtones. But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it.” (p. 100)

Even though Hawking is thus reported, on page 105 it is implied that he is in fundamental disagreement with David Bohm.

Moreover, neither in A Brief History of Time nor in Boslough’s book, is there any reference to the EPR effect or Bell’s theorem, important to Bohm’s theories and discussed in detail in my contribution. So we may infer that Hawking, like Einstein and Bohr, has his own personal philosophy, which leads him not to take account of all proven phenomena germane to his thinking.

Michael Cocks

Feedback

That internationally respected organ of scientific research, The Sun, has conducted an experiment into faith healing. It went like this: The Sun published a centrefold colour picture of the hands of Christian Dion, who calls himself a psychic. Readers were told to place their hands on the hands in the photograph at a given time (8 pm on Monday 29 October, so you’re too late now) and experience a flow of healing energy, and all that.

Readers were to phone in and tell The Sun of the wonderful things that transpired.

Two days later, The Sun published the results: one woman’s sight was cured on the eve of an operation for glaucoma, a child’s asthma cleared, a child’s stomach-ache went away, and a man confined to a wheelchair got up and walked. Oh, yes, and a woman’s lights blew, curing her migraines “for the first time in months”.

The Sun has previously sent Uri Geller up in a hot-air balloon to beam his psychic forces down on Britain, and told readers to look into the (photographed) eyes of Doris Collins and await visits from their dead relatives and pets.

This time the energy streamed into Wendy Grossman, founder and former editor of The Skeptic. She has written to the Press Council, urging it to censure The Sun or demand that it back up its claims with solid proof.

New Scientist, 10 Nov 1990