[Hajman]

What I am saying is that human origination can not account for all of the phenomena collectively known as 'crop circles', nor all of the characteristics associated therewith. And I really can not conceive of someone (or even groups of human someones) going to all that bother for a practical joke.

I know this is what you're saying. This I stated was your argument (if I was vague, then I hope to be more clear this time around). Your argument seems to hinge on "If I don't know how it's done, no one else can do it". You're also the one making the positive absolute claim of aliens doing it (meaning you have more weigth of evidence to present then do we). Also, which is simplist: Some people have a technique you don't know about that do this for fun to see what kind of headlines they can get, or aliens (which haven't been proven to exist yet) waste time and energy to come over here and draw cute designs in our fields, when they could just simply respond in kind and 'wire' us back the answer? Also, if you assume aliens exist to be able to support your theory that they made the crop circles, you can't use the crop circles to provide evidence that aliens exist (without falling into circular reasoning).

Tell you what. You give a general location near where you are, and tomorrow morning have a crop circle appear there which contains the representation of an atom of water, the binary value for Pi (to ten decimal places), two prime numbers of four digits each, and an Alfred E. Neumann 'What, me worry?' face, and I'll believe that all of these were likely done by humans. Otherwise, I'm free to speculate.

Tell you what. You come over here and show me how to levitate a person just like the pro illusionists do it, and I'll believe it can be done. Or do any of the illusionist tricks that only they know, or else I won't believe they can do it (even though they don't show people how they do it). That line of argument's a bit silly, isn't it? Your argument seems to fall under the same line of reasoning, and is flawed do to the same reason. The crop circles we're pertinent to this thread might or might not have been non-man made, but that doesn't help your argument any. Your arugment isn't flawed because it's a possibility, it's flawed because your trying to ask others to prove a negative on an argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument of ignorance: saying "because I don't see how it could be done, that means it can't").

-The Hajman-

[Le-Roy]

   I begin to see. Evidently we are too disparate to effectively communicate. My original post meant, to me, 'If you folks seem to think this to be so childish and funny, then it should be no big deal for you to explain every facet of these phenomena.' I guess you took it as 'In the absence of demonstrable proof of the technique involved, I positively assert that aliens did it.'

   It is really no great skin off my nose, either way. I happen to believe there are many things we can not explain, and that I am perfectly free to believe about them as I wish, lacking any definitive scientific data/analysis. I do not, however, insist that everyone else believe similarly.

(I ain't real serious about too many things, Haj...;^)