Crop Circles with Chelsey Weber-Smith

What do men really get up to at the pub? For this April Fools' Day episode, Sarah tells urban legend correspondent Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria the history and the mystery behind crop circles, those sophisticated patterns left imprinted in corn and wheat fields said to be made by alien beings. For years, no one could find a rational reason for their mysterious existence as they spread across various countries; that is, until a pair of surprising culprits finally came forward to reveal their master prank. Digressions include Ramona Quimby’s dad’s alma mater, sexy adaptations of costume drama novels, and the unrivaled power of shaky cam footage. More Chelsey Weber-Smith: Listen to American Hysteria Follow American Hysteria on instagram Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler "Every Corn is a Glamorous Woman" is a semi-original song by Magpie Cinema Club (it's just "Rockabye") More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  There's more than one way to bend a corn, and every corn is a glamorous woman.

• 0:11Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall. With me today is our hoaxster-in-chief, Chelsea Weber-Smith. And today, we're going to talk about crop circles, seriologists, and extraterrestrials. And we won't meet any extraterrestrials, but we will meet a lot of British people. And I think that's even more exciting, in a way. Chelsea, how are you doing?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  You know, I am of England, so I can confirm that we are freaks from another planet, that planet being England. Here, I want to try my, let me try my crop circle noise.

• 0:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 0:55Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Did that sound cool?

• 0:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that sounded great. Is that supposed to be a flying saucer landing?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02Sarah Marshall?

  Flying up? Okay.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Landing, or sucking up a person. I was gonna say sucking up a baby, but I don't know how often they abduct babies.

• 1:10Sarah Marshall?

  I haven't heard that specific one, but that would be cool, you know?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, not for, well, I don't know. I think the baby would have a great day. That would be a good children's book. It would be like Baby's Day Out, but he goes to space.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, or like an 80s buddy movie where the aliens are the buddies, and they're like, "How'd we get this baby? We gotta watch this baby all day? I was trying to beam up that beautiful woman."

• 1:34Sarah Marshall?

  It's actually the forgotten sequel to Flight of the Navigator.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38Sarah Marshall?

  It was destroyed by Disney. Chelsea, what are your associations with crop circles? Is this something that you grew up watching cheesy 90s TV about at all?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, definitely. I feel like I caught a few, like, Fox specials on it, as most people did. But I was just thinking before this about how weird it is that me, of all people, has not done

• 2:06Speaker 01

  You know, a deep dive even of my own for fun into crop circles. So I'm really coming in pretty fresh. I have like UFO alien abduction knowledge, definitely, but, but just not crop circles. And I know like, I know like the skeleton of the story, but I'm excited for it to be filled in with blood and guts and muscle by you.

• 2:32Sarah Marshall?

  And, and as we like to, we are coming back to the corn because cornfields are, are one of the, one of the notable fields in which these crop circles are made.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43Sarah Marshall?

  And first started turning up historically. And much like UFO abductions, which you just mentioned, this is a phenomenon that like growing up and watching these kind of history channel type shows about, you would have thought had been around for like way longer. And then it turns out that there's a very distinct point in time, actually, where we started seeing what we might call a classic presentation of them. And in this case, it's 1981.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Which is amazing because when we did the corn mazes one, the companion to this episode, you taught me that corn mazes started in like the 1990s and I was shaken, shaken to my core.

• 3:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And of course, like there's, you know, beautiful historical hedge mazes and things like that. And different kind of iterations of these ideas, but like, yeah, these specific things that feel timeless to us sometimes are of our own lifetimes.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  I know.

• 3:39Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe for some interesting, specific reasons. And can you talk just a little bit about kind of the point in time at which the classic idea of the UFO abduction begins?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Let me just like tap into my memory here. I mean, we started really like. Seeing UFOs around the 1940s, around World War II. There's a really great book by Carl Jung. It's called Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

• 4:10Sarah Marshall?

  Carl Jung's contribution to UFO stuff has been really overlooked.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  It has been because it really was the book for me that inspired my podcast, American Hysteria, because it was this look at like how we externalize our anxieties and fears into these vessels, like for example, UFOs, right? Or Satanists, in the case of what you and I talk about, right? So it's like, that happened during kind of the war years when we were afraid of like being bombed on our own territory and things like that. So we started to see these things. And what I love to always mention about UFOs, because I think it's so cool and so interesting, is that the first, it was either the first or one of the very, very first UFOs that

• 4:56Speaker 01

  was seen was described not as a flying saucer, but as an object that moved like a saucer skipping across the water and newspapers printed it incorrectly. And from then on, what did we see?

• 5:12Sarah Marshall?

  Who's skipping all these saucers? Don't they have flat rocks?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it's wasteful. Let's say that. It's indulgent and wasteful. But I think that that's just a great example of how our perceptions can really be changed based on what we're expecting to see. And I just think that's so fascinating.

• 5:31Sarah Marshall?

  And sort of like the way words change definitions.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 5:35Sarah Marshall?

  What about the kids? They could cut their feet on all the saucers.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  And you know, I mean, in terms of abductions, it's so like married into the movements around recovered memory therapy. A lot of people would have something they barely remembered, like some maybe sleep paralysis experience that they just can't quite explain. They'd go and see a therapist that had their own belief in alien abduction. And you know, the rest is history. This the the ability to influence someone into believing something different about what had happened to them and kind of extrapolating that experience. It's a great, we have a two part episode on it called Alien Abductions, I think. I don't know, something like that.

• 6:23Sarah Marshall?

  That sounds right. It's one of my favorite episodes that you've done that I've heard because you've done many, many, many shows.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 6:31Sarah Marshall?

  And in this case, would it be correct to say that this phenomenon kind of began or like that there are sort of these scattered stories that people you can tell people are starting to kind of hear about maybe from disparate parts of the country or even the world. But, you know, we have, we now have newspapers that are capable of having, you know, like a wire service that picks up a local story and takes it national in a way that technology is aiding and news is starting to travel a bit faster. And that often they're these, we see this in the Satanic Panic, too, that there are elements of a bigger story that coalesce at one point. That's like a flashpoint appears or the, you know, these things that people in the culture are talking about and thinking about sort of get melted into a crucible.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:17Sarah Marshall?

  And then form this overarching narrative. And it seems like in this case, there were like a couple of people who experienced or told this story in a way that made it make sense to people in a way that could then be replicated.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Will you say more?

• 7:34Sarah Marshall?

  Well, would it be fair to say that the classic UFO abduction story for Americans was started by this one couple?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I know.

• 7:42Sarah Marshall?

  Who came forward with an abduction story. Yeah. And in a story, and in a case that also involves a lot of hypnosis and recovered memory type stuff.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I mean, as you mentioned, like this, this flashpoint, you know, Betty and Barney Hill, this was in, I believe, early 1960s. They're driving along a road. They have a strange experience they can't explain of missing time. And from there, they start to, you know, or at least Betty begins this kind of therapy and the recordings of the therapy are wild where she is kind of like. Remembering this abduction and from there, there's the movies that came out of it. And it just becomes, you know, like you said, like it is this flashpoint that then is absorbed into all of our psyches and we start to view things through this like previously available

• 8:34Speaker 01

  story that we can then synthesize our own experiences with. So I think that that's

• 8:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  And I will say, I am not here to say aliens aren't real. So, you know, I may be a skeptic, but

• 8:47Sarah Marshall?

  Me neither. I just don't think that they're recreationally sexually assaulting us. And it's interesting to me that that became the dominant narrative for Americans in like the 60s and 70s.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  That's, that is very true. Yeah, that's very much a part of this.

• 9:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And it's like, well, we do have a culture that like really represses, you know, the kinds of crimes that we're saying aliens are carrying out, you know, and that that doesn't mean nothing, in my opinion.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  No, and it's interesting because there's like different schools of thought, like John Mack is so interesting. He was a Harvard professor who was eventually totally like disgraced, quote unquote, by like the institution because he interviewed a bunch of abductees and believed what they were saying. And generally, I think John Mack is pretty cool. I don't believe in a lot of the things that he talks about, but he's created like a really nice space for people who have these, you know, these experiences that are, you know, we don't understand. But a lot of the people that he interviewed and like, it seems like the interviews that were most important to him had more to do with aliens showing us

• 9:54Speaker 01

  environmental destruction and like leading us toward a better way, which is much nicer than the narrative of like, you know, experimentation.

• 10:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which is kind of the premise of James Cameron's The Abyss.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

• 10:10Sarah Marshall?

  Which I really love, actually, is something for aliens to do because you have to ask if they've come all the way here, like surely their only goal wasn't just to like fuck with us.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:20Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, unless they're like teenage aliens who are just being incredibly extravagant with fuel, but even, I mean, maybe, maybe.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe.

• 10:33Sarah Marshall?

  But, okay, but tell us about, like, have you ever found a crop circle creepy?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I think so. I think they're really creepy. Well, I

• 10:42Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, nice.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I'm really scared of aliens.

• 10:45Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I'm a little bit scared of aliens.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:48Sarah Marshall?

  If I'm in the right mood and I, and I start picturing aliens, I'll get scared of aliens.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 10:55Sarah Marshall?

  And by that, of course, I mean, the little, the little gray guys with the big heads, which are, again, another classic 60s presentation, to my understanding.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely. And I think Barney and Betty Hill were a big part of that, too. Because they saw gray aliens. But I feel like, for me, I watched Mars Attacks too young, and the rest is history.

• 11:15Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I've never seen that because when it came out, I was like, hell, no, I'm, I'm a baby. I can't possibly see the scary movie.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Literally have no idea how I got my mitts on it.

• 11:25Sarah Marshall?

  I might still not be ready.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  It's fucking scary.

• 11:28Sarah Marshall?

  Although I would like to see all of Sarah Jessica Parker's oeuvre.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  She's good in it, for sure. I think it's a good movie. It's fun. It's a lot of fun, but very scary for a child, and it really cemented my fear, as did those, like, like, I think the, like, shaky cam videos of UFOs are scary.

• 11:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, there's something inherently scary about a shaky camera, arguably because the Zapruder film really put the kibosh on the shaky camera party.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:56Sarah Marshall?

  But also because you, I'm sure that there's like, A, it's like, it's jarring, you know, you don't know what you're supposed to be looking at, and it's, you know, the image is shaking around. And also, you have the reasonable expectation that you're gonna, you're about to see something scary, because that's usually the context there.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 12:15Sarah Marshall?

  So you could like, I mean, if you showed me a really shaky cam quarter, recording of a child's birthday party, I would be pretty terrified.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the Blair Witchian sort of ideas like, you know, it's like riding through the dark woods with a handicap.

• 12:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess that's what happens in Signs.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Signs is really good. I mean, it's insane. Like, the ending of it is crazy.

• 12:43Sarah Marshall?

  Signs is scary. They do, they have to show too much of the aliens at the end. And you're like, well, that might have been too much of the aliens.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  No, it was too much. I think they should never have shown the aliens, is my opinion. And it shouldn't have ended with him becoming a Catholic priest again.

• 12:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Spoiler.

• 13:01Sarah Marshall?

  Well, the aliens had something to tell him about the Lord, I think. But, I mean, but the idea that we think aliens are coming to tell us to not fuck everything up is really nice. And that's if I, if I am to believe in an alien or sort of like the story of aliens making meaning in my life, like, that's the kind of alien that I like to imagine. And it kind of maybe fits with crop circles, because the idea behind crop circles, which people start talking about in the early 80s, and which really pick up traction in the late 80s, and which there are still many, many crop circles, there are still people who love crop circles and study them and have theories about them. But they really had their first,

• 13:45Sarah Marshall?

  like, top of the pops heyday in the late 80s. And basically, they are, they're circles made in the crops. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a fairly precise circle made by bending but not breaking, like, corn or wheat or some kind of cereal grain. And they started showing up, not just specifically in England, but specifically in Hampshire and Wiltshire.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 14:14Sarah Marshall?

  Which is also great. The aliens have come all the way across the universe to Hampshire specifically.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  It's an honor, you know?

• 14:25Sarah Marshall?

  Only to the south of England. And this, a lot of this story takes place, therefore, around Stonehenge, which, as you can imagine, is very exciting to paranormal-type research calculators.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:37Sarah Marshall?

  And Stonehenge is also relatively close to Southampton, which, in American, is where Jack Dawson wins the tickets on the Titanic.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Thank you for translating that.

• 14:48Sarah Marshall?

  And we're gonna watch some Unsolved Mysteries featuring a lot of English farmers

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:56Sarah Marshall?

  who have what I think it's fair to call hot fuzz accents. And I'm so excited to just share this little moment in time with you. This is from season two of Unsolved Mysteries, so 1988 or 89, I think.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Our birth year.

• 15:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  We were older than corn mazes, but we're the same age as our twin crop circles.

• 15:21Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't that nice?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that that's not true because we're just twins with the episode about crop circles of Unsolved Mysteries.

• 15:29Sarah Marshall?

  That's still pretty good. We're twins would die hard.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  We'll take it.

• 15:33Sarah Marshall?

  Not everybody can say that.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Hey, that's true.

• 15:35Sarah Marshall?

  I do think it's funny how like everyone who can remember the eighties is starting to act like the people I remember watching in a documentary about the roaring twenties when I was in AP US History. Yeah, I have to let people know it was AP. I'm proud of it, okay?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  You should.

• 15:51Sarah Marshall?

  It was hard.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  It is hard. I only lasted one year and I was like, nope, I'm gonna smoke weed.

• 15:57Sarah Marshall?

  That was my one AP class. I was like, that is enough. I am ready for regular placement.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Made everything a lot easier after that.

• 16:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I also learned, because I've been rereading the Ramona books, because they're so good, that when Ramona Quimby's dad goes back to school, he goes to PSU and I went to PSU.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Wow, that must have felt really good.

• 16:19Sarah Marshall?

  And I really think that that should be on their website, that it's where Ramona's dad went.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I think it should be on your website, that you went to the same school as Ramona's dad.

• 16:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you're right. I should, I should put that on there.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Jam it in. Shoehorn it in somewhere.

• 16:34Sarah Marshall?

  That'll just be what I start off with.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 16:40Sarah Marshall?

  The unexplained.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Stonehenge, the great megalithic monument of southern England.

• 16:49Sarah Marshall?

  That voice is music to my ears.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Stonehenge is only one of hundreds of such monuments scattered throughout Britain.

• 16:53Sarah Marshall?

  I love hearing Robert Stack describe Stonehenge.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  For centuries, these puzzling formations have baffled scientists and laymen alike. But recently, scientists have identified another phenomenon that may relate to the mysterious British monuments: wheat circles.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Wheat circles. Wheat, wheat circles.

• 17:09Sarah Marshall?

  Wheat.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, there he is.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  This photograph was taken recently in England. It shows circles in wheat fields. Seems simple enough, but in fact, they are not simple at all.

• 17:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  No one knows how these enigmatic circles got there. Molded gently from unbroken stalks of wheat and corn, they may just represent one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the century.

• 17:29Sarah Marshall?

  But maybe not.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Nearly 95% of the circles occur within 30 miles of Stonehenge, and all the rest are near other stone monuments similar to Stonehenge. Are the circles caused by something we can explain, like whirlwinds?

• 17:41Sarah Marshall?

  Whirlwinds?

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Or are they caused by something we cannot even begin to understand?

• 17:46Sarah Marshall?

  Really, Kelsey? You don't think whirlwinds?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  It's not a good explanation.

• 17:49Sarah Marshall?

  You don't think it's whirlwinds?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Charity Down, a farm two hours' drive from London, England. In the early morning hours of June 15, 1988, 37-year-old farmer Chris Wood slowly drove a tractor through one of his wheat fields.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I'm 37. What does it mean?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Just after sunrise, he saw something in the field that he had never seen before. He couldn't explain it: a huge circle that appeared in the wheat.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  It's really, really amazing, you know, how the actual crop was laying on the ground, and it was so, so perfect, really.

• 18:25Sarah Marshall?

  He looks exactly like Prince Charles.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  The circle Chris Wood found that morning has never been explained. During the last 12 years, more than 750 large, perfectly symmetrical circles, some of them as big as 100 yards in diameter, have formed overnight in seemingly random fields of wheat, corn, and other crops.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  The question no one can answer is, how did the circles get there?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Honestly, they're a lot sloppier looking than I remember.

• 18:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hold on to that observation.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  The first circle I found was in 1985, August 3rd.

• 18:59Sarah Marshall?

  Busty Taylor is being interviewed.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  It was the last sort of flight of the night and we were flying around and as the aircraft banked around to the right, I looked into the wingtip and there below me was this beautiful quintuplet set, a large circle with four smaller ones around it.

• 19:15Sarah Marshall?

  The mommy and the babies.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  I marveled at the sight and I questioned myself then, what on earth did that?

• 19:20Speaker 05

  We were harvesting, it was the last day of harvest. We went out to the combines in the morning to cut our last field and we come across this circle. There was no real damage as such, the corn was flattened down.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Must have been so weird for them.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  It was just odd, strange.

• 19:38Sarah Marshall?

  The corn was flattened down.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  Well, I've been here since October 1957 and the first circles we saw were, I would say, 72, 73. And that was a small circle, about four yards across. And then we saw another one the following year, about the same size. And as the years have gone on, we've seen them 12 yards across with the small ones either side of them.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  He said the 70s?

• 20:05Speaker 07

  They vary in diameter, the smallest we've had would be about five meters, the largest would be, I suppose, 15 perhaps. They have a neat, perfect pattern from a center where it's flattened, the edges are very distinct.

• 20:21Speaker 08

  The most wonderful thing about it is when you actually go out the night before to look for a circle and there's nothing there, it's just a lovely field of growing corn. And then the following morning, when you get up early in the morning in the first light of day and suddenly there is the circle, you just can't believe it.

• 20:39Sarah Marshall?

  All right, let's pause a moment.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:42Sarah Marshall?

  Well, what are your thoughts so far?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think part of it is definitely that I maybe, I think I'm understanding right, that he, one of the witnesses is talking about like the early 70s. Was that right?

• 20:56Sarah Marshall?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  So I didn't know that it was going on for such a long time. I think I thought that it was like a phenomenon that happened over like the course of a few months and then that was kind of it. So

• 21:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  At least for the initial, you know, the ones that sparked this, this idea and this thing. And then, yeah, the other thing is, I always think of, or we always hear maybe that crop circles are like these incredible mathematical feats that are so perfect. And yeah, I just, the video that we just saw, they definitely didn't look very perfect to me.

• 21:35Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh, sick burn. Yeah. Well, it's funny to call something a symmetrical or a perfectly symmetrical circle because like, I didn't major in geometry, but I'm pretty sure circles are symmetrical by definition. That's why they're circles.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 21:52Sarah Marshall?

  And you're right. Some of them are, you know, certainly not perfectly symmetrical. They're, but they're like, you know, they're, they're very good.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Of course. Yes.

• 22:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And so in terms of media coverage, with this started showing up in the news in 1981, or it started getting public attention. But then when people kind of looked back on their experience, there's people, as we see in these interviews, remembering encountering them in the early 70s. And a case that people also point to as evidence of these being patterns made perhaps by UFOs landing and taking off, is a story out of Queensland, Australia on a sugarcane farm in 1966 where a bunch of cane was flattened. And some farmers had witnessed some UFO type phenomena. I think flashing lights was one of the things

• 22:46Sarah Marshall?

  that people talked about, or at least one person did.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Okay, interesting.

• 22:50Sarah Marshall?

  And so again, it's like one of these things where there's like, if you're reading news from around the world, which people are able to at this point, there are these ideas that kind of are shifting around in people's minds, or aliens are visiting different parts of the world.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  That could happen.

• 23:04Sarah Marshall?

  And they went to Australia first.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:06Sarah Marshall?

  But what do you make of the fact that this is all happening around Stonehenge?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's very convenient for this, the story that whomever, whether they be men or alien, you know, is, is cooking up here. I've been to Stonehenge and it is very much a tourist trap at this point. So it's hard to feel very mystical there. I think there are like fun Druid gatherings that maybe can, can give you that experience, but it's really, it's very big parking lot at this point.

• 23:44Sarah Marshall?

  I remember going in like 2005 and being very offended that they were selling rock candy. And thinking about it now, I'm like, I want to eat the Stonehenge rock candy.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's just good branding, you know?

• 23:56Sarah Marshall?

  It is.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  But I mean, I think it makes sense that people would be more likely to be able to view this through a mystical lens because of the proximity to one of these like deeply mysterious aspects of Europe. Yeah.

• 24:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And it does kind of lend some like secondhand credence to the idea of like, oh, well, like, yeah, it's a magical place where there's energy. So of course the aliens are showing up there. Or as Robert Stack, or whoever was working their ass off writing this voiceover for him, says at the end, perhaps the ancient Druids saw circles left by the aliens and were inspired to make Stonehenge, which is.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:43Sarah Marshall?

  Quite a fun idea.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  That is a fun idea and quite the jump as well.

• 24:49Sarah Marshall?

  I also, I mean, many people far smarter than me have pointed out that these sort of cariots of the gods ideas, which by the way, the guy who wrote that book just died like in the past year, I think.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  R I P.

• 24:59Sarah Marshall?

  But you know, that there's like an intrinsic racism to them because the idea is that, that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have figured out how to build the pyramids. So the aliens must have helped them. The aliens must have created Mayan civilization. But then, not to like, say that Robert Stack is like necessarily in conversation with cariots of the gods, but I like that when we're imagining the Druids, we're like, no, they did that themselves. The aliens just kind of gave them the idea.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:26Sarah Marshall?

  But it was more of an homage.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, totally.

• 25:31Sarah Marshall?

  One cool thing about the area is that there is a formation, not a formation, actually a manmade piece of art, which is probably from the Bronze Age, so from pre-Roman Britain, called the Uffington White Horse, which is this giant ancient pictograph of a horse made by, I think essentially building a trench into the landscape and exposing the, the white chalk underneath and keeping it free of vegetation. I'm going to send you, send you a picture of that so you can see it.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Oh, very cool.

• 26:03Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't that great?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  That's really cool and, and does definitely kind of hearken to crop circles. So what, what I'm looking at people is this, yeah, like a very kind of spindly version of a horse.

• 26:19Sarah Marshall?

  360 feet long.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, gosh.

• 26:22Sarah Marshall?

  110 meters.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it kind of reminds me of like, if you connected the, connected the dots of a constellation, like it's giving, you know, Big Dipper vibes for sure. Or like, you know, there's probably a better one to compare it to, but.

• 26:39Sarah Marshall?

  It's giving big cave painting.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Totally, totally.

• 26:43Sarah Marshall?

  And there's, you know, debate over whether it's maybe some other animal, but I mean, in, in any case, it's just this big, beautiful. Piece of art made out of nature. And I guess something I would, I would suggest is if humans could make that, then why can't they make circles in some corn?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely agree.

• 27:04Sarah Marshall?

  And more to the point, if humans want to make that, then why wouldn't they want to make circles in the corn? Because one of the things I remember learning actually about cave paintings in my art history classes is that some of them were actually executed in a place that it would be very difficult to get to, to paint in or to view the painting, which just kind of suggests, you know, the importance of the act, I think, in a way, the fact that it wasn't casual.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:31Sarah Marshall?

  Um, in some of these cases, at least. And that the, the sort of human drive to create, I mean, I would certainly call all of this art.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:42Sarah Marshall?

  Um, is, is deep seated and kind of hard to explain often. And, and the ways that we can maybe explain other human behaviors with more of a cost benefit analysis kind of a thing.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And how nice is that? I mean, I guess it's the same kind of thing of like, why do we, like across time and culture, create religions? You know, it's like, there's a bonding aspect, right? It's like bringing people together around shared ideas and shared reality. I guess, you know, it makes sense that you bring people together to understand the world in different ways by making art about it. That's what we do now. That's what we're doing right now. And this.

• 28:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Gorgeous tapestry.

• 28:26Sarah Marshall?

  Are we the crop circle we wish to see in the world?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I think we are. I think we goddamn are.

• 28:33Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, let's look at, let's look at some of our seriologists here in this episode. Let's skip to, um, eight minutes and 45 seconds. We're going to watch some.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  On the same thing, right?

• 28:44Sarah Marshall?

  Crop circle researchers. Yeah, same Unsolved Mysteries segment. And we're going to hear first from Professor Archie Roy of Glasgow University.

• 28:52Speaker 09

  There are quite a number of them. There is the frankly unacceptable one of.

• 28:58Sarah Marshall?

  Archie.

• 28:59Speaker 09

  Circles being formed by hundreds of hedgehogs all marching around in circles.

• 29:05Speaker 09

  Another one is that they are the

• 29:07Sarah Marshall?

  That's the most British explanation.

• 29:08Speaker 09

  Mark of flying saucers. Another is that they are due to the downdrafts of helicopters, or that they are caused by whirlwinds,

• 29:18Sarah Marshall?

  That I'd be closer to believing.

• 29:18Speaker 09

  Or that they are hoaxes by human beings.

• 29:21Sarah Marshall?

  I like to be started with the hedgehogs. Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 09

  I think that it's very reasonable for a person to say,

• 29:26Sarah Marshall?

  That hoax one is looking pretty good.

• 29:28Speaker 09

  Because they look so artificial. But I don't think that the hoax theory can be held very strongly, because there are so many of these circles. Now, in eight or nine years, there have logged about 700, 250 this year, this summer alone. The amount of time that will have to be spent by a very big team of people making those circles is getting quite enormous. I simply don't see the hoax theory as a very strong contender.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  As part of a televised experiment, British military personnel attempted to create an artificial crop circle.

• 30:06Sarah Marshall?

  What? That's what the military is doing in England.

• 30:10Speaker 09

  Something mechanical is used to flatten the crop.

• 30:12Sarah Marshall?

  I know. I mean, I guess the military maybe doesn't have anything better to be doing, but...

• 30:16Speaker 01

  And may that be true.

• 30:17Speaker 09

  Very, very quickly.

• 30:18Sarah Marshall?

  Honestly, good use of military.

• 30:20Speaker 09

  Whether it's

• 30:20Sarah Marshall?

  Crop circles.

• 30:21Speaker 09

  And that is mechanically made, or it is a naturally created one.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  They made a Pac-Man.

• 30:27Speaker 09

  When we examine a naturally made circle,

• 30:30Sarah Marshall?

  They did. It's so cute.

• 30:30Speaker 09

  The portion of plant that just comes out of the ground must be softened, bent over, and then hardened up again. So, not only is the mystery in the circle itself, but what is it that is softening the plant, bending it over, and then hardening up?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Skinny little mustache.

• 30:51Speaker 09

  This is a real mystery.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Vincent Price.

• 30:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  If the circles are not a hoax,

• 30:55Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, let's pause. So, this is interesting too, because now we're seeing so many crop circles proliferating in the late 80s. And the, you know, naturally occurring observation that maybe this is just a human-created hoax. And then the crop circleologists are saying, no, no, no. Even if some of these are hoaxes, I can tell which ones of them are hoaxes because they are different.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. Okay, maybe that accounts for the sloppiness that I noticed in the previous video.

• 31:25Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I mean, if you were committed to crop circles being alien-created, then you could certainly say that.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  And I'm committed to that.

• 31:34Sarah Marshall?

  Let's see. Okay, I have another. You have so much fun stuff on this one. Yeah. Oh, God, the cat was scratching his ear and his foot was bonking the glass.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I was horrified that there was someone at your door.

• 31:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I thought someone was knocking on the window within that creepy way men do.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Oh, that's scary. That's really scary. You know, I stay up and I read my stories about froggers. Meaning people that are living in people's houses without them knowing. That's my bed type story. And the other night, there was all these scratching sounds and I was so freaked out. And I was like, where are they coming from? But then I figured out that there was a possum in our compost bag outside. So it was really a great, a great surprise. And it all ended up really good because he was a beautiful boy. I don't know. I don't know if he was a boy, but.

• 32:26Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, possums actually can see 27,000 genders.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And may we all.

• 32:33Sarah Marshall?

  Like mantis shrimp. Okay, I'm going to read to you from, of course, that most wonderful publication, Skeptical Inquirer, from the winter 1992 issue. And of course, our pal, Jo Nickle.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Ah, I knew. I knew it was gonna be.

• 32:47Sarah Marshall?

  Saw some people acting silly across the pond and said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get in on this one.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  God, I love Skeptical Inquirer. I do get the, the digital magazine.

• 32:58Sarah Marshall?

  I don't. I should get it.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  You should.

• 33:00Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so the serologist we heard from talking about the difference between manmade and authentic crop circles was Pat Delgado. And he, at the time, this issue of Skeptical Inquirer has come out, has just co-authored a book with another serologist, Colin Andrews, about crop circles. And they're also heavily featured in this Unsolved Mysteries episode.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Is Jo Nickle's in it?

• 33:23Sarah Marshall?

  Jo Nickle is not in the Unsolved Mysteries episode for some reason.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Because he was in the one that we did when you were on our show doing spontaneous human combustion. So I thought maybe they would have brought it back.

• 33:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which I loved doing that one.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  That was fun.

• 33:39Sarah Marshall?

  And I was very glad that they had him on. But no, this one is skeptic free. And there were three books on crop circles that came out in 1989 alone, according to this article.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 33:51Sarah Marshall?

  Which really also speaks to how well publishing was doing.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 33:57Sarah Marshall?

  So this article gets into the idea that they're like a weather phenomenon. And there's another theorist who's put together the idea that they're coming from a phenomenon similar to globe lightning, but involving plasma somehow. I don't understand

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that.

• 34:14Sarah Marshall?

  all the words in it. But it's interesting how, you know, there's patterns that start emerging. And what people also point out is that there's more and more with each passing year, like exponentially so. And they're increasing in complexity.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:28Sarah Marshall?

  Perhaps because the aliens are, you know, trying to communicate more and more complex messages with us. Or perhaps because, you know, it's things escalate when there's a fad. And perhaps this is a human driven fad because it's getting a lot of attention.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Well, unlike the aliens, I would think would be smart enough to know that we are not getting it. You need to make it simple or not harder.

• 34:53Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And what are we supposed to be getting from it?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  And they're like, do your math homework.

• 34:59Sarah Marshall?

  There are also people studying crop circles who think that quite a lot of the crop circles are based on human driven hoaxes. But again, there's this continued belief that even if some of them are imitations, it's like a copycat crime in a way, and that they're all based on something real.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it is a lot of crop circles. Like that was, that number was a lot higher than I was expecting. And I understand why people would. Would think that at least some of them are legit because they're happening in different locations too. So that also, you know, it always makes it a little less easy to designate something as a hoax.

• 35:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And we have one of the academics that we heard from arguing that it would be too huge a team of people required to do all of this. And what occurs to me is that if it is a human driven hoax, then these people don't have to be communicating about it.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:58Sarah Marshall?

  You know, it's something more like a meme and the way that, you know, trends spread today, which we can observe very easily on social media, where people don't have to talk to each other in order for an idea to catch on as long as it's picked up by media outlets, because then it can spread quickly and easily. And of course, much quicker and easier now than it did back then. But in the closing narration of this segment, Robert Stack is like, even more crop circles have been reported since we aired this segment, including outside of Britain for the first time. And it's like, yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:29Sarah Marshall?

  Because you aired the segment. That's why that happened.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  It does also, like, it reminds me of the whole conspiracy theory thing where it's like, you know, how could so many people be keeping a secret at the same time? And it is kind of like, how could so many people be making crop circles and also keeping it quiet? And maybe they're not, you know, maybe it's just not getting any coverage because they're telling guys at the pub and then the next day the guys are like, well, I'm not like calling the news about it. I'm just gonna slap Tommy on the back and buy him a beer because that was a lot of fun.

• 37:06Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. Let me read this quote from the Skeptical Inquirer. "Few would have underestimated the seriologist's will to believe had they known of the crop message incident of 1987. The message, written in the typical flattened crop style and with the words all run together, read, 'We are not alone.'" Delgado told readers of Flying Saucer Review, "At first sight, it was an obvious hoax, but prolonged study makes me wonder. Of the crop circles," he said, "maybe the..." Circles are created by alien beings using a force field unknown to us. They may be manipulating existing earth energy. Or the beings may be terrestrial ones laboring by the sweat of their brows. That's Joe Nicol again, of course.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  The message is really fun.

• 37:53Sarah Marshall?

  And also, wouldn't the aliens have written, "You are not alone"? Like, let's use our heads, everybody.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  That's a great point, Sarah. Very good point.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Unless the aliens are like, maybe there are aliens that are alien to both humans and us.

• 38:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Wow. They're alien aliens.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Or it's bullshit.

• 38:16Sarah Marshall?

  Or that. Yeah. So we also have the issue that they happen overnight, right? They happen unobserved because if you could catch an alien doing it, then you could, you know, have an alien.

• 38:32Sarah Marshall?

  And so farmers, you know, will wake up and come out in the morning and see a crop circle and say, well, I'll be goddamned. And this article continues, "Not only does the circle forming mechanism seem to prefer the dark, but it appears to specifically resist being seen as shown by Colin Andrews's Operation White Crow." Come on, you guys.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:53Sarah Marshall?

  This was an eight night vigil maintained by about 60 seriologists at Cheesefoot Head, a prime circles location.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Cheesefoot Head.

• 39:02Sarah Marshall?

  12th, 1989. Yes, winner of the most English location award. Cheesefoot Head. It sounds lovely, I have to say.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Gorgeous.

• 39:13Sarah Marshall?

  Hey, I mean, in Portland, there's Cornfoot Road by the airport.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Again, gorgeous.

• 39:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, gorgeous. I hope I never get cornfoot, though. "Not only did the phenomenon fail to manifest itself in the field under surveillance, but although there had already been almost 100 formations that summer, with yet another 170 or so to occur, not a single circle was reported for the eight day period anywhere in England. Then a large circle and ring, the very set that being swirled in the same direction seemed to play a joke on Meaden by upsetting his hypothesis." Because interestingly, researchers will hypothesize that, well, it always goes clockwise, and then the next circle will be counterclockwise, and things like that keep happening.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:58Sarah Marshall?

  A large circle and ring was discovered about 500 yards away on the very next day. Then we have another quote unquote "top secret" operation, Operation Blackbird, another surveillance operation using, I believe, the help of the actual military, including their infrared surveillance equipment.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Putting it to good use, I see.

• 40:21Sarah Marshall?

  And things are really escalating.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 40:24Sarah Marshall?

  And so in 1991, something really fun happens, which is that two guys come forward and say that they were the ones who did the first crop circles in 1978. Nobody noticed them for three years. And they got the idea when they were at the pub, having had a few beers, and had heard about the case out of Australia where the idea was that the cane had been bent down by a flying saucer and thought that they would make a circle out in the field for a laugh. And so they did, and then they, they just kept doing it. And we're gonna watch some news coverage about it from the time. Because I just really love that this is where the story is, is leading us now.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's just so interesting that it wasn't the first.

• 41:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, and then, of course, there's like the question of like, what is art? Art is intent. What are crop circles?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:20Sarah Marshall?

  Are crop circles intent? Where did those initial ones come from? And were those previous attempted hoaxes?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Sarah Marshall?

  Were, were they accidental? Or, you know, because it's like, the thing is, like, grass or corn or whatever, especially old dead corn, can get pushed down by all sorts of things for all kinds of reasons. And a lot of these phenomena only become phenomena when people start looking for them.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would also venture to say that if you're just walking through your field and seeing a bunch of corn pushed down, without the aerial view, you're not seeing that it's forming like a truly meaningful pattern. Like, I'm sure you could see that it is circle-esque, but beyond that, it'd probably be hard to like, fully actually visualize what you're seeing as something that fantastical.

• 42:09Sarah Marshall?

  Right, exactly. Because they're designed to be seen from a distance, from a hill. So vantage is important, but ideally arially, which is how we get to see them now.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:19Sarah Marshall?

  Of course, there are still many lovely crop circles to this day.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  That's wild.

• 42:26Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't know who all is making them, but I'm glad that they are.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Hats off to you on this week of our Lord, April Fool's Day.

• 42:35Sarah Marshall?

  I have my fingers crossed that somebody is going to write in and say, I like to listen to your shows while I'm making crop circles.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that would be so cool. I would love to meet somebody that did this. Maybe we should do this.

• 42:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Maybe we should be the change we wish to see.

• 42:56Sarah Marshall?

  Although I'd also like to know about best practices for doing crop circles in a way that doesn't interfere with anybody's crops, ironically.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to take away any income from our already, you know, underserved farming community.

• 43:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but you know, crop circles, corn mazes. What about a crop circle corn maze?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  I feel like we could hit up some local haunts, you know, like some of the, the seasonal Halloween farms and see if they'd be interested.

• 43:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What about a crop circle corn maze with aliens in it?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  That would be so cool.

• 43:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that would be sick.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Okay, we're on to something here. I mean, we've long discussed having a farm in which there is a haunted house. So maybe this is the

• 43:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  the obvious extension of that plan.

• 43:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of potential because there's a lot of pumpkin patches and there's a lot of haunted houses, but there aren't that many haunted pumpkin patches, at least that I've seen.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  No, it's usually like the corn maze down the way.

• 43:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Or, well, and a lot of times the corn maze itself is not haunted, which I always feel is quite tragic.

• 44:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It's just a regular corn maze, but.

• 44:07Sarah Marshall?

  Any maze can be haunted by the spirits of the people who got frustrated when, or the people who took their boyfriends who were too dumb to figure it out.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Amongst the corn.

• 44:20Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, let us watch coast to coast. Let's get some breaking news. Oh, fun. A coast-to-coast breaking news. It's 1991 and Britain has been haunted by crop circles for 10 years. Hell, yes. Okay. Yeah, this is not Art Bell's Coast to Coast tragically. This is just a normal news show. Okay. For southeastern England. I know, bummer. It's all right. That's why we're not listening to The Chase by Giorgio Moroder right now.

• 44:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I love this theme song.

• 44:52Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 44:53Speaker 10

  Good evening. Experts are tonight divided over claims by two men from Hampshire that they're responsible for the South's famous crop circles.

• 45:03Sarah Marshall?

  How exciting.

• 45:03Speaker 10

  Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer say they created the strange patterns with nothing more than a wooden board and a length of rope.

• 45:10Sarah Marshall?

  I remember this.

• 45:11Speaker 11

  The men decided to reveal their hoax when they heard the government was planning to finance research into the circles. But some scientists remain convinced the circles are not man-made. I shall be talking to one such expert in just a moment.

• 45:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, there he is again.

• 45:26Speaker 11

  But first, this report from Graham Bowden.

• 45:28Sarah Marshall?

  Little mustache guy.

• 45:29Speaker 11

  If their story's true, Dave Chorley and Doug Bauer are probably the most successful hoaxes of all time. The pair, who both live in Southampton, claim to have made more than 200 corn circles throughout the south of England.

• 45:42Sarah Marshall?

  And that's what I call success.

• 45:43Speaker 11

  According to them, the hoax began as a bit of harmless fun 13 years ago. Since then, the patterns have become more elaborate. Many thought they were made by alien spacecraft. Some scientists have devoted their life's work to the search for a natural explanation. Others have written bestselling books on the subject. Mr. Chorley and Mr. Bauer say everyone was conned. And the newspaper which published their story says it spent a week verifying their claims.

• 46:11Speaker 12

  For the first three years, nothing happened at all. And we realized that we were putting them in fields that the public couldn't see. And we then had to find a slope or a dip in the land that the motors could see.

• 46:23Sarah Marshall?

  Smart.

• 46:23Speaker 12

  Well, we decided on the punch bowl at Cheesefoot Head on the Petersfield Road.

• 46:27Sarah Marshall?

  Cheesefoot Head.

• 46:28Speaker 12

  And it was only a few hours before the first reports were coming through about the circle that was found in the punch bowl at Cheesefoot Head.

• 46:35Speaker 11

  The men are scornful of the self-styled experts who've camped out at known circle sites in the hope of filming the unexplained phenomenon.

• 46:43Speaker 13

  I can't understand anybody of that intelligence walking in and making something of flattened corn and shapes in cornfields. Quite honestly, had it been us ordinary laymen and gone, I think we'd have sussed that eight within a year.

• 46:56Speaker 11

  The men say they planned their designs with geometric precision.

• 47:00Sarah Marshall?

  What a fun hobby for you and your best friend.

• 47:02Speaker 11

  Today, in a cornfield near Chichester, they set out to show how they did it, carrying the tools they've used for thirteen years.

• 47:07Sarah Marshall?

  True.

• 47:08Speaker 11

  Watched this time by the world's press.

• 47:10Sarah Marshall?

  And each corn step matters more than a regular step.

• 47:12Speaker 11

  The Japanese are especially curious about this strange art form.

• 47:14Sarah Marshall?

  That's true, yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 11

  Mr. Chorley and Mr. Bauer went to work spiralling outwards to make their crop circle.

• 47:19Sarah Marshall?

  So they're showing them doing it.

• 47:20Speaker 11

  The secret, they say, is flattening the corn halfway up the stem.

• 47:23Sarah Marshall?

  With just like rope and a piece of wood, basically.

• 47:26Speaker 11

  Rocking by day was a luxury for them. Normally, they did it by the dead of night. Next day, they returned to join the experts.

• 47:33Speaker 12

  They used to infiltrate their ranks when they came up to look at the circles that we'd done. We came up the next night and mixed in with them.

• 47:39Sarah Marshall?

  That's some wire that he's using to hold some string to kind of make sure that everything is geometrically correct. Oh, cool. I don't fully understand it because I'm not good with visual, spatial stuff. But it's to help make the crop circles. Okay.

• 47:55Speaker 13

  And when you get out in one of these fields at midnight or two in the morning, I'd rather be out in one of these fields and have a week away in the south of France or something, because anyone that's not been in one at midnight in an English countryside and you're doing it on a few beers and a couple of... Cheese rolls, absolutely wonderful, absolutely wonderful.

• 48:12Speaker 11

  But the circle gurus are not so easily put off. Colin Andrews, who's studied them for years, was convinced that this was not like the others.

• 48:20Sarah Marshall?

  Oh no, here's Colin Andrews, who's studied them for years.

• 48:23Speaker 14

  Straight away, we can see this is everything we could ever see with a hoax. The plants are broken, they are rough, the grain is on the floor. There's no symmetry here whatsoever. It's extremely ragged, extremely ragged, and it is obviously a hoax.

• 48:37Speaker 11

  So it is a hoax for an unexplained phenomenon. It seems tonight that the issue is far from settled. One thing's sure, there won't be many more crop circles this year. Almost all the corn has been harvested. This final circle, if it is to be that, lacks the precision of many of the others. It looks as if the controversy is far from over. Graham Bowden, coast to coast Sussex.

• 49:00Speaker 15

  Well, back from watching that demonstration, corn circle expert Patrick Delgado from Oxford in Hampshire. Mr. Delgado, you are not convinced then by the hoaxes?

• 49:09Speaker 16

  No, I'm not, except I'm convinced that it's a hoax.

• 49:12Sarah Marshall?

  Corn circle expert.

• 49:13Speaker 15

  Is there no way at all, deep in your heart of hearts, that they could be telling the truth?

• 49:19Speaker 16

  Uh, I'd, no, I, I can't see a way through.

• 49:21Sarah Marshall?

  Does he think they're not telling the truth?

• 49:23Speaker 16

  Um, they've endeavored, I suppose, they've done their very best.

• 49:27Sarah Marshall?

  Just say you think that some of them aren't hoaxes, that feels like a smarter angle.

• 49:30Speaker 16

  But it failed. What I've seen today, out of that farm, I had a look at it, along with Colin Andrews, and all I could see was that the crop had been pushed down, and there were things about it that I could see that it was manmade.

• 49:49Speaker 15

  Now, you see, with respect, you do have a bit of a vested interest in keeping all this going, because you make money out of writing books about it.

• 49:55Speaker 16

  Oh, you're making it sound very mercenary.

• 49:57Sarah Marshall?

  What, what, what do you think of our, our crop circle guys?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I mean, what fun, what fun. Um, I do think it's just, uh, I, you know, I love a hoax that doesn't have a ton of, uh, baggage, you know, and aside from the, maybe the people who spent a lot of time investigating this, and the- The resources spent by the government, you know, it's not a it's not something that's really causing a ton of harm. It's causing wonder. I like wonder. I like when two guys hang out and do something together. And it just seems like a like, it must have just been really exciting to do this and like, wait for a response, right? Like, that's always something

• 50:44Speaker 01

  I think is so interesting about people that create hoaxes is like, that between the time you commit the act of the hoax, and then the time in which the hoax is discovered and the coverage of the hoax starts. Like, I think that that just must be such an interesting feeling to be waiting for that. I mean, we all have felt it a little bit when we're like, doing a prank of some kind between like, laying the prank and waiting for the person to, you know, interact with the prank in some way. But I just can't imagine doing something. I have much too bad of anxiety to actually do something like this. But I do appreciate that they came

• 51:23Speaker 01

  out and stopped a bunch more government funds being dedicated to understanding it. That feels like they were like, okay, this has gone too far. So I think that's cool.

• 51:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and it does feel very in keeping with a pattern that we've seen many times now in the conspiracy theories of today, where, you know, information comes out that should really debunk the phenomenon, or like, kind of provide answers to this mystery that people have been trying to solve. And the very people who seemed most invested in solving the mystery are like, no, no, thank you.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's, I understand that. It's really, really hard if you've dedicated that much time in your life to just fully, I mean, it's like your books are already in circulation. It's like, you know, there are times like with with our shows that new information comes out, and I'm like, that what I said is no longer true. And it doesn't feel good. I don't like it. And if, you know, I had written entire books about a subject, it would be, you know, it's pretty difficult to to fess up to that. And so I get it.

• 52:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly. And that if there if there is something mysterious happening out there, or if extraterrestrials are trying to contact us to help us, which is a very hopeful idea, then that's not negated by the fact that equally miraculously, two guys are having a laugh. Because also, it's nice to think that like, you know, aliens aren't putting so much energy into making art in Hampshire.

• 52:58Sarah Marshall?

  And like, coming all the way here to not give us any particularly useful message. Just like, give them some circles. They love circles.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just the sidewalk chalk of the great beyond. You know, it's a, I don't know. I do think that there would be easier ways to communicate. I mean, unless we just cannot speak any kind of overlapping language. So they're trying to talk to us in math, which I think is what people think about this, as like, a very crude interpretation.

• 53:30Sarah Marshall?

  That would be nice. Well, and one of the questions that people also have is like, wow, some of these crop circles are like, pretty mathematically sophisticated. Like, surely doesn't that point to extraterrestrial intelligence? And it's like,

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe it points to nerds.

• 53:45Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe, but also maybe the people who do it like, are really into math.

• 53:51Sarah Marshall?

  And also, by the way, the reason that they come forward about this at all is that Doug Bauer's wife grows suspicious that her husband is spending so much time out on Friday nights. Interestingly, these crop circles only tend to appear on Saturday mornings, at least the ones that these two guys make, because this is the night that they go out to the pub. And there's a lot of mileage on the car, and so she thinks he's having an affair.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:16Sarah Marshall?

  And so he has to come clean.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:19Sarah Marshall?

  And tell her that he's been making crop circles.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  That is amazing.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  The theater of heterosexual monogamy strikes again. That's so cool.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Oh, man. So they didn't really come out because of the government funding. They came out because he didn't want to get yelled at by his wife again.

• 54:40Sarah Marshall?

  Let's call it a little bit of both. Yeah. And they just, and what the story ends in is, you know, a phenomenon that has outlived its creators and also that I think took off because it wasn't entirely created just by these two guys, right? They were acting off of stories they had heard elsewhere, some of which also I think were probably inevitably human created as well. Although, of course, you know, there's, there's lots of things that happen when people aren't looking that we don't necessarily understand intuitively in the natural world and that we can only find the answers to by, by studying more. But I just, I, I love that clip where they're talking about it being just delightful and fun.

• 55:25Sarah Marshall?

  And you have a couple of beers and cheese rolls and you're out in the moonlight in the wheat field with your rope and your piece of wood.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  What if they're gay? I know that's like the obvious joke to make, but like this would be a great cover.

• 55:42Sarah Marshall?

  It's not a joke. It's fan fiction. It's the next heated rivalry.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It is fan fiction. And how incredible to, to be like this generation of like a straight married couple that just has no idea what the other one is doing. Like, this is like this man's entire life at this point, it feels like.

• 56:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And she just has no idea. You would think he would come home and be like, like, honey, look at the, look at the one I made tonight. But nope, it's just for him. It's just for him and his buddy.

• 56:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, that's the direction that we hope that marriage can move toward if, if we're gonna keep it around as an institution. If you, if you're gonna marry someone. You should know about each other's crop circles.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  I think so too, but you know, everyone's also entitled to their secrets and their private thoughts and their private life, I guess. So I also respect it in a way.

• 56:35Sarah Marshall?

  That's true too. But if I'm gonna marry someone for love, I want to be making crop circles with them. Not every night, but you know, at least once, unless they're scared of the dark or something.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And like, maybe she could just come out one night and just be like, I want to know what you do. I want to know about like, what really lights you up. I think that could have been nice, but.

• 56:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And she could just, as I feel about baseball, come have a beer and read The New Yorker.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:03Sarah Marshall?

  And be supportive that way.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  But maybe she was no fun at all. So it's hard to say.

• 57:08Sarah Marshall?

  Or maybe she was super fun.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Like too fun?

• 57:11Sarah Marshall?

  And everyone was fun. Yeah, maybe everyone's gay in this story. Maybe she is fun and gay.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  What do you think she would be doing with her best friend on Friday nights?

• 57:22Sarah Marshall?

  You know, we have no data on her.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  We have no data.

• 57:25Sarah Marshall?

  But just if I'm gonna imagine something out of nowhere, let's say line dancing. It was 1991 after all.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  What immediately jumps to mind for me is looking at tide pools.

• 57:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Looking for like little critters in tide pools.

• 57:39Sarah Marshall?

  Well, we are near the ocean.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then maybe they like, play a little, like, they like, create a little family of all the different creatures. And then they, they like, take pictures of them like the Cottingley fairies.

• 57:50Sarah Marshall?

  You know, the, the thing about Wuthering Heights is that it's made me want adaptations of all these sort of prestige costume drama novels where everyone is wearing latex and having sex the whole time. And so when you said tide pools, I was like, did they see any tide pools in Persuasion? Then I was like, sexy persuasion, that could be good.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  That could be really good.

• 58:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, anyway, um, so this is, this is, this is a tale of, of British people and the things they do. And I find it, as with the Cottingley fairies, as you just mentioned, very, very, very charming and nice and great, that the motive that no one predicted, who was in this sort of paranormal research area when this phenomenon started, was that the people who did it, whether alien or not, were doing it for fun.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  I know, for friendship.

• 58:46Sarah Marshall?

  And fun is the motive, fun and friendship and doing, and making something under the moonlight. And I was looking at some Reddit discussions of crop circles and, you know, which I love to do for any kind of paranormal thing. And one of the questions was, what happened to crop circles? And the answer is, we still have them, they're still around, but they're just not a craze the way they were back then. You know, I think that the debunking of them certainly became something people could point to as an answer, although that didn't stop us from growing up watching creepy segments on History Channel shows about crop circles and what did they mean, despite the fact that we already knew. But also, we don't know who's made all of them over the years. And the question of how an

• 59:29Sarah Marshall?

  idea like this spreads around and why, and whether there are kind of different human motives that we can see in the people who create them, is all very interesting. And I would like to know more about all of that. You know, the story is, is by no means sewn up.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:46Sarah Marshall?

  And one of the jokes that people made in this thread, which I feel is somewhat true, although I don't, not, not totally true, is that kids today don't have to bend over corn in order to hoax adults. They can just do it on their phones.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  They can like use AI to do it at this point. Yeah.

• 1:00:03Sarah Marshall?

  But I just know that there are pranksters out there right now, hanging out in the corn in the moonlight. And if you haven't tried it, maybe this is the night.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  What a beautiful thing to do. I, I really want to give this a shot.

• 1:00:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, the meme thing really makes sense, putting it like that. And it's just like, there are still a lot of mysterious elements to this, which is really fun. You know, I think it's nice when. We talk about something like this and it doesn't end up being tidy because, you know, both of us love some paranormal stuff in our lives.

• 1:00:40Sarah Marshall?

  And that we have an answer to some of it, which is like, why did it show up in Southern England?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Sarah Marshall?

  At this specific time period and why around Stonehenge? And it's funny to realize that the answer is because these guys lived near Stonehenge and they could only get so far in a night.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  It's like such, I mean, okay, so there are two possibilities here. You know, it would be like, either they had heard about farmers finding these patterns of bent over crops and then they were like, okay, like we could do something like that. Or they just came up with it as an idea. And if they just came up with it as an idea, that's really, really brilliant and really very, very, very cool.

• 1:01:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, we know they'd heard about this, the story in Australia, but I don't think that there was any media super locally about this kind of thing. I think it's the kind of thing that once it became a phenomenon, farmers locally were like, yeah, I kind of remember something like that.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Sarah Marshall?

  You know?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Sarah Marshall?

  But, but I think that they were inspired by like news stories from elsewhere in the world.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Okay. See, and then there, there's the mystery, right? It's like, who are the originals? And I think, you know, if I was gonna go full skeptic, I would say that there was something explainable that happened that wasn't actually creating such perfect shapes. And that it was like a memory of like, yeah, I saw the, these really strange like patterns of my crops being bent down. But from that point, like it wasn't necessarily that they had this evidence that it was so perfect. But then, you know, you can extend that out into being something else. I don't know. I'm not sure.

• 1:02:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's more meat on the bone.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Because the Australian ones were like seen from above.

• 1:02:29Sarah Marshall?

  Uh, no, they were noticed by, I think it was just one that was noticed by a farmer.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Okay. All right.

• 1:02:35Sarah Marshall?

  But again, it's like. Something that sort of solidified into this thing that could be understood and replicated

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:43Sarah Marshall?

  in these cases around Stonehenge, where it's like, it's a circle in the corn or the wheat typically. And also, what do you think about making a perfect circle? If you have rope, it's like the same mechanism by which, you know, you draw a circle with a compass in geometry class.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. And that was something I was thinking is like, how could you really possibly achieve this? And it's like, actually, it's, you use a string. So many things that were like, how could you possibly achieve this complicated, like outrageously difficult act? And it's like, well, you just tie a piece of string to something and walk around. And you're like, oh, yeah, duh.

• 1:03:21Sarah Marshall?

  And it's like, it's heartening to be like, you know what? We actually underestimate people with our theories because they're smart, they know things, we know different things from each other, things that would seem magic to somebody else.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Sarah Marshall?

  Who doesn't have your, your background of knowledge, even if it's maybe something that seems pretty simple to you. And we like to have fun in ways that kind of leave behind something beautiful or at least mysterious. It's like, who, why did we make that horse? I suspect it was fun.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it does make sense, like you can really account for the different ways that the circles looked, meaning like, like, you know, the one guy was like, well, these stalks are bent down in a different way. And, and that would be because people were hearing about these crop circles and

• 1:04:08Sarah Marshall?

  Had different technique.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  And had a different technique. They like, looked at that and the person was like, how could this ever be made? And they're like, well, I'm a smart person who understands math and I could make this. But of course you have to come up with your own technique. They're probably not doing the same technique as our two best friends with the rope and the thing.

• 1:04:25Sarah Marshall?

  Because they're hearing about it. They're not typically seeing it, the people who are replicating these.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Sarah Marshall?

  Perhaps.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  And so it makes sense. It's, it's just like a meme.

• 1:04:34Sarah Marshall?

  There's more than one way to bend a corn, and every corn is a glamorous woman.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Every corn is a glamorous woman. Thank you for bringing that back up, just in case it was out of anyone's head since last year.

• 1:04:45Sarah Marshall?

  We're back in the corn. Yeah. And I also, I do feel bad for these guys who staked so much of their identity on being crop circle researchers and

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Sarah Marshall?

  having it be not some guys, but like,

• 1:05:04Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't it exciting to find out an answer and the answer is that it was two guys having some fun? I love that the answer was guys having fun. That's like never the answer.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Sarah Marshall?

  Let's enjoy this one.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Sarah Marshall?

  The answer to the Dyatlov past mystery wasn't, "Some guys had fun."

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't.

• 1:05:19Sarah Marshall?

  It was an avalanche.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, not fun, not fun at all. But yeah, I think it is, it does just remind me of a meme. You got a template and everyone's gonna do something different with it. And so it goes on and on and on.

• 1:05:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  And it's like, if you, I do feel that it's always a good idea. A lot of skeptics don't do this. And if only for self-preservation in the future, you know, just leave the door open for all possibilities. Like you and I, we're gonna leave the door open that there were some aliens.

• 1:05:51Sarah Marshall?

  What if the aliens were inspired by those guys having fun?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  There you go. And they were like, "We could have some fun." I hate my wife.

• 1:05:59Sarah Marshall?

  And then they went to their own planet.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Sarah Marshall?

  And made crop circles there and drank alien beer, which to them was just beer.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, it's just, it's plasma. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think that leaving the door open for wonder is never a bad thing. I think making a career out of a mystery might be a, might be shaky ground. Because, you know, I also respect it. I like people who are passionate about things and really go for it. So, everyone in this story has a passion.

• 1:06:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And it worked out better for some, worse for others. And I just wish everyone the best.

• 1:06:43Sarah Marshall?

  I like that some people just thought to enjoy themselves in a way that nobody could have necessarily imagined. You know, I love it when- Any of us think of something that we want to do and we know it's something that we want to do and not what we're, we've absorbed from like cultural messaging that we should be wanting to do because it's just, you know, who would have thought of that? And where did that idea even come from? And then you're doing it.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  I would love to hear that conversation where they came up with the idea in the pub. Like that would be some precious audio to me.

• 1:07:23Sarah Marshall?

  I know that it's like, we've made way too many TV shows about too many historical events, but this one probably does need to exist.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Sarah Marshall?

  And it could be just like with everyone from Hot Fuzz.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  There you go. It'd be perfect.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  It's already cast.

• 1:07:40Sarah Marshall?

  It's called the wheat circles.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Wheat.

• 1:07:45Sarah Marshall?

  Wheat. Chelsea, you do, you do a very mysterious show called American Hysteria. What topics have you covered lately over there?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  So at the point that this episode will be out for all of you, I will have just put out our two-part series on the cultural history of dinosaurs and their relationship to American popular culture, as well as American culture in general, and how we interpreted the discovery of fossils to mean so many different, very American things. They were used to bolster popular support of capitalism is one of the things.

• 1:08:28Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible how we made that work.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 1:08:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Life finds a way.

• 1:08:33Sarah Marshall?

  What topics have you covered that perhaps someone who likes crop circles would enjoy?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that Alien Obduction series we mentioned. I think the episode that you did of spontaneous human combustion is a really nice companion to this as well. I mean, gosh, it's like, we've just done so many things around the paranormal. I am both a skeptic of the paranormal and a believer in the paranormal. So anytime we get to delve into those topics is a lot of fun.

• 1:09:04Sarah Marshall?

  I believe the paranormal deserves, you know, adequate research.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Sarah Marshall?

  You know?

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely, definitely. And also space for the mysterious because when we lose the mysterious, things get pretty stale and you're not out in the moonlight with your boys. So stay curious, people.

• 1:09:25Sarah Marshall?

  Stay by curious, everybody.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:38Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you for being here. Thank you for being an April fool, a wise fool, a fool for love. We of course have a wonderful bonus episode to share with you. And this month, it is the Orca Report with our Deep Sea correspondent, Brianna Bowman. There's been a lot of Orca news in the last few years. And don't worry, this bonus is two hours long, and we had such a good time making it for you. And if any of you want to hear more about fishery science specifically, let us know. Brianna is very excited to share more of that with us. We are putting together another listener episode. I don't know if you caught the one that we put out last holiday season, but it's one of

• 1:10:23Sarah Marshall?

  my favorite things that I have, I can't really say made lately, because I told Miranda to make it. But I got to listen to all of the voice memos that you sent in about where you're from, where you call home. And it meant so much to me to get to help stitch that all together and to hear from you all. And so I decided that we should do that again. Summer is approaching, kind of. This will be our last episode for June. And I went through a few prompts before I realized I had kept coming back to the same basic theme, which is that I want you to tell me about what you love, whether it's a hobby, or a person, or a place, or an inanimate object.

• 1:11:06Sarah Marshall?

  I'm not going to do a full Liza Minnelli impression, but I am thinking that. A fact that you think more people should know, I talked in this recent bonus episode, I think, about something I learned on an episode of Oligies that has never left my mind, which is that when sharks eat something they can't digest, they can just reverse their stomachs like a tote bag that they're trying to get muffin crumbs out of. And I just think that's great. I want everyone to know that. Not everyone wants me to tell them that, but that's okay. So.

• 1:11:35Sarah Marshall?

  Something that you love, whether it's a feeling, a place, a thing, the moment when you take the first bite of a really good apple, a particular moment of the day, anything and everything. I just want to hear about it, and so do the rest of us. So you can send a voice memo. Try and keep it about three minutes or less. I know that's a very short amount of time, but we want to listen to as many of these as we can. We do always listen to every submission that we get, but we want to fit in as many as we possibly can. And you can send those to [email protected]. That's our email address for these submissions. It's a Stepford Wives reference.

• 1:12:17Sarah Marshall?

  sloppyandalive, S-L-O-P-P-Y-A-N-D-A-L-I-V-E at gmail.com. And we will listen to them and enjoy them. And we're going to keep those submissions open until, I don't know, let's just say through April. If you're listening to this and it's no longer April, technically, it's over. But listen, I'm not huge on rules, so take that as you will. So that's what we're putting together. We're so excited to share it with you, and we're so excited to keep heading into the spring. You should know that Miranda Zickler is our producer and our editor, and that Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant, and I am so thankful to them both. And Chelsea Weber-Smith was our guest. Go listen to American Hysteria, that's Chelsea's show.

• 1:13:02Sarah Marshall?

  You can listen to it wherever you find good podcasts. It is this show's sassy, outdoor sibling. We are the indoor one. And I love getting to make shows with Chelsea. I love getting to share our tween fixations with you. And that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to hear from you. And if you want to send something in, but you don't get it together to do it, and too much time passes, and you overthink it, like I would, that's okay. I can still appreciate your thoughts from far away, and I'm so thankful for them, too. See you in two weeks.