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CNN Live At Daybreak

Since Release of 'Signs,' 'Crop Circles' Has Taken on Life of Its Own

Aired August 08, 2002 - 05:57   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Since the release of the movie "Signs" last week, the phrase crop circles has taken on a life of its own.

As CNN's Beth Nissen reports, though the term may be new to some people, it's been cropping up among scientists for more than two decades.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Crop circles are intricate, seemingly mystical designs that since the mid-1970s have periodically cropped up, usually overnight, in a field. They are also the latest field of battle between science and pseudoscience.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS, ASTROPHYSICIST, CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY: Pseudoscience is based on ideas that are either non-testable or, in fact, have been tested and have come up disagreeing with the experiments, many ideas that are just simply wrong. Crop circles are a perfect example because for some reason, as often happens, immediately people said aha, it's aliens. Well, that's an interesting hypothesis.

NISSEN: But not a hypothesis that can be tested. And anyway, a hypothesis already disproven. In 1991, two humans, Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley, admitted that they, not aliens, had been making crop circles in England at night for 13 years. Step by step how to directions for ever more complex designs have since been published on the World Wide Web.

KRAUSS: In science, once you propose something and test it, if your hypothesis doesn't agree with the observation, we throw out the hypothesis, no matter how beautiful it is. It's gone.

NISSEN: Pseudoscience doesn't play by those rules. It allows, even encourages, inventive guesses, strange coincidences, popular theories, with or without evidence. Doug and Dave's confession aside, some Americans will continue to believe that aliens might have made the crop circles. And maybe landed in Roswell, New Mexico a few decades back, and might well have visited Earth more than once. It's possible, right?

KRAUSS: To have some perspective on what's possible and what's not possible you have to have some grounding in science. And unfortunately in this country right now, the level of scientific literacy is extremely low. Fifty percent of Americans, in a survey by the National Science Foundation, did not know that the Earth orbited the sun and took a year to do it.

NISSEN: Krauss and other scientists say it is experience hard for Americans to accept limits of physics, of possibilities. Part of the problem is our democratic tradition, our belief that majority opinion rules. It doesn't in science.

KRAUSS: When it comes to science, there's sometimes only one side. In fact, that's what makes science so powerful.

NISSEN: There's something else, a law of nature, American nature.

KRAUSS: I think that, in fact, Americans have a special predilection towards believing in these type of things because of the American mentality that anything is possible. The notion that some things are simply not possible seems to go against the grain.

NISSEN: He said it, I didn't.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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