Drone Agriculture is About to Discredit Crop Circle Truthers for Good

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If drone agriculture takes off — and there’s good reason to think it will — we’ll be spending a lot more time looking at farmland from the air. That’s great news for farmers looking to increase the output of their fields or minimize the negative effects of too much fertilizer. That’s bad news for people who want to preserve the mystery of crop circles, mainstays of pop alien mythology which have always been made in pretty much the same way they are currently created by guys with surveying tape and wooden boards. A surprising amount of drone research comes out of the American heartland, and that’s because many of those institutions have deep agricultural roots. Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, a roboticist at the University of Minnesota, told Inverse in December that a major reason he wants to develop small, solar-powered drones is to give farmers a tool that doesn’t have to come down frequently. From this vantage, farm drones can give you daily updates and resolution at the centimeter scale — fidelity satellites currently can’t match. So what does that mean for would-be extraterrestrial messengers? Simply put, it will be tougher to sneak in and out of cornfields undetected. Though the cover of darkness will still be helpful, drones that monitor crop data don’t necessarily need the same amount of light as human eyeballs. Plus, in areas that are prone to vandalism — or, perhaps for crops, large nocturnal pests — flying monitors are still possible without solar power; the drone company CyPhy works has proposed drones powered by tethers, for instance, that float in place like sleepless sentinels. We know drones work for spotting human-sized animals, particularly when there’s little tree cover — ecologist can easily spot 5-foot alligators from 300 feet over a marsh. That’s not to say that drones couldn’t help us solve some mysteries of crop circles. The crop circle craze triggered some weird theories at its height — Stephen Hawking believed strange air vortices could have caused the crops to fall, and others thought they were the product of mating hedgehogs — in but 1991 two British men confessed to more than two decades and hundreds of crop circles. Though we know they’re man-made, the vandal/artists behind them have kept mum on just how they’re able to map out such complex symbols. Want to learn more then read the full article at Insverse