By Benjamin Radford, Live Science
Contributor | January 7, 2014 10:23am ET
A mysterious 310-foot-diameter crop circle that
appeared in a farmer's barley field in Chualar, Calif., was not alien made;
rather it was a marketing stunt promoting Nvidia's new Tegra K1 processing
chip.
Credit: Screengrab via
YouTube/Nvidia video
A mysterious 310-foot-diameter crop circle that
appeared in a farmer's barley field in Chualar, Calif., as 2013 ended puzzled
the public for more than a week. Echoing the sentiments of many, the field's
owner told CNN, "To be that intricate in design, it kind of baffles me as
to how that was done."Videos and photos of it went viral, and though some
dismissed the crop circle as a hoax, others weren't so sure. Some crop-circle
experts wrote in-depth analyses that claimed to cleverly decode hidden meanings
in the pattern, including that a bright comet would appear in the sky later
this year.
It remained a mystery until Sunday night (Jan.
5), when at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the real circle
makers stepped forward: a marketing team hired by computer-graphics company
Nvidia. The "crop circle" was not an astronomical calendar forewarning of an impending
comet, but instead a drawing of the company's new Tegra K1 processing chip. A
small team of British crop-circle artists created the complex pattern expertly
and without detection. It was a great publicity stunt, and one that left many
people wondering how experts could have been fooled.
Why do people fall for such obvious hoaxes?
Part of the answer is that the human brain is hardwired to seek meaning, even when
there is no meaning to be found. In psychology, the tendency for the mind to
find coincidences, patterns and connections in random data is called apophenia.
In statistics, there is even a name for this type of fallacy: a Type I error. A
common example of a Type I error is a false positive result on a medical test.
[In Photos: Mysterious Crop Circles]
