Nancy Talbott claims to have unlocked crop circle science. Matt Williams is a crop circle maker encountering the paranormal in his circles. Why are they at odds?

photo by: Gary S

On this episode of Skeptiko, I return to a topic that’s haunted me for awhile. I’m from Chicago. For a lot of people from Chicago one value that’s ingrained into you from a young age can be summed up by the phrase, “don’t be a chump.” For someone from Chicago, there’s nothing worse than being played for the fool. The chump. A couple of years ago when I interviewed Suzanne Taylor about her movie about crop circles and about her investigation into the crop circle phenomena, I got played for a chump. I bought into Suzanne’s story without fully investigating it. I bought into her claim that no imperfect crop circle or incomplete crop circle had ever been found. I bought into the idea that the phenomena was shrouded in a mystery that was being revealed by science. Thanks to you Skeptiko listeners, I was quickly reeducated. Many of you told me about the work that’s been done by people with a more skeptical perspective on crop circles and what’s been revealed by human crop circle makers. Of course, much of this is old news, both to the general public that has moved on from crop circles, and for me. That is until I heard from today’s guest, Nancy Talbott.

Nancy is one of the best-known crop circle investigators. She claims to have adhered to very tight scientific protocols, and investigated crop circles from a scientific perspective. And, she claims to have peer reviewed papers to back-up her work. So when Nancy popped up in my Facebook and started messaging me, I responded. I told her about my skepticism. I told her how I had gone down this path and felt like there really wasn’t much there to investigate but she persisted and convinced me to take a second look. So we set up this interview:

Alex Tsakiris: Blinding is just a control mechanism.

Nancy Talbott: No, the double-blind study means very specifically something.

Alex Tsakiris: A double blind study, for example in pharmacology, means something very specific but blinding is just a basic scientific control that can be instituted in any experiment. And in this case, the simple fact is–one of the people that you get when you Google that is Colin Andrews who said, in 1995 I tried to send samples to Nancy, to BLT, collected independently, and say here are the samples. One is from a field that we presume to be alien. Another is from a field that is subjected to wind damage. [These are] independently collected samples–photographed and videotaped so we know that they’re independent–send them to you. You evaluate them. I’ve talked to a number of people including crop circle maker Matthew Williams who I know you don’t feel fondly of. But I’ve talked to a number of people and they all say the same thing: there’s this real resistance from BLT when it comes to just doing simple blinding and–

Nancy Talbott: Okay, I get what you’re saying. But first of all, you don’t know a lot of stuff so let me tell you a few things.