If one assumes that most hoaxing is done by students or employed persons then a logical assumption is that most hoaxes would be done during times when one could stay out late. Thus one would expect that there should be statistically more hoaxes done on Friday and Saturday than on other days of the week.
Crop circles are generally not found until the next morning at the earliest. Since several researchers such as Jurgen Kronig, Busty Taylor John Macnish and George Wingfield overfly the most active areas several times a week, it is unlikely a significant formation will go unnoticed for more than a couple of days. Thus if the majority of crop circles are hoaxes, one would expect to find a significant number of them on Saturday, and Sunday. The least likely day of the week to find a hoax would therefore be on a Friday.
Last year two men, commonly refered to now as "Doug and Dave," were filmed inside a circle with Pat Delgado. Pat pronounced the circle genuine, and Doug and Dave then claimed they had made the circle. That a claimed hoax is accepted as such without any supporting evidence is itself disturbing, but the entire setup, co-ordinated by the Today Newspaper, stinks of sensationalism. Speaking with several people in England, I am led to believe it is fairly widely believed that the circle that Pat was "trapped" with was indeed genuine. When one compares pictures of this circle with the one created the following day within the view of television cameras, one is struck by the differences in appearence. It is interesting that they can supposedly make a quite impressive circle in total darkness, but only able to create a messy approximation during the day. But of course this does not yield any good statistical evidence, so let us proceed.
In the issue 5 of the Cereologist magazine, George Wingfield wrote an article about the hoax in which he commented about Ms. Bower that "She must be the doziest person in the world if it took six years to notice his nightly absences." The large number of circles claimed by them would indicate they would have to be working at least several night a week on them so George's viewpoint is not hard to understand. Doug's wife responded with a letter to the editor in the following issue, in which she demanded an apology with the explanation that they were gone usually on Friday nights 'not weekly'. This falls into the pattern we previously proposed, and since most crop circle dates of discovery are recorded, this is easily analyzed. For instance, taking a list titled "Famous Crop Circle Hoaxes" compiled in May of 1992 by Jenny Randles, Paul Fuller and Terence Meaden (the group which is attempting to prove that crop circles are caused by an elusive ionized plazma vortex), we find that the second entry, HO2, is a formation found on July 4th, which is claimed to have been hoaxed by Doug and Dave. (Note that England does not celebrate July 4th as we do in the US). This was a Wednesday. Thus it is highly unikely this was hoaxed by Doug and Dave if we are to believe Doug's wife, that they did their hoaxing on Friday nights.
This study is not totally inclusive. The analysis is performed using 2 documents, one published by the CCCS of crop circles compiled by Stanley Morcom, and the second one the aforementioned paper "Famous Crop Circle Hoaxes". These references are used in total without any additional selections, so there can be no possibility of any bias added by this author. Formations without a day given are simply omitted. It is understood that there may be several hoaxes which have found their way into the CCCS document and several formations identified in the "Famous Crop Circle Hoaxes" paper may well be legitimate. However, for this statistical analysis we only require that a larger percentage of hoaxes are properly identified in the hoax paper than are found in the CCCS document. The better the identification the more definite the study will be, but 100% accuracy is not expected or required.
| TOTALS (AVERAGE per day) | STANDARD DEVS | |||||||||||
| Day of Week | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | overall | weekday | weekend | expected | actual |
| CCCS formations | ||||||||||||
| Wiltshire formations: | 0 0% | 1 3% | 5 14% | 6 17% | 6 16% | 11 31% | 7 19% | 36 (5.14) | 29 (5.8) 81% | 7 (3.5) 19% | 2.26 | 3.71 |
| Hamphire formations: | 1 8% | 0 0% | 2 15% | 0 0% | 1 8% | 7 53% | 2 15% | 13 (1.85) | 10 (2) 77% | 3 (1.5) 23% | 1.36 | 2.41 |
| Total: | 1 2% | 1 2% | 7 14% | 6 12% | 7 14% | 18 37% | 9 18% | 49 (7) | 39 (7.8) 80% | 10 (5) 20% | 2.65 | 5.74 |
| HOAXES | ||||||||||||
| Hoaxes | 8 35% | 1 4% | 3 13% | 2 9% | 2 9% | 2 9% | 5 22% | 23 (3.3) | 10 (2) 43% | 13 (6.5) 56% | 1.81 | 2.43 |
The Hampshire data is broken out because of the claims by Doug and Dave that they made most of them. The trend however is better correlated with the Wiltshire data than the "hoax" data.
It can be seen that there is a significant divergence of the data. For instance, two days, Saturday and Sunday, account for well over half of the hoaxes, yet in the CCCS tabulation, the total for these two days are significantly below the number found on Friday alone, both for the Wiltshire and Hampshire formations. The hoax document has over 3 times as many formations per day during the weekend than during the weekday. The CCCS data shows there to be slightly more formed during the weekdays. One would expect essentually the same rates for weekdays as weekends if the phenominea is not from human actions. Thus it can be argued that whatever selection criteria was used to differentiate between hoax and real phenomena seperates data so that the aforementioned theory is confirmed. One curious aspect is the lack of formations found on Monday in both papers. The large number of formations found on Friday is totally unexpected, and it almost appears that the phenomenon is purposefully avoiding the weekends! However, part of this clustering on Fridays can be attributed to the fact that some of the pilots do more overflying on Fridays (and Saturdays) than other other days of the week.
The obvious conclusion is that although there are certainly hoaxes, there is also another catagory of events which can be shown to be statistically independent of the hoaxes.