Izzy leads Swiss media around by the nose with crop circle stunt
But not as superhuman as hoped: The crop circle in Uster is not an inexplicable mystery, but a viral stunt by the Ringier youth portal Izzy.
One can argue about the originality of the idea to fake a crop circle. But one thing is indisputable: the idea worked. Numerous media - first and foremost 20 Minuten - have prominently picked up the story and partially exploited it. With a Facebook video called "How Crop Circles Really Form," Izzy broke the story on Wednesday.
On Wednesday evening, 20 Minuten consequently gave its readers the all-clear via push message: But not an extraterrestrial warning of an imminent catastrophe (that's how the subject was interpreted in reader comments, among other things) - just a joke ("media stunt") from the competition.
The 20 Minutes main competitor and Izzy's neighbor Blick.ch took the breakup with a certain amount of schadenfreude. The question of why no Ringier media responded to the story - although they usually do so relatively reliably and, if need be, also take inspiration from the competition - should thus be cleared up. "The anger among journalists is likely to be great, the laughter at "Izzy" even greater," writes Blick.ch.
That crop circles are created by human hand has a long tradition. Besides, again and again specimens appear which cannot be explained clearly. However, there are different approaches. In Australia exists according to Wikipedia for example the "intoxicated kangaroos" theory. Quote: "In Australia, wallabies have been observed kicking round crop circles in opium fields. After eating the opium poppy, they get into a state of intoxication and start walking in circles in the fields until they fall over."
Besides other - depending on the subject - more or less credible theories, there are also different explanations, which are categorically rejected by science. These are messages from extraterrestrials or plants, magnetic anomalies or the transmission of morphogenetic fields. As so often, neither one nor the other can be excluded or confirmed with certainty. The truth lies somewhere out there. Even if "out there" in this case meant "at the Dufourstrasse". (hae)
