Can Satellite's Microwaves Cause Crop Circles?

A little quantitative thinking may help here. First, let me cite 
from a web reference, concerning radar, which is, of course, 
a microwave source:

"2.How much energy do radars transmit? Is it dangerous?

"This varies with the radar, but the answer to the second 
question is almost always no. Weather radars might transmit from 
100-500 kW peak power, but they only do this in very short 
bursts. For example, the MIT C-Band radar transmits 150 kW peak 
power, but only in 1 microsecond pulses, 1000 of these per 
second. So the average power over any 1 second interval is only 
(150,000 * 10^-6 * 1000) kW or about 150 Watts - perhaps as 
strong as a couple of bright light bulbs.

"Further, the intensity of power in a microwave beam drops off 
as 1/(range^2); by the time a weather radar beam hits a target 
and bounces back, the antenna usually measures at most 
milliwatts of power.

"Nonetheless, OSHA regulations on safe levels of microwave 
exposure are somewhat sketchy. Radar engineers working close to 
the antenna dish typically prefer the transmitter to be off, but 
more than a few hundred meters away, the intensity has almost 
certainly dropped to safe levels."

Since microwaves follow the inverse square law, and therefore we 
can determine the amount of energy required to cause a ground 
effect by a little back-of-the-envelope reverse calculation.

Since the suggestion was made that the effect shown in crop 
circles had been duplicated in a microwave oven, let's look at 
the energy necessary to duplicate those conditions from 
geosynchronous orbit (roughly 22,000 miles distance).

If the microwave oven output is 1.3kW, and the distance is 0.1m, 
and 22,000 miles is 35,405,638.811m, which is 354,056,388.110 
times the distance in the oven, the output at the source must be 
1,300W * (354,056,388.110m^2) (if I've done this right), which 
is 1.629627036487 x 10^20 Watts. That is what's needed to 
produce a microwave oven level effect on the ground in a space 
the size of the interior of a microwave oven. This ignores 
dissipation of energy into the atmosphere through heating or 
ionization, and it also ignores the dispersion of the beam as it 
travels through the atmosphere. 

Another note of interest, 

"The reason that the SPS must be so large has to do with the 
physics of power beaming. The smaller the transmitter array, the 
larger the angle of divergence of the transmitted beam. A highly 
divergent beam will spread out over a greatdeal of landarea, and 
may be too weak to activate the rectenna. In order to obtain a 
sufficiently concentrated beam, a great deal of power must be 
collected and fed into a large transmitter array."

Which suggests beam dispersal effects are not negligible.

But let's move on.

Since the average power plant produces. let's say, 1GW (1x10^9), 
a space-borne power plant to produce the stated effect would 
need to be... well, astronomically more powerful than a normal 
power plant. One wonders how it would be put into space 
unnoticed.

But let's leave that aside for the moment, too, and assume 
something not in evidence, like atomic bomb-pumped MASER 
technology, is in use. With output in the specified range, every 
firing of such a device ought to light up the nuclear warning 
sensors of every nation on earth.

Not to mention the radio effects, which probably dwarf that of a 
solar flare. 

Yet the postulate is that someone is taking this risk, many 
times a year, just to fool some UFO buffs. One wonders at the 
sanity of those who might undertake it, much less those who 
suggest it as a plausible alternative to conventional fakery.

Now even if one wants to postulate a more local airborne source, 
the inverse square law still wreaks havoc on the size of the 
necessary power plant. And, really, if the motivation were to 
fool the UFO buffs, wouldn't it be cheaper to hire a bunch of 
college students to fake the things? It seems so to me.

------
Mark Cashman, creator of The Temporal Doorway at
http://www.temporaldoorway.com