Geometrical lay details of
3 formations close up
plus honest common sense
as evidence for/against authenticity

copyright Jonah Ohayv, Jan. 2004

Click on photos for enlargement.

Background logic

We who don't live in crop-circle "hot-spots", and who can only visit them for short amounts of time, require methods to research formations both before and after actually visiting them.

Careful study in advance of the wonderful aerial photos on the Internet can in some cases highlight subtle design details, which narrow down probabilities of the origin of certain crop-circles. These details can then later be checked out in the crop-fields themselves. To share our results convincingly, it's then important to document our findings on the spot.

Starting from the physically man-made angle -
To tramp down a particular crop-circle design requires certain practical steps done in order. If it can later be shown that these actually occured, we have a good case for claiming hoaxing. If the necessary steps are proven absent, however, or if they become overwhelmingly impractical, it takes an act of faith and ignoring of logic, to still maintain that that formation is hoaxed.

Now from the "genuine" angle -
If we find in a formation very time-consuming, complicated, consistent, and infinitesimal steps totally unnecessary for the overall aerial design....but which are useful for the aesthetic or micro-structural wholeness in that design - although from both the ground and air most people might at first glance barely register them....if such details are found en masse, due to the constraints of construction time alone or technical practicality, hoaxing would seem ruled out.

Part 1

Example 1:

5-pointed star's pathways

aerial photos by Lucy Pringle

Avebury Trusloe, July 13, 2003

The subtle, pleasing unity of this design is achieved, among other ways, by the inner and outer standing rings apparently being unbroken and directly connected to the standing radial spokes at all their junctures. Noticing this on the aerial photos, I then visited the formation Aug. 12 and 13, which was a whole month after its creation, together with Steve Tyler, an archeologist used to examining field-evidence, to see if this was in fact the case.

Here are closer views of the outer rings' junctures referred to.

At all 5 junctions, 3 of them shown above, common sense tells this story, also clear in Lucy Pringle's first aerial photo above: The innermost of the outer downlaid rings had not been continued around the circle during construction - which would routinely have made most sense, to make sure its sections aligned and were comparable, and to preclude possible skewering errors, and to avoid making 5 sets of many, precise measurements, and to to do the job all at once.

The perpendicular spokes in standing crop had only been broken through by impatient tourists, in much thinner paths than the rings' uniformly wide path itself. This is because these inconsiderate visitors did not want to have to walk all the way back to the formation's center and its innermost ring there, every time they wanted to go on to the next section ("pie-piece") of the formation's outer ring. And indeed, as we shall see, had they walked toward the center, they wouldn't have been able to get through there either, without breaking new alleyways!

Here's the inner ring junctures we would likewise examine.

These three photos are views of the same junction at the innermost ring.

Here are 2 more of the 5 inner junctions.

As before, at all 5 junctions involving the inner ring's downlaid path, the crop is even more clearly not originally broken through - as the visitors' ugly breakthrough holes are at considerable distance from the ring itself or, in the last example, are much thinner than the ring's width.

Had the formation been hoaxed, its creators would clearly continue this inner ring evenly around the formation, instead of crashing through each juncture in thin paths at some distance, which leaves ugly results everywhere.

Geometrically creating the mentioned inner and outer rings as parts of 5 completely separate pie-sections, entails numerous individual measurements of arc lengths, relative angles, and spoke lengths, where a small measuring mistake would become completely obvious in the overall aerial photos. Doing all this from the ground for the sole sake of creating an aesthetic effect of unity, which is only subconsiously noticed at all (and which only I here point out) - would be too time-consuming and prone to error to make any common sense in attempting.

After many hours of detailed examination through two days, I was too tired to systematically photograph the following extra evidence of genuineness, which Steve first noticed. Several of the above photos do however show this illustration's content:

The downlaid paths enclosing a standing "pie-section" (that is, the laid paths following a fifth of the inner standing ring, a fifth of the outer standing ring, and lying along their two connecting standing spokes) - these paths were laid in a particular, amazing order. Walking clockwise around the section, at each of its 4 corners, the next path lay underneath, and was therefore downed first, whereas the present walking path lay on top.

That means that, in each pie-section, the 4 corners would have to be started by 4 different people at the same time - instead of one path continuing directly on into the next one time-wise and lay-wise. Also other persons would have to stand at the corners holding strings or tape measures in the air for the walkers to follow. All to create corner underpaths invisible from the air and inconspicuous on the ground. This process, tying up many people and inviting numerous, obvious errors, therefore makes no realistic sense at all.

So while all these details do not make hoaxing absolutely impossible, it's just too unlikely to be so!

Why would the genuine crop-circle energy, on the other hand, use these discovered design finesses? To unify the whole formation and weave its sections tighter.

Geometrical sophistication

The crop-circle geometrician Allan Brown offers here his illustrations of the sophisticated design interactions in this formation's overall symbol. These relations cannot be accidental and demand precise execution in the field.

7 illustrations copyright Allan Brown


Click: Part 2 - Example 2