copyright Jonah Ohayv, Jan. 2004
Click on photos for enlargement.
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.
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!
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.