By Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg
 
There is something wonderfully ironic about a crop circle researcher digitally manipulating photographs of crop formations to prove that they are NOT man made - ie without the traces of human artifice.
 
Freddy Silva has adopted a method for some time now where he digitally distorts aerial photographs of crop formations to make them appear to have been taken from directly overhead - a plan view, without any perspective (actually impossible to achieve photographically). His method includes overlaying specific geometric templates over the photographs ostensibly to show that the crop formations contain accurate renditions of these templates within their geometric structure.
 
It seems that Silva is unaware of the artifice that his camera and computer generate. The resulting photographs, can offer little evidence of any possible accurate geometric analysis, compromised by their mediation and distortion. After they have been manipulated is it really surprising that the photographs appear to demonstrate whichever geometric hypotheses Silva chooses to overlay them with?
 
At this point we would like to make clear that crop formations DO have underlying geometric structures (we incorporate them into the formations we create, as do the other circlemaking groups we know). However we think that Silva's method is unlikely to uncover these geometric templates with any degree of accuracy.
 
In the past crop circles were geometrically analysed by on site measurements and surveys. Silva's photographic distortions belong more to a genre of digital artisanship, rather than objective methodical analysis.
 
Like alchemists of centuries ago, who, with a poor grasp of linguistics and little understanding of the difference between representation and reality thought to experiment on the name of an object in order to transmute the actual object. Silva appears to genuinely not recognise the difference between analysing a photograph of a crop circle, and analysing the actual crop circle.
 
In Anatomy of Deception Silva utilises this same method to allege that the formations we made in New Zealand 1998, and at Avebury 1999 are geometrically flawed. By distorting the photographs of the formations we have made he attempts to show that they contain geometric inaccuracies, above all this method of analysis is subjective at best and biased at worst.
 
In the case of the NZ formation Silva has manipulated a photograph which he claimed is from the NZ paper 'The Southland Times', - although it looks suspiciously like one of our aerial photos of the formation... 'fess up freddy! - overlaying it with a geometric structure that bears no relationship to the design template we used...
 
For the first time we publish here diagrams of the Triangular based Formation we made at Avebury, an artwork commissioned by The Mail newspaper, at the end of July last summer.

The diagrams show the construction sequence, the scale of the formation, and the underlying geometric structure.
 
The formation was made covertly with no artificial lighting in 5.5 hrs with seven circlemakers. The formation measured 300ft across and comprised of complex geometry based around an equilateral triangle.
 
The field we chose (the farmer was paid by the Mail) was situated adjacent to Avebury rings, less than 200ft away, and equally close to Avebury Stone Avenue. It was bound by roads on two sides. Situated on the side of Waden hill, the field rises up above Avebury rings and is visible from many points in the village and from within the rings. On a busy July evening at the height of the crop circle season it would have been hard to have picked a more visible and public field. All night we were silhouetted by a bright clear full moon to the South.
 


 
As we suspected people were about at Avebury that night. Crop circle enthusiast Chad Deetkin reported being there for several hours on the Art Bell radio show "Dreamland" on 15 August 1999 in an interview with Linda Howe: "And Linda I can tell you we were so close we were probably the distance of a housing city block, which is what, a 1000ft at the most, away from where this thing appeared and when you think about it in the light of a full moon we could see the field very clearly. And there was nobody there, and even after we'd left about ah - it was about quarter to twelve when we left, we circled the whole area several times in our car because we just wanted to see if anything was happening, it was such a strange night. And we came back, it would have been twelve thirty or so and there was still nothing there. "
 
Linda Howe called our claim a "patently false story" and was backed up by Whitley Strieber, the well known abductee and author who presented that edition of Dreamland. On the same programme others were also alleged to have been walking late that night and saw nothing.
 
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