The 2010 crop circle season has already been marked with controversy, over whether three new crop pictures which appeared at Old Sarum on May 5, Stonehenge on May 9 and Yarnbury Castle on May 15 might be paranormally real or human-made fakes? Experienced field investigators such as Andrew Pyrka, Paul Jones and Janet Ossebaard have not yet reached any clear consensus on this issue. Some people have commented that the third formation at Yarnbury Castle, which appeared close to a car park and a newly cut fence, looked “messier on the ground” than the other two, but no definitive conclusions have yet been reached.
In order to examine the photographic evidence with more rigour, we downloaded high-quality aerial images of all three formations, then used Adobe Photoshop to “invert” their bright yellow colours into purple, so that details of line quality and depth of shading could be seen more clearly. Some of our preliminary results are shown below:
On the left above, we can see uniformly tidy lines, and uniformly even depth of shading, across the entire Stonehenge formation of May 9, 2010. Whereas on the right above, we can see many untidy lines, and quite uneven depth of shading, at many places within the Yarnbury formation of May 15, 2010. Some of those variable features have been marked with small yellow arrows. Such details will depend to some extent on ambient lighting, and quality of the original photograph, but by studying a series of independently taken photographs, a quantitative judgment can possibly be made.
Two further examples are shown in the next slide below:
There we can see quite tidy lines, and fairly even shading, throughout both crop pictures at Old Sarum of May 5 or Stonehenge on May 9. Please note that the Stonehenge photograph studied here is entirely different from the one studied in a previous slide above.
The clear implications of this preliminary analysis would be that “laying down of the crop” was performed in a highly tidy fashion at both Old Sarum and Stonehenge, by applied uniform pressure from above. Yet at Yarnbury Castle, the applied pressure was seemingly far less uniform, consistent perhaps with a mechanical means of construction. Further inspection of Yarnbury with this analysis in mind may perhaps reveal the precise reasons for its variable and/or mottled appearance.
CMM Research
P.S. We would like to thank Lucy Pringle, Chris Bird and Steve Alexander for use of the photographs studied here.
P.S.S. There may also be certain mathematical criteria to distinguish paranormally-real crop pictures from human-made fakes, but those will be kept in reserve for future controversies. Also, it remains unclear whether this new filter inversion test will be of any value for green or brown crops such as barley or wheat.
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