By Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg
 
In 'Anatomy of Deception' Freddy Silva attempts to prod around in the corpus of the circlemakers, to dubious effect.
 
Ostensibly this is a critique of our work apparently prompted by the Triangular based Formation we made at Avebury, an artwork commissioned by The Mail newspaper, at the end of July last summer.
 
The background to Silva's criticism of our efforts last year and in previous years is coloured by the fact that when Silva reported the Avebury triangle on his website 'the crop circular' he claimed it had been Psychically predicted... As soon as the story broke in the media, that we had made it, this report mysteriously disappeared from his web site to be replaced with less than complimentary commentary, claiming we, the local farmer and the Mail were, in our own ways ridiculing crop circle researchers.
 
Backtracking on his own reports sets the scene for the comedy of errors and sloppy thinking that follow in Anatomy of Deception:
 
Silva follows the recent trend of crop circle researchers who don't bother to check their facts. He begins by stating that we claimed to have made the Stonehenge Julia set in 1996. This stems from an original interview with CNI news researcher Michael Lindemann In which I - Rod - claimed to have not made the formation - but that I was aware of who did, how and when.
 
Incorrectly, Silva alleges that we also claimed to have made the Windmill Hill Triple Julia set of 1996, in which (according to his own calculations) each of the 196 circles would have to have been made in 58 seconds for this formation to be completed in one night. Creating a single circle in 58 seconds is apparently beyond human endeavour, simply NOT possible.
 

 
Two summers later we made a formation for the BBC consisting of 100 circles in 2.5 hrs. It was constructed under test conditions with no artificial lighting. The logo in the middle of the formation (belonging to our sponsors Yellow Pages, which Freddy mistakes for 'bad geometry'!) took 20 minutes to construct, and the rest of the geometry about 30 minutes (we can't remember the exact timescales of each construction step - but this is close). That leaves 100 minutes for....100 circles. An average of 60 seconds per circle: VERY humanly possible (we were filmed doing it, with thermal imaging cameras). Freddy also feels that the connecting paths that lay out the geometry of the BBC formation were uncharacteristic of the 'genuine' phenomenon.
 
But oddly in a fit of selective amnesia Freddy forgot that both Windmill Hill and The Stonehenge Julia (he regards both as 'genuine', not man made) were characterised by very prominent 'connecting paths'. Other researchers call them 'underlying paths'. Michael Glickmans believes they are a tourist route around the formation! "The debunkers claim that these are construction paths by hoaxers. They are in fact tracer paths which show the visitor the route through the formation." You can read for Michael's report here.
 
Freddy also didn't like the the profile of a new car model for Mitsubishi that we created a few weeks later - claiming the wheels were crooked. Photographs of it tell a different story. Indeed it was so accurate, based on a technical elevation supplied to us by the company, that they considered erasing it from the field (such is the secrecy that surrounds new models of car).
 
During the construction of the BBC formation we were caught by Matthew Williams. He spotted the cars of the camera crew parked down a farm track adjacent to the field. Matthew knew that we were going to make a formation somewhere in the area that night with a camera crew. Whilst that gave him somewhat of a lead we felt the exercise had been a failure. When the Mail offered us the opportunity of another commissioned formation the next year we were determined that things would be different...
 
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