This crop circle was made by the famous "CircleMakers", originally named "Team Satan", a team of graphic artists mostly from the London area.
It was commissioned by the Daily Mail newspaper, who organized this demonstration to once again show how crop circle experts can be fooled [dm1]. The newspaper got permission from the farmer, Mr. Farthing, who received money in compensation.
The field was at a popular and usual place for circle making, less than 200 feet from the Avebury stone circle, Wiltshire, U-K., on the side of Waden Hill, a place where the formation would be easily noticed the next day from places in the villages and from the touristy Avebury ring. Of course crop circles were being done there for more than a decade every year and it continued the following years.
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Above:
the Avebury ancient site.
The three CircleMakers Rod Dickinson, John Lundberg, Will Russell, and 4 friends did the crop circle by night, under a full moon, in less than 6 hours. They started at 11:00 p.m. and were accompanied by a Daily Mail journalist nicknamed "Samantha Taylor" [1] and a newspaper photographer nicknamed "Nick Holt". They left the place at 04:30 at dawn. The diameter of the formation was 300 feet.
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Above:
The Avebury "3D cubes" crop circle.
The crew was staying at the White Horse Hotel near Cherhill and returned to the field at Midday to see if their crop circle was found. It was apparently discovered at 05.30 a.m. and by midday it was crammed with crop circle tourists, a TV crew, and crop circle researchers. The farmer had agreed to let people in the field for a small fee. [cm1]
The Daily Mail newspaper interviewed the locals and the curious, asking them who they thought did this, and many said that no human being could have done this crop circle, that if human had tried to do it, they would have been seen.
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Above:
The blueprint for this crop circles,
by the CircleMakers.
Two weeks later, on the sensationalistic Art Bell radio show in the US, on August 15, 1999, "Crop circle expert" Chad Deetken [2] claimed to interviewer Linda Moulton-Howe, that he and his wife were at "1000 feet at most" of the place, at least from 00:30 a.m. to 01:30 a.m. and saw no crop circle nor anything suspicious. Other claims [3] that "people there saw nothing" were made and Moulton-Howe and horror-books author and self-claimed "abductee" Whitley Strieber then denied that the circle was made by the CircleMakers men, calling this a "patently false story".
However, in a later article on the web, Deetken now said that all except him and his wife had left at 11:00 p.m. and that they walked the "Avebury Avenue" and "meditated", to leave "at 12:30 a.m.". [cd1] Deetken did not grasp that such sites are simply popular to crop circle makers just because of the paranormal nonsensical beliefs attached to ancient sites and he rather believes that there are "Earth energies" at such ancient sites and that crop circles are "related" with such "Earth energies"; which he claims to detect by dowsing.
And Deekten then claimed that when he visited the circle he immediately thought it was "a mess" and that his opinion was confirmed when the Daily Mail revealed that it was done by the CircleMakers. But only to change his mind a few paragraphs further!
Crop circle "expert" Lucy Pringle claims the crop circle had not been made by men, with the reason that the places are never deserted because "Visitors and locals mingle with the stones and walk through the lanes all night long.") [lp1]. Alas this claim contradicts that of Chad Deetken who said that the places were deserted ("We arrived at 10 PM and found the site deserted") [cm1].
No investigation was carried out, the "experts" being satisfied with what looks like hearsay and general speculations about crop circles; no location maps, no localization of people saying they were there, none of the infamous "samples" and "research" on plants anomalies, or so-called "radioactivity" or "UFO sightings". Nobody says a word about looking for clues of human realizations, no search for hidden paths for example.
In his book "Anatomy of a Deception", self-proclaimed crop circle "expert" Fred Silva used a distorted picture of the formation and claimed it proves it was "a hoax", i.e. made by men, because "the geometry was flawed", that it was "inferior work" and "without meaning".
However, another "crop circle expert", Michael Glicksman, believed just the opposite, arguing that the formation's design was so complex that it cannot have been made by men. In the "Sussex circular" crop circle bulletin, he wrote: "If anyone had asked me, after ten years of study which was the cleverest crop formation in terms of number and geometry, I would have put Avebury in the top ten." [mg1]
German crop circles book authors Werner Anderhüb and Hans Peter Roth on the contrary cite the formation as a hoax by Team Satan commissioned by the Daily Mail, and also argue that the realization is "messy" [ar1].
