Beckhampton, nr Avebury, Wiltshire. 
Reported 24th July.

Updated  Monday 24th September 2001

Beckhampton nr Avebury. Team SaTAN Special 2001

Oh dear, here we go again. 

The London based “Team Satan”, the “best” circle-fakers, in the (not so) fine “land art” business have been at it again. This time they have been commissioned by a local TV station to prove that they, and others like them, are capable of creating complex and convincing crop formations. 

They failed miserably, yet again.  

FAKE---------------------------------REAL 

From the air this effort appears, at best, crude, at worst, hapless, trashy, irregular, over elaborated, geometrically inferior and totally unoriginal. 

On the ground the thing is a shambles. 

They said that it took them four hours to make this “complex” crop formation, that I can believe, it looks clumsy and rushed.  As soon as I stepped into this arrangement of irregular shapes it was obvious that the authors of the work had paid absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever. All the laid areas are extremely messy with zero coordination and devoid of fluidity, just as you would expect from a bunch of people smashing their way through a crop field in the dark. Maybe they think if they make a mess, with lots of standing bits in-between we will all be so awe struck by their phenomenal skill and ingenuity that we won’t notice that all the individual standing sections are out of sync with each other by a huge degree.

Standing at the center of the formation and rotating oneself throughout three hundred and sixty degrees is the best way to appreciate the glaring errors inherent within the construction of the formation. Each of the inward facing wedge shape sections in this part of the pattern is hopelessly flawed, some of them are as much as one foot to eighteen inches adrift from the intended position, this never happens with such ugly regularity in real crop formations, fact! One would assume that these sections are supposed to be all the same size and shape. The fact that these crucial elements of the design are all dramatically different in both size and shape speaks volumes about the capability and credibility of the individuals involved in the creation of this formation. On the one hand this team suggests that they are capable of producing sophisticated, original and flawless designs. On the other hand, when they are given the opportunity to prove it on camera they fail so hopelessly that it leaves me wondering what their real motivation is. They must be well aware that anybody who knows anything about crop circles would not be at all convinced by this effort, on the contrary, this shocking mess can only provide more proof that these people are nothing more them hapless circle fakers with an agenda that renders circle researcher opinion and criticism obsolete. 

No doubt the public will get a few cleverly edited images to marvel over and most people will have the long awaited answer to the phenomenon delivered direct from those nice fellows over at HTV.  

What a shame!