Wiltshire - England
WILTON WINDMILL
Discovered on May 22, 2010
The Windmill crop circle
Also visible on the website of
Lucy Pringle
Geometric reconstruction by Zef Damen
(Automatic translation generated by the author)
The true fake — or the fake true
On May 22, 2010, a crop circle was discovered at the foot of Wilton Windmill. The next day, Robert Hulse visited the site and filmed the state of the oilseed rape field. His footage leaves no doubt: this formation was made with boards. Stems were broken and crushed, with none of the characteristic base curvature. It’s indisputable to anyone who looks closely on site, even without much crop-circle experience.
Yet the online information about this formation rarely highlighted the real condition of the plants. Close-ups were missing or misleading, suggesting an anomaly when it was simply mechanical trampling. The pranksters/hoaxers play with mathematical motifs meant to impress, but the ground truth tells a very different story.
Let’s recall the key points:
- Cameraman Robert Hulse was categorical: the formation had been made with boards or similar tools, leaving long, characteristic scuff marks on the stems.
- He also noted that stems were broken at the base throughout the formation.
- A few thin, more supple stems were not broken and lay flat. We had already observed in a
previous experiment (SITE ARCHIVE) that such young stems can bend without snapping but spring back quickly once pressure stops. Here, the seemingly “bent” stems were under layers of broken stems. Their horizontal position was due only to the weight above and cannot be read as an anomaly comparable to
Golden Ball Hill (2005) or
Rutlands Farm (2009).
- The fractures observed matched direct blows, like those produced during
the 2006 experiment by Robert Hulse and David Cayton. It’s absurd to imagine “sabotage, stem by stem”: to reproduce this look would require delivering several thousand heel strikes with impossible precision. The hypothesis of a natural anomaly or sabotage is therefore unfounded.
- It remained to track plant recovery. Would flattened stems resume normal growth, as observed at Rutlands Farm in 2009? (Site ARCHIVE)
OILSEED RAPE DOSSIER — Other photo galleries of oilseed rape formations made with boards
