An
apparently false claim of human fakery from Celle, France on June
12, 2014: the real field image was altered by an overlay of “cartoon
plankers”, then posted June 23 on the French “debunking” website
Touraine Insolite
While I
was studying a wonderful “Chartres labyrinth” crop picture which
appeared near Celle, France on June 12, 2014, someone brought to my
attention a claim from a French “debunking” website, called
Touraine Insolite, that it had been made by an unseen team of
fakers using rope and boards.
Their
evidence was just one photograph (103 kb), plus a long story which
supposedly gave more details. Please scroll down on
Retour-sur-les-Crop-Francais-Assimiles-Synthese if you wish to
read this interesting example of modern French literature.
When we
look carefully at the single photograph supplied, which supposedly
provided “evidence” for human fakery, we can see right away that it
was taken from a real field photograph which was trimmed, then
altered using a computer program, so as to include an overlay of
“cartoon plankers”:
Let us
zoom in now, to study their “photographic evidence” more carefully.
We can see that the real field photograph (shown at upper left) has
been altered by the careful overlay of “cartoon plankers”, some of
whom have “black dots” for “faces”:
They
look like “insects”! The real crop-circle photograph is shown at
upper left above, while the photo-shopped fake is shown at lower
right. Two enlarged views of those “cartoon plankers” are shown at
upper right or lower left.
This
computer artist also replaced certain parts of the real crop picture
with “standing crop”, to make it appear as if the crop picture were
only “half finished”. When we study those “whitewashed parts”
carefully, we can detect faint “brush strokes” which were used to
cover up the real image.
Most of
the crop tramlines have “increased in size” for the fake image,
especially on the right. This comes about because the entire fake
image has been blurred, then given extra contrast. Please compare
details in the trees at upper left versus lower right?
Finally,
this aspiring computer artist made a serious error at the very end.
He did not realize that certain metadata for his “evidential
photograph” would give him away! Those metadata show that his
“fakery slide” was saved from Microsoft Powerpoint with a standard
size of 960 x 720 (shown below on the right, and marked with a blue
box):
For
comparison, I show the metadata from one of my “crop circle
collages”, which was likewise saved from Microsoft Powerpoint (above
on the left, marked with a red box). All other “real” photographs of
patterned crop on that Touraine Insolite webpage show a
variety of sizes, which are typical for real photographs taken in a
field. Not fakes made on a computer.
In
summary, this was an amusing and useful exercise. It demonstrates
that photographic evidence for crop circle “fakery” cannot
be accepted at face value without careful scrutiny, and without
supporting physical evidence of some other kind. This is because
certain dark-minded people wish to deceive others of a trusting
nature. In this modern age of computers, any skilled artist, while
sitting at his desk, can produce a plausible fake within several
days.
Other
claims of “fakery” for certain complex crop pictures seem equally
doubtful, but those might be left to another article in the future.
Were you gullible? Did you believe that a beautiful crop
“labyrinth”, which appeared near Celle, France on June 12, 2014, was
a human-made fake? If so, then all of the beauty of this wonderful
French crop picture was lost to you, and you only have the debunkers
to blame.
Red
Collie
(Dr. Horace R. Drew)
P.S.
Thanks to C.C.D. for informing me of the French debunking claims