When I received an email from an Australian 3-D artist, Jack Newnham, saying he had discovered that the 2006 Savernake formation could be viewed stereoscopically, I wrote back that I doubted it strongly.   

 He had attached some pictures to his e which were meant to be viewed with red/green stereo glasses, but I didn’t have any glasses so I couldn’t look at his evidence.  My doubt was based on the difficulty of precisely constructing the subtle differences in geometry required for the left and right eye images.  (Of course, such a trick would be easy if ETs are involved!  ;-)  So he posted a pair glasses to me, and, was I surprised when the crop circle popped into dramatic three dimensions!   

 Experienced in working with 3-D, Jack suspected something when he saw a photo of the circle by Steve Alexander on the Crop Circle Connector.  But the first thing he had to do was to rectify the perspective of the photo, which had been shot from the air at an angle, to look like the point of view was directly overhead, which he did using PhotoShop [image 1 attached].  Notice the pair of op-art patterns composed of crescents.   

To work his 2-D to 3-D magic, Jack copied the photo, swapped left and right patterns, and then superimposed them on top of the originals with transparency.  Finally he tinted one pair red and the other green [image 2 – use red/green glasses if you have a pair].  The third image shows his method.  The fourth shows a paper model he made to give you an exaggerated idea of the effect if you don’t have glasses.  See how there’s a cone the center part of which comes up off the page, while outer part goes down.  

If you then take a close look at the first image again you can notice a subtle difference between the nest of crescents on the left and the nest on the right.  The right hand one is slightly scrunched.  Everyone who looked at the crop circle prior to Jack assumed the nests were identical – but they are not!   

And this cannot be just an error in construction because if the squeeze were accidental the 3-D result would be a cone pointing entirely up or down.  Instead it’s a cone with the inner part going up and the outer part going down.  That has to be intentional! 

And it means great care had to be taken in construction on the ground, moving the centers of the arcs just a few inches this way and that.  My hat’s off to the Circle Makers! 

 There were actually four different “Wormhole” formations (as I called them) in 2006, but the Savernake circle was the only one which incorporated actual stereoscopic elements.  Here is my shot of the cool Wormhole in Aldbourne.  

 To communicate with Jack directly, write to:

jacknewnham@bigpond.com