Solano County Crop Circles – Twentieth Anniversary

??????Twenty years ago Crop Circles appeared one night in a wheat field North of the Solano College campus.?That gave us an entire summer of fun.

???????????I enjoyed walking the site, people-watching, and observing the reactions of the crowd.?At the time I was teaching a class that covered science and pseudo-science, and this event gave me a lot to talk about.?The X-Files show enjoyed popularity, and the crowd followed the mantra “I Want to Believe.”?

???????????I overheard some onlookers walking the site who in all seriousness said, “I’ve seen crop circles all over the world and I believe that this one is a hoax.”

???????????“They’re all a hoax,” I said.

???????????“You haven’t seen wheat magnetized like I have.”

???????????“That’s a really slick trick, magnetizing something that isn’t ferrous.”?

???????????“Look here, there are twin clearings in the wheat caused by energy from the machine that they used to make the circles.”?

???????????“Those are tire tracks from a pick-up truck.”

???????????“No, the wheat is untouched between them.”?

???????????“Look, the wheat pops right back up,” I said as I brushed the wheat with my arm and it rebounded without making a mark.

“No truck has clearance that high.”

“OK, how about this?” I said as I lowered my arm to brush the wheat right next to the ground.??“If I was Marisa Tomei’s character in My Cousin Vinny I could tell you the make and model and year of the truck.”?

I Want to Believe.?

I had friends visit from all over the Bay Area.?Often they walked in with tin-foil hats.?I strung together a bunch of scientific jargon in a satire that was published in The Vacaville Reporter.?I can’t find that column, but it was something like, “the resonant microwave frequency energy field’s blast created twin wavelength interference emanations – a malformation giving evidence of the tremendous energy emitted by the crop circle creating machine.?At first, I mistook them for tire tracks.”?

A colleague of mine used that article in his class for several semesters.?

The owner of the field sold T shirts at his produce stand, and interest continued well into the summer.?

Several groups of paranormal investigators opened formal enquiries into the crop circles.?One group issued a report that concluded that the crop circles were not the work of human beings.

Eventually a group of four teenagers tired of the joke and admitted “We did it.?It’s really boring around here.?We saw a documentary on crop circles, borrowed a water ski rope from the garage, anchored it in the center, and used boards to stomp down the wheat to make circles.”?

The paranormal investigators weren’t convinced that it was a hoax and certainly weren’t convinced that these teenagers could have pulled it off.?They held a press conference.

“The nodes of wheat samples taken from inside the crop circles were larger than those collected from outside the circle.?Based on past crop circle experiments, it's possible that a blast of microwave energy could have caused such malformation.”

“The teenagers say that they made the crop circles by moonlight.?There wasn’t enough moonlight on the night in question for them to cut such an intricate design.”

“The teens would have needed an extremely advanced working knowledge of Euclidean geometry to make the unique size and shape of this formation.?When you compare the ratio of the sizes of the circles, their ratio was the same as the difference in frequency between each note on a musical scale.”

Some smart-ass from the back of the room asked, “when you play the scale, does it sound like the notes in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind?’”

The paranormal investigator was not amused.?

I Want to Believe