Do I believe in crop circles? Of course I do. Why, there was one in my backyard just the other day! Okay, so it wasn't in my backyard. It was just down the street in the field near my house. I caught a glimpse of it coming over the hill on the way home recently. (That day, everything was "weird".)

Real crop circles are an impressive display of fractal geometry:


Oceanside crop circles look more like this:


You really have to see these things from up high to get a good look at them. I may have to rent a helicopter. Visiting aliens? Government experiments? Drunk farmers? Bored teenagers? The best explanation I've heard is that they're all created by inebriated, underpaid alien interns making a few extra bucks from the galactic office of interstellar marketing by placing brand logos from galaxy-wide corporations on our world's farmland in preparation for Earth's forthcoming admission into the Galactic Federation of Planets. It only makes sense.

These things go back a few hundred years, before aliens existed. Back then it was always The Devil. Oh, give me the olden days, when the unexplained was just the trivial ball-tossing of the gods! Why, if that was the usual explanation, we could all just shrug, cross ourselves, and get back to work when something weird happens.

But I'm not stupid. I got out of the car and hiked in to get a closer look. Everyone knows you have to check these things for:

1. Elongated apical plant stem nodes.
2. Expulsion cavities in the plant stems.
3. The presence of 10-50 micrometer diameter magnetized iron spheres in the soils, distributed linearly.

(In order to distinguish them from the fakes.)


My determination? UFO landing. No, really. I know because I nearly broke my ankle when it got stuck in the hole the craft's landing gear made. It probably landed the other night when we had all that fog. If I'm lucky, the aliens will disembowel the neighbor's cats for research. Those cats keep crapping in my yard.

And I wonder why I'm always late for work.



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