- ROCKVILLE -- Where Rockville
and Suisun Valley roads meet outside Fairfield, it's just another day.
Nothing paranormal about it. Nobody is wandering around, for example, wearing
an aluminum foil hat, armed with a tuning fork and chanting toward the
heavens. And nobody from Fox News or CNN is following them around with
beefy news cameras, beaming their images around the globe.
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- "Everything's back to normal," said Sally Estudillo,
owner of La Barista. "But it was fun while it lasted."
-
- It was exactly one year ago when a huge crop circle formation
mysteriously appeared in a wheat field only yards away from Rockville Corners,
turning this sleepy farming community into ground zero for the largest
paranormal event in Solano County's history.
-
- For a while, the discovery brought national attention
and lured thousands of psychics, researchers and curiosity seekers to the
area. Some took measurements and meditated over broken chaffs of wheat.
Some claim they felt waves of healing energy pour through their bodies.
Some sold wheat and commemorative T-shirts. A little girl sold "alien
lemonade."
-
- At the center of the circus stood Larry Balestra, owner
of the wheat field. Everyone wanted an interview with the soft-spoken farmer,
who remembers feeling uncomfortable with all the attention.
-
- At least initially.
-
- "I'm not the kind of guy who likes to be that public,"
Balestra said. "But it got easier. They were lining up."
-
- Among those pulled to Rockville was Carolyn Skrzydlewski,
a graphic designer at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. She remembers the
intense energy she felt from the crushed stalks. "It was a sort of
unsettled feeling as I was standing there, a bit uncomfortable," Skrzydlewski
recalled. "The energy changed as we sat in the center of the circle."
-
- What was it? A year later, she still isn't sure.
-
- "Better people than me have formed hypotheses,"
she said. "I'm open to it being whatever it is, or isn't. But I think
it was absolutely fascinating. It was quite obviously something no person
could have made."
-
- Or could they?
-
- Two weeks after the discovery, four teenage boys came
forward to confess they had made the crop circles out of boredom. The hoax
theory satisfied skeptics, but holes emerged in the boy's story. They claim
they worked by moonlight, for example, although it was two nights before
a new moon.
-
- Meanwhile, a Fairfield based paranormal research firm
that studied local crop circle formations found the circles were subjected
to microwave energy and were likely created by someone with extremely advanced
knowledge of Euclidean geometry.
-
- Steve Moreno, founder of the firm, PsiApplications, still
doubts the teens' tale.
-
- "If they did do it, they wouldn't be aware of any
of those things, and they wouldn't be able to duplicate those effects,"
he said.
-
- In the weeks after the crop circles were discovered,
two other formations turned up - a small one in a nearby wheat field, and
another in a corn field 15 miles away, near Vacaville's Nut Tree Airport.
Proof of who or what created them remains unknown.
-
- Despite the debate - or maybe because of it - the Rockville
formation proved fortuitous for an area that has been hard-hit by decades
of dropping crop prices and the pressures of encroaching development.
-
- Business at La Barista shop hummed along for several
weeks, as city dwellers who eventually grew tired of standing in a hot
wheat field ordered smoothie after smoothie.
-
- "It lasted a lot longer than I thought," Estudillo
said. "At first I thought it would last just a week, but they kept
coming. . . I thought, 'This is big stuff.' "
-
- Balestra, too, rode the wave. Business picked up at Larry's
Produce, his fruit and vegetable stand down the road from the crop circles.
And the farmer made extra cash by selling crop circle T-shirts.
-
- Eventually, the bubble burst and the crowds went home.
In the end, Balestra figures he broke even between destroyed wheat crops
and modest T-shirt sales. (He has plenty of shirts left, for anyone who's
interested.)
-
- While the Rockville crop circles stand as the single
largest crop circle formation in North America, they're gone now.
-
- And if the circle-makers - whoever they are - return
to Balestra's field this year, they won't find wheat. They'll find black-eyed
peas. Green leafy sprouts will soon cover the area where thousands of human
beings stood last summer and felt . . . something. But what?
-
- A mystery, still unsolved.
-
- Despite a front row seat, Balestra isn't any closer to
the truth. "Everybody who has their opinion has a good argument,"
he said.
-
- But if his black-eyed peas one day grow feet and walk
away, we'll know.
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- http://www.dailyrepublic.com/articles/2004/06/28/news/news1.txt
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