- A mystery in the age of certainty. An oddity on a corner
where corn and hay and soybeans are as predictable as the sun coming up.
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- What's a 71-year-old farmer to do?
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- John Polomcak of Lawton just wants a better idea of what
might have caused a patch of corn in one of his fields to lay down flat,
plants all pointing east.
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- A team of independent researchers may not have that answer.
But they have confidence that research such as theirs is the only way to
find it. So they will converge today on the field with measuring instruments,
notebooks and specimen bags to collect samples of plant tissue and soil
for analysis.
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- It's an effort the researchers hope eventually will shed
some light on what might cause the curious phenomena called crop circles.
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- Skeptics roll their eyes. But Detroit high school biology
teacher Charles N. Lietzau says the medical community also once scoffed
at the scientists who said tiny microorganisms were responsible for disease.
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- Lietzau, with Indiana residents Roger Sugden, an aerial
photographer, and Ted Robertson, a master harpsichord maker, are part of
what they term a "response team" for the International Independent
Crop Circles Researchers' Association.
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- "I just hope they're good," Polomcak said.
"I want to know what's going on."
- It's a question he's been puzzling over since he and
his son first noticed the disturbance a few weeks ago.
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- About half a dozen rows into the field, barely visible
from the road, the men found a rectangular area about five rows wide and
12 feet long that opens onto a larger rounded area about 32 feet in diameter.
"My boy and I hauled some cattle and he come around the corner and
said 'some son-of-a-gun ran through the corn,' " Polomcak said. "He
got out to look at it and said 'Come and look. All the corn is laying ...
all down the row -- it's all same direction.' "
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- Polomcak said the impression is far different from someone
driving through a field. "No way I could see that any one could drive
up and back and up and back without bending them stalks both ways,"
he said.
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- Nor does it appear to be the damage that sometimes comes
with harsh weather or disease, said Polomcak, who has farmed for more than
60 years, and grown hundreds of acres of corn each year.
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- "I've been farming all my life and I never seen
anything like it," he said, adding neighbors have suggested it's a
prank.
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- A similar incident was reported last year in a wheat
field near Howell. The ICCRA team reports that circle was "authentic,"
Lietzau said.
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- When Detroit newspapers ran that story, it was followed
the next day by another story -- that an area radio station's hosts claimed
credit for a hoax.
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- But the station later retracted that claim when the radio
personalities were unable to demonstrate for television news crews how
they had created the pattern and the farmer threatened to make them responsible
for damages to the field.
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- Lietzau and his fellow investigators stand by their original
determination.
- The researchers will examine Polomcak's corn for specific
evidence of ruptured stalks, swollen nodes, patterns of discoloration and
evidence of magnetic and radioactive fields. "Our rule we operate
by is that the data is the only authority," Lietzau said.
- Broken stalks and abrasions may suggest a hoax, with
its perpetrator using a board to flatten stalks into a pattern, Lietzau
said.
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- More subtle cellular damage, or soil anomalies, may suggest
a release of energy is behind the flattened stalks.
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- Some of the distinctive plant damage noted in the crop
circles the group has deemed authentic can be duplicated using microwaves.
They think sound waves may be able to create similar effects, though such
experiments have not yet been done to bear that out.
- Where these energies come from is entirely hypothetical,
Lietzau said. "Each of us is free to hold our own beliefs and speculation
because it may guide us toward certain experiments, but we only make statements
based on conclusive scientific evidence."
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- That strict adherence to standard science may not be
enough to offset the doubt that springs, perhaps, from the group's respect
for diverse opinions about likely causes, reflected in its online newsletter's
links to sites such as UFO Magazine, Aliens Truth and Para-normal.com."It
really doesn't matter (what people think of the investigators) but we find
local people are seriously interested in the truth," Lietzau said.
"National media are just looking for something to play as a joke."
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- © 2004 Kalamazoo. Used with permission
- http://www.mlive.com/news/kzgazette/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1093360965206760.xml
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