Return of the aliens?

HistoryLink.org Essay 9112 : Printer-Friendly Format

The little farm town of Wilbur, in Lincoln County, might seem an unlikely destination for intergalactic visitors. But, really, it would be hard to cut crop circles in L.A. And a crop circle, which some aficionados associate with extraterrestrial beings, is what farmer Craig Hayden found in his wheat field late last month. Along with five crop rings of declining size.

This visitation follows one in June 2007 to another farm near Wilbur, where nine circles were made in the wheat. So it appears Wilbur, population 965, is definitely on alien radar unless -- dare we suggest it? -- the extraterrestrials actually reside in the neighborhood.

Among the UFO fanciers who showed up at the Hayden farm, reports Jonathan Martin in The Seattle Times, was Peter Davenport, a Stanford University graduate with degrees in Russian and biology, who runs the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, which, handily, is only about 30 miles from Wilbur.

Davenport told the Times that he couldn't be sure of the authenticity of the circles at the Hayden farm because wheat stalks at the circles were sharply crimped and the edges of the circles were a bit ragged, both of which suggest they were made by humans. "Genuine" circles, in comparison, are characterized by depressed plant stalks, rather than crimped ones, suggesting they were formed by some sort of energy field, and by better geometry.

Well. Whatever, or whoever, visited the Hayden farm, the incident fits into a well-known historical pattern in our fair state. As HistoryLink.org cofounder Walt Crowley recounts in this essay,

The modern phenomena of UFOs and "flying saucers" began in Washington state on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold spotted nine mysterious, high-speed objects "flying like a saucer would" along the crest of the Cascade Range.

A couple of weeks later, Coast Guard Yeoman Frank Ryman of Seattle's Lake City neighborhood took the first modern photo of a UFO (the fuzzy black-and-white photo you see here).

Let's also not forget that the "men in black" were first associated with a report, later admitted to be a hoax, of a flying saucer explosion over Maury Island.

And we would be remiss if we failed to point out the 1954 windshield pitting hysteria that gripped Western Washington. Everything from H-bomb radiation to sand fleas was blamed for that, when the more likely, but sadly prosaic explanation was that most of the pits had been there unnoticed all along.

Back in Wilbur, the Haydens are getting on with farming. Despite the interest in their crop circles, they plowed the field last week. "The combine levitated as I went over it; the electric instruments went haywire," Braidy Hayden told the Times, tongue firmly in cheek.

By Tom Brown, August 13, 2009

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