Crop Circles: Meet my Fodder

by Katharine Leis

Crop circles.

If you don't know what they are, then you must have had your head buried deep in the sand for the past 10 years or so. For some unknown reason, circles and other shapes have appeared in farmers' fields all over the world but mainly in Europe.

Scientists study these circles and go out on expeditions with measuring tapes, notepads and miscellaneous "blank"-onometers abound. They attempt to duplicate the circles using rope and plank self-made harnesses. Hollywood even decided they were interesting enough for a movie.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

OK, for one, if they are a mystery, than what good does it to do send an agriculturist, an astronomer, and a physicist to go try to figure them out? That sounds more like a dork joke than an actual study.

George: Hey Bob, an agriculturist, a physicist, and an astronomer go out to a field with a $500 000 government grant to try to find out why there are flattened crops. Guess what they got?

Bob: What?

George: $500,000!

Are there not enough mysteries out there that we can be paying some more attention? Like, oh, cancer, earthquakes, terrorism, the ozone layer, serial killers, overt pessimism. What is the big deal with the crop circles?

Oh, well, maybe ALIENS caused them. Like aliens would have nothing better to do than travel 500 million light years just to smash some corn in Bulgaria. That's like driving from Florida to Oklahoma to buy some gum.

One article I read stated that the interesting thing about them is that none of the stalks are broken, just folded over.

WELL BLOW ME DOWN! Jiminy, what was I thinking! Give them a million instead!

Hey, while we're at it, why don't we research other strange circles that could be caused by aliens, like those watery rings on your coffee table that appear even after you asked your friends to use coasters for their drinks. Where did THEY come from?

Or how about that little circle of mustard that forms on the end of the bottle? Oh, no wait, circles of yellow grass that appear on your front lawn when you don't even OWN a dog? HOW did that happen? Alien-pee?

I think the government should give me at least $500,000 to try to figure those out, and any others I can think of before I completely lose it.