I had no intention of doing something fancy, said Olson, who plans on getting a mohawk haircut for his 60th birthday. I just made circles.
• Hodgepodge
At a family reunion, Olson's nephew, Curtis, and his friends were wondering what would happen if they came across a UFO. David Olson decided to play a little practical joke that became a close encounter of another kind.
On a steamy September night in 1979, Olson, equipped with a propane torch and burlap sacks on his feet, spent five hours creating two huge circles simulating UFO landings in his nephew's cornfields outside Lake City, Minn.
They apparently became the first crop circles reported in the United States, and the southeastern Minnesota town was invaded all right. International media and UFO investigators scoured the landscape.
Olson kept his secret for nearly eight years. And as for his nephew? He hasn't spoken to his uncle since Olson came clean.
Minnesota's close encounter of another kind
As the mystery deepened, crop circles were discussed in Parliament and debated on television. They were the subject of dozens of books and countless magazine articles. And they began appearing outside England -- in Holland, Germany, Japan, Canada. A few appeared in the United States, too, but not many, especially when you consider our fabled stretches of amber waves of grain. Even today, more than 90 percent of the 10,000 reported crop circles have appeared within 50 miles of Stonehenge.
Then, in 1991, two elderly chaps told the British newspaper Today that they were responsible for the crop circles. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed they'd started making the circles as a prank one Friday night in 1978 after downing a few pints at a pub in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge. Over 13 years, they'd created more than 1,000 glyphs, they said, and copycats had done the rest.
To prove their point, they created a crop circle while a reporter watched. It was a simple process. They set up a pole with a string attached to the top. They pulled the string taut and walked in a circle. That created the perimeter. Then they flattened the grain inside the circle by pushing wooden planks around.
When they finished, the newspaper summoned Patrick Delgado, a prominent crop circle researcher. Delgado inspected the circle and issued his learned opinion:
"No human being could have done this," he said. "These crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is of a high level of intelligence."
The Real Story of Those Mysterious Circles Runs Rings Around the Movie