Three off-center orbs, one bigger than the next, in 3-foot-tall hay in his Gardiner field.
"Three days, the road going up there is probably a half a mile long, it was lined with cars, both sides," Rocque said, remembering the August 2002 scene. "One woman was in a wheelchair; I'll never forget it. She wanted to go out in the wheelchair, see if she could get healed or something. I don't know how it worked out for her."
He says he'd never seen anything like it before, never anything since.
And, he says, it was not a hoax — despite appearing days after the opening of M. Night Shyamalan's movie "Signs."
Ventura said his kids found the formation out riding their all-terrain vehicles, about 50 feet off the road.
At the time, Nancy Talbott investigated. One-third of the BLT Research Team, the oldest crop circle research group in the country, she's based in Cambridge, Mass. Her conclusion in Gardiner: genuine, as in not man-made.
"Of course, there are idiots that go out and make crop circles," Talbott said.
Those, she's not much interested in.
Talbot has a network of people taking soil and plant samples from inside and outside reported crop circles in about half the U.S. states and Germany, Holland and Israel, she said.
"Whatever is going on, it's not a simple solution. It's a very complicated, very layered situation," Talbott said. "What humanity calls UFOs, ghosts, remote viewing, poltergeist, as well as what we call crop circles ... my work is telling me that these things are all related. The thing that runs through all of them, the best I can tell so far, is this stream of consciousness."
The group's work is on a Web site where Talbott has also started posting crop circles by year. Two were reported on a Rockland farm, in 2006 and 2008.
From 2006: "Field is near a limestone quarry and an old Indian site, and resident reports she has seen light-balls in the area with some frequency and that her camera would not work in downed areas of field."
Jeffrey Wilson in Ohio, director of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers' Association, said about 20 new ones are reported in the U.S. every year. He has spotted patterns: Most crop circles, he found, are on the downslope or bottom of a hill, close to water and close to a power line with a transformer.
He has used a Geiger counter to measure radiation inside the circles and has studied the growth nodes on plants — "like the knuckles on your fingers" — for changes. "In non-man-made ones, those growth nodes become elongated; they get stretched out," Wilson said.
After Rocque's crop circles were discovered, he tried to make a fake circle by stepping on a board, to compare the two.
"No matter what you could do, you could not make it look like the straw that was in them crop circles," said Rocque, a retired auto technician. "After what I've seen, I've got an open mind. We're not the only ones."
I've actually come across information during lots of different research and I have continually come up with limestone and strange lights. I've even used that premise for a short story about hauntings. Haunted sites most often are linked to limestone. England is absolutely chalk-full of limestone. Also, it is the capital of crop circles. I'm not sure how the two go together, if they do, but when I hear about limestone anywhere, I know I'm going to hear stories of freaky things. Admittedly, that picture above reminded me of a dustdevil's remains. We get those here in AZ and we can see them because the ground is all dirt so the circular winds pick them up. They leave marks on the desert like that. I don't see any reason why this weather phenomenon doesn't happen elsewhere, but with the ground being moist and covered in plants, it's only noticed by the patterns it leaves behind...
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