Alien crop circles? Draw your own conclusions

Origins of designs in North Whitehall wheat field are best left to imagination.

By Daniel Patrick Sheehan Of The Morning Call

What would you do if you woke up one fine day and found a bunch of ''crop circles'' in the wheat field?

Elizabeth Henninger called the newspaper. She might have called the television station, but you know how sensational television people can be. Remember ''Alien Autopsy?''

So she called the newspaper, which dispatched a reporter and a photographer and a videographer, all of whom took a good, long look at the three designs, snapped some photos and shot some video, and arrived at no conclusions whatsoever.

''I'm open to any ideas,'' said Henninger, who is not a farmer but has rented her home on 50 acres of farmland in North Whitehall Township for 10 years and has grown familiar with the cycle of crops -- familiar enough to know that big depressions don't typically appear in the wheat overnight.

Henninger hasn't seen the farmer who tends the fields for months, so she hasn't been able to ask him. And it's not a topic you broach with just anyone.

''There's all kinds of ideas,'' she said, recalling a television special about crop circles from some years back that offered theories about their origins. ''My grandson is running around, he's 9, and he's saying, 'The aliens are coming to get us!'''

That's one theory. Others attribute crop circles to pranksters -- a couple of Britons confessed to creating the first circles by smashing down wheat with a board -- and to freakish winds.

Henninger's crop circles aren't the huge, intricate patterns familiar from television. In fact, they aren't even circular. One looks like a giant footprint. The others are sort of oblong. But, in classic crop circle style, the wheat inside them is bent to the ground, not broken. And there are no tracks leading to them to suggest the approach of animals or the work of human hands.

Besides, Henninger has a nervous little terrier mix named Scrappy who barks at everything that approaches the house, and he was quiet Thursday, when the circles appeared. So was the chicken that hangs around the front porch.

Henninger, for the record, doesn't think aliens were at play in the fields, though she doesn't preclude the possibility. ''I'm just curious to find out what it is, and if anyone else in the area has it going on,'' she said.

Bob Leiby, Lehigh County Cooperative Extension director, has a pretty good theory. Mind you, he didn't see the circles with his own eyes.

''If there's a definite pattern involved, a geometric pattern, we can assume it was either made by some alien being or someone trying to perpetuate a hoax,'' he explained. ''If fertility is high, soil moisture is high and we get some wind, it is a process we call lodging. The corn or the wheat or whatever just fall over. It happens a good bit of the time when we get into late June. The stalk can't support the weight of the head.''

That doesn't sound at all like alien activity. Doesn't even sound all that mysterious.

''It slows down the harvest process a little bit,'' Leiby said. ''The guy running the combine needs to get the header closer to ground.''

The truth is out there, indeed. Sometimes it's more fun not to know.