by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
In 1986, Jim Speiser of Fountain Hills, Arizona, got the urge to create an electronic forum dedicated to a discussion of paranormal topics. He started a BBS (bulletin board system) using six personal computers located at various locations in the U.S. and Canada linked together with a Fidonet system. People would dial a number that would access a computer through a modem, and they could read and post messages and access files. Speiser called his new BBS “The ParaNet.” In the summer of 1991, there was a “spin-off” of ParaNet named the Multi-national Investigations Cooperative on Aerial Phenomena, and ParaNet published a magazine called Continuum to get their investigations reports out to the public. The first case in the Volume 1, Number 1, September 1991 issue involves an investigation of a simple crop circle in a cornfield in Iowa that led researchers to other reports of strange activity in the area. The case became far more complex than a simple crop circle report, and this has ended up becoming a two-part blog. In the first part, we’ll look at the investigation and three witness accounts, and in the second part we’ll look at one more account, the conclusions, and the aftermath, which included poltergeist activity reported to have been experienced by one investigator at his home.
In Continuum, the case, number PN-91-0001, is presented in a report format. The author of the report is James Roger Black, who was a principle investigator along with Robert W. Atwood. Both were residents of Iowa City, Iowa. According to Black, Atwood called him and told him about a crop circle in a cornfield in Blue Grass, Iowa, owned by Delmar “Snowball” Meyer. Atwood heard about it from a co-worker who was Meyer’s son-in-law. Black, together with Atwood, drove to the farm at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23, 1991, (coincidentally, the first day the public was able to access the World Wide Web) and met Meyer, a 57-year-old former marine, who was at the circle with some friends when they arrived.
According to Black, Meyer had first noticed the circle the day before, Thursday, at 6 p.m. as he was driving on adjacent Coon Hunter Road. Meyer thought it must have been formed overnight starting on Wednesday. He reported it to the Scott County Sheriff’s Department at 7:06 p.m. according to the police report. He told Black and Atwood that he’d never had problems with trespassers or troublemakers and was, in Black’s words, “completely baffled by the whole thing.”
That morning, people from the local TV station, KWQC, came to the farm to do a story for their noon report. The report prompted neighbors to stop by and see the circle for themselves, and this resulted in three distinct trails through the field. Meyer said he examined the field just after finding the circle and found no trails or footprints at that time.
Black describes the corn stalks as being swirled around the center counter-clockwise at right angles to the radius. They only saw four broken stalks, and the rest were pushed over with the roots pulled out on the upper side and still in the ground on the lower. The ones that were broken were broken just above the roots.
They measured the diameter and came up with 46.5 feet ± a couple of inches. An officer from the sheriff’s department told them he had seen no evidence of any sort of pole being driven into the center.
According to Black, the field was covered in a fine dust, and while they found they could walk carefully with flat-soled shoes and not leave a mark, people wearing field boots left footprints wherever they went.
Black says that when they were headed for the field, they noticed a small herd of cattle. They asked Meyer if there had been any missing or mutilated cattle in the area, and he said he wasn’t aware of any.
Black describes a steady stream of friends and neighbors during the two hours they were there. They talked with some of them and got the names of three people who had reported strange events in the area on Wednesday night, and they spoke with them on the phone over the next few days.
One man they spoke with, identified as “J. H.,” was a farmer located 3/4 of a mile northwest of Meyer’s farm. He reported that on Thursday morning, between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., he heard a rumbling sound unlike anything he’d heard before but thought it might be a tractor-trailer having trouble. He said the sound came from the southeast and that he “could have kicked himself” for not looking out the window.
The next witness was a 46-year-old woman, identified as “M. A.,” who lived with her husband, an ex-fireman who lost his legs on the job, her mother, and “C. S.” who helped her look after her husband. “M. A.,” is described as having never had any psychic or occult experiences and as having an actual aversion to the UFO subject. She is quoted as saying, “whenever someone would mention them I’d get up and walk away.”
- A. claimed to have been seeing UFOs in the area since 1990 when she saw a strange light in the sky while driving with her mother. She said it came towards them and stopped 150 feet over their car. She couldn’t hear any noise, and she stopped the car and turned off the engine. She checked with her mother and verified they were both seeing the same thing which was, in Black’s words, “a classic flying saucer.”
She described it as having a silver-colored metallic skin, windows that were small and square “like bathroom windows,” a searchlight on a pole on top, white lights around the rim, and multi-colored lights underneath. Through the windows, she saw what looked to her like “a computer room.” Black notes that her husband ran a bulletin board system in their home “so the computer metaphor would come naturally to her.”
She said she heard no noise and described the scene as “peaceful.” She said she was terrified at first but that “some kind of force” took her fear away. According to her, she observed the craft calmly for ten minutes, then started the engine and drove away, and at the same time, the craft took off and went out of sight.
- H. said she had seen a light moving in the distance three or four times since, which she thought might be the same craft. She said she became disgusted and made the decision to ignore it because of the ridicule she was receiving from her friends. She told the investigators that a couple of weeks before the crop circle formed, she saw “the light” again and became extremely angry. She said she sent out this thought to the craft: “If you’re real, why don’t you land? Give me some proof.” She believed that this might have been why the crop circle formed in Meyer’s field.
According to Black, M. H. was driving east on Highway 61 around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday morning after leaving a friend’s house. She saw the light over Meyer’s bean field and decided to ignore it. She turned south onto Coon Hunter Road and saw that the light was following her. She watched it in her rear-view mirror and saw it descend into Meyer’s corn field. She continued home and didn’t say anything about it to anyone.
According to Black, M. H. woke up on Thursday morning with a backache, a headache, and one of her ears hurt, and she attributed all this to “sleeping on it wrong.” She took aspirin and by the end of the day, the pain was gone, but her back felt uncomfortable. She was told by C. S. that she had come home extremely late, and this confused her because she didn’t think it had been much past 1:00 a.m.
- H. saw the noon report on KWQC and when she heard it reported that a circle had formed in Meyer’s field on Thursday night, she immediately drove to the farm partially with the intention of correcting the reporters. When she arrived, she found that the crew was still there and she told them that the circle had formed on Thursday morning (Wednesday night in her mind), but they stuck to their version until Meyer stepped in and backed her up.
According to Black, Meyer invited her to see the circle, and she went with him but couldn’t bring herself to go inside of it. She said she became quite scared and felt like she was “not invited.” She was afraid that something would happen if she stepped inside, but she didn’t know what.
Black describes M. H.’s life as becoming difficult after her first encounter, in part due to the ridicule she received, and that she attempted to “push it away.” He says she didn’t know if she believed in UFOs and asked him several times if he thought she was crazy and was relieved when he told her there were many others who reported similar experiences. She said she still had no interest in UFOs other than how they directly affected her, and she didn’t want to hear about the experiences of others because she didn’t “want to start imagining things.” She only wanted to know the answers to three questions: How was her fear taken away during her first encounter? Why was she scared to enter the crop circle? Why was she chosen to witness the sequence of strange events? She said that once these questions were answered, she never wanted to hear about UFOs again.
Next week: A witness with more strange encounter reports, a discussion, a paranormal aftermath, and conclusion
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