Crop-circle expert harvests some electrifying theories

HOWELL TOWNSHIP, Mich. — They've come late at night, holding flashlights, their beams cutting the dark in the middle of 1,000 acres of wheat fields. They've come in the afternoon under blue sky to lift their arms and pray.

One group wanted to camp. Others want to take pictures.

Crop circles may be Hollywood now, but out here, at the edge of Detroit's suburbia, they represent something more ethereal, and, said Mike Esper, who discovered three crop circles on his farm a few weeks ago, something more strange.

"It gets weirder by the minute," Esper said.

He discovered the three circles — 51 feet, 10 feet and 8 feet in diameter — as he drove his combine around the wheat field. Not wanting to destroy the evidence, he left a 3- to 4-foot perimeter of wheat intact around the largest circle.

He called in a crop circle researcher to take a look at them. The expert, Jeffrey Wilson, who travels the country, took measurements and studied the circles for three days recently. Wilson determined they weren't the act of man, that they were not a hoax, that they were the result of some unexplainable natural phenomenon.

Esper promptly e-mailed the local news media.

"I'm amazed by the whole thing," he said. "I wanted to leave it so people could see it."

The flocks soon followed.

"I'm getting calls from all over the place," he said.

He loved the attention in the beginning, but recently, he began wondering if it was too much. Seekers can be found in his fields every day, usually in the afternoon.

On a recent afternoon, giving another tour to the curious, he stumbled across an empty soda can.

"First money I've made since it started," he joked, speaking of the 10-cent deposit on the can.

The crowds joke, too, but not always. The circles are just as often treated like shrines.

"It's an array of humanity out here," Wilson said. "You get everything from scientific interest to those who meditate with crystals."

Though hundreds already had flocked to the circles before Wilson arrived, the evidence wasn't destroyed, he said.

He found dozens of wheat stems with holes in the middle. He said the electricity associated with crop circles generates heat and that heat turns the moisture in the stems to steam. It expands and blows out the holes.