WILBUR, Wash. — The Chamber of Commerce paused last year to give special thanks to an uncommon type of visitor who doesn't come around much but makes each visit count.
"Thanks to the Aliens who made Wilbur their Vacation Destination!" reads an award of appreciation.
Wilbur, a no-stoplight wheat town (population 960) 65 miles west of Spokane, is on the way to becoming the Northwest's hub for the extraterrestrial-obsessed. For the second time in three years, crop circles have mysteriously appeared in wheat fields, generating curiosity, jokes and coffee-shop debates of the "Big Question."
The latest appeared in late July on a remote hillside of the Haden family wheat farm just south of Wilbur. Five rings of diminishing size, plus one filled-in circle, were crushed into ripe wheat. "This is the one where they put the spaceship landing pad down," said Keith Haden, pointing to the circle, and struggling to keep a straight face.
His friendly skepticism is the prevailing local mood. Depending on your belief in the supernatural, crop circles are either a mysterious sign of extraterrestrial contact or a clever hoax that has risen in popularity since the mid-1970s. Southern England has been ground zero, but at least three instances in eastern Washington farmland have been reported since 1993.
Before the Haden farm formation, the most recent and celebrated was an elaborate set of nine circles found in June 2007, amid 120 acres of green wheat northwest of Wilbur. That sighting was widely reported, and the Llewellyn farm was soon inundated with out-of-state tourists in saris and tinfoil-covered helmets, scientific researchers from the University of Washington and - in at least one case - a group of naked dancers. Billy Burger, a local institution, put an Alien Burger and Invasion Fries on the menu.
"I thought the less you said, the more it would go away," said Jim Llewellyn, owner of the farm. "But the next thing, there were planes flying overhead and people all over the place. It spread like wildfire."
Craig Haden, owner of the land where the most recent crop circle was found, hoped to avoid such a scene. After spotting the circles while inspecting his land on a motorcycle, he told his son, Braidy. They found no sign of tracks through the ripe wheat or footprints between the rows.
"It makes you think," said Braidy Haden, a 23-year-old wearing striped overalls and sporting a soul patch.
The sighting wasn't widely reported, but word leaked out locally and ad hoc roads soon were cut through the fields.
A woman recently dropped by with a metal detector. Keith Haden, Craig's brother, offered the woman's husband the tinfoil hat that a friend had dropped off. Among the people who arrived was Peter Davenport, who runs the National UFO Reporting Center from a former military missile bunker in the nearby town of Davenport.
"As to whether it is a genuine formation, I am not able to pass judgment with any certainty," he said. The wheat stalks at the Haden crop circles were sharply crimped and the formation's edges were ragged, both signs it was man-made.
But the Llewellyn crop circle, Davenport said, was "very interesting." Investigators from BLT Research Team, a Cambridge, Mass.-based group that investigates crop circles, came away believing it was the "real McCoy," according to a summary of their research on their Web site. Among the evidence: bent - not crimped - stalks and cavities blown out of the wheat stalks, interpreted to mean that they had been pushed down by a pulse of energy.
Llewellyn said the researchers made a case that "makes a skeptic like me think," he said, talking on his cell phone from his combine. "It wasn't the high school kids from Wilbur. This was a professional job, somebody who knew what they were doing."
In 2007, self-proclaimed experts of the phenomenon investigated crop circles in western Clay County in Arkansas after farmers in Delaplaine, Knobel and Peach Orchard told of discovering designs in wheat fields over four summers. One featured a beetle, one was a large circle with nine smaller circles spiraling away from it, and another resembled a pointed sprocket on a bicycle wheel.
"We don't believe they were made by humans," said JoAnne Scarpellini, a crop-circle investigator from St. Louis who has crawled through numerous flattened crops in the United States and England. "We're in the dark about Clay County. Something likes the place a lot."
Nancy Talbott, one of the owners of BLT Research, asked in 2007 about the Arkansas cases, said she believed the circles could be "gentle" signs from aliens. The markings gradually alert humans of a pending visitation from critters from a different world, she said.
"The designs are kind of pretty," Talbott said. "It may be another life form's way of making us think we're not alone. They are preparing us for a friendly visitation, not a warlike situation like if they just suddenly showed up."
For the Arkansans, the circles were more of an annoyance than a wonderment. Clay County Cooperative Extension agent Andy Vangilder said at the time that the circles caused $250 to $500 in damage to wheat fields.
Joe Nickell, a former magician, has investigated crop circles for decades and has a conclusion:. "One hundred and two percent of crop circles are fake," said Nickell, a writer for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, based in Amherst, N.Y.
A pair of British hoaxers admitted in 1991 they came up with the idea at a pub decades earlier. Their techniques were replicated for a 2002 Discovery Channel documentary that sought to debunk the mystery. MIT scientists found the man-made crop circle matched characteristics of unexplained formations.
There will be no such tests on the Hadens' crop circle because they've plowed the field. "The combine levitated as I went over it, the electric instruments went haywire," said Braidy Haden, with a straight face.
The night after it was found, he and a buddy drove out to the formation to look for unexplained lights. When their headlights crossed the reflectors of an old piece of farm equipment, the pair jumped. "Scared the hell out of us," he said.
On a tour of the field earlier this month, the circles were still visible amid the stubble. Braidy and Keith Haden wondered how the circles were made so straight, how the equipment was moved in and how they were made without leaving tracks.
"It'd be tough to do," Braidy Haden said. "I'd like to get some friends together and give it a try." Information for this article was contributed by Kenneth Heard of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 08/23/2009