One of the most well-documented cases of crop circles still resonates in people's minds as being completely unexplainable. In 2003, Arthur Rantala watched three crop circles form in a field near his home in Wisconsin as he sat in his workshop and sipped some coffee.
The edge of his property overlooks the countryside. A storm was rolling in and Arthur decided to take a break to watch it unfold. Around 7:40 am, the wind began to pick up and the sky started to darken. The trees across the street in his neighbor's field were blowing violently with some of the bark peeling off. The stalks of wheat began to flatten into three circular formations completely on their own... right before Arthur's eyes.
“The one on the left appeared first and it looked like a black hole,” Arthur told a local newspaper, “then the one on the right and then the one in the middle. All in a matter of 10 to 12 seconds.”
Weirdly enough, crop circles are not weird in the state of Wisconsin. In fact, plenty of locals believe that they have witnessed crop circles in local fields. After news broke about Arthur's experience, people flocked to the fields to see it for themselves.
“Mr. Rantala’s important eyewitness observation to the crop circles forming may be the first-ever recorded in the USA, and is certainly one of only a couple of dozen reported world wide in the last 50 years,” a field report from an investigation of the crop circles says. “Mr. Rantala reported that there were no apparent means for the wheat to have been swirled and flattened – nothing unusual in the sky, no lights, no unusual sounds, and no unusual odors. Whatever the energetic force was that caused the circles to form, it was beyond the range of visible sight.”
The news began to spread when residents were posting photos of the crop circles online. Dr. Charles Lietzau, Jeff Wilson, and Roger Sugden knew that they had to go investigate. Dr. Lietzau and Sugden were both members of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) while Wilson had previously investigated an estimated 100 crop circles. They wanted to see it for themselves to try and determine whether or not it was a hoax.
In their report, Wilson writes, “There is no known technology that is able to duplicate this blown node collar effect on thousands of plants in these downed areas of crop fields. However, this effect has been reproduced by putting stems into a microwave oven and cooking them for a short time. The appearance, then, of these blown node collars is conclusive evidence – in itself – that these circles were not flattened by human-mechanical means.”
The blown known collar effect describes a leaf popping like popcorn due to the base of the plant gets heated up quickly. The soil in the ground was also highly magnetized. Tons of other people have tried to debunk the crop circle but no one ever cracked the mystery. Arthur himself believes that it was somehow created by the storm.
“People are going to believe what they want to believe,” Arthur said. “I saw what I saw and I didn’t see any spaceship or aliens.”
“We know that electromagnetic energy is the cause,” Lietzau explained. “The source of that electromagnetic energy is unknown; therefore it is completely open to speculation.”