The Cache County Sheriff's Department is investigating the possibility that furry four-legged creatures from Earth, not aliens, were responsible for the crop circle discovered just south of here last week.
Sheriff Sid Groll said he still believes mischievous human beings are the most likely culprits but had no leads as of late Tuesday that would suggest the field design was a prank. The only suspects thus far have big claws and whiskers."We did have one farmer call in and say he had similar (circles), although quite a bit smaller, where gophers were involved," Groll told the Deseret News. "All the grain was laid down in a circular formation toward the center of the circle. They were trimming (the grain) off and storing it."
If the creators of the 270-foot crop circle are, in fact, human, they could be arrested on misdemeanor vandalism charges. But Groll said they probably wouldn't face more than a fine.
Gerald Alder, who leases the barley field from his cousin, said he saw no paths or trails leading into the field when he discovered the design Friday. Some of the dozens of people who visited the field in the days to follow suggested it might be a hoax. Others offered out-of-this-world explanations.
Whether man-made or of the "authentic" variety, the Logan crop circle is one of a growing number of crop designs to be discovered in American grain fields. The phenomenon reached its zenith in southern England in the early 1990s and continues there and around the world today, despite the well-publicized admissions of two British hoaxers.
For the most part, however, U.S. crop circles aren't nearly as impressive as the intricate designs appearing in England, including a recent crop circle that appeared near Stonehenge.
"The appearance of crop formations has continued this year in England, but they've gotten almost no publicity," said Don Berliner, a member of the executive committee of the Fund for UFO Research in Maryland. "There have been well over 1,000 in England. In 1990 or '91 they were appearing at the rate of eight to 10 per day, and that's entirely too much work for hoaxers."
Linda Moulton Howe, an investigative journalist who has researched earth mysteries for nearly two decades, said British researchers are excited about a 30-second video taken Aug. 11 by a college student. It shows a small white light moving across a wheat field where a crop circle was later discovered.
"But to me the big story in England is - everybody is in agreement - that formations this summer are probably the most outstanding of all time," Howe said from her home in Pennsylvania. "They have been enormous, 1,000 feet or more in length, very complex patterns."
In the United States, meanwhile, crop circles have been found recently in Paulding County, Ohio; Columbia City, Ind.; Butte County, S.D., and Chehalis, Wash. Crop samples from those circles and the Logan formation have been sent to W.C. Levengood, a retired University of Michigan biophysicist.
Levengood has detected structural changes in plants found inside many crop circles and believes the formations may be created by a natural phenomenon involving ionized plasma.
Some have suggested there a link between UFOs and crop circles. The Fund for UFO Research pursued that angle when it financed a 1991-92 study by Michael Chorost, a Duke University doctoral candidate.
"There were some anomalies, but most of what they found was ambiguous," Berliner said. "They were looking for things that would enable them to say, `Yes, this is a genuine crop circle and that one is a hoax,' but they really didn't come up with enough to say that with any confidence."
Levengood, however, said there is a definite distinction between plants involved in an "authentic" crop circle and those that were not.