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.
Stems that are still in the ground with holes in them aren't the result of a hoax, he said.
He estimates he has seen at least 130 crop circles since 1996. It was then, as a graduate student of physics and chemistry at Eastern Michigan University, that he got his first inclination to take them seriously.
"Throughout my career, I've always been interested in things people didn't have explanations for," he said.
Wilson, 33, trekked to his first circle in Ohio. He borrowed a Geiger counter from EMU, persuaded a friend to go with him and arrived at the scene only to find a sheriff had roped it off as though it were a crime scene. He talked his way past the yellow tape.
As he moved closer to the center, he noticed a pattern that he would find at every other circle: Radiation levels were higher in the middle.
Why? "I don't know," he said.
But it got him theorizing. Soon, he was measuring the electric field and the electromagnetic field within the circles. He noticed the circles often appeared near transformers attached to power lines.
He also discovered a pattern among eyewitnesses of the crop circles who never report seeing any light or anything else unusual.
He tried to get academia to bite, but it hasn't — yet.
He said science needs more approaches to study crop circles. It reminds him of airline pilots reporting strange patterns and colors of light shooting off the top of thunderheads in the 1980s.
Eventually, NASA sent planes up with high-speed cameras and discovered a new phenomenon — sprites and jets, which are red and blue atmospheric flashes. There is no complete explanation, but it is no longer considered a farce.
He sees circles the same way, part science, part mystery.
On a recent afternoon, a few more folks carefully walked through the circles on Esper's farm. They snapped photographs. They laughed and pondered, often in the same instant.
"I think it's cool," said Susan Davis, 47, a high school teacher who didn't seem to mind the possibility humans had done it. "Even if it's just art, it's beautiful. If it isn't — wow!"