I do not know who reads these letters or whether anyone does. I found this address on a notice in a Trinidad paper asking for accounts of unusual things seen in the southern counties, and I have been carrying this one around for nearly twenty years, which seemed long enough to either let it go or write it down. I am writing it down.
In the summer of 1893 I was working the wheat harvest on a farm north of Pueblo, in the Arkansas River Valley, on the east side of the county road. There were six of us on the crew and we moved in sections, starting from the south end of the field and working north toward the creek. On the third morning, I walked the east field margin ahead of the reapers to check for debris or standing water, which was part of my usual routine.
I found the pattern before the reapers reached that section. I almost walked past it. The grain was not obviously disturbed from a distance — you had to be at the edge of it to see that something was wrong. The wheat was down. Not broken, not chewed, not storm-beaten. Bent. Bent at the stalk, about eight or ten inches from the ground, laid flat in one direction with a consistency that would have taken a man a long time to do deliberately and a long time to do by accident.
The shape was not a circle. I want to be clear about that because I have since read descriptions of things like this described as circles, and what I found was not a circle. It was more like a plan for a circle — the first part of one, the arc of it, maybe a third of the way around. The arc ran from south to east, curving gently, and then at the east end there was a spur. A straight section, running due east, maybe twenty-five or thirty feet, and then nothing. It stopped. There was no mark, no damage, no continuation on the other side. It stopped the way a sentence stops when someone puts down their pen in the middle of a word.
I walked the shape. I want to be precise about this because I think the walking of it matters: I entered at the south end of the arc, followed it east, followed the spur east to its end, and then stood there for a while looking at the clean, standing wheat on either side of me. Then I turned and walked back along the arc to where I had started. The arc — spur east — return. That was the full path of it. There was nothing more.
I did not tell anyone. I thought about it for a while, standing there in the morning, and I could not think of a single person I trusted to hear it without either laughing or getting religious about it, and I had no patience for either reaction. The reapers came through that section before noon and by evening there was no mark. I wrote it down that night in the back of a ledger I kept and did not show anyone.
The years went by. I worked other farms, other harvests. I thought about that field occasionally but less and less. Then, about two years ago, a man I worked with showed me a newspaper clipping he had carried back from a trip east. The clipping was from an English paper. It described marks in English wheat fields — circles and patterns that farmers were finding in Wiltshire, which is a county in England. The clipping had a drawing of one of the patterns, and the drawing showed a full circle with a satellite ring and an arm extending east.
I looked at that drawing for a long time.
I do not know what to make of the English business. I have read three or four accounts of it since and they are all either credulous in a way I find embarrassing or dismissive in a way I find equally embarrassing. What I know is that the shape in that drawing was the shape I walked in a Colorado wheat field in the summer of 1893, and that the Colorado version was incomplete, and that the English version was not. I was looking at what that field had been trying to become.
I am enclosing the clipping. It is the only copy I have. I do not want it back.