Chualar crop circle contains message, braille expert says
The tiny farm town of Chualar attracted a curious crowd after a giant, mysterious crop circle appear in a remote farm field of barley Monday. The field's landowner hired armed security guards to keep gawkers wondering if aliens landed in the Salinas Valley from climbing over a barbed wire fence.
VIDEO: Crop circle plowed under
Word of the crop circle on Chualar Canyon Road spread all the way to Fairfield, New Jersey, where braille transcriber Debra Falanga lives.
Falanga said her jaw dropped when she saw a photo of the crop circle because in its center there is a braille inscription.
PHOTOS: Intricate crop circles appear in Chualar
"It's fascinating. I don't know what it means, but it's readable," she said. "Those dots are in very specific order. It's so perfect it's almost like a machine did it. They are not off in any way, shape, or form."
Braille is a system of dots that enable blind people to read and write through touch. Falanga said the dots form three lines and translate in braille as:
192 192
B 192 1
192 192
Orchestra conductor Carl Christensen of Monterey said he works with blind music students and agrees that it reads 192.
"Now we just need to follow the 192 clue!" Christensen said.
The only way to definitively know "192" was meant to convey would be to ask the crop circle's creator. No one, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, had come forward to claim responsibility as of Tuesday.
A YouTube video uploaded by an anonymous videographer Monday claims to document two friends who drove down Chualar Canyon Road just before sunrise. The video shows green bursts of light flashing over the field just before dawn, and the friends run with their camera through the field until they stumble into the circle. YouTube: Watch it here
Locals are highly skeptical of alien stories swirling around their town. Jim Gillott, of Chualar, said he saw extension ladders and a crew of 30 people in the field last week.
"Every time I drove by I saw them walking around," Chualar resident Jake Gavin said. "It looked like they had little GPS's or something."
No one realized how intricate the crop circles were until professional photographer Julie Belanger flew in a helicopter over the field by coincidence while on her way to Carmel Monday morning and shot aerial photos.
"It was beautiful. Quite beautiful," Belanger said. "I believe it's possible that aliens exist, but I don't know if they would bother making a crop circle to give us a message."
The field's property owner, farmer Scott Anthony, 58, of King City, was out of town on vacation when the incident happened. Anthony had planted barley between cash crop harvests to add nutrients to the soil, and the circle creator did not damage anything, he told CNN.
Anthony ordered a crew to plow the entire field back into the earth Tuesday. By 1:30 p.m., the circle was destroyed -- but not its mystery.