The Granum Fire Department is famous for having a UFO land in front of its building, leaving a "bleached" area of ground as shown in this photo taken by Fire Chief Don Douglas. The G.F.D. had pins designed to commemorate the event.

The following is an article from
THE JAPAN TIMES — SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 1992

WINIPEG, Manitoba (AP)   Those confounding crop circles showed up again last year across North America.

A new report says 87 sets of circles, rings and other shapes were found flattened or dug into fields in 1991.

And despite an embarrassing hoax in England last year, the Winnipeg researcher who compiled the report insists there’s still lots of mystery surrounding what he and his colleagues like to call “UGMs” — unidentified ground markings.

“People have suggested everything from aliens to some sort of government secret weapons testing as theories,” says Chris Rutkowski, who founded the group he calls the North American Institute for Crop Circle Research.

“We’re not ruling anything out.”

But he admits that most of the crop circles are likely fakes.

Rutkowski, a University of Manitoba employee who designs school science courses, set up the institute after requests for information from British researchers of the crop-circle phenomenon.

He gathered data for his report from UGM enthusiasts throughout the United States and Canada.

The incidents include a 10-meter-wide ring discovered in a grassy field at Fort Lawrence, Nova Scotia. A compass needle was said to spin rapidly outside the ring but was unaffected inside it.

A perfectly circular ring of mashed grass was sighted in Dandridge, Tenn. Cattle appeared to shy away and those that ventured near were said to have become sick. A police officer says he filmed a UFO in the sky not far from the site two months earlier.

Crop circles first gained notoriety in England, where numerous rings have materialized over the last few years.

But a celebrated incident last year left many convinced they were all a hoax. Two painters who claimed they were responsible for making many of the circles crafted a new one and invited expert Pat Delgado to investigate.

Delgado confidently declared that no human could have had a hand in its creation.

Even Rutkowski, who also prepares an annual report on UFO sightings in Canada, estimates as many as 90 percent of the crop designs likely are hoaxes.

The fakes probably include complex sets of circles and corridors flattened into fields in Coalhurst, Nova Scotia, and Jonesboro, Ga., last year, he says.

In 1990, an investigation discovered that a crudely made circle in a field near Glenlea, Manitoba, was the work not of extraterrestials, but of a rather earthly farm hand riding a garden tractor.