Reported Crop Circles for the State of California -

Greenfield, Monterey County/Bakersfield, Kern County (June 22, 2010)

This formation was originally reported to the ICCRA by member Ruben Uriarte (also CA MUFON State Director) as just a YouTube video which had been posted online. The video is crudely edited in an attempt to make it more mysterious, with both ground and aerial footage interspliced with textual commentary, with no narration. After viewing the youTube clip, I sent out an email with my transcription of the video clip along with my editorial comments and analysis:

Ruben let me know about this formation this afternoon, and I've seen the video. It 'smells' of a hoax to me. No contact info given, allegedly a 'news' 'copter was used to film this… But you can clearly see the board marks in the circles, going round and round concentrically. All the text in the video - "gate was locked", "it appeared overnight", etc... is so vague a description it was like it was invented. I wouldn't be surprised if this is an attempt by Discovery Channel/Nat Geo to see what researcher reaction is. I'd be VERY wary of this...the video reminds me of one of these 'viral' promotional stunts...

CA MUFON is going to try to investigate - however Greenfield, CA is in the middle of the state, quite a way from where most researchers live there. It will be interesting to see what they dig up.

You Tube video transcription [editorial commentary in parentheses]
6/22/2010 Greenfield, CA
Two days ago I was leaving my family’s farm with a friend
[what family? Who’s the friend? No one is identified in the video, no locations identified, no revealing landmarks to identify where the formation is.]
When we noticed something
Intercut with just a few seconds of ground footage
Another friend of mine flies the helicopter for the local news station
He agreed to take us up
[the only TV channel registered with the FCC for Greenfield, CA – KSCZ channel 42 - went off air in 2007; there are two Spanish-language radio stations in Greenfield, CA - KLOK 99.5 FM, KSEA 107.9 FM which play contemporary Spanish Pop music; one of which may be just a repeater station. As small as Greenfield is, I don’t think you would need a traffic helicopter for the radio station.]
Intercut of several, few seconds-long aerial clips of the formation
[The entire video only lasts just over a minute inclusive of all the intercut commentary (1:04). If you went to all the trouble of going up in a helicopter to take aerial video footage, and took the time to edit it, why just give people a few seconds of video? They clearly took lots of footage from various angles and elevations…where is the rest? Since this is being posted on YouTube, why not give people longer unedited views of the formation? The total amount of video footage in the posted clip of the formation is less than the total amount of time dedicated to the text used to describe it. This seems strange…]
There was nothing in the field the day before
[who’s making the claim? Any evidence to support this? Any unusual weather conditions?]
The gate to our property was still locked
[Why would this matter? It insinuates against an argument that people made the formation – that because the gate was still locked, no one could have gotten in and made the formation. If someone made the formation, couldn’t they just jump the gate? As the last statement of the short video, this seems odd – ‘methinks thou protest too much…’?]

Taking in the whole of this clip, it is my suspicion that the formation is a fraud. The way in which this video was edited together, it seems “staged”. Let’s look at the formation itself to see if we can find evidence of this:

Bakersfield, CA Hoax

You can see areas which exhibit the tell-tale signs of the mechanical-flattening process.

MUFON’s Chief Investigator Steve Reichmuth listened to the sound of the helicopter in the video and identified it as likely to be a 2-person Robinson helicopter – one not likely to be a News helicopter. ICCRA’s Roger Sugden also made the same observation independently suggesting a Robinson R22.

It turns out that the formation WASN’T even in Greenfield, CA as the YouTube video purports, but rather in Bakersfield, CA (140 miles away). It took a few days to figure this out, but after the local sheriff in Greenfield confirmed that there was no crop circle there, some additional sleuthing revealed that the rock band Korn (who are originally from Bakersfield, CA), were responsible for the formation. Korn hired the professional crop circle hoaxers from www.circlemakers.org – led by John Lundberg with Wil Russell, Rob Irving, and Mark Barnes – to construct the formation for the band’s use in a music video and a live concert broadcast over the internet. By July 5, The Circlemakers confirmed the news on their website, followed with an official press release from Korn on July 8.

The original YouTube video strategically edited out the Korn III logo for their upcoming album which was also created in the field.

If one is cognizant of the details of how the hoaxers methodically construct their imitation formations, you can usually see these details readily in aerial photos / footage, even among the most-experienced ‘professional’ hoaxer teams. The way in which they mechanically construct their imitation formations leaves behind these ‘artifacts’ or tell-tale signs of Page | 6 human involvement. In this case, we were able to identify that this formation had been hoaxed, strictly on the basis of the aerial footage – before it was reported later that a professional hoaxing team had actually made the formation.

Korn played their live-on-the-internet concert from the imitation crop circle on July 11, 2010.

Crop type: grain

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sFb9RhKy1M
Jeffrey Wilson, Roger Sugden, ICCRA investigation; Steve Reichmuth, MUFON Chief Investigator; Ruben Uriate, CA MUFON; Jeffrey Gonzalez, Sanger Paranormal Society / CA MUFON; “Crop Circle Mystery in Greenfield”, June 28, 2010,
KION http://www.kionrightnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=12724273 ;
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=819014&blogId=536864899 ;
http://www.circlemakers.org/korn_circle.html


 


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Page last updated on August 17, 2011

© 2008 ICCRA - Jeffrey & Delsey Wilson.