Reported Crop Circles for the State of Ohio -

Owensville, Clermont County (June 24, 2010)

On June 24, 2010, I [Jeffrey Wilson] was taking an alternative route home and happened to spot an unusual circle in a grass field. Stopping the car to get a closer look, I snapped this photo from the side of the road, which had a slightly elevated view of the circle.

Ovensville, OH Circle

Ovensville, OH Circle

The area was clearly circular, but sometimes it is hard to tell if what you are looking at is truly a crop circle, so I walked down next to it to examine it a bit more closely:

Ovensville, OH Circle
Above: Composite, panoramic “fish eye” photo of circle

The circular area was of a canopy of blooming flowers – Crown Vetch (identified later by my wife Delsey, a certified Master Gardener). The growth of the Crown Vetch was not as tall as the surrounding field grass. The circle is 26 feet in diameter N/S. Pulling back the canopy of flowers revealed my suspicions that this was an actual crop circle though, as the field grass underneath was flattened and swirled down – these Crown Vetch plants had grown up through the original flattened field grass and created a canopy, not allowing the plants below to right themselves:

Ovensville, OH Circle

Crown Vetch is not native to the USA, although it is often used here for erosion control. It is actually considered an invasive species by the IPSAWG (the Invasive Plant Species Assessment Working Group) because of its ability to fully cover and shade out native vegetation, particularly in grasslands.

One question we always have to solve for in crop circle formation investigations is – when did the circle occur? In this case it was evident that this circle was not fresh, but exactly how old could it be? When I got home and mapped the location of the circle in Google Earth Pro, I may have found a clue to answer that question:

Ovensville, OH Circle

The mark in the field is circular, and is exactly where the “flower circle” is today. Unfortunately, Google’s satellite image isn’t particularly sharp for this date, so we won’t know for sure, but it appears as if the circle may have existed as far back as September 1, 2009. This would agree well with the blooming Crown Vetch, as it usually does not bloom until after its first frost season – if the circle arrived last summer, the vetch could have begun then before winter arrived, and would be blooming now for the first time.

Checking the Archaeological Atlas of Ohio (W.C. Mills, 1914) interestingly reveals that in nearly the exactly spot of where the circle is today, there once existed an Indian mound (red triangle in the center of the map below; Stonelick is the name of the Township):

Ovensville, OH Circle

I haven’t tracked down any records to find out what happened to the mound yet, but this was an interesting circle investigation nonetheless!

Update: just a few days after I had posted the details of this crop circle, the field was harvested, and you can clearly see the circle remnants still left in the field:

Ovensville, OH Circle

By the way, the above photo was taken using the Theodolite Pro app for the iPhone – an amazing tool which I’ll be using often for all of the orientation data it collects and attaches to the photo – which I suspect will open up new avenues of research in the years to come.

Crop type: Crown Vetch

Source: Jeffrey Wilson, ICCRA investigation

  


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Page last updated on October 7, 2014

© 2008 ICCRA - Jeffrey & Delsey Wilson.