Apparently Michigan is making a move to take over the title of Loony Bin Capitol of America from Florida. Now we’ve got our own case of crop circles near Howell.

MICHIGAN CROP CIRCLES: Farmer raises a mystery

HOWELL TOWNSHIP—They’ve come late at night, holding flashlights, their beams cutting the dark in the middle of 1,000 acres of wheat fields. They’ve come in the afternoon under blue sky to lift their arms and pray.

One group wanted to camp. Others want to take pictures.

Crop circles may be Hollywood now, but out here, at the edge of Detroit’s suburbia, they represent something more ethereal, and, said Mike Esper, who discovered three crop circles on his Livingston County farm two weeks ago, something more strange.

Crop circle researcher Jeffrey Wilson, who as near as I can tell has never met a crop circle he didn’t think was authentic, has declared these circles as authentic. You’ll pardon me if I remain skeptical when you can find sites like Circle Makers where they tell you how they’ve hoaxed all manner of crop circles. The folks at Circle Maker’s have gone on to do custom circles for all manner of movies and advertisements since. It doesn’t help that several crop circles which Wilson had declared to be the “real thing” were later revealed to be hoaxes with the perpetrators coming forward and even demonstrating how they did it. Naturally, Wilson claims these people are just trying to get attention by trying to take credit for the circles.

Meanwhile, the loons keep showing up at the farm in Howell to mediate while clutching their crystals or pray. It’s enough to make you wish there really were aliens making the circles who would come back and pick these idiots up. They’d be doing us a favor, really.