Meath Hill had a crop circle; Area residents recall strange sight

David Croft believes something unusual happened one night on top of Meath Hill.

He’s just not sure if it was an unidentified flying object that burned a crop circle into a farmer’s field or something else.

“There were a lot of questions about it,” says the retired AECL employee reflecting on that day back in the mid-1970’s when he stopped at the side of Highway 17 to see the odd phenomenon. “I never saw anything like that before in my lifetime.”

Stepping out of his 1972 Plymouth Fury, he walked over and saw a 14-foot scorched ring in the near distance. There were three men digging at the site. They wouldn’t tell Mr. Croft what they were doing. The ground in the middle of the ring had been flattened. He noticed boulders resting to the sides of the circle.

With the 60th anniversary of an alleged 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico being observed this month, several area residents have found themselves recalling similarly strange happenings here.

“I said to myself ‘this must have been a small flying saucer’,” Mr. Croft says, looking at a black and white photo he took of the circle.

Pembroke resident Isabel Hudson may have been one of the few to see the thing that landed on Meath Hill.

Sitting on the front porch of her Cecilia Street home, she looked up into the night sky and saw a shimmering, reddish ball of light. The light gradually descended in a southwesterly direction.

“It was something coming down,” said Ms. Hudson, noting that the light vibrated unlike any aircraft she had ever seen before. “There were things going on that just didn’t look right.”

The morning after sighting the UFO, Ms. Hudson went down to the Meath Hill crop circle where a large crowd of sightseers had gathered. The area was cordoned off with mine tape. She recalls the farmer who owned the property saying “Somebody’s playing a dirty trick on me.”

Mr. Croft adds that at the time, a federal Agriculture Department official released a statement saying the circle was a result of a fungus growth that was destroying the field’s grass.

One theory to explain crop circles is that pranksters have used state-of-the-art equipment to create them. However, Mr. Croft believes the circle couldn’t have been fabricated, as he noticed the fence bordering the field was intact and there were no tie tracks leading to the site. Ms. Hudson has no doubt that a flying object caused the circle.

“I still think it was something that came down from the sky,” she said.

This wasn’t the first crop circle in the area. Three rings appeared in a farmer’s field in Pontiac County in 1969. The circles showed up after several people in Chapeau reported sightings of a UFO.

UFO sightings are on the rise this year in Ontario, according to HBCC UFO Research, a non-profit organization based in British Columbia that tracks UFO phenomena across Canada. The organization reports there have been 106 sightings in the province so far in 2007. People are claiming to have seen triangles, disks and formations of light. According to the organization’s website, the last sighting of a UFO in the Ottawa Valley was near Renfrew in April.

(Source: http://www.thedailyobserver.ca)