51 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
51 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
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07-Apr-87 11:35 MST
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Sb: APmn 04/07 UFO Prankster
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LAKE CITY, Minn. (AP) -- A man says he, and not outer-space visitors,
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flattened two circles in a cornfield as part of a prank to make people think
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that unidentified flying objects had landed there.
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The confession by David Olson, 44, a chemist with an Eagan engineering
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company, comes nearly eight years after he flattened the circles in his nephew's
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cornfield as a practical joke on his nephew, Curtis Olson, in September 1979.
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The joke quickly ballooned out of proportion into a probe by authorities and
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a UFO center investigator.
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"I thought my brother, Bruce, would ask me if I was responsible and I'd admit
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it," David Olson, of Morristown, said Monday. "But the first I heard of it was
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on television and then it was too late.
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"It developed so fast and people were so intense about it, I thought I'd
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better shut up. I thought they might be so angry around there, they'd string me
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up."
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The idea of the prank came to Olson in the summer of 1979 when people were
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talking about flying saucers at a family get-together. Olson said his nephew
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seemed strongly convinced of their existence.
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His nephew farmed a few miles southwest of Lake City at the time and Olson
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decided to pay a visit to the cornfield to set up a fake UFO landing.
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"A good practical joke depends on patience and thoroughness." David Olson
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said. "But I never realized it would be as much work as it was."
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He drove his pickup truck to his nephew's cornfield about 11 p.m., then
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lugged a posthole tamper and a butane torch into the field.
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"I brought the tamper to simulate what would have been landing gear setting
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down and I spent a lot of time on that," Olson recalled.
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He said he took special care to tamp in about seven areas to make the landing
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gear impressions appear symmetrical.
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"I started stepping corn down and making progressively bigger circles," he
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recalled. "I used about two of the one-quart butane canisters to singe the corn
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on the ground and some of the standing corn surrounding the circle. That would
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have simulated a blast of energy."
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After his nephew spotted the flattened corn, the Wabasha County sheriff, a
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county agriculture extension agent and an investigator for the Center for UFO
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Studies of Evanston, Ill., descended on the farm.
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Although Olson has confessed, his nephew flatly rejects the confession.
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Curtis Olson, who now lives in Montana, said Monday he agrees with
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investigators who say something unexplainable happened in September 1979 in that
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cornfield.
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"Listen, I know he is capable of pranks," the nephew said. "But we had
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experts out there who said it couldn't have been a prank. They concluded that
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something came down with tremendous force. He could have been out there a week
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and not do what they found."
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Copyright 1987 by the Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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