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