Paranormal Story Archives
April 2002 –
Page 14
Ice
Circle Formation
by Bilrux
In late February, 2001, I observed a crop-circle-type formation on a frozen pond in Greenbelt, Mary;and. I work on an upper floor of a high-rise office building in Greenbelt, a heavily-developed suburb of Washington, DC. From a window near my cubicle, I overlook a large storm water drainage pond. From about Feb. 22 through 25 of 2001, there was a period of snow and sustained sub-freezing temperatures that caused the pond to freeze over. On the morning after the snowfall (about 6"), I noticed a large circle had formed on the surface of the ice. The entire circle was not immediately visible (perhaps because part of it may have been covered by snow), but as the day went on, the full circle became visible.
The pond is in an open, relatively flat area that is usually subject to strong local wind and breezes, even in calm weather. The pond surface did not appear to have nearly as much snow accumulation as the surrounding land areas, perhaps having been blown clearer by the wind. The pond is roughly the shape of a baseball infield: generally triangular, with a curved back, but much larger. The "home-to-first" and "third-to-home" legs are about 500' to 600' each. The circle wasn't centered on the pond, but skewed a bit toward the "home-to-first" side. The circle appeared as a slightly darker band against the more-whitish ice of the rest of the surface of the pond, with the band being nearly as wide as the apparent length of cars passing on the street near the pond. The circle appeared (from 12 stories up, and a few hundred yards away) geometrically perfect, and the band was uniform in width.
The next day, I noticed another band of the same width, in the form of a straight line, beginning inside the circle and extending left (from my perspective) well outside the perimeter of the circle. Again, the entire line gradually became visible as the day progressed, and it appeared geometrically uniform. From my perspective, the right end of the line started low in the lower right quadrant of the circle, and was roughly perpendicular to a 0- to 180-degree axis of my line of sight, extending to the left, well beyond the edge of the circle, and in overall length was roughly slightly larger than the diameter of the circle.
By the third or fourth day, a smaller concentric circle segment appeared inside the larger circle. Again, this pattern revealed itself gradually, as the day went on. Again assuming my line of sight as a 0 - 180 axis, this circle segment began at about 30 degrees, and extended counterclockwise to about 160 degrees, in sort of a "letter C" shape. This smaller circular segment did not transect the straight line, which was lower in the larger circle. The smaller circular segment's diameter was roughly 3/4 to 2/3 the diameter of the large circle.
I pointed out this strange pattern to several of my co-workers, and we all agreed it was pretty unusual, but didn't give it much other attention at the time. My personal speculation was that it must have been formed by some thermal effect, with the straight line being due to some kind of piping or something under the surface.
I thought it curious (especially after having an inexplicable multiple UFO sighting several years earlier), but didn't give it much further thought until about five months later, when I stumbled upon a report on the Internet of an ice circle in Churchville, MD (about 50 miles to the northeast) during the same period of cold weather in Maryland. That circle appeared on a smaller farm pond, and had a short, straight line extending from one edge of the circle, pointing north. That report, posted by a researcher of crop circles, pointed out that the circle with the short line happened to be the meteorological symbol for ice. A photo of that formation showed it as a whiter band against darker ice, unlike mine, which was darker against lighter. The edges of that circle (at least in the web site's photos) were less clearly defined than the formation I saw, although the width appeared uniform. The report also led me to links to numerous reports, mostly from Canada, and mostly on farm ponds, of numerous such ice circles, all within the last few years.
When I saw the report, it was summer, and the ice and the circle were very long gone, but I walked to the pond and inspected it more closely. At that time, the water was clear and shallow, and no piping was visible. I paced off the length of the "third-base-to-home" side of the pond for my estimate of its size. I checked with a compass, and the straight line I saw was also at least roughly in a North-South alignment. I don't know for sure if the ice was solid enough to support the weight of a human being, although I doubt it, and I couldn't see any footprints on the icy-snowy surface at the time of my observation, although I could faintly detect tracks of geese and other waterfowl even from my distant observation point.
For whatever it's worth, the Churchville location is only a few miles from the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and my Greenbelt location is about a mile from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
As with my earlier UFO sightings, I don't know the cause of this phenomenon, and I have no "conventional" explanation that makes sense. What really strikes me as strange, in retrospect, is that the second circle and the straight line seemed to appear before my eyes, even though I wasn't watching it continuously, and there was no additional snowfall to cover any pre-existing formations after the snow that preceded my first notice of the large circle.
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