People around the city Tuesday were trying to figure out who carved mysterious designs in the snow on the Green overnight. The snow patterns, which looked like the crop circle formations found in farmers’ field around the world, dotted the Green from Chapel Street to the center fountain.
“It’s kind of hard to miss,” said Steve Santana of Seymour, who sat near the fountain Tuesday afternoon, looking at the designs.
“It looks like somebody was having fun. They knew what they were doing. Or maybe a space ship landed here last night,” Santana said. “Those are quite the patterns.”
City spokeswoman Anna Mariotti said the snow formations were not a city art project and that people at City Hall did not know who was responsible for them.
“It is one of the many things that makes New Haven special,” Mariotti said of the mystery.
One of the patterns was a swirling design, with shoveled-out rows several feet wide. Other designs involved random circles, large and small, connected by straight, shoveled lines.
“Whatever placed them there was aware of its surroundings,” said Colin Andrews of Guilford, an author and expert on crop circle formations around the world. He visited the Green Tuesday at the request of WFSB-TV for a story the TV station was doing on the formations.
“The designs were placed with some accuracy with respect to the monument and the sidewalks in the center of the Green, but the precision of the actual designs lacked preciseness, which has always been evident in the several thousands of unexplained crop circles that I’ve witnessed in many countries around the planet.”
His conclusion? “This was clearly done by people having some fun,” Andrews said. Continued…
By mid-afternoon, sunny skies and higher temperatures were starting to impair the overall effect of the snow circles.
Even so, Brian McMurphy of East Haven did a double-take as he walked past.
“That’s interesting. Was it aliens?” he asked. “That one over there looks like an engineering symbol or something.”
Crop circles have been a topic of great debate for decades. Many people consider them nothing more than elaborate hoaxes, while others believe they’re a sign from some unknown source.
Contact reporter Jim Shelton at 203-789-5664.
( via nhregister.com )