Perhaps aliens got lost on the way to Area 51. 
 
 An elaborate crop circle in a barley field about six miles southeast of Salinas appeared to have landed from out of nowhere Monday, when a YouTube video depicting its alleged discovery made its way onto the Internet. 
 
 By late afternoon, news of the circle outside Chualar had drawn curious onlookers from throughout the Salinas Valley. 
 
 Stamped in the middle of the field, the design covered about an acre and looked like a strange computer chip with dots in the middle that some Internet observers interpreted as either Braille or Morse code. 
 
 Most crop circle enthusiasts were quick to call it a hoax. But with the landowner apparently unaware of how it happened, theories were multiplying all over the Internet by press time. 
 
 Security guards from San Jose-based Echelon Security were outside the property Monday morning. They said they could not reveal their client, only that they had been hired to stop the area from "becoming a circus." 
 
 Ben Johnson, one of the guards, said the circle appeared either Sunday or Monday morning. 
 
 The guards were happy to lead reporters to the circle. From ground level it looked like nothing but trampled-on grass cut at different angles. 
 
 A representative from the company at its San Jose headquarters said he could not reveal when the firm was hired or who the client was. 
 
 The property belongs to Scott and Debbie Anthony. Reached at home where she was ill in bed, Debbie Anthony said she'd heard about the spectacle but knew nothing other than what she was seeing in news reports. Scott Anthony could not be reached for comment. 
 
 A man who identified himself as Hector at the ranch office said he had not been able to get out to the field to inspect the design. 
 
 In the 2½-minute YouTube video posted Monday morning, two men appear to drive along Chualar Canyon Road before sunrise and see flashing lights in a field. 
 
 They get out of a compact car, hop a fence and enter a pushed-down area of weeds on a cultivated field. 
 
 "Dude," says one man, "are you seeing this?" 
 
 Among the first people to spot the crop circle from above were Julie and Pat Belanger, co-owners of the 111th Aerial Photography Squadron company. 
 
 Julie Belanger said they were flying in a Robinson R44 helicopter from South County Airport in San Martin toward Carmel when they spotted the circle. 
 
 "Flying through that area is not always very exciting," Belanger said, "and then, all of a sudden, that thing's there." 
 
 She said she had never seen anything like it in 20 years of aerial photography. 
 
 "I don't know about aliens," she said, "but someone very creative put it there." 
 
 Joe Pezzini, chief operating officer of Ocean Mist Farms, one of the largest growers in Monterey County, said he'd "never heard about (crop circles) around here." 
 
 The circles are typically discounted as hoaxes, and at times their creators come forward. But there are dedicated researchers throughout the country who try to verify their authenticity. 
 
 Jeffrey Wilson of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers Association said there was a "dead giveaway" this circle was a hoax. 
 
 He said it was too aligned with the man-made road, looked like human-invented Braille in the center, and the YouTube clip seemed similar to guerrilla-marketing techniques Wilson has seen. 
 
 "My guess is that ... it is commissioned work for an advertisement," he said. "Or a commissioned work for a production company making a documentary on crop circles or for some kind of film." 
 
 Wilson said it seemed to fit the mold of one professional crop circle-making group, Circlemakers.org, which has done work for the BBC, Nike, History Channel and others. 
 
 An email sent late Monday to the company was not answered by press time. 
 
 Crop circle researcher Nancy Talbott of the BLT Research Team in Cambridge, Mass., said that at first glance the Chualar circle appeared man-made. 
 
 "I looks very mechanical," she said. "... It doesn't look the way most of the genuine circles I've worked on look. That doesn't mean I'm right." 
 
 She said it could only be verified as authentic if she and her team could inspect the field and run tests. 
 
 Talbott said her group, which has studied thousands of crop circles since the 1990s, looks for physical changes in plants and soils. She said her group believes the changes are caused by very brief bursts of extremely intense heat. 
 
 Crop circles have been a phenomenon among UFO and paranormal activity enthusiasts since the mid-1970s, according to a lengthy 2009 article on the subject in Smithsonian magazine. 
 
 Theories about their origins include suggestions the circles are landing platforms for UFOs or Mayan symbols signaling the end of the world. 
 
 Yet there have been scattered reports of strange symbols in agriculture fields since the 17th century, the Smithsonian article said. 
 
 The Monterey County Sheriff's Office, the California Highway Patrol and Salinas Municipal Airport said they had not received reports about the circle and no neighbors reported hearing any abnormal sounds. 
 
 Security guards with Echelon said they did not receive reports of vandalism. Their main task was to guard the scene until an expert could arrive to determine how exactly the circle was made. 
 
 Staff writer Virginia Hennessey contributed to this report. ||||| Julie Belanger shot this photo of the Chualar crop circles from a helicopter Monday morning. (Dec. 30, 2013) 
 
 Cue "The X-Files" song. Mysterious, giant crop circles have appeared on a Chualar farm and startled observers into wondering if aliens landed in the Salinas Valley. 
 
 VIDEO: Locals wonder who -- or what -- created Chualar farm crop circles 
 
 Two friends were driving on Chualar Canyon Road south of Salinas just before dawn Sunday when they witnessed strange bursts of green light flashing on the horizon. The duo turned on a video camera, pulled over, hopped a barbed-wire fence, and walked toward the lights. 
 
 "Dude, are you seeing this?" one friend said. "Dude, this is a crop circle." 
 
 PHOTOS: Intricate crop circles in Chualar 
 
 The friends investigated the field until they panicked and sprinted away. The duo wanted to remain anonymous, and they uploaded a video of their experience on YouTube under the name Cannot Say. 
 
 "Needless to say, pretty wild. But we slipped away and it's too good not to share," Cannot Say wrote. 
 
 No one realized how intricate the crop circles were until professional photographer Julie Belanger took a helicopter ride Monday morning. Belanger had not heard about the circles and she flew in a helicopter over the farm by coincidence. 
 
 Belanger said her first immediate thought was, "What is it?" 
 
 "It was beautiful. Quite beautiful," Belanger told KSBW. "I believe it's possible that aliens exist, but I don't know if they would bother making a crop circle to give us a message." 
 
 Curious onlookers grew in number Monday afternoon as word of the crop circles spread. People stood on top of vehicles and fences to get a better view, and security guards kept gawkers from entering the field. 
 
 "I'm always willing to believe. It looks like aliens to me," Manuel Madrid of Gonzales said. 
 
 While alien believers marveled, skeptics sounded off to debunk any extraterrestrial Chualar theories. 
 
 KSBW.com reader Russell Martin commented, "The Ancient Chualarians have always been known to be a bunch of merry pranksters." 
 
 Michael Myers commented, "Yes they mastered Intergalactic travel and can't make a perfect circle." 
 
 Paige Penrose chimed in, "That looks really neat, regardless of who did it! Great design." 
 
 As of Monday night, no one had stepped forward to claim responsibility for the crop circles. ||||| Published on Dec 30, 2013 
 
 VIDEO UPDATE Jan 5,2013, 9:30pm PST: 
 
 
 
 So, yes, it was us at NVIDIA. We set out to create something iconic to represent our engineers' hard work on our just-announced Tegra K1 mobile processor. It's nice to see we captured the imagination of a decent-size audience in the process. 
 
 
 
 The pair you see in the video work at NVIDIA. And while it was meant to feel like a "Blair Witch" discovery moment, we're not expecting any Oscars. This was shot in one take - on a cell phone camera - before the circle was complete, so it provides just a limited view. 
 
 
 
 The image in the circle is a pictograph of our new "impossibly advanced" Tegra processor. It makes so many advances that, to us, it seems almost extraterrestrial. The image itself has the number 192 both in braille in the center and in the clock positions of the spheres orbiting the circle. 192 is, of course, the chip's number of Kepler GPU cores (cores only seen in desktops, workstations and supercomputers up until now). We had revealed that fact back in July at the SIGGRAPH conference. 
 
 
 
 We couldn't have done this without the highly cooperative landowner in Chualar, Calif., who let us use the barley field that he planted to refresh the soil (which he was intending to mow this winter). We also got a lot of help from the warm, gracious local residents who helped us host this art. We can't thank them all enough for their hospitality. 
 
 
 
 If you want to see a behind-the-scenes video go to: 
 
 http://youtu.be/5LJCTnNmT48 
 
 
 
 ----------------------------------------------------- 
 
 Original Video Text: 
 
 
 
 A friend and I were driving on Chualar Canyon Road south of Salinas, California before sunrise, and THIS happened. Needless to say, pretty wild, but we slipped away and it's too good not to share. Created this account since I don't want this tied to me. Still not sure what to make of it. ||||| Story highlights An elaborate crop circle appears on a farm in northern California 
 
 The farm's owner doesn't know how it got there 
 
 A Braille transcriber says it's the number 192 written repeatedly 
 
 By Tuesday afternoon, the intricate design had been plowed under 
 
 An elaborate crop circle sculpted into farmland two hours south of San Francisco is no more, having been mowed down to the dismay of hundreds who flocked to glimpse the unexplained site earlier this week. 
 
 On Tuesday afternoon, the intricate design etched into a field of barley was plowed back into the earth. 
 
 The property owner, farmer Scott Anthony, 58, ordered a crew to plow the field, CNN affiliate KSBW reported. 
 
 Debra Falanga, a crop circle enthusiast who "definitely believe(s) they are created by other-than-human-beings" -- said Wednesday she's disappointed that it wasn't kept intact so that people can "go in and experience the energy." 
 
 "When something unusual like this happens, why not let people experience it?" said Falanga, speculating the landowner wants his life "back to normal." 
 
 Still, during the short time it did exist, the crop circle attracted plenty of attention. 
 
 It was spotted Monday morning by Julie Belanger, a photographer, as she and her husband flew over in a helicopter. 
 
 "What is it?" was her first thought, she told KSBW. 
 
 Whatever it was, "it was beautiful, quite beautiful," she said, adding that they came upon it by chance. She said she was skeptical that the crop circle was evidence of something otherworldly. 
 
 "I believe it's possible that aliens exist, but I don't know if they would bother making a crop circle to give us a message," she said. 
 
 If they did, what's the message that was carved into Anthony's 2,000-acre farm outside the tiny town of Chualar? 
 
 Falanga -- who called KSBW after seeing a picture -- described it as a "very detailed" depiction of the number 192 written over and over in Braille and in such a way to orient the top and bottom of the circle. 
 
 "The Braille was so accurately portrayed ... That's hard to do manually..., never mind in a crop circle," Falanga, a certified Braille transcriber from New Jersey, told CNN. "It looks like a ticker tape of the number 192, 192, 192." 
 
 What to make of that repeated number (if that's what it is) is another mystery. Falanga said some speculate it is related to the number 192 found in Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses (a fact familiar to many in nearby Silicon Valley). Or it could have something to do with the radioisotope iridium, which has 192 in its symbol. 
 
 The theories don't stop there -- including some people's belief that this is all much ado about nothing. 
 
 Anthony described the elaborate design sculpted into one to two acres of his barley field as a lot of squares and rectangles within a large circle. 
 
 "To me, it looks like a computer chip or something like that," Anthony told CNN in a telephone interview Tuesday. "To be that intricate in design, it kind of baffles me as to how that was done." 
 
 Anthony said he was out of town on vacation the week before the discovery, having been alerted to it by a call from an employee on his farm 10 miles southeast of Salinas. 
 
 "He said, 'Hey, there's a buncha stuff out in the middle of the field,' so when I went up there I go, 'Ohhhh, shoot!'," he said. 
 
 How did it get there? The farmer said he has no idea, adding "it didn't look burned to me, it just looked like it was pushed over." 
 
 Soon, the news vans showed up, followed by the curious, some of whom stood on fences to get a better view. Anthony called security agents to keep people from crossing onto his farmland, where he also grows broccoli, snap peas and lettuce. 
 
 "It's a food safety issue," he said. 
 
 That didn't stop the roadsides from filling with the curious, many of them self-appointed experts. 
 
 "It looks like aliens to me," Manuel Madrid of nearby Gonzales told KSBW. 
 
 "Definitely pranksters," said Brandon Brooks of Chualar. "This is kind of a strange place to have anything out of the ordinary happen." 
 
 The latter theory got some support from Jim Gillott, who told KSBW that he had seen 20 to 30 people with ladders in the field in the days before the design was discovered. 
 
 And Jake Gain said he too had seen evidence that humans were involved. 
 
 "Every time I drove by, I saw them either parked over there," he said, pointing, "or people in the field just walking around, and it looked like they had little GPSes or something," he said. 
 
 And someone identified solely as "Cannot Say" posted a 2½-minute video on YouTube that shows green flashes of light emanating from what appears to be the field before dawn on Monday. "Dude, this is a crop circle," says one of two men in the video as they clamber from their car into the field. 
 
 The founding publisher of Skeptic magazine was unimpressed. 
 
 "It looks like a couple of kids did this," Michael Shermer told CNN. "Short of having a video of it, it's hard to prove that kids did it. So, in that case, we have to make a choice: what's more likely? That aliens landed in Chualar, California, or that a couple of pranksters made it? 
 
 "We have zero evidence of aliens landing anywhere; we have lots of evidence of pranksters hoaxing." 
 
 Such circles can be made by simply dragging a rope attached to a board over the grass, he said. 
 
 Still, he noted, such stories are attractive to many. "People seem less intrigued by pranksters than they do by aliens, so it's a compelling story for people to think that we're not alone."
– (Updated: This was later revealed as a PR stunt.) A "very detailed" and "quite beautiful" crop circle drew hundreds of curiosity seekers to a farm outside the small town of Chualar, Calif., this week for a fleeting look at the crop circle, which was mowed down Tuesday. Word of the crop circle emerged Monday, via this YouTube video and after a photographer happened to fly over Scott Anthony's farm in a helicopter, KSBW reports, and it drew all the usual alien invasion theories. What was it? The number 192, repeated in Braille in an intricate circular design, says a crop circle enthusiast and certified Braille transcriber. "It looks like a ticker tape of the number 192, 192, 192." What does it mean? Some think it's a reference to the fact that 192 is found in IP addresses; Chualar is close to the Silicon Valley. As for how it got there, Anthony is clueless, noting that he was on vacation before it appeared and telling CNN, "it didn't look burned to me, it just looked like it was pushed over." One local says he saw a lot of people in the field with ladders just before the crop circle was spotted, and another backs him up: "I saw them ... in the field just walking around, and it looked like they had little GPSes or something." A crop circle researcher tells the Monterey Herald it's obvious this circle was man-made (he cited its careful alignment with the road, among other things), and theorizes it's probably some sort of advertisement—or was. Anthony says he ordered the barley field plowed because all the people trying to access his land created a "food safety issue." (Click to read about the potential truth behind a similar mystery: desert fairy circles.)