As you may know, Eastern Oregon was Gifted with the Sri Yantra Mandala Formation in August 1990. It arrived in a dry wilderness lake bed east of Steens Mountain, and consisted of 13.3 MILES of lines, each 10" wide and scored to a depth of 3 inches in the hardpan. The graphic below is the Sri Yantra, and the Pattern discovered in the dry earth was identical in all respects.
Four jokers claimed it - the joke was that they alleged they pulled a 'garden cultivator' like a plow for OVER 13 MILES, in an officially designated Wilderness Area, in the August desert heat - where not even cars are permitted. They concocted the story that they hauled all their gear 3/4-mile to the site each day. (It turned out that that was one of many discrepancies in their story, for they'd allegedly told a sergeant from the Air National Guard that their campsite was actually two miles from the Formation.) A second discrepancy: In their initial 'confession letter' to the newspaper they wrote that all four of them were hitched up simultaneously to pull the cultivator, but the video shows only two of them attempting to pull it. Another one I found of interest is the apparent major exertion seen to be required to gouge a thin 1/2"-deep line into the earth (as seen in the video) Vs that needed to create a trench 10" wide and 3" deep - apparently without effort, according to the same video. (The reason the 'real' line was easy to dig out is because it was already there - they had apparently filled in the trench with the soft dirt, and hoped to give the illusion that they were digging the furrow with their plow.) These 'variations', as well as various others, stretched my own and others' credibility well beyond believability. One can reasonably conclude that the only creativity these four expressed was through their over-active imaginations and not through any grand desert artistry.
Interestingly, the skies above the Sri Yantra are regularly used as part of the Idaho Air National Guard's pilot training area. According to the lieutenant pilot who first spotted the huge Pattern on August 10, no pilots had reported a design-in-progress; the Pattern had simply 'appeared' one day
