Have aliens landed in west New York? That's the most likely reaction to a set of images of "pond circles" that recently went viral after a woman in Eden, N.Y. took the pictures and sent them to a local TV station, setting off a flurry of wild speculation in the community and beyond.
Peggy Gervase told told local news channel WGRZ that she discovered several perfectly-formed circle holes in the middle of a frozen pond backing up to her home when she stepped out onto her deck Friday night.
"I took a couple pictures of the pond and I put it on Facebook because I'd never seen this before in our pond," Gervase told WGRZ. "It's eerie, in a way, and cool in a way. It's crop circles, crop, pond, water, ice circles -- just circles."
Once the photos were posted to WGRZ's Facebook page, users began offering an assortment of bizarre explanations for the mysterious phenomenon, including elephant footprints, fish gas, and, of course, extraterrestrials. For the time being, Gervase remains unconvinced it was aliens. "I'm not that far gone yet," she said.
While observers are quick to point out the obvious similarities between the strange perfect circle formations and crop circles, experts say there are far better explanations for the "pond circles" beyond human or alien intervention.
"Circles are an interesting phenomenon because you get quite frequently the opposite effect in slow currents in a river, say, at a bend where the water slows down on the outside of the bend," said MarcDantonio, a photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network.
"The opposite effect I am referring to are 'ice circles,' and you can get perfect round circles of ice spinning oddly separately from the rest of the ice in the body of water as if a laser cut a small groove in a perfect circle all the way around to separate it from the rest of the ice," Dantonio explained to The Huffington Post.
Dantonio said that often sporadically occurring springs of warm water or slower moving currents in ponds can cause such peculiarities.
"Slower moving water is more resistant to freezing than completely still water," said Dantonio. "Given the right conditions, where freezing has just begun, my personal feeling is that these ice holes are really areas where some underground springs that have been creating small currents in the pond have moved the water just enough to prevent it from freezing at the same time as the rest of the pond."