Mystery Rock Sneaks into Corn Field

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- A big rock has spouted in a farm field in Cedar Rapids, creating a big mystery. It wasn't there last year. 'We picked the corn last fall and the field was fine. We came back this spring to do some field work, and this big rock was here,' said Bob Taylor, 51, a hired man for Balderston Farms of Central City.

That was four weeks ago.

Taylor, who guesstimated the boulder at 15,000 pounds, said maybe it was a meteorite.

But the rock is clean, not burned. It's sitting on the field, not in a crater."

Taylor said the rock didn't rise out of the ground as stones tend to do when a field is plowed because it's too big for that.

Taylor wondered if the boulder rolled off a truck that was hauling it to a housing development across the street.

One fence post leans a little toward the rock, as if it might have been grazed by the boulder as it rolled off a truck, down the embankment and into the field.

Still, the clues for that scenario don't seem real evident, either.

"Why didn't it make some kind of indentation from the road to here?" Taylor asked. "That's the mystery."

There are scratch marks on the boulder, as if it was lifted by a machine. But it's unlikely someone plopped the rock in the field with a crane in preparation for another housing development.

Randy Balderston has been renting the ground to farm for 15 years, and nobody told him or Taylor about it.

"Nobody's said anything about it," Taylor said. "Nobody's claimed it. Nobody's moved it."

For now, Taylor said, they'll farm around it.

"I can't lift it," he said. "We figure, whoever owns it, a contractor or whatever, will come back for it."
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Information from: The Gazette, http://www.gazetteonline.com/