I farm about 340 acres in western Iowa. Been working this land since 1981, took it over from my father. Corn and soybeans mostly, some hay. Good land, flat as a table, drainage is decent. Normal operation, nothing fancy. My property runs north to south, and to the east I border a section that used to belong to the Hofmann family. They sold it in 1992 to some German company, biomedical outfit called Schneider BioTech or something like that. They put up fencing all around it, posted signs every fifty feet. No trespassing, authorized personnel only, the whole nine yards. Never saw anyone working the land though. Just let it sit there, couple hundred acres going to weeds. My wife thought it was weird they'd buy farmland and not farm it. I figured they were holding it for development or maybe planning some kind of facility. Didn't think much about it until the spring of 1993.
I was out planting corn, early May. Working the eastern edge of my property, right up against their fence line. It was late afternoon, sun was getting low, and I happened to look over toward their field while I was turning the tractor around. There was something moving out there. Something big. At first I thought maybe they'd brought in equipment, finally doing something with the land. But the movement was wrong for machinery. Too fluid, too organic. I stopped the tractor and stood up to get a better look. It was maybe a quarter mile away, near the center of their property. And it was massive. Had to be at least as big as my combine, maybe bigger. Long and cylindrical, moving through the field in this undulating motion. Like watching a snake move, but scaled up to something enormous. The body was segmented, I could see ridges running along its length catching the evening light.
I watched it for maybe five minutes. It moved slowly, deliberately, making this path through the weeds and wild grass. The front end, I guess you'd call it the head, was slightly tapered, and it seemed to be pushing through the soil as much as moving over it. Every so often it would rear up, maybe ten or fifteen feet in the air, then come back down and continue moving. The color was hard to pin down from that distance. Pale, grayish-brown, with a wet sheen to it like it was covered in mucus. When it reared up, I could see the underside was lighter, almost white. No legs that I could see, no appendages. Just this massive segmented body moving like a earthworm, if an earthworm could be the size of farm equipment. I didn't know what the hell I was looking at. Part of me wanted to drive over there, get a closer look. But something about the way it moved, the sheer size of it, kept me in my seat. I just watched until it moved behind a rise in their field and I lost sight of it.
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