Jackson County Wisconsin UFO Landing Site, Fun Stuff You Find on a Forest Inventory 
You don’t often see UFO landing sites that are nearly a mile in diameter, and had this one not been so large I might have missed it.
A while back we were doing an inventory for Wisconsin’s largest private landowner on about 30,000 acres of their forest land that they were considering selling.
Before heading into an area we do spend a bit of time on planning; analyzing GIS photos, maps, and more to determine the best access points, travel routes, timelines, and number of man hours required for each block of timber.
This is when I came across a large peculiar site next to one of the forest blocks that we would be measuring in Jackson County.
This site appeared to be a nearly a perfect circle approximately ¾ of a mile in diameter, certainly not a natural site.
In some areas of the state a circle like this is not unusual with centerpoint irrigation systems looking similar to this from a satellite or aerial photo image, but this is a much forested county with very few farms, and certainly no big time farms with irrigation systems.
The local natives of this area, the Ho Chunk or Winnebago Indians have interesting burial grounds that can sometimes be picked out on an aerial photo, but they are certainly not this large or distinctive either.
Well when the time came to do the sample plots on the tract of land that our client owned adjacent to this site, I made sure that my son Nick, one of our Foresters, got the assignment to do these and that I was available to assist.
I happened to talk to my mother, who lives near here, the night before doing these plots and tell her that we would be checking out more than just timber the next day, so she volunteered to come out and meet us for lunch.
That morning I dropped Nick off at the other end of the tract that he would be measuring and told him to work his way toward the UFO site. Then I drove around to the other side, picking up mom in Black River Falls, before finding my way into the UFO site from the west side.
When we got there we did not find any scorched earth, or any X Files type G men, the healing had begun, just a huge nearly flat circle with a deep depression near the center with a pond started in it.
The topsoil was gone and there were occasional piles of black rock rubble here and there with grass growing throughout the site. There were also occasional patches of young aspen which are generally one of the primary successional tree species that get started after a major disturbance like this. Clearly the disturbance happened at least 20 years ago for these trees to be here now.
After driving around the trail that circles the site we found Nick emerging from our client's property ready for lunch, we then drove to the nearby county park to enjoy a picnic lunch with a special guest.
It is here that we discovered the origin of our UFO site, at this park was a large and very deep lake at the site of one of Wisconsin’s few iron mines that was started in 1969 and concluded in 1983 and as the big information board explained the large circle north of here was actually a tailings pond and not really the largest UFO landing site as we had been jokingly referring to it as.
One great thing about traveling around doing forestry work, you always find a wealth of interesting things, even if they are just a UFO site in your imagination.
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