Just before New Year's Eve 2013, an aerial photographer named Julie Belanger was flying over the farmland south of Salinas when she spotted something in a barley field near the small community of Chualar that stopped her cold. A massive, intricate pattern had been carved into the crop overnight — circular, precise and unmistakably extraterrestrial in character.

"It was beautiful," Belanger said. "Quite beautiful." PhoneArena She also noted, carefully, that while she believed in the possibility of alien life, she wasn't sure they would bother making crop circles to communicate with us.

Fair point. As it turned out, they hadn't.

The Pattern

The crop circle near Chualar, six miles south of Salinas, contained a stylized image of a computer chip and the number 192 in Braille. MajorGeeks Three large dots on the outer perimeter were positioned at the clock positions of 1, 9 and 2. The same number was encoded in Braille over and over throughout the design, hidden in plain sight for anyone who could read it.

Word spread fast. Curious onlookers grew in number as the story circulated. People stood on top of vehicles and fences to get a better view, and security guards kept gawkers from entering the field. MajorGeeks The farm's owner, Scott Anthony, claimed to have no idea how the pattern appeared. He hired the security guards and eventually made a decision that sent one corner of the internet into genuine grief — he plowed the whole thing under.

The story quickly went global, with websites and television stations as far away as Mongolia and Hungary reporting it. More than a few people told reporters they had a simple explanation for what they saw: aliens. NVIDIA Blog When the field was plowed over, one commenter on a CNN story actually expressed concern that humanity had just destroyed an integrated circuit more advanced than anything we had ever built.

The Confession

On January 5, 2014, at a press conference in Las Vegas ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage and came clean.

"This is a confession," he said — and then explained how his company came to create a crop circle in a field of barley near Salinas. MediaPost Publications

"I told the engineers that Tegra K1 is impossibly advanced, it's practically built by aliens," Huang said. "I want you guys to go out and launch this product, to put a marketing campaign behind it that rivals the technical contributions." PCWorld

The Tegra K1 was Nvidia's new mobile processor — a chip with 192 graphics cores that used the same Kepler architecture as some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, packed into a tiny mobile package. NVIDIA Blog The 192 encoded in the crop circle was the core count. The number hidden in Braille throughout the design was the product number. The entire thing was a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Nvidia hired some of the world's best crop circle artists to execute the design NVIDIA Blog and even had two employees make a staged "discovery" video — posted to an anonymous account with the caption "A friend and I were driving on Chualar Canyon Road south of Salinas before sunrise, and THIS happened. Needless to say, pretty wild" — to help seed the mystery online.

It worked beyond anyone's expectations. The story went global, and when the circle was eventually plowed under, the internet mourned. NVIDIA Blog

Why Salinas?

Of all the farm fields in California, why here? The Salinas Valley's flat, open, agricultural landscape was perfect for the scale of the design and for aerial photography. The area's identity as a working farming community — not a tech hub — made the appearance of what looked like a circuit board in the middle of the lettuce fields all the more surreal and arresting.

It was also a nod, intentional or not, to the long history of this valley as a place where things grow. Nvidia chose farmland to plant the idea that a new kind of harvest was coming — one measured not in bushels but in computing cores.

A Local Legacy

Nvidia today is one of the most valuable companies in the world, the engine behind the artificial intelligence revolution, worth trillions. Back in January 2014, it was a respected but not yet legendary chip company trying to break into the mobile market with a product it believed in.

The Chualar crop circle didn't just generate press coverage — it generated wonder. For a few days, the world looked at a barley field south of Salinas and genuinely wasn't sure what to think. That's a remarkable thing for a marketing campaign to accomplish, and it happened right here.

The field has long since been replanted. But if you drive down Chualar Canyon Road on a clear morning, it's hard not to look at the rows of crops and wonder — just for a second — what else might be hiding in plain sight.