I can't explain it, but I too have had some corn oddities. I have a few that don't know if they're ears or tassles. They've kind of done both. These are the "suckers" (I forgot what they're actually called, the shoot off the side of the main stalk). I picked one last week that was an ear, relatively well formed on the bottom half, empty on the top, growing up out of it's husk, and at the bottom of the ear, there was kind of the beginning of another ear inside the husk. We peeled off the husk, and an extra layer of kernels, and had a pretty tasty half ear of corn.