Foil Hat Ninja

“Yesterday’s news is only yesterday’s news if you heard about it yesterday.”—William Randolph Hearst

 

Almost exactly one year after the appearance of the Chilbolton-Arecibo “response” crop formation, another remarkable formation showed up just a few miles away in the fields of Crabwood Farms on August 15, 2002. This one also contained a message written in ASCII binary code, but this message could be interpreted as being a rebuttal to the one from Chilbolton. Rather than just containing raw data, this message was actually a message – one that was easily translated into English. For those of you who speak fluent ASCII binary, you can see the whole thing for yourself here. For those few of you not familiar with this language, here it is in plain old English.

“Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. (Unknown word) There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING.”

The word that I have identified as unknown is interpreted as BELIEVE by some, but others think that’s a reach. Their best attempts at decoding it have yielded EEULEVE or EELIJVE or other equally meaningless words. If it was meant to be BELIEVE, they say, it was seriously muddled in the creation process.

If you’re wondering about the bizarre use of capital and lowercase letters, you’re not alone. You can easily check the accuracy of this if you like. The first four numbers for each letter are either 0100 for uppercase, or 0110 for lower. The final four numbers designate the actual letter. More on this later.

But what has probably grabbed you attention more than the code, which is contained in the disk portion of the formation, is the face. It’s certainly a far more striking feature and easily identifiable to most of us. It is, of course, a rather impressive depiction (given that it was done in wheat stalks) of one of the grays, and a sinister looking one at that. Considering the contents of the message, it would seem that whoever was responsible for this glyph was giving us a warning about them.

So who is responsible for this thing? Naturally, many claim that it’s just an elaborate hoax, including some who take crop formations seriously. Their main two reasons for rejecting its authenticity are that the rather cryptic message is given in plain English (or at least English in ASCII code*), and that the face is so menacing. They take this as an indication that whoever created it had a clear agenda. Why these two things are taken as proof of a hoax is beyond me.

Many also assume that the three “stars” beside the lower left portion of the face designate a high military rank, usually interpreted as a three-star general. I’m also not sure why they think that. My first impression was that they probably represented the three belt stars of Orion. That is often said by abductees to be the alleged home of the grays. The flaw in this theory is that those three actual stars do not form a straight line as the circles in the formation do. Maybe we’re all wrong and none of us really know what those three dots designate.

And then there’s the eyes. They have pupils. The grays are supposed to have solid black eyes. Some claim that this is clear evidence that this must be a fake. I would suggest that they are using faulty logic. Pranksters most likely would have made the alien look as much like the iconic version of a gray as possible in order to make their fraud appear more credible, not to mention that solid eyes would be much easier to make than ones with more detail. Easier + more authentic makes a hard argument to dismiss for why a fake would have solid eyes.

One last piece of evidence from the naysayers is that there were reports of people hearing a helicopter in the area on the night in question. That may well be true, but this isn’t proof of a fraud all by itself. There’s no way that this formation was created by any sort of helicopter known to humanity. And if their argument is that this helicopter flew the human crop circle artists into the area, then where did it land? A helicopter couldn’t land anywhere any closer than a car could park without leaving evidence of its presence in the field. A car would have been a much less obtrusive means of transportation. On top of that, other witnesses reported hearing “whooshing” noises and seeing swirling lights over the field that night.

None of this proves who did or did not create this formation. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to include it because I’ve always been a little surprised at how quickly some people have rejected its possible otherworldly origin, apparently just because its message doesn’t fit in with their preconceived notions. I guess it just goes to show that it isn’t just the skeptics and hardcore materialists who can be closed-minded.

Easy for me to say. I guess. I’m still not convinced that we aren’t just being screwed with by an unknown intelligence (intellegentia incognito) for reasons we cannot yet fathom.

Some further evidence for either the paranormal origin of the message or the amazing aptitude of the jokesters is some of the mathematical data included in the formation. To begin with, it’s helpful to note some of the basic measurements.

• It is 390 feet tall and 240 feet wide.
• The disk is 100 feet across.
• The message contains 26 words, including the unknown word and ampersand.
• There are 59 horizontal lines crossing the formation.
• There are 33 lines in the disk.
• There are 151 ASCII characters in the code.

If you play around with these, you can find the following.

• 59 х 33 = 1947, the year of the Roswell UFO crash in New Mexico.
• 59-33 = 26, the number of words in the disk.
• 33% of 59 = 19.47.
• 151 х 33 = 4,983, which is the number of miles from the Crabwood formation to the Roswell crash site, give or take a few, although it’s only fair to point out that Europeans measure distance in kilometers. Perhaps it’s relevant that 240/390 = .615, which is very close to .621, the number of miles per kilometer.
• 151 + 33 = 184, which is the number of days in a year up to July 3^rd, the approximate date of the Roswell UFO crash.
• 33.33 is the approximate latitude of the Roswell crash, and 33.33 х π = 104.66, the longitude of the crash site, or at least close enough for rock ‘n’ roll.

This source also listed a few more mathematical correspondences between Crabwood and Roswell, but I’m not convinced of their accuracy…or I just don’t get what they’re saying.

They also point out that the diameter of the disk times π equals its circumference. This doesn’t fill me with confidence in their mathematical acumen since this is true of all circles. However, what I’ve included here does all add up as far as I can tell. And, in the interest of fairness, even though I’m not sure that the message contains 151 characters (I tallied it at 155 – don’t forget to count those spaces), I included this calculation anyway because I must confess my ignorance of binary code, and so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Even if I’m right and they’re wrong, it’s still pretty darn close.

There’s one more calculation of theirs that I’ll include at the end of the last part of this article because that’s where it’s most relevant. Speaking of that last part, here it is now.

There is one theory put forth by the man who seems to have devoted the most research toward this glyph which states that the timing of the Crabwood formation was set to correspond with the 50^th anniversary of squadrons of UFOs being seen flying over Washington DC on a nightly basis in late July of 1952. If so, it was just over two weeks late in coming, but maybe the creators were running a little behind schedule. This researcher’s reasons for believing this are given in greatly simplified form below. I’ve omitted  some things because I just don’t find them to be compelling and/or significant, and I don’t want to waste time rebutting these questionable elements of the rebuttal.† Before we get started, I should also point out that he thinks that this anniversary indicates that these mass sightings were of ships being flown by the evil grays as a show of power.

First of all, there is the aforementioned (almost) exactly 50 years between late July of 1952 and mid August of 2002. Using a formula so convoluted that I won’t even attempt to explain it here, he deduced a numerical pattern from the irregular use of upper and lowercase letters in the code to come up with a number: 50.05. This is very close to the actual 50.01 years between the DC UFOs and the appearance of the Crabwood formation. However, he had to convert binary numbers to base-10, then to base-32 math and use the Mayan calendar to do it, so one can reasonably argue that you can make sense out of any seemingly random elements if you’re willing to look hard enough. That’s fair, although I must point out that he didn’t decide to convert to these numerical systems or use the Mayan calendar arbitrarily. Other elements suggestive of Mayan culture and timekeeping have appeared in other formations, and his reasons for the mathematical conversions aren’t that farfetched. The main problem for me here is that the Mayans never used binary, base-10 or base-32 math; they used base-20. Our “aliens” seem to be mixing their metaphors. It’s not like they couldn’t have just as easily used random capitalization to indicate the Mayan base-20 mathematical system. That would be far more convincing.

Also, most of those other Mayan-themed formations seemed to confirm, or were interpreted as confirming, the significance of the ending of the Mayan calendar in December of 2012. Since this came and went without incidence, either the interpretations of these symbols were wrong, or their creators were as duped by the importance of this event as some humans. Or, once again, it’s possible that they were just screwing with us. Naturally, I tend to find this to be the most likely possibility.

This same researcher also claims to have found a hidden calendar within the code that begins on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and also includes August 15, 1946, not sure why; July 28, 1952, gray aliens buzzing Washington; August 15, 2002, when the formation appeared, August 15, 2005, some other “Mayan” crop formations appeared; and August 15, 2047, yet to be determined. Make of this what you will.‡

I confess that I didn’t give his methods for determining these dates a thorough going over, so I would be a complete hypocrite to dispute them. Still, December of 2012 came and went more than two years ago, and even the most ardent supporters of Mayan prophecy have stopped talking about it by now. I guess we’ll have to wait until August of 2047 to see what happens, but if I’m still around I probably won’t be holding my breath for anything earthshattering.  I fear that this highly intelligent and diligent man has wasted a great deal of time and energy grasping at straws or falling for a very complicated joke. Time will tell.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that there was one more measurement made by the researcher who made all of the Crabwood-Roswell connections and also confirmed the value of π. It is this: the number of bits (0s and 1s) in the disk, 1208, times π is 3795. If you take this number of days and convert it into years, it’s 10.3. The day the Crabwood formation appeared, August 15, was the 227^th day of the year, or .6 of the way through the year. Basically, this means that it showed up in the year 2002.6. When you add the 10.3 to this, you get the year 2012.9 – the very end of 2012 when the Mayan calendar ran out. Cool, huh? Except, of course, that nothing happened.

Also, if you forget about converting years to decimals and just count the days, 3795 is 10 years and 142 days, if you remember to factor in leap days in ’04, ’08 and ’12. Adding that to August 15, 2002 gives us a date of January 4, 2013, just over two weeks past the dreaded December 21, 2012 Mayan Doomsday.

Two weeks late again? Now I think I’m starting to spot a pattern here.

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*Some find it odd that “aliens” would be communicating in ASCII binary code since it is only one type of binary code and, therefore, not universal. On the other hand, what language would we prefer they use? The Arecibo message was sent in ASCII code, so we started it. Whatever their motivations, they were communicating using the same method that we initiated.

†Some of this theory is also based on what I consider to be the highly unreliable information provided by “former” members of military intelligence who now claim to be on the side of government disclosure. A lot of what they have to say borders on the ridiculous to say the least, and I strongly suspect that they’re part of an ongoing government disinformation scam.

‡He also claims that this calendar code accounts for the confusion in being able to correctly identify the word BELIEVE. I would explain his reasoning, but I can’t make heads or tails of it myself.

 

“‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is one of the meanest things that you can say to a blind person.”—Nick Dresden

 

I love Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. With only some wooden planks and a bit of rope, they have managed to create some of the most incredible and complex works of art that the world has ever seen. And somewhere along the way, these working-class stiffs learned enough about binary code to figure out how to encrypt messages into their creations, and one of them had been dead for more than two years at the time.  Those guys are amazing.

But seriously, the people who think that these things are all the work of a handful of individuals who trespass on peoples’ land late at night, create them in the dark, destroying  crops in the process, and somehow never manage to get caught are delusional. And that doesn’t even take into account how incredibly complex some of these formations are. Sure, some of the ones that are known to have been manmade are pretty impressive, but some of the others have features that go beyond what is reasonable to suggest that a few pranksters could pull off in just a matter of hours. Some contain plants that have had their stalks woven together into thousands of individual braids and/or have had their physical structures altered at a molecular level. Both of these are a wee bit more complex than what you can do with boards and some rope in one night. For instance…

On August 14, 2001, a crop formation appeared in a field within a few hundred feet of the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire, England. This formation was unique in several ways. First, it was a depiction of a face. That was new. Also, it had been made using a “pixel” technique in which swirls of circular flattened and unflattened plants were used to create the image, complete with shading effects that demonstrate a remarkable attention to detail which Doug and Dave’s ghost must have had a hell of a time perfecting. Lastly, it bears some resemblance to the famous (or infamous) “Mars face,” which is either proof that intelligent life once existed on that planet or is merely a trick of light and shadow, depending on who you ask.

Multiple individuals have examined and analyzed these techniques and similarities ad nauseam, including a statistical analysis of how likely it is that hoaxers could have created this formation undetected right outside of a scientific installation equipped with security cameras. I have no intention of going through all of that here. It’s easy enough to find if you’re interested. Instead, I’ll just put the two images side by side and let the pictures speak for themselves. Personally, I don’t see that much of a resemblance, but that doesn’t matter. It’s what happened a few days later that’s really the main focus of this piece.

Five days after the face appeared, another formation materialized just a few hundred feet from the first. This one was originally dubbed the “Persian Carpet” because of its shape and design, but it only took a couple of days for researchers to discover that this glyph contained a lot more than just a pretty pattern. It was a near perfect replica of the binary coded message that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) had broadcast into deep space from Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 1974, but with some very significant differences.

A binary code is a way of conveying information using only 1s and 0s, and is thus a more universal way of communicating. It can be used to represent both numbers and written language, but in this case they stuck to numbers as well as using it to create illustrations of some pertinent data. You can see the original message as transmitted here, but it’s easier to make out visually if you lay it out as a grid and shade the “pixels” for 1s in black and leave the 0s white.

The original Arecibo message was created by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and included mathematical, scientific and astronomical information combined in some instances with pictograms configured in such a way that the information contained within it could be deciphered by any sufficiently advanced intelligence. It was done in this way because, despite what science fiction tells us, creatures on another world wouldn’t likely speak English, and our units of measurement would be meaningless to them. The information contained in this message was basically:

1. Our base-10 mathematical system.
2. Atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA, which are not arbitrary because the atomic number represents the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom of that particular element.
3. A bunch more stuff about DNA, including its double helix structure and chemical composition.
4. The population of our planet at the time.
5. Essentially a stick figure representation of a human, along with our average height (5’9”) based on a wavelength formula that’s way more complicated than I’m prepared to go into.
6. A chart of our solar system with a rough indication of planet sizes and with emphasis placed on the third one because that’s where we live. Pluto was included because it had not yet been demoted from its planetary status at the time.
7. And, for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to me, a depiction of the Arecibo telescope dish that was used to send this message.

The information contained in the Chilbolton formation duplicated this pattern, but they replaced data in the original message with what appears to be information about their own species and solar system.

The first section was unchanged, seeming to indicate that they (whoever “they” are) also use a base-10 mathematical system, which is plausible but not likely. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s no law of science or mathematics which dictates that base-10 is the only, or even the best, way of doing math. But I’ll play dumb and let it go at that.

The elements indicated in the original message also remained the same, but with one addition. Silicon was included in the Chilbolton glyph, apparently indicating that this substance, as well as the others, plays an important role in the DNA of whoever might be responsible for the formation. Naturally, there’s plenty of room for speculation on what this could mean, but expanding upon that will make more sense as we move further along. You’ll see what I mean when we get there.

The next several differences are in the section that originally contained more specific details about our DNA. The Chilbolton formation contains a third strand of DNA, suggesting a triple helix structure, but only on one side. The information concerning the chemical structure has also been changed, which I don’t find as intriguing as some obviously do. I would tend to expect that. What I do find a bit perplexing is that, upon closer examination, some claim to have found mistakes made by Drake and Sagan in the binary representation of the structure of our DNA in the original message. These could have been simple oversights, but some aren’t willing to concede that. They think that these “mistakes” were made on purpose, but none of them can come up with a convincing argument, even amongst themselves, as to why Drake and Sagan would have done this. That’s a question that we may never find an answer for since Sagan passed away before these alleged mistakes were discovered, and I guess that Dr. Drake hasn’t made himself available for comment on the subject.

For those of you who would like to know more about this, you can find an exhaustive analysis of the DNA information contained in both the Arecibo message and the Chilbolton response here, but be forewarned: when I say exhaustive, I’m not kidding. You’d better have a solid grasp of advanced biology and/or lots of time on your hands before you try to tackle this one. I have none of the above, so I didn’t. To me, it was all just “Blah blah blah DNA, blah blah blah nucleotides,” etc. There’s also all sorts of speculation about what this third strand of DNA could mean beyond just taking at face value that the senders of the response are aliens who have triple helix DNA, but that’s out of my wheelhouse as well.

Now we get to the really juicy part that even we non-geneticists can enjoy. It can be clearly seen that the figure of the human has been replaced by a figure that some think might be a representation of the beings that we have dubbed the grays. It might be? I would suggest that there is no way that this could be anything but a gray. Given the restrictions of this sort of low resolution, “pixels”-in-a-field format, I can’t imagine anyone being able to create an image that looks any more like one of them. The code that originally represented the average human height as 5’9” was also changed to 3’4” – about the same height as those who have claimed to have encountered the grays report.

The block to the side of this picture which gave the population of the Earth in 1974 as 4.3 billion was changed to a value of 21.3 billion, which is even more interesting when we move down to what was originally a rough depiction of our solar system. The Chilbolton glyph also shows a sun with nine planets, but this one highlights three planets: the third, fourth and fifth ones, with emphasis on the fifth. This would seem to indicate that these beings exist on three planets of their solar system, with the fifth one either being their original home world or the most populated of the three or both. Some have speculated broadly that this is still a representation of our solar system since the number of planets is the same, but I’m not buying that. There are quite visible differences between the representation of our solar system in the original message and the one depicted in the Chilbolton formation.

I guess that this would be as good a place as any to point out that what the Chilbolton Face has to do with the reply to Arecibo doesn’t seem to be obvious to anyone, beyond lots of vague speculation. There is one individual who insinuates that it all makes perfect sense to him, but since he doesn’t really enlighten us as to why, I’m guessing that he’s only trying to make himself seem smarter than the rest of us simpletons.

Either way, I don’t really concern myself too much with the particulars of the case because I just don’t believe that the Chilbolton formations, or crop formations in general, come from the grays or anyone else on some other world. My suspicions about the intelligences behind UFOs as well as crop formations lean more toward the esoteric than extraterrestrial, although I suppose that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either/or. Who knows the point at which the scientific and the supernatural might converge?

What I find interesting is why someone would want us to believe that they do come from outer space, just like they seem to want us to believe that UFOs are ships from another planet when there is so much compelling evidence that this is not the case. But just to play ET’s advocate, let’s assume for a moment that I’m wrong.

In that spirit, I’ll concede that a silicon-based life form is certainly not outside of the realm of possibility, but it would almost certainly be a very different sort of creature than us or the grays. The reasons for this are complicated, and again, I’m not going to go into the details on this. Suffice it to say that it’s extremely unlikely that our gray friends are silicon-based. And the elements contained in the Arecibo message were only the ones that make up our DNA. It turns out that silicon would be a lousy bonding agent with these other elements. The inclusion of such an unstable ingredient in this formula for DNA just doesn’t make sense. It would be roughly the same as putting regular gas in a diesel engine, i.e., it’s a great way to destroy a perfectly good motor. Adding silicon to our DNA would probably turn us into big piles of rotting goo. Just like aliens from another planet flitting around in our airspace in flying saucers, this cover story seems fabricated to be some sort of intelligence test. Will we take this demonstrably shaky evidence at face value and/or fall so in love with the idea of visitors from another world that we selectively ignore facts and refuse to consider any other possibilities? The true believers in our benevolent space brothers from the Pleiades definitely don’t want to hear my answer to that.

The last discrepancy between the Arecibo and Chilbolton messages is the image at the bottom. In the SETI message, it was a diagram of the Arecibo radio telescope dish. In the Chilbolton formation, it is believed by most to be a rough depiction of the crop formation that appeared near the Chilbolton installation in the very same field just one year earlier in the summer of 2000. It was one of the several fractal types of formations that have shown up on occasion, in this case being a specific kind of fractal usually referred to as a Sierpenski Sieve. Fractal antennas were a fairly new concept at the time, with the Sierpenski setup being one of the more effective designs. It has been suggested that perhaps this design showing up adjacent to a radio telescope was no accident and that the first actual response to the Arecibo message was to show us what sort of antenna would be best for receiving messages in return. Makes perfect sense…until you think about it.

If aliens from halfway across the galaxy* are actually capable of causing extremely detailed images to appear on the surface of our planet, it really doesn’t seem like getting information from one place to another is one of their biggest problems. Sending someone a message telling them how to get a message from you is redundant…or pointless. Besides, we all know that the grays are from one of the belt stars in the constellation of Orion, not the M13 globular cluster where the Arecibo message was directed. Nice try fellas.

So all of this ends up looking like yet another plausible case of extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us on the surface, but upon closer examination is as unlikely, unscientific and full of holes as Clyde Barrow. Just another dead end in a maze that we haven’t yet figured out how to navigate to get to that cheese. Oh well. I’m used to that by now.

But wait! The whole story has yet to be told. I’ll get to that in a few weeks, but for now, I’m a little burnt out on this topic. This thing was a beast to research. I think that next week I’ll take on something a little less demanding, like numbers that don’t exist even though we couldn’t live without them. That sounds light and bouncy.

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*Actually, it’s just a quarter of the galaxy away.