“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 3rd, 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 50th 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 227th 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.
