Answer To 'Arecibo' Crop Circle? - A Clever Hoax?
Chilbolton Radio Telescope(2), nr Wherwell, Hampshire.
The Arecibo Radio Telescope broadcast the signal on November 16, 1974 during a ceremony marking an upgrade of the Puerto Rico-based telescope. The transmission can be arranged into a diagram showing, among other things, a human stick figure, the solar system, the telescope itself and the DNA molecule.
The signal was "about a million times stronger than the typical TV transmission," says Frank Drake, the astronomer who organized the project. As such, he notes, it outshines the sun at a comparable wavelength and could be detected with technology similar to radio telescopes on Earth.
The Arecibo message was sent toward M13, a star cluster some 25,000 light-years away, which means that it will take 25,000 years to get there. However, the signal will pass near some 30 stars along the way.
Those are the bare facts concerning Frank Drake's transmission from Arecibo during the upgrade of that radio telescope.
Sent on November 16, 1974, this radio transmission would have taken less than 16 years, at least a one-way trip of 8 years to reach a destination that could receive, decode, and answer the transmission if the answer is in the crop formation near Hampshire.
The signal was a 3-minute digital transmission. We are lulled into thinking it looks like a diagram on paper, but that is a translation of the digital signal into a graphic representation.
As for the crop formation near Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire on August 19th, the liklihood that aliens would even know that the graphic representation would be on a rectangular medium, as it is converted to graphic form, and displaying this untransmitted form back is extremely small to not likely at all. The small changes in the graphic to reflect an alien source are convenient representations of our own lore regarding aliens - short with large heads. The pairing of Earth and Mars seems like a concession to Richard Hoagland. And, if we accept the presence of Grays right here on earth, we could also conjecture that they would simply appear in the night and make their own symbols after picking up the Arecibo transmission from an orbiting spaceship, then decide when the time is right to return an answer.
The fact that the Chilbolton radio telescope is nearby is an indication that someone in that area was knowledgable about Drake's Arecibo signal and could have contributed information to the (human) circle makers to construct this elaborate hoax to entertain us. Is that possible?
I believe so, and is more likely than aliens returning a graphic answer to a digital signal.
If this is an elaborate hoax, think of how humans will go to such incredible lengths to fool other humans. It has been done before and is cause for us to be vigilant and extra skeptical when it comes to events such as these.
If this is an answer from real aliens, then even they seem to be having a little fun with us at our expense. Certainly, if they could so easily decipher this signal, they could decipher our languages and present a little more straight forward proof of their presence.
Bill Hamilton Executive Director Skywatch International, Inc.
What a strange article. I refer to: "Answer To 'Arecibo' Crop Circle? - A Clever Hoax?" by Bill Hamilton.
It seems designed specifically to portray the crop formation near Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire as a hoax message - at all costs. Sure, you could portray the message as a hoax if you liked, but at least do it logically and rationally!
Bill Hamilton seems to completely ignore the Prime number encoding of the message placed there specifically by the SETI experimenters. The message was encoded in Primes in an extremely logical manner, and thus Bill Hamiltons suggestion that aliens wouldn't be able to decode it insults both the intelligence of the scientists who went into making the original Arecibo message and the intelligence of any potential alien presence reading it.
And so what if the creators of the response put a rectangle around their response? A message like that would have to be inverted to be practically laid out in crops in this manner, or else it could seem like a bunch of random holes, and then in all likelyhood it could be easily destroyed if investigated (people would leave tracks) or simply ignored completely. If you're trying to get peoples attention with a message, you don't create one that could be easily destroyed or ignored. Now if you invert the image, so its not so susceptible to damage upon investigation, and so that its noticeable, then yes, now you need to create some kind of a border arounf it (out of simple necessity - unless you wanted to flatten the whole damn field). Well since the message is in the form of a 2 dimensional 23*73 grid, umm, how about a rectangle?!
1) The original Arecibo message as sent is too difficult to decode and view in its intended form - graphically. Therefore Frank Drake and the entire SETI team are complete idiots. In 1974, they created and sent the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space without actually creating this message in a manner that it could be understood by anyone. 2) Advanced alien races (advanced enough to be capable of receiving the message) are all incredibly stupid as they are all incapable of understanding the universal language of mathematics as well as employing simple logic and reasoning. Given a message of length 1679, they completely fail to think "hey someone sent a message, I wonder if they did something logical like encode it in primes", and as such completely fail to notice that the message had a length of a composite of two primes (23 and 73). Then because of these utter failures of simple logic and reasoning, they never view this set of binary data in this message the only two ways that were likely intended by the sender. So they don't render the image both ways as a 23*73 and 73*23 grid, and as such they never find the visual pattern hidden in the first of these. 3) Because the aliens (which could originate from anywhere) drew themselves with big eyes and a big head, they must therefore be of the type referred to in popular culture as Grays. 4) Because we can think of a million different possible ways that aliens could use to communicate with us, the fact that they could have chosen to communicate with us using the same method we attempted to communicate with them can be discounted entirely.
I don't know whether the Arecibo-response message is a hoax or not, perhaps some analysis of the bend in the stems of the bent crops (and whether there is breakage as is common with obvious hoax circles) could yeild some answers. But I do know that Bill Hamiltons analysis as to it being a genuine message from alien intelligence or a hoax seems very forced and biased toward the latter. Indeed, to the point he insults the intelligence of the SETI experimenters, and the intelligence of any potential alien recipient of the Arecibo message.
Indeed, as those points are both obviously true, it also insults the intelligence of the reader of his article... which in this case, was me.