SETI article – Is the Latest Crop Circle a Message from E.T?
Crop circles. Undoubtedly you’re aware of these intricate patterns carved in the wheat fields of (mostly) England. But could they be signals from visiting aliens? Despite the fact that many of the circles are known to be the work of pranksters, interest in crop circles has enjoyed a recent revival thanks to a pair of new patterns that appear in a field next to the Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire, England. One is of a face, and many say that it looks like the archetypal “gray” alien so often seen in films and television. The second is a modified version of the 1974 Arecibo message, broadcast in the direction of the globular cluster M13 in November of that year. The Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake (who was then Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and is now Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute) together with his Observatory staff, was a simple graphic consisting of 73 rows of 23 “bits” per row. This number of rows and columns was chosen becau
