Change - The Chilbolton Reply

I’m going to say a bad word. Well, two bad words - crop circles. There.

It was about 1990 when crop circles started to change. They had been pretty basic until then and suddenly became more and more sophisticated. People, both lay and science-based, were intrigued; that is until Doug and Dave, two guys from Scotland, confessed to making them. And for the great majority of people, that was that.

I’m going to make the case that it wasn’t.

The most astonishing crop circle to ever happen happened in 2001 right beside The Chilbolton Radio Telescope in Wiltshire England.

But there’s a preface: the year before, 2000, another crop circle appeared in the same place. Here it is, both in the context of the telescope and on its own (this is a relatively small crop circle, a good reference to just how large and intricate these things can be.)

We’ll get back to it shortly. The following year, 2001, another crop circle appeared in the very same place. This is what it looked like:

The face, that appeared on the same night, is intriguing (you only actually see it from the air) but I’m going to focus on the rectangle. First of all, note how close it is in location to the previous year's circle. From the accounts of people who walked in it, on the ground it was a confusing mess of tufts and lines. But here’s what it looked like from the air looking straight down:

People figured out a surprising thing - that it bore a striking resemblance to the very message SETI had sent in 1974. Here’s what it looks like if you did the same thing to it that we did to the Arecibo message from the previous post: (note, I have put the Chilbolton message on the left, and the original Arecibo message below that on the right for comparison purposes)

The Chilbolton Reply

What is most intriguing is that changes had been made to our message: some perhaps expected, some very much unexpected.

It starts in the purple section of blocks below the white numbers on top: A NEW ELEMENT WAS ADDED to the five elements of our DNA. There are now six elements (instead of the five in the Arecibo message below). It turns out that what was added, in the right place and with the right atomic number (the vertical row second from the right) was silicone. The remarkable thing about this is that AFTER this appeared we discovered life forms deep in the ocean composed of only silicone.

Below that in the original message are our blue and white genetic nucleotides (they actually fixed a mistake in the white part, filling in a block that had been accidentally left out in our message) and blue DNA double helix. Whole articles have been written on the changes made here, but essentially it shows a different but perfectly viable triple DNA helix.

The red and yellow below that are pictograms similar to what we sent in our message: if indeed it reads as ours did then they look somewhat different - shorter with bigger heads - and their solar system has multiple inhabited planets.

And then there's my personal fave; where we have shown (below in purple) our form of communication - a pictogram of the Arecibo radio telescope, they now show THEIR form of communication. Go back to the start of this piece and look carefully at the shape of the crop circle that appeared at Chilbolton the year before in the very same spot as this one. Now look at the purple shape at the bottom of their response.

Hmmm. Their form of communication, it seems, is

crop circles.

Of course, this doesn't mean that another life form is talking to us - or, in fact 'answering' us. It could be a remarkably inventive, elaborate and one would imagine very expensive hoax. But one thing is for certain: this was not done by two bumpkins named Doug and Dave.

And that puts us in a different place, doesn't it?