Crash Course on Crop Circles: Part Three

Odds are we will never run out of interesting wrinkles in the crop circle phenomenon.

After the first and second posts in this series, we’ve reached a dangerous point: a point where just posting lots of large-format pretty pictures is no longer an option.  Now it’s time for actual content, perhaps even substance, on the slippery matter of crop circles.  We have no answers—y’all should know us better than that—but we do have a number of loaded questions, and today’s Brainsturbator promises to be a whopper.  (Or, a bloated piece of shit, who knows.)

Today we deal with the problem of extraterrestrial communication—how to bridge the gap between species, and how to deal with the unthinkably vast distances separating us from....well, anything at all.  This universe is primarily empty space, and our solar system is no exception.  Once you’re a couple hundred thousand miles from Earth, it recedes into nothingness....and nothing takes it’s place as a landmark, either.  As of this writing, humanity has yet to work out a feasable solution for dealing with this --- then again, maybe it’s already been dealt with for us.

Without further bloviation, then, we introduce our third and strangest installment in a never-ending procession: the Crash Course on Crop Circles.

But first...

So in the last installment, I mentioned how the Mandelbrot set was originally discovered by a Benedictine monk in the 1200s.  Thanks to a heads-up from Miqel, it now turns out that was a (very tasty) hoax, perpetrated on gullible morons such as myself.  From one bullshit artist to another, a big tip of the hat to whoever had me believing that for the past 6 years of my life.

ONWARDS!!!

Ready for a heavy dose of the weird?  Here’s a quality rabbit hole for you:

First of all, a lot of the information for this post comes from Richard Hoagland, who is basically the astronomy version of David Icke.  He is most entertaining, but also transparently full of shit upon any serious examination. (If that offends you, feel free to leave outraged comments for me to ignore.)

I would refer the curious reader to this discussion of his “Cydonia” evidence and actual credentials, but why read the skeptics?  Let Hoagland prove my case himself: read this recent article on his website about a robot’s head being found on Mars.

As always, just because someone is a pathological liar doesn’t mean they can’t provide valuable lessons, so definitely take a look at Hoagland’s website. 

Second of all, let’s begin with Carl Sagan. 

Carl Sagan is a smug prick, and I say that as a kid who grew up on him, and still deeply respects him to this day.  Just the same, facts is facts.  And to his eternal credit, Mr. Sagan had good reason to be cocky.  How many people can say they designed a message to extraterrestrial civilizations and then had NASA fire it off into space?

I am of course referring to the “Pioneer plaque.” The original idea belonged to Eric Burgess, who approached Sagan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.  This is High Synchronicity, considering the JPL was the epicenter of Occult and Extraterrestrial weirdness out in California, which is a very bizarre state to begin with.  The JPL was home to Jack Parsons, who may or may not have caused the entire modern UFO phenomenon with an assist from the 20th Century’s most amazing asshole, L. Ron Hubbard.

There is some dispute as to wether or not Richard Hoagland was with Burgess, but considering Sagan himself acknowledged Hoagland (last paragraph of link), and Hoagland claims that he was involved, it’s probably safe to bet the “dispute” is just Hoagland’s Haters at work.

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Sagan took the concept and ran with it, collaborating with Frank Drake (you might have heard of his punk band, Drake’s Equation) on the design for a plaque, which would be attached to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft.  This turned out to go over great on a public relations level, so NASA repeated the Plaque on Pioneer 11 as well.

Space Vinyl, Baby...Space Vinyl

This right here is dedicated to Dr. Quandary.  The Voyager Golden Record is a study unto itself, vastly more complex than other messages and way too detailed to get into here.  (For instance, it’s got greetings to the Space Brothers in 55 different human languages, including Sumerian and Akkadian...although I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for those two “dead” languages being in the mix.)

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So: not one, but two Pioneer missions with plaques attached, plus an intricate slab of Space Vinyl, all blasted out into the cosmos as beacons and ciphers for whoever and whatever stumbles across it in the millenia to come.  But was all of this enough for Carl Sagan?

All of This was not Enough for Carl Sagan

Sagan and Frank Drake stepped it up even further in 1974, with the Arecibo Message, a coded transmission that was broadcast into space at the Grand Re-Opening of the Arecibo Observatory.  The Message was more Drake’s baby this time, and it marked an even more sophisticated (and interesting) approach to ET communication.

The message was aimed at the M13 cluster, so it will be around 50,000 years before we hear back from any ETs out there.  (Unless they’re already here, and they intercepted the message earlier.  That is always a possibility, at least.) The message was transmitted as a binary code, which begins with instructions on the base 10 number system, which would hopefully enable an ET to decode the actual Message.  What was the Message itself?  Sagan summed it up rather nicely:

The decoded message forms a kind of pictogram that says something like this: “Here is how we count from one to ten. Here are five atoms that we think are interesting or important: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus. Here are some ways to put these atoms together that we think interesting or important - the molecules thymine, adenine, guanine and cytosine, and a chain composed of alternating sugars and phosphates. These molecular building blocks are put together to form a long molecule of DNA comprising about four billion links in the chain. The molecule is a double helix. In some way this molecule is important for the clumsy looking creature at the center of the message. That creature is 14 radio wavelengths or 5 feet 9.5 inches tall. There are about four billion of these creatures on the third plant from our star. There are nine planets altogether, four big ones toward the outside and one little one at the extremity. This message is brought to you courtesy of a radio telescope 2,430 wavelengths or 1,004 feet in diameter. Yours truly.”

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Fast Forward to 2001

Did you know that the Skull and Bones Society has their own occult calendar which places 322 BC as the year 0?  (322, you see, is when the Greek philosopher Demosthenes committed suicide.  For some reason, this is exceptionally signifigant—most fraternal secret societies are actually even weirder than Skull and Bones.) This means that the year 2001, to them, was the year 2323.  But why would I mention something like that?

Anyways, on August 21st, 2001, mankind was blessed with one hell of a crop sign.  Check this puppy out:

Pause. Rewind.

Things get even more suspicious when you realized a year earlier, there was yet another doozy, in the exact same spot. (This fractal pattern is among my all-time personal favorites, which is, sadly, a hollow and meaningless statement.)

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To get a sense of how precise and complicated this formation is, here’s a guide to draw the formation—or better yet, re-create it in a wheat field near you. 

So What’s up with the Radar Base?

You probably noticed that both of the signifigant formations here are right across the road from the same building, and it’s clearly not a gas station.  It’s the Chilbolton Radio Observatory, built in the 60s and in use ever since. 

After digging around awhile, we finally had to accept that there is—apparently—nothing sinister or strange about the Telescope.  Although Hoagland claims it’s involved with the Ministry of Defense, I haven’t found any info to corroborate that, which is odd considering the NSA super-surveillance compound at Menwith Hill (as well as it’s Aussie counterpart, Pine Gap) are both open secrets that don’t even get token denials anymore.

Chilbolton would appear to be Mostly Harmless.  The official website is full of lurid and shocking revelations, like “Researchers use the facilities at Chilbolton to develop advanced techniques for future meteorological radar systems.” They had a rough time opening in 1967 when it turned out they had fatal design flaws, but rather than re-formulating the whole story, you can just read about it here.

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What Does This Mean?

Remember that underestimating humans is a waste of effort.  As impressive as these specimens are, assuming there were not human pranks is merely an assumption.  Much space is wasted in crop circle writing in trying to determine the “probability” of the message being a hoax, but that’s either immediately and visually obvious, or not really worth the time it takes to consider.  Further, all of these calculations involve humans with boards, not satellite weapons systems and microwave beams—the Knowledge Gap of classified defense research rears it ugly head again, because we don’t know what the state of the art even is in 2006.

So what does all this mean? 

Up to you.  But if you asked good old Hoagland, here’s some of what you’d find out: The crop circle is an extraterrestrial response to the 1974 Arecibo Message. The evidence may not be conclusive, but it’s interesting and visually compelling.  Here’s a couple thousand words:

As the savvy reader might have noticed, there’s a whole other crop circle in that top image that never even got mentioned.  We also haven’t discussed the real meat of wether or not humans are deluding themselves, and all our “logical assumptions” are merely monkey habits that will not compute for an ET civilization.  We also haven’t tied all this into the Circlemakers—who were uncharacteristically quiet on this round—and we haven’t explored the various New Age factions that are keen on co-opting these crop circles for their own apocalyptic agenda.

Why?  Because my frontal lobes are currently smoking and I’ve been up for a good 30 hours now. We will don the scuba gear and dive in the the Real Heavy Weirdness in part four, which for once, will immediately follow this installment. (Unlike, say, our “series” on Jackson Stephens.) I’m only human, after all—enjoy your day and check back tommorow.

Further Reading for Curious Primates

Part One and Part Two of Richard Hoagland’s article about these crop circles.

The Great Silence—David Brin
An examination of the Drake Equation, and the single best piece of writing on the probability of extraterrestrial life, intelligence and civilization I’ve found anywhere.

Wikipedia’s page on Crop Circles—a reader noted I’d never linked to this.  I’d actually never read it, I guess my gut instinct steered me clear of wiki.  Anyone who’s been paying attention for these last few articles would have to chuckle at their summation of the phenomenon:

Various explanations were put forward to explain the phenomenon, which soon spread around the world. In 1991, two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, revealed that they had been making crop circles in England since 1978 using planks, rope, hats and wire as their only tools. Circlemakers, a UK-based arts collective founded by John Lundberg have been creating crop circles since the early 1990s. One source documents the process, creating a simple circle in around an hour.

Despite the evidence that crop circles are of human origin various paranormal theories continue to enjoy some currency, although these violate Occam’s Razor.

The experts tend to be the dumbest motherf***ers in the room at any given moment....why is that?

PART ONE PART TWO PART FOUR