This article is a bit old, but found it when searching for something else. The author doesn't want to draw too many conclusions as to what might be going on here, and as he said

"I haven't fully explained every discrepancy, merely because I'm deliberately keeping a couple of subtle aspects back so that we can ask for further explanation, should anyone claim it as a hoax...The nearby 'face' formation was more elaborate in terms of the ground lay, as each individual circle appeared to have been swirled separately to the rest of the formation, indicated by a smooth swirl of crop around each circle, instead of being brushed across the formation, forming pathways between each circle.

However, both formations would represent an immense effort required in order to portray what we see in the field and from the air. To create either within the constraints of a few hours of darkness is extremely impressive irrespective of their origin; terrestrial or extra-terrestrial.

Again, irrespective of origin, both have taught me personally a great deal about SETI, human physiology, binary encoding and more importantly - communication, both in transcribing this for you the reader, as well as academic conversations I've had with people as a result of doing this analysis."

<a>http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/articles/arecibo.html[/url]

Anyhow, the crop "circle" contains a binary representation of the signal sent out in 1974. First,from the author's idea

"The pattern which occurred in the Chilbolton crop field, is the same image as shown in the books (ie. the one on the right of fig.3 and the mirror image of the original decoding). This could imply that IF someone hoaxed the formation, they copied the incorrect pattern printed in a book. Alternatively, I may have converted the original pulses by mapping left to right when converting into a 23x73 grid, instead of going from right to left - which personally doesn't seem correct to my interpretation of the original binary sequence.

If anyone can explain this discrepancy, I would love to hear your comments."

Two thoughts that come to mind in reading this:

- When encoding binary dgits, they could be encoded left to right, or right to left in order of significance. Different computer platforms have encoded differently in this regard. (Lets just say this was mentioned in one of the comp engineering classes I had taken awhile back, though admittedly I'm still a student...)

- Further thought, reading things from left to right (when looking at things in terms of human readability) is a convention in the English language. We are used to seeing things written from left to right, because this is how English is written.

However, not all languages are written in this manner. Arabic is both written and read from right to left, and actually their books are written from back to front as well. Arabic and English doesn't follow the same convention and as such what might seem natural to us might not seem natural to an Arab.

I'm currently taking Japanese, and it is written from left to right (or it can be from top to bottom); however in the time I've taken this (still a first year student however) I know not to take certain conventions for granted. In other ways these 2 languages don't follow the same basic written structure, aka no space in words, use of kanji as well as an "alphabet" or kana actually, lack of punctuation marks (a hiraghana "ka" specifies a question sentence, not a question mark) among some basic differences. Not even on Earth, do we all follow the same language format/standards.

Perhaps someone else has some other ideas...

Some other changes though, in the list of elements, silicon was added in another column, properly encoded. The area representing the solar system had a slightly smaller sun, with the 3rd through 5th planet positions (of our original message) emphasized, but the 5th more so. The area of the original message equating to world population then, now has a value in excess of 21 bilion. There's a third strand of what was originally meant to equate to a strand of DNA, and some variation in the nucleotide part of the representation according to the author here.

Well if it was a hoax, it was a mighty clever one at that, all the way down to the imensity of effort put into it in a relatively short period of time, and the seeming accurate encoding of other pieces of information (aka adding silicon to the elements), if one accounts for the mirror image representation mentioned in the article...

Either way, hmm... Interesting to say the least.

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