skullaria wrote:
"Okay, guys, let's end all of this xenophobic, fearful denial and get serious. Does anyone really believe that two old guys with rope and boards made the 1368-digit Crabwood CD message by hand, late at night while no one was looking, and contrary to all other eyewitness accounts of its creation? You might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny!

Come on, all of you geeks and nerds worldwide: let's get to it! You can be even more famous than Jodie Foster in Contact if you succeed! (Carl Sagan used a wormhole there too, because his friend Kip Thorne told him they were possible.)"

If I look at Crop Circles as nothing but....performance art....I'm still amazed - the 'quality' and quantity of the art just gets better and better!

Tired, waking up, no coffee but my first impression was...

If this message is from aliens, why would they come all this way, go through the trouble to lay down a message like that, but fuck with us with things like "false capitalization?"

Hijexx wrote:
If this message is from aliens, why would they come all this way, go through the trouble to lay down a message like that, but fuck with us with things like "false capitalization?"

...because the image is very cool looking, but I've yet to see any reasonable explanation for how they're interpreting that snowstorm as binary. Considering the precision the rest of the crop formation shows, any binary actually encoded into that spiral should really be much clearer and easier to discern if the pictures weren't crap. I looked at this stuff rather carefully back in 2002 when it happened, and my assessment then is the same as it is now. The pictures are too effed up by artifacting to be of any use. Freeware software was available then to convert any pictures someone might have (heck, ANSI art fiends did stuff like this by hand) of an "alien" into data that someone could use to go create the formation using just a laptop to keep track of what they were doing. Frankly, I'd like to have seen the message hoaxters were trying to encode there, but the pictures are just too messed up.

If anyone happens to have a more accurate version of these images (as in, not-JPG-artifacted-all-to-hell) any of us actual geeks could take a very close look at it indeed, but... the chances that there's going to be some other message hidden in the ASCII (which is all we are getting basically, since the pics are godawful) are slim to none. That aspect is just going to be a waste of time. Only loons would go to the trouble of hiding a message in another coherent message when the transport is already this gnomic. I can think of a few ways one could encode a short message in the alien but again, the images are so garbled it's unlikely more than a handful of bits could be pulled out--which isn't likely to be enough to get a coherent bit of anything out. Forget Reed-Solomon encoding.

I'm highly suspicious of the way this ASCII was apparently deciphered. Either there are better pictures out there that aren't on Ms. Pringle's site, or there's so much noise in the image that there's such a massive amount of room for "interpretation" that the results just can't be trusted. FFS, something this detailed should have had people out in a field with some tape measure and some assaying tools to get exact measurements if they actually wanted to do more than sensationalize it. Surely a higher-resolution scan of this image would be available if there was anything to this.

...and hey, maybe it's just me, but I figure any aliens smart enough to have deciphered ASCII and cross galaxies to send us a message using it would also have been smart enough to notice that ASCII is eight bits, all the time, no more, no less, and that "corrupted" section would not even be remotely possible. Drunken farmers--on the other hand--might not be so exacting.

In short, I say it's farmers doing it, these farmers did one hell of a job on a beautiful bit of performance art, but the "deciphering" is about as scientific and trustworthy as seeing the Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun.

My point is - who says or cares WHO the message is from.

Quit thinking aliens when you think about crop circles, and start thinking performance art!

Can you do it?

Could it be...that is part of the performance?

As an art form, the complexity, the execution - it is quite amazing!

skullaria wrote:
My point is - who says or cares WHO the message is from.

Quit thinking aliens when you think about crop circles, and start thinking performance art!

Can you do it?

Could it be...that is part of the performance?

As an art form, the complexity, the execution - it is quite amazing!

I'll "quit thinking aliens" when I think crop circles as soon as people stop making the stupid association. Especially with a link to a big "crop circle" with a huge fucking alien picture!!! :)

I don't think of it as performance art. I think of it as vandalism. Sort of how I think of graffiti.

If it is done on someone's property without their consent, it is vandalism, end of story. Might look cool, pretty, be a marvel of what can be done overnight in the dark, but it is what it is.

skullaria wrote:
"Okay, guys, let's end all of this xenophobic, fearful denial and get serious. Does anyone really believe that two old guys with rope and boards made the 1368-digit Crabwood CD message by hand, late at night while no one was looking, and contrary to all other eyewitness accounts of its creation? You might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny!

Come on, all of you geeks and nerds worldwide: let's get to it! You can be even more famous than Jodie Foster in Contact if you succeed! (Carl Sagan used a wormhole there too, because his friend Kip Thorne told him they were possible.)"

If I look at Crop Circles as nothing but....performance art....I'm still amazed - the 'quality' and quantity of the art just gets better and better!

Actually, I believe three or four really sharp guys with laptops and electronic measuring tapes made it by hand.

Dagmar wrote:

skullaria wrote:
"Okay, guys, let's end all of this xenophobic, fearful denial and get serious. Does anyone really believe that two old guys with rope and boards made the 1368-digit Crabwood CD message by hand, late at night while no one was looking, and contrary to all other eyewitness accounts of its creation? You might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny!

Come on, all of you geeks and nerds worldwide: let's get to it! You can be even more famous than Jodie Foster in Contact if you succeed! (Carl Sagan used a wormhole there too, because his friend Kip Thorne told him they were possible.)"

If I look at Crop Circles as nothing but....performance art....I'm still amazed - the 'quality' and quantity of the art just gets better and better!

Actually, I believe three or four really sharp guys with laptops and electronic measuring tapes made it by hand.

"You believe....."

There ya go - everyone has an opinion, everyone has an idea....

THAT is performance art!
Maybe one day we will find out who the artist is...but I don't let my 'not knowing for sure' cloud my appreciation of the art itself. The patterns are becoming more complex, intricate, often concerning mathmatical concepts lately....as an artform - it is evolving.