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.

RE: Binary Crop Circle?