The Message and The Reply

In 1974, a group of scientists aimed humanity's most powerful radio telescope at the stars and transmitted a message into the void. The Arecibo message, named after the massive Puerto Rican dish that sent it, was designed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. It contained 1,679 binary digits encoding information about human life.

The target was the Hercules globular cluster, twenty five thousand light years away. No one expected a response. The transmission was ceremonial, a celebration of the telescope's new capabilities. Even if someone received it and replied immediately, the answer would take fifty thousand years to arrive.

Twenty seven years later, an answer appeared in a wheat field in England.

On August 14, 2001, a formation materialized near the Chilbolton radio telescope. It depicted a face. Three days later, a second formation appeared beside it. This one was unmistakable. It was the Arecibo message, modified.

The format was identical. Binary code arranged in the same pictographic structure. But the content differed in specific ways. Where our message showed carbon as the basis of life, theirs showed silicon. Where we depicted double helix DNA, theirs showed triple. Our human figure was replaced by a different form. Their population was listed as twenty one billion. Their solar system showed habitation across multiple worlds. Their transmission device matched a crop formation that had appeared in the same field one year earlier.

Someone had replied to our message using our own format. In a wheat field. Twenty seven years after we sent it.

The crop circle phenomenon was not new in 2001. The first modern documented case occurred in 1966 when Australian farmer George Padley witnessed a disc rise from a swamp and leave a circular pattern in the reeds. Ten meters in diameter, the plants bent counterclockwise in a perfect spiral.

But the phenomenon extends far deeper into history. In the ninth century, Archbishop Agobard of Lyon recorded pagan rituals performed within mysterious circles that appeared in fields. In 1686, Oxford professor Robert Plot published drawings of crop circles and noted they formed suddenly, accompanied by bright lights, after which animals refused to graze nearby.

A pamphlet from 1678 titled The Mowing Devil described a farmer awakened by lights moving across his field, who found the next morning a circle of crops cut with impossible precision. The anonymous author concluded no human hand could have created it.

These patterns have appeared for centuries. We simply did not pay attention until they started carrying messages we could almost understand.