Art Bell welcomes Michael Glickman, Seth Shostak, and R.C. Hoagland to debate the 1974 Arecibo message—a 2-trillion-watt broadcast encoding human DNA, solar system data, and key life elements—targeting M13’s star cluster. Shostak dismisses a crop glyph near England’s Chilbolton Observatory (1969–2001) as a plausible reply, citing its low odds of interception and the observatory’s non-SETI focus, while Hoagland insists its silicon inclusion and evolving patterns hint at deliberate "acculturation" by unseen observers. Bell urges cautious scientific scrutiny, questioning whether this could be Earth’s first alien contact—or a human hoax testing our readiness for the unknown. [Automatically generated summary]
I know that you are by now very well aware of the incredible crop circle at Shobolton, the ones in Great Britain that have been popping up in recent days.
And there is this absolutely astounding one, which is more like a glyph, I would say, than a crop circle as we've come to understand crop circles, which would appear to be an answer to the SETI signal the bigger sent out back in 1974.
But before we get to your take on those, and I know you've got those on your screen, so we can talk about them as the hour wears on and Richard joins us at the bottom of the hour, before we get your actual take on all of this, tell everybody the technical details as you know them about the signal that was sent out.
And it was during a time when the director of the Arecibo Radio Observatory, that's a big dish down in Puerto Rico that probably many listeners have seen in the movie Contact, was headed up by Frank Drake.
He was the director.
But Frank Drake was already known by that point as the father of SETI.
Well, it actually is mostly used for receiving, but it isn't the case that this was a one-shot, you know, transmission.
The dish was actually built with the intention of doing planetary radar experiments.
For example, if you want to know, you know, what the surface of Venus looks like, well, Venus is covered with clouds, but if you can bounce some very powerful radar off that planet and look at what comes back, then you can map the surface of Venus.
So that was part of the intention.
It's also used for upper atmosphere research.
So it's always had a transmitter on board, but it's true.
That's not used a lot of the time, but it's used fairly regularly.
In other words, in the beam, if you were looking at the power coming out that beam, it was equivalent to broadcasting all the energy produced by every electrical generating plant on the planet in all directions.
Yeah, it was, you know, it was intended as kind of a demo.
I don't think that anybody at the observatory figured there was a big chance that the aliens were going to hear this because if you're only turning the transmitter on for three minutes, it's going to be pretty lucky if they happen to be listening when that signal washes over them.
Okay, if you go down on the webpage I know you're on, the one that says Hoagland Crop Glyphs Part 3, and you go down to image number three, on the right, there is what appears to be, I don't know what you would call this, a glyph.
It looks like a glyph, sort of, which is supposed to be what was sent out from Arecibo on that day in 1974.
Is that a representation of the zeros and ones, the digital signal that roughly was sent out?
The only caveat there is that this picture here on the website, it's been colored in just so you can make it a little easier to separate one thing from another.
I mean, you know, we could spend a lot of time on that.
That's probably not worthwhile.
But let me just say very briefly that, you know, some thought was given to what should we tell the aliens.
I mean, that's what this was about.
It was just an exercise to, you know, broadcast something about us to them.
And people sat around the observatory and decided, well, what the aliens would probably want to know, at least what we would want to know if we were the aliens, is what do earthlings look like?
Where are they located?
And how are they built?
And to some extent, that's all answered in this little graphic, this bitmap you might call it, if you're a computer type.
And so you can see down there there's a little stick figure of a man, and there's some DNA, and some of the molecules that make up DNA above the DNA, and down below a little map of the solar system, and below that, a picture of the telescope.
We've had this all described to us before, but those are the major elements of it.
And you say some guys sitting around the observatory, the SETI Institute, or who exactly, I guess I don't need names, but it was sort of a gathering of people who decided, you know, kind of committee-wise, what would be in here?
Well, with all of these years now to reflect on, looking at that broadcast, as I am and you are right now, would you change much about it after all these years?
In your work at SETI, as you go from radio to now include light, I guess, pretty soon, that's what I'm reading about anyway.
Would it surprise you, shock you, if you got a radio answer somewhere near hydrogen, your favorite place, that would be essentially an answer to this signal?
Well, it would surprise me, actually, Art, because that gets down into the nature of the reply that apparently some people believe has been carved into the wheat there.
I take it they pointed it at a part of the sky that was, I don't know, most favorable, that would have the most stars or whatever in line, best chance for reception.
Now, as I say, this thing was aimed at M13, and you might think, well, that's a good idea, and not terribly dangerous, because after all, if M13 is 25,000 light years away, you know, why are we worried about this?
I might say that at the time, this was kind of interesting, the astronomer Royal of Britain got somewhat riled up about this broadcast, and he petitioned the International Astronomical Union.
Yeah, I think That a three-minute demonstration, I tell you what was interesting about this, not so much the transmission per se, because that was just a very simple technical exercise.
I think that the really interesting thing was, as you point out, coming up with this message.
What would you say to the aliens?
You know, I'm sure that that was the subject of lots of discussion, and we've talked a little bit about it tonight.
I mean, it's just not entirely clear what you would tell.
Now, a few days ago, in a field in England, this Chilboltan glyph appeared.
It's not really a classic crop circle.
It is extremely complicated to do if you're going to try to tromp it out.
I don't know how they would do that.
It became what appears to be an answer to the Arecibo signal of 1974 in a crop glyph in England.
And it is so close, I think you would at least agree, even though you think it might be a hoax, you would agree certainly that this would represent, obviously, an answer to that transmission.
The other thing is that the little map of our solar system, which has nine planets and the third one, namely Earth, is offset in the direction of the stick figure to indicate, hey, this is where we live.
Now they have, it looks like, nine planets still, but three planets are offset, which might suggest that...
Yeah, instead of just one.
So that suggests that, well, maybe they've got more planets occupied.
Who knows?
Done a little bit of local colonization.
And the third thing that strikes me is, whereas on the bottom of the Arecibo message, you have a picture of the Arecibo antenna and a little diagram of how it works, you have something here that I don't know what it is.
It looked to me like some sort of spacecraft with solar panels or something like that, but I really don't know what it is.
In any case, that's...
That's a bit of a mystery, but it's clearly changed.
All right, my audience said almost together in email that I received, when you get to that part where everybody says, well, how come in a wheat field, why would they do it in a wheat field?
I'll tell you what the answer was that my audience gave.
But if you're worried about that, if you're worried that the message won't reach everybody, then you could write it in the sky or you could just burn it into the pavement of the local interstate.
I mean, there are lots of other things you could do.
But the real point is if you're going to burn any message, I mean, just try and picture this.
You're in an alien parliament, right, 100 or 1,000 light years away and trying to decide whether to spend 100,000 galactic cruiseros to build this big spaceship with the burner on the bottom to send, you know, 100 or 1,000 light years to this little blue planet just to come down and carve graffiti in our wheat.
You know, that's a really expensive proposition for very little gain.
So I think that if that's all you wanted to do was give us a little bit of info, why not broadcast it to us?
Because, you know, to begin with, you can pick that up anywhere on the planet, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper.
And I'm not at all surprised you're skeptical because I'm skeptical.
I mean, when you're confronted with, I mean, Art just asked the key question.
If you had received this thing, you know, at Arecibo or Owens Valley or any place, you would be jumping up and down.
The first thing you would have done is notify everybody on the loop and have them all look at the same star and see if they got the same signal, right?
And then you would proceed with the exciting stuff, which is to decode it.
The problem is the medium.
You don't think a priori this can be real because you don't see philosophically why you would spend so many galactic credits to do something so simple with so limited bandwidth and so little return, right?
Well, but, you know, I'm intrigued that Art's audience, almost to a person, says the biggest reason to do this is so it can't be covered up, because that's basically the reason that I would come up with, that this cannot be covered up.
No matter what the motives of government or institutions or your motives or whoever's involved in SETI, this stuff is out in the open, and because of the internet and because of cable television and satellites, it has gone around the world.
You know, though, this is the exact same reason that Seth says that a similar signal received at SETI could not be covered up because of all the networks and because of the internet and all the rest, right, Seth?
But I mean, those who believe this would believe any conspiracy nearly, and they would certainly believe that there would be sort of a setup like that.
So everybody would believe it would have to get out.
One thing that strikes me about these crop circles, I would like to get to the point that the signal has not gone anywhere, but one point that strikes me about these crop circles is their enormous preference for England, for the United Kingdom.
There have been about 160 crop circles in the last 10 or 20 years that have appeared, and almost 100 of those have been in the U.K. Now, it's a good point, Richard.
There are thousands that have appeared, not just 160.
I mean, I have a little experience with signals, because if you go up to the top of our page there, you'll notice that we have a little representation of the Pioneer plaque.
Eric Burgess and I were the guys who suggested to Carl that we start sending messages into the galaxy.
And we started with a set of glyphs.
We started with an actual picture of who we were and how big we were compared to the spacecraft and what planet we came from and where it was in the galaxy and all that good stuff.
This is the first message in 71 that the human race actually sent into the galaxy.
And there is a binary code, you know, based on the hyperfine transition of hydrogen and all that.
But it basically is a kind of a picture that you're supposed to use the binary to decode.
And we only followed up in 74 with the Arecibo message.
Now, let me stop you for a second, Steph, on the whole philosophical thing, because I find it slightly tedious when everybody keeps coming up with theories why aliens do this or why they do that or why they don't do this.
As a point of fact, we don't know what an alien would think.
We don't know what an alien would think would be economical or political or democratic.
We have no basis for presuming anything.
We've got to start with what we got.
And at the moment, what we have is a rather remarkable glyph, which, by the way, is still in the wheat field, guys.
I got an email from England this morning, and it's still there.
So if you go down, you know, the thing I find most intriguing with this little mystery is whoever did this, and I'm right in the middle.
I can argue that it's a hoax or I can argue that it's real Seth, all right?
That may surprise you, but I can make both cases.
The thing I'm intrigued with, to start with, is the differences between what's there in that field and the original Arecibo message.
Because there is really interesting information, and even with a little bit of digging, I mean, the web we have is such an extraordinary tool that I was able to find some pretty interesting information regarding some details of the differences.
If you go to the second line of the message, all right, in the crop width, like if you go down to, let me see, where are we here?
You go down to image number, it would be image number five, which is done by Paul Vigay, who runs the Crop Circle Research Institute over there in England.
He has done a very careful analysis, which we also link to, so people can maybe later on this evening go and actually read what he's done here.
He has pointed out in red on the right-hand side, you can see all the differences between the Areceba message and the glyph response.
What I found, for instance, in the second line is the line devoted to the definition of the elements that are required for living things.
Remember that was part of the key discussion, Seth, back in 74?
And I looked and I found the most remarkable thing from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego this afternoon.
Scientist named Benjamin Volcani, B-O-L-C-A-N-I, died in 1999.
He was 84.
In 1969, Volcani established the biological role of silicon in the most fundamental life processes through his work with diatomas, which are little single-celled aquatic plants that are the base of the marine food chain and the oceans of the whole world.
I think that it would pay instead of, you know, looking at these differences, and we ought to do that, but I think that all the differences can be ascribed to either a good imagination or a fair familiarity with science fiction.
Because if they've replied to the Arecibo message, then they have to have received the Arecibo message.
Now, the Arecibo message was broadcast, we've already said it a million times, by the Arecibo Telescope, which is 1,000 feet in diameter, and at the frequency at which the broadcast, which was made, which is about 2,400 megahertz, the size of the beam, the transmitter beam coming out, is two minutes of arc.
That's 1 15th the diameter of the full moon.
That's a small patch on the sky.
This is like taking, imagine hanging a field with marbles hung on threads and aiming your laser pointer through there, but the marbles are each 100 miles apart.
Okay, how far does that laser beam go before it hits a marble?
Pretty far.
You can work it out.
It's freshman astronomy.
You can work out how many star systems this signal has hit in the 27 years it's been since it was broadcast from Puerto Rico.
And the answer is zero stars.
The chances that it's hit one star in, you know, within 27 light years, and really you should make that 13 and a half light years because after all, you've got a lot of time for the fly to get back here, and that can't be better than the speed of light.
But even if you don't do that, even if you assume they have faster-than-light travel, the chances are 50,000 to 1 that it's hit a single star.
Yeah, well, you have the same problem because the chances that they're in the beam now are actually smaller because they're closer and the beam is smaller.
Well, let me, you know, again, we're backing up to assumptions.
Let me follow what Art just said.
My theory about this, if it is real, that it has nothing to do with the signal being intercepted and returned, et cetera, et cetera.
It is that someone has decided it is time to respond in an idiom that we understand, and they took the most well-known message we ever sent, the first radio SETI signal we ever sent, and they basically laid it out with modifications to describe something they want us to think about as part of an acculturation.
If aliens had been wandering around, if the UFO phenomenon is representative of someone looking us over since the 1940s, if not before, then we don't have to consider that they received this out there at all.
They would have been able to pick it up on the equivalent of CNN, although CNN didn't exist in 1974.
I mean, you kind of cavalierly dismiss the idea that the information contained in this is relevant.
I would like to point out that Dr. Vocani's work was not even apparently known to Frank and to Carl when they composed the original signal that silicon is important as a biochemistry of current life systems here on Earth.
But I suspect that the intention there was to show that they know that silicon is the only other candidate in the world of chemistry that can hook up to make complex molecules that are necessary for life.
Carbon does that a heck of a lot better if you look around.
There's more silicon in the crust of the earth than there is carbon.
But if after 4 billion years, all it's made is some quartz and sand.
But surely, gentlemen, you can both agree this was not done by a couple of beer-drinking, good old boys with boards and chains in Great Britain because they just wouldn't think this up, would they?
Well, that will be interesting to find out, and it would be really useful if you could continue to try to call the Chilbotin folks and either get them to talk to the rest of us or maybe ask some questions yourself as to who saw what, when, do they have security cameras?
I mean, this is a very important government facility, very important.
And you can't go anywhere in England these days without running into a security camera.
That's one of the main complaints for the civil libertarians over there, that even in a country grocery store, you're put on video.
So it would be nice to find out, and we haven't been able to find out because they don't answer the phone, if they had security cameras, if they were running tape, and if anybody saw anything.
In other words, why don't we proceed on this scientifically instead of making assumption after assumption after assumption?
I mean, we're into describing the message, but I do think that it is important to look at the context a little bit about this whole idea of using crop circles because they can't be covered up.
You know, the same is true of graffiti sprayed on the subway cars of New York.
But, you know, if you found the Arecibo message sprayed on the side of a subway car in New York, you probably wouldn't leap to the conclusion that this was a message from extraterrestrials.
But I find that this grain graphics are very similar because, to begin with, you can only do it six months, it's not even that, six months of a year, which who would want a communication mode where you had to wait until it was crop season?
They always do it at night.
And by the way, kind of an interesting thought, I'd be interested to hear what Richard has to say to this.
The crop circles were a little bit late in showing up in Britain this year.
The crop circle season, as they call it there, got started very late.
And that's maybe not coincidental because the government, being afraid of foot and mouth disease, had levied large fines on anybody who was caught walking into a field because they would spread the contagion.
So, you know, that sounds like something that the aliens were keyed into, too.
And it's true there are fewer total numbers of circles.
But they didn't start later.
There just are fewer numbers of them.
Now, think about this: you've got a bunch of hoaxers who, you know, scramble around in the middle of the night and invade farmers' fields and make these things, right?
That's the model.
This year, they had guys with shotguns and dogs and helicopters and infrared and surveillance, and they didn't catch anybody.
Michael Gwickman, who has been there all year, is an expert on these and runs into everyone that appears, I think, is going to be on next hour or next half hour.