We are Stardust taking Destiny into our own hands

Sacred geometry, sacred comfort zone

The crop circle phenomenon is really rocking the boat; even though there have been no further crop circles imprinted on Wiltshire farms (or elsewhere) since August 29th this year, world interest is piqued and they’ve picked up the baton and won’t put it down. Even Google, when I opened my mailbox this morning, had ‘Google’ written in croppie image in the bookmarks bar. If Google knows about crop circles, I assure you the whole world knows.

What is less certain is why we have become obsessed with these beautiful creations.

A very small percentage of world population lives in rural Wiltshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire, but that is where the crop circles are: each summer another series more sophisticated and intriguing than the summer before.

Holland and Germany, Scotland and the NW Pacific states of the U.S. have had a smattering, but the bulk of appearances has occurred within the sacred precinct of ancient tombs and temples in the Cotswolds and Marlborough Downs. They are often accompanied by high frequency sound and more-than-average people-friendly feelings.

There are already an enormous number of electro-magnetic nodes in this rolling countryside. They attract fluctuations in compass readings, making dowsers mightily confused: cell-phones are turned off because their signals are useless; camera batteries recharge spontaneously. The magnetic nodes are what Neolithic farmers noticed in the land; it inspired them to build solar doorways made of stone: lunar alignments in megalithic grandeur stretch as far as the eye can see.

Now a more cosmic imprint appears in this anomalous zone. And it is affecting visitors who have described sensations of ‘deep peace’, a desire to be ‘at one with’ and share their experience with others in the circle, an ‘inner glow’.

Is it too far-fetched to call them messages from the stars?

Before he died in 1996, American astrophysicist and quantum astronomer Carl Sagan was convinced we as an evolving race were capable of using our intelligence and technology to reach the stars. He would have been the first to express jubilation at the fact that the stars may be reaching out to us in return.

‘We are stardust taking our destiny into our own hands’: his words.

One of his ‘babies’ was SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence; he spent years devising mathematical code which could be sent in pulses via (in his day) the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. He envisioned pulses returning from a distant intelligence, advanced enough to understand and use mathematical signatures as a common cosmic language. When Sagan died of bone-marrow cancer in 1996, computers were large, but the internet was in its infancy. He could only dream that a radio beam of binary pulses would elicit a response from a stellar region in the middle of the Milky Way; of how a mere 13 years later computer code would be the new means of communication. He might have guessed.

He called the essence of number the ‘Rosetta stone’, the common language of science and mathematics. He was prophetic when he described distant intelligence as ‘someone fond of mathematics’, using our own knowledge to beam back to us a message we too might understand.

Fractal Wave image near Avebury Wiltshire June 2008

Sacred geometry and music have much in common: harmony of sound is reflected in the harmony expressed in mathematical Fibonacci numbers – or a cascade of increasing dimensions seen as visually perfect, the Golden Mean. After 2007, a year of curvaceous designs leading the eye and enhancing the land, 2008 brought patterns that upped the ante: in June a Pythagorean Comma graced a Yatesbury field near the ancient sacred site of Avebury. This ‘standing wave fractal’ was described by University of York electronics expert James Lyons as a pictorial rendition of the harmonic scale on a piano. “The Universe is a glorious keyboard with strings between every atom of matter (holographic) and by implication all mankind!” In July a crop circle depicting swallows (the totem bird of perspective) had a second layer added on a successive night. There were other ‘multiple’ sequential patterns. August culminated in a magnificent sacred ‘rose window’ motif (top) and several indications of the number eight or viewed laterally, infinity. Visitors to August formations were seen to kneel in prayer, sound the ‘Om’ and share food, water and animated conversation with their fellows in the barley.

The 2009 season has been heavily laced with 2012 images from the calendar of the Maya: the single remaining earth civilization still to count mankind’s progression in ‘Ages’. We humans are nearing the end of the final Mayan ‘Great Cycle’, scheduled to complete on 12 December 2012 (12/12/12). Also a record number of cropcircles in 2009 produced images of Fibonacci sequences, DNA strands of our own double helix as well as an enhanced multi-strand variation (significant, below), and a plethora of holograms or three-dimensional material bridging the divide between sound, mathematics, philosophy and spirituality.

In all this splendour, a little croppie found in a Chilbolton field in Hampshire in 2001 may have been overlooked:

Binary sequence sent from Arecibo

The Arecibo message sent on November 16th 1974 by Carl Sagan and his SETI cohorts was by design formulated as a sequence of 1679 pulses of sound in binary code (zeros and ones). It was beamed at the M13 stellar cluster in the constellation of Hercules, 25,000 light years distant. Because SETI was attempting to communicate with high caliber intelligence by means of a cosmic language (feet, meters, inches would have no meaning) it used the combination of two prime numbers, 23 and 73, as the logical format: 23 columns of 73 rows (23×73=1679) figure at left. For clarity, the zeros and ones are shown as black and white.

The message was brief. It gave in simple terms the numbers 1 – 10; Atomic numbers 1,6,7,8,15 of the elements of Life, Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Phosphorus; a larger section describing the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA with its double helix; a human figure (stick man) with a height of 5ft9ins expressed in ‘wavelength units’; earth’s then population of 4.29 billion (1974 value); a diagram of the solar system, nine planets and sun, with Earth placed above the others to indicate origin of the code; and a curved diagram of the radio telescope from which it was sent.

In 2001, 27 years after transmission, an answer came back. With a few differences. Binary code of zeros and ones highlighted in black and white, appears below, right. Differences are highlighted in red. On the left is the ‘answer’ which arrived on the night of August 21st, 2001 in Chilbolton, Hampshire in a field next to the Chilbolton radio telescope. (Arecibo has no barley fields; it’s on a mountain top). At Chilbolton, flattened crop are zeros, standing stalks are ones.

Chilbolton variations on an Arecibo theme

Numbers 1 – 10 return unaltered. In the second sequence, the atomic weight, 14, of silicon has been added in its correct position on the Periodic Table. [Silicon is the constituent of crystalline structure; this should excite light beings and crystal consciousness supporters everywhere]. There is a change in the number of nucleotides in DNA, which is coincidentally given an additional strand. Our stick man is replaced by a shorter being (3ft 4ins) with larger head. The ‘population’ figure in decoded binary sequence equates to 21.3 billion. In addition to Earth, the fourth and fifth planets are highlighted.

Chilbolton radio telescope and crop circle

Perhaps the population figure is intended to cover all three planets. Or it may represent a distant planetary system where the fourth and fifth are the ones with life. ET doesn’t say. The final sequence depicts not a radio telescope, but a crop formation occurring in the same field the year before. Their previous communication (2000) had fallen on deaf ears. ET was hoping this one didn’t.

While there was a flurry of interest shown in astrophysical circles at the time of the Chilbolton appearance, the general public was unaware of its significance. Criticism ensued from astronomers who knew that a radio transmission would take hundreds of years to reach a distant star system. The crop circle response was generally discredited.

It is interesting to note, however, that after Carl Sagan died, Arecibo sent a second transmission in 1999, this time aimed at the Vega, Deneb, Altair triangle and at the time there were several solar system planets and the moon in the transmission ‘window’. If the code happened to get fielded by ET in the Jupiter moon system, or one of Saturn’s orbiting bodies, the time lapse for a response is less fantastical, more worthy of consideration.

Any transmission from the stellar regions is worth our consideration, don’t you think? Our world may be about to change beyond all recognition. Our future may depend on it. Carl Sagan come out, come out, wherever you are.

Much of the research on the Chilbolton crop circle was carried out by Paul Vigay, a talented mathematician and electronics wizard, to whom this blog is dedicated. He died suddenly in 2008.