In a couple days after the original October 26^th posting, the story leaked that the “amateur radio astronomer” was actually a British engineer named “Paul Dore,” and that he worked for “a major British aerospace company.”  Over the next few days, a remarkable drama played itself out electronically around the world – with some folks believing the “Dore” discovery was real, others instantly dismissing it as a hoax.  Additional “amateur” confirmations were soon posted on the “Dore website, only later to be removed because they proved to be outright hoaxes -- using stolen identities of real amateur astronomers elsewhere in the world!  Meanwhile, “Dore” hinted in his own e-mails that he was about to hold “a major press conference” on November 4^th, complete with two professional radio astronomers -- who had apparently confirmed his observations “at a large European radio telescope observatory.”

On November 3^rd, a major non-anonymous research facility – the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) – independently posted its November 2nd observations of EQ Peg.  Despite observations with the ATCA’s six 22-meter “dishes” of a whopping big signal (below) at 1451.8 MHz (megahertz), Dr. Ray Norris, who conducted the observations, dismissed it as “mere satellite interference.”  He based his dismissal on two facts: the signal was NOT on the original frequency posted by “Dore” – 1453.1 MHz; and, the source picked up by the ATCA array was “several degrees away from EQ Peg.”  Since the standard SETI paradigm is that “ET” will “phone from home ,..”, the idea that the source could be moving and changing frequency (which would imply it was close-by, and decelerating … toward Earth) was simply unthinkable.

On the same day (November 3^rd), “Dore” suddenly cancelled his press conference, claiming a “visit by British and American intelligence authorities had convinced him that he had actually picked up a secret satellite transmission ….”  Simultaneously, another Britisher – claiming to be the REAL “Paul Dore” – popped up on the Internet, vehemently claiming that the entire affair had been a hoax … with HIS stolen identity ... and that we’d done it!!

This strange sequence of events then caused the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak (who had made the original September 17^th erroneous EQ Peg observations) to post a detailed timeline of the whole affair – including my small role (see below) -- and his reasons for concluding that the latest story involving EQ Pegasus was in all likelihood “merely a hoax.”

Alerted early on by the fact that one half of EQ Peg’s celestial coordinates are “19 hours, 56 minutes” north Declination (“19.5” anyone ..?), our take both privately and publicly (on Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” for instance) was that we all had been subject to some kind of “extremely sophisticated ‘black’ agency intelligence operation.”  That possibly, a group of “insider” dissidents -- who wanted to get key information made public, either as a “test” of our reactions to an imminent SETI contact … or as a means of “leaking” real information on an imminent hoaxed “landing of an incoming interstellar probe” -– had staged the entire “Dore Affair” simply to “blow the cover” on the operation.  This assessment was based, in part, on independent “inside” information I had been given from a DOD source months before, regarding just such a bizarre scenario.  After “Dore’s” sudden cancellation of the November 4^th press conference, which not only mentioned direct involvement of both British and American intelligence agencies, but also made curious references to “bad weather,” we posted a detailed “decoding” of his rambling e-mail … with some surprising results. 

Reamrkably, everyone who attempted to seriously probe into the EQ Pegasus affair was either immediately tarred with the “hoax” brush themselves, or promptly (after beginning their investigations …) claimed it was simple “interference” and not worth scientifically pursuing.  Both radio professionals and amateurs alike (the SETI League, for instance) exhibited a remarkable lack of curiosity over the details of this “detection” – even after ATCA’s independent confirmation of “something” intriguing out there -- and promptly also refused all further discussion of the signal.  I even had a trusted friend and senior radio astronomer (formerly under contract to NASA on a major planetary mission), refuse further contact with me … after he made a few exploratory phone calls to other colleagues on the subject (I’d quietly asked him for information on any additional NASA or professional radio astronomy confirmations of the EQ Peg signal, apart from Australia).

Then, just when it couldn’t get much weirder ... the entire “Dore” website disappeared, replaced with a site containing the logo of the National Security Agency … and MY initials at bottom!  Shortly, that page disappeared, to be promptly replaced with another … this one sporting three upside down flags (universal symbols of “distress”) ... with my initials still in place.  It’s still there …

In the end, it seemed that we had all been involved in some kind of bizarre “intelligence” operation.  And, at least part of it seemed to have specifically targeted Enterprise … But – to what end?

There are now unmistakable overtones of this infamous 1999 “EQ Peg Affair” … surrounding the current 2001 Chilbolton glyphs.

First: the location is essentially at a government-contracted facility -- dealing specifically with “radio communications” and with “weather” … both key subjects of the EQ Peg soap opera two years ago.  Second: the latest “alien communications in the crops” once again involves the Arecibo Radio telescope, just as the whole EQ Peg scenario actually began with Arecibo’s detection of a false SETI signal in September of 1998 (for, if it had not been for the initial Arecibo “false alarm,” it is highly doubtful that mainstream media – including England’s own BBC – would have been so quick to spread the second report of an EQ Peg SETI signal a month later …).  Third: Enterprise research once again seems to be involved -- this time, the appearance of these two glyphs pointing suggestively toward Mars … and a previously unknown chapter in our solar system’s history … a chapter we had just unveiled in our latest “Tides Paper.”

Which – given the extraordinary optical sophistication and execution of this communication in the wheat (below) -- raises once again the specter that, if this is NOT a bonafide “ET Chilbolton signal,” the only other likely source (because of the need for high technology) is once again our friends in the intelligence community ….  For years there have been rumors regarding the viability of such “exotic” technologies under the intel community’s control.  What is lacking, of course, is any proof (we’re awaiting results of crop sample analyses of the Chilbolton glyphs – which would provide evidence of such “high-energy” manipulation of the crop -- even as we write …).

If the eerie similarity with “EQ Peg” (including the repetitious accusation once again that Art Bell and I “somehow” hoaxed these glyphs ourselves!) is accurate, our analysis leads now to two possible motivations for an “intel community” involvement in the glyph’s appearance -- either separately or combined:

1)     to seed important new information, regarding our own solar system history and our evolution, into the general population -- from a “dissident” faction of that intel community.  Information known only to a few … and until now censored from the rest of us.  The contents and timing of the glyphs – immediately after publication of our new Mars Tidal Model -- would suggest that this “someone” wanted more attention paid to the possibilities raised by that new model, to underscore our own collective heritage on Mars.

2)     to highlight the increasingly inconsistent events surrounding the original “Arecibo Message” – “who’s” known “what” … “when.”

As independent researchers have poured over that original Message and shared their insights across the Internet, it has become increasingly obvious that “something” (though not what some have claimed) was curiously wrong with its construction, 27 years ago.  These real “errors” now center on the representation in the binary code of the number of nucleotides in the human genome, as it was known and published by the scientific genetic community in 1974.  Remarkably, these fundamental “errors” have apparently gone unrecognized and unchallenged for over a quarter of a century--

On the 25^th Anniversary of the original Arecibo Transmission in 1999, one of the participants, Donald Campbell, now a Cornell University professor of astronomy, but a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory at the time, said “It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it.” 

And earlier, Carl Sagan himself noted (only four years after the historic Ceremony), “The Arecibo message was clearly not intended as a serious attempt at interstellar communication, but rather as an indication of the remarkable advances in terrestrial radio technology [emphasis added].” 

Not intended as a “serious attempt” …?

That’s not what everyone’s believed (certainly those involved in SETI) for the last 27 years!  In fact, many of those present at the actual Ceremony on that afternoon of November 16, 1974 took the event VERY seriously, according to Harold Craft, Cornell's current vice president for services and facilities, who was also physically at Arecibo in 1974.  Said Craft, "We translated the radio-frequency message into a warbling audio tone that was broadcast over speakers at the Ceremony.  When it started, much of the audience spontaneously got up and walked out of the tent and gazed up at the telescope …"  And Frank Drake, Director of Arecibo when the Message was transmitted, described the scene in “Murmurs of Earth” this way:

“ … It took 169 seconds to send, and as the warbling of the message changed to the steady tone that marked the end of the message, the emotional impact on many of the audience was evident – there were tears in many eyes and sighs to be heard.  Brighter than the fires of our own sun, the message was on its way …”

Because of this conviction, that the Real Era of Interstellar Communications had begun that afternoon, in the wake of the Arecibo Message an entire Paradigm was born – convincing professionals and laymen alike around the world that if “extraterrestrials” existed, their ONLY means of interstellar communication with us (or us with them) would be via the “practical” long distance technology of “radio.”

So, was the “Arecibo Response” at Chilbolton really designed to reveal (through the world-wide attention it would bring) some important “curious inconsistencies” regarding “Mankind’s first Interstellar Radio Transmission?”  And, was that in turn designed – after almost 30 years -- to make us ask some hard questions about the larger nature of “SETI” itself …?

The more researchers probe into the original Message (remember, prompted solely by the appearance of its “answer” at Chilbolton), the more we find that simply does not fit with a previously presumed “careful, thoughtful composition” 27 years ago ….  Take, for example, the original scientific paper on the event written by “the staff” of Arecibo (but actually by Drake and Sagan) -- which has now come under its own scrutiny, after 27 years.  This key description of the historic experiment was duly published after the Transmission, in 1975, in the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, Icarus.  Carl Sagan not only was one of the paper’s authors ... he was also the Editor of Icarus at the same time -- a fact which shall become highly significant in a moment.

In this Icarus paper, there is a familiar (by now!) reproduction of the digital “ones” and “zeros” of the original binary Prime (below, left).  Right alongside it (below, center, in this slightly modified version) was a black and white “cartoon” of the same “23 by 73 pictorial digital message.”  But—

The “cartoon” – which had by then circulated around the world in newspapers, television and magazine coverage -– contained several fundamental errors.  The most obvious, the central “spine” – denoting the number of nucleotides in human DNA – was missing a critical “0” (below, center).  Compared to the actual binary signal that was transmitted (below, left), this represented a specious increase in the number of nucleotides in the human genome of over half a million – a not insignificant error.  And, that transmitted binary nucleotide number (below, left) – representing 4,294,966,110 base pairs  -- was in and of itself also extremely curious … as you will see below.

Given the nature of the peer-review process -- let alone the fact that one of the paper’s key authors was the journal’s Editor --such a set of obvious “mistakes” is puzzling.  Oh, yes, and this wrong “cartoon” (representing the binary message) was also printed in Icarus backwards … from the actual transmission sequence of the original binary code (above, left and far right).

In light of Carl’s extensive biological background, these repeating “errors” are unfathomable.  Given his dual position as the Editor of the major scientific journal which published the paper, they are simply inexcusable.

Sagan wrote his first published scientific paper, "Radiation and the Origin of the Gene" (1957) while still an undergraduate.  As documented by one of his biographers, Keay Davidson (“Carl Sagan: A Life,” Davidson, Keay; 1999, John Wiley & Sons), Sagan completed this important paper with guidance from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist H.J. Muller of Indiana University, for whom Sagan worked one summer as a lab assistant.  According to Davidson, “The paper was published in the journal Evolution, an auspicious venue for a 22-year-old researcher still a few years shy of his doctorate.”

Years later, in the “Message Construction and Transmission” section of the Arecibo Icarus paper, the “staff” would note “… valuable suggestions for improvements [to the Message] were given by a number of people, but particularly by Carl Sagan. “  Recollected Drake, "He knew more about biology than any astronomer I'd ever met, and was fast making a never-before-heard name for himself as an 'exobiologist.'"

Which makes these redundant “biological errors” in the Message even more perplexing ….

Prior to his highly visible involvement in SETI research, Sagan had been a vigorous proponent of actual interstellar travel and visitations (as opposed to merely radio searches of deep space)!  In 1963, he wrote (and had published) a landmark paper on the subject ["Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight," Planetary and Space Science 11 (1963): 485-98], which proposed sending humans to other stars and (long before Zacharia Sitchin) suggested similarly that aliens might have actually visited the Earth sometime in the past.  In fact, this was the first paper he sent to me (RCH), after I initially called him at Harvard for some advice in 1964 ….  It was one key reason why Eric and I, years later, took our idea for a “message” on Pioneer 10 – destined to be the first physical emissary from Mankind into the Galaxy –- to Carl, that historic afternoon in November 1971.

But there are other aspects of Sagan’s diversified background which may give us important new perspectives on how these “Arecibo errors” might have taken place: his now-documented early recruitment into the so-called “black world” of high-level military space intelligence.

According to Davidson’s biography: “… a turning point in his [Sagan’s] career came when he won the two-year Miller Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, starting Sept 1, 1960.  Berkeley was perfect.  It had many distinguished departments, especially Astronomy.  It thronged with the right people, especially Nobelists and future Nobelists: Melvin Calvin, E. O. Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segre, Edwin McMillan, Luis Alvarez, Owen Chamberlain ….

“In the fierce competition for the Miller Fellowship, Sagan needed an ace, something truly distinctive, something that would make the Miller judges sit up and take notice.  So he decided to confide to them information that he was required by federal law to keep secret.  He revealed his research at a Midwest institute on the remote detection of lunar nuclear explosions.  He must have known the risk he was taking.  The information was classified; he had previously cautioned Muller [his Nobel mentor at Indiana University] not to discuss it with others.  After all, the cold war was still ‘hot,’ and Washington did not look kindly on the leaking of nuclear information.  But the risk was worth taking if it would get him to California [emphasis added].

“The risk paid off.  On March 7, 1960, William R. Dennes, chair of the executive committee for the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, informed Sagan that he had won the two-year fellowship starting in September 1960 …” had by then circulated around the world.

Given this history, and Sagan’s previously documented eager enthusiasm for actual interstellar travel (as opposed to simply sending signals …), were these “mistakes” in the 1974 Arecibo transmission … actually carefully designed … and by Carl Sagan?!  Did Sagan subtly, deliberately – through his “improvements” – clandestinely place classified information in the Arecibo Message (as well as its later publication in Icarus)?  Was this his own “message to the future” … to ultimately reveal to History that he -- Carl Sagan -- knew some extraordinary “secret,” not generally known to the scientific community or public … a secret that, among other things, one day would also demonstrate the ultimate hypocrisy of SETI?

Was Carl -- long before the mysterious appearance of a sophisticated “message” at Chilbolton in 2001 -- trying to tell us something about real communication with “aliens,” known only to a few in 1974 … including Sagan?!

“Carl knew I was constructing this [Arecibo] message, and since he was very interested in it, he volunteered to be a proxy extraterrestrial.  So one day we went off to the campus faculty club and had a long lunch while I silently laid out the rough drawing of the message in front of him …. He had a few suggestions for improvements, but the message worked.  I felt full of confidence this time as the computers at Arecibo went to work constructing the commands needed to control the radio transmitters [emphasis added] ….”

From this first-hand account, by the then-Director of Arecibo himself, we learn that Sagan was the last person Drake consulted … before coding the actual Message into the Observatory’s computers.  So, what were those last minute “improvements” that Carl suggested at that luncheon?

I’d be willing to bet that one of them entailed the total number of nucleotides in human DNA ….

If you carefully examine the central “human genome” section of the original Message, you will count a little over 4 billion nucleotide sequences coded there [by whom?  Drake, when recently questioned on this point (see below) said “from a standard biology text”].  Yet, in 1974, the commonly accepted number of these base pairs was “about 1 billion” (see also Francis Crick’s comments, below).  In fact, this identical (wrong) number of base pairs is written in the text of the Arecibo Icarus paper: “ … there are some four billion such pairs in a single human chromosome.” Here, then is an undeniable historical record of “multiple, redundant errors” in Mankind’s First Deliberate Interstellar Radio Message – in the original Transmission; in the scientific paper’s authorship on that Message … and in its final editing. 

A few months after the November transmission of the Message, Drake and Sagan in May, 1975 co-authored an article in Scientific American titled “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence."  In the original magazine (as opposed to the web version) an illustration of the famed Arecibo Message was used (below).  It carried the same binary “mistake” – “four billion nucleotides in the human genome” -- originally transmitted in November, 1974 … and another “pictogram” version of the same erroneous comparative diagram published in Icarus itself.  The fascinating aspect of this diagram is that, while the binary is clearly wrong (too many nucleotides for 1974) … the black and white “pictogram” claiming to represent that binary version is even “wronger!”

The digital version (bottom, right), as we have mentioned, encodes 4,294,441,822 base pairs in the human genome; the “cartoon” version (bottom, left) curiously illustrates 4,294,966,110 base pairs … 524,288 more.

Fours years later, in 1978, in an article in Smithsonian Magazine Sagan would again personally reiterate this curious DNA mistake: “ … these molecular building blocks [in the Message] are put together to form a long molecule of DNA comprising about four billion links in the chain [emphasis added].”

Remarkably, in the same time frame (1978), Sagan also published the previously mentioned “Murmurs of Earth” – the official history of the creation of the “Voyager Records” (the spacecraft messages that physically followed the first Pioneer Plaques out of the solar system on Voyagers 1 and 2).  In Chapter 2, authored by Drake himself and titled “The Foundations of the Voyager Record,” the former Director of Arecibo would write about the nucleotides incorporated in the Arecibo Message:

“That DNA is important to us is clear.  Of equal importance, a large number placed within the DNA molecule [in the Message] tells of the number of nucleotide pairs, or code bits, in the typical DNA molecule …”

And Drake illustrated this “large number” (which, significantly, he didn’t describe further) with the same wrong (too large) binary number used in the original Transmission and in the original Icarus publication (below, left).  But, for the first time, it was at least paired with a consistent black and white “pictogram” representing that same wrong number (below, right).

A logical inference from this pattern of events is that Drake left the biological aspects of the Message strictly up to Sagan (“He knew more about biology than any astronomer I'd ever met ….”) -- only insisting on a consistency between the binary number transmitted and the pictorial version printed in his Chapter.  In every other representation of the Message controlled by Sagan, the preceding, inexplicable inconsistency was faithfully maintained … for over six years.

So, what was Sagan up to?!

If these had simply been one-time “stupid mistakes,” either in the original Message or in the original Icarus “Message paper,” you would have thought that Sagan himself (as Editor!) would have eventually caught them.  Instead: he again reinforced that key wrong number -- “4 billion nucleotides in the human genome” -- in repeated publications that he authored.  And, he also repeatedly published -- in Icarus and in all subsequent articles -- the bizarre, contradictory transmitted binary data side-by-side with the wrong “pictogram.”  This forces us to consider the “unthinkable”: that the erroneous encoding of “four billion nucleotides” in the original Message, its repetition in the Icarus paper … and in every subsequent book or article that Sagan wrote or edited about this subject, from 1974 on … was NOT an “error”… but was part of a carefully calculated plan ….  But to accomplish what?

In 2000, Celera Genomics (a private biotech corporation founded in 1998) finally announced at a major White House ceremony (along with the 16-year government-funded “Human Genome Project”), preliminary results for this long-awaited number: from actual DNA sequencing, there now appear to be approximately 3.2 billion nucleotides in human DNA … and counting [link to ].  This, though far above the official estimates in 1974 (see below) is only 75% of the number that Sagan coded in the Arecibo transmission in 1974.  Other current estimates now place it as high as 3.5 billion nucleotides … with a still existing “twenty percent error.”  So, the eventual totally sequenced number of actual nucleotides in the human genome (they’re not done yet!) could ultimately reach Carl’s “magic” number of 4.29 billion!

Twenty seven years after the Transmission, in the “Arecibo Response” glyph appearing at Chilbolton in 2001, the “alien DNA” (above the clearly “alien” figure) is pictured as being composed of “4.2949 billion base pairs”  … only about half a million more than the precise number Sagan digitally coded in the original Arecibo Message in 1974!  But -- the “alien” base pair number is exactly equal to the conflicting “erroneous pictogram” that Sagan insisted on publishing over and over and over again.

Obviously, he wanted us to pay special attention to that contradiction … and the “alien DNA number” … which has now mysteriously reappeared in an English wheat field, in 2001.

I mean, there are only two possible explanations for Carl’s otherwise incomprehensible, repeated “mistakes” in this sequence of events surrounding the Arecibo Message: outright stupidity … or … deliberate “covert actions” -- based on key “inside information” that Sagan deliberately wanted to call to our attention … at an “appropriate time.”

From personal experience, I can vouch for the fact that Carl was NOT a stupid man.  Which only leaves the “double agent” explanation ….

Leaving aside Sagan’s precise “source” of this astonishing information for a moment, Seth Shostak – Carl’s “heir apparent,” in terms of carrying on the SETI “myth” -- seems now to have taken a page or two from Sagan’s “double agent” play book ….

Certainly, Shostak’s misleading public comments re the “Arecibo Response” at Chilbolton, if not his own contradictory actions regarding the original 1974 Message (see below), have only deepened suspicions regarding SETI’s decades-long lack of serious scientific interest in real “messages” ….

Evidencing not one whit of scientific curiosity in the striking, inexplicable, geometric figures appearing literally around the world for the last thirty or so years, Shostak instead has repeatedly (and seriously) misstated the facts concerning the “crop glyph phenomenon” in general, and the appearance of the Chilbolton glyphs in particular – both in recent media interviews and in print.  From vastly understating the total number of mysterious glyphs world-wide, to completely disregarding the presence of highly significant and completely inexplicable “molecular markers” and “anatomical anomalies” in the majority of “real” circles -– evidence for the application of some type of high technology, “high-energy phenomenon” to the standing crop in the process of the creation of the glyphs -– Shostak has maintained the illusion that ALL are “simple hoaxes,” casually done by “college kids.”  And in so doing, he has attempted to perpetuate the myth – successfully launched at Arecibo 27 years ago -- that the ONLY means of valid communication with another intelligence is through interstellar electromagnetic messages.

Yet, Dr. Shostak – responsible for the SETI Institute’s “public outreach” program -- has curiously perpetuated the identical errors in his “debunking” article on Chilbolton that Carl Sagan allowed in Icarus 26 years ago; in his recent rote “defense” of the current radio SETI paradigm, combined with his casually dismissive commentary on the Chilbolton glyphs, Shostak (for some reason) ironically chose the same, erroneous “four billion nucleotides” (and the “alien” version at that!) in the backwards “cartoon” that Sagan used so many years before (below).  Further, when informed of this error personally by Dustin Brand (in a recent phone conversation), Shostak has done nothing to remove the erroneous “cartoon” -- which he is still representing on the SETI website as the real Arecibo transmission of 27 years ago.  In fact, a couple days after his conversation with Brand, Shostak authorized another article on the SETI website, featuring again the same mistaken, “alien” visual version of the 1974 Transmission.

Frank Drake is the current Chairman of the Board of the Shostak’s SETI Institute.  When Brand attempted to contact Drake directly, to ask him some key questions about these curious “inconsistencies” in the original Message, Drake did not respond.  Instead, he had Shostak act as a go-between.  When asked how Drake (or whomever) had arrived at the “four billion nucleotides” transmitted in the original Arecibo Message, this was when Shostak said Drake simply told him “We consulted a standard biology reference on the subject.”

The problem is … there were no “standard biology texts” from this time frame, which specifically assigned “4 billion nucleotides” to the human genome!

For, in 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick (and their research associate, Maurice Wilkins), shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the precise nucleotide structure of DNA.  In a press interview after his acceptance speech in Stockholm, one of these “fathers” of DNA, Francis Crick himself, explained:

“DNA is a polymer. That is to say it has a regular, repeating backbone with side groups called ‘bases’ projecting at regular intervals. However all the bases are not the same, there are four kinds of them and the genetic information is conveyed by the precise order of the different sorts of bases along the DNA. In other words, the genetic message is written in a language of four letters. Incidentally, the total length of the message for man is not short, it is probably more than a thousand million letters long [emphasis added].”  In 1968 – less than six years before the Arecibo Message was designed – James Watson, in his classic work describing his and Crick’s discovery of DNA, “The Double Helix,” reiterated this same number ... “a thousand million (a US billion) ….”

Given these clearly authoritative references, it has been a real mystery trying to identify what “standard DNA reference” -- with the much higher number that was Transmitted -- Drake could be “remembering” ….

Curiously, six years after the Transmission, in 1980, Sagan himself would publish (in a book called “Cosmos” -- from his immensely popular PBS TV series of the same name) a new number for this crucial aspect of human DNA.  In Chapter 2 of “Cosmos,” Carl would suddenly “recant” his previous assertion regarding the “four billion base pairs” in the human genome, this time clearly agreeing with Crick’s statement in 1962:

Later on the same page, however, he would carefully blur the issue, noting “… This major influence on the function of the blood – so striking as to be readily apparent in photographs of red blood cells – is the result of a change in a single nucleotide out of the ten billion in the DNA of a typical human cell [emphasis added].”

Clearly, he was not only now providing a conservative range of possibilities (as opposed to the two precise numbers he had previously published), Sagan was now attempting to camouflage his previous, too-accurate assertions.  This raises the question: “who” finally tumbled to what he had been doing for the previous six years, forcing him to ultimately appear to support the “conventional” genetic view …?  For, later in the same volume, Sagan would reproduce another version of the Arecibo “cartoon” – this one in color, but without the accompanying binary data -- and, for the first time, this one would be the correct representation of the binary message actually transmitted … the one that now appears on the official Cornell University website.  The one that Frank Drake for some reason still refuses to exchange for the erroneous “alien” version on the current SETI website ….

It would certainly appear, from all this, that the creators of the “Arecibo Response” glyph at Chilbolton – whoever they may be -- had a well-developed sense of humor … in both their choice of a human interstellar communication to finally “answer” (Sagan’s mysterious “hidden Arecibo Message”) … as well as in their location for carrying it out: in the virtual shadow of an example of the REAL quarter-century “hoax” for practical interstellar communications – a “primitive” terrestrial radio telescope!

The original Arecibo Message took only three minutes to transmit towards the globular star cluster, M-13 – a collection of over 300,000 stars located about 24,000 light years away in the constellation of “Hercules.”  With intense scrutiny now focused on the contents of that message, and the discovery that some kind of “hidden agenda” apparently went into its construction (What did Sagan say, “… clearly not intended as a serious attempt at interstellar communication …”?), it’s only logical to also ask “What about the destination?  How was M-13 chosen as the target for this ‘scientific slight-of-hand?”

A little research turned up the fact (again, from Sagan himself) that the Message was transmitted on the afternoon of November 16, 1974.  The ostensible reason for choosing M-13 was that it would pass almost directly overhead at that time of year, at the time of the planned Arecibo Telescope “upgrading and resurfacing Ceremony” (the ostensible reason for the Transmission in the first place).  Arecibo’s “dish” is a 1000-foot diameter spherical metal reflector, lying fixed across a water-carved limestone valley (a “karst”) in northern Puerto Rico.  Being immobile, it can only view the sky passing almost directly overhead (below).  Observations of (or transmissions to) stars and other objects from Arecibo depend on the Earth’s rotation to bring its targets into view across the span of one full day.  Specific experiments thus have to be timed for a brief two-hour period (plus or minus ~20 degrees) out of every 24 hours -- when these objects pass close to the zenith “pointing” of the movable “feed” of the otherwise fixed reflector.

Thus, the Arecibo Ceremony itself (and the hurriedly created and transmitted “Message from Mankind”) was, in hindsight, obviously carefully carried out in direct compliance with the ancient Egyptian rituals that we’ve discovered in so many other space activities …. between 12:56 and 1:13 PM, that key afternoon.

With its Ritual transmission toward M-13 … at 13:13 that afternoon (on a string of “Hyperdimensional 13’s …”), the “facade of SETI” was successfully begun.

No wonder there were “hidden messages” encoded in its contents: it was obviously designed from the beginning as another aspect of the Ritual -- to successfully “capture” the hearts and minds of anyone interested in true interstellar conversations … as the ONLY “practical” (but totally controllable) means of Mankind’s ultimate “connection with the stars“….

Which Sagan (and now, someone at Chilbolton) obviously thought should ultimate be exposed ….

Finally, we’ve noticed something else that’s interesting: the first “formal” Message actually delivered into space was on Pioneer 10, launched in the Spring of 1972.  A few months later -- in the first growing season after launch -- the first modern crop circles began to appear in fields across the British Isles ….  Slowly, over succeeding decades -- and now in over 70 countries around the world -- they have escalated into the thousands, and in a dazzling array of increasing mathematical, geometric, and esthetic complexity and visual sophistication.  Until—

The Chilbolton glyphs appeared – and completely shattered all preceding patterns for such “messages.”

Shortly after the successful launching of the first interstellar Message that Eric and I suggested (aboard Pioneer 10), Carl published “The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspecive” in 1973.  In it he wrote,

“The greater significance of the Pioneer 10 Plaque is not as a message to out there; it is as a message to back here [emphasis added].”