From Arecibo to Crop Circles: The Contested Quest for Extraterrestrial Contact

To the point

An early 1974 effort by Carl Sean used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message about math, science, Earth’s place in the solar system, DNA, and a human form to greet any outsiders, and in 2001 a crop circle near Hill Bolton Observatory in Britain was claimed as a reply, a phenomenon with a long history including Agabard’s 9th‑century mentions and Robert Plot’s 1686 sketches, plus a 1991 confession by Doug Bower and Dave Chley that many circles were created as hoaxes, though some patterns were hard to explain and sparked talk of unusual effects and nonhuman authors, culminating in a later circle depicting a gray alien with a binary warning that further fuels questions about whether any genuine signals exist or if all such reports are fakes.