Crop Circle Revelation
During
the summer of 1991 interest in the crop circles in England
Giving
the subject a certain legitimacy was scientist Dr Terence Meaden, a meteorologist
and author who had proposed that an elusive natural phenomenon, the Plasma
Vortex, was causing these mysterious patterns in the crops. To prove his theory he set up an observation
project with a team of Japanese scientists on a hilltop between Calne and Devizes
where a watch was carried out using radar and other scientific instruments. Nevertheless the agency that caused the crop
circles continued to evade detection and, despite the appearance of some
circles in the fields below, nothing definite was established.
During
the previous year the phenomenon had progressed from simple circles in the corn
to highly elaborate shapes called pictograms which embodied both circles and
rectilinear elements. Although most investigators, like me, saw clear evidence
of intelligent design, Dr Meaden continued to insists that his “plasma vortex”
was the answer, even suggesting that it might explode like some physical
mechanism scattering cogwheels and springs, thus causing straight lines and
possible key-shapes to result. Other
researchers would cautiously allow that some “unknown intelligence” was at
work, but at the start of 1991 there were few who seriously believed that the
crop circles were all man-made.
So
for quite some time, Dr Meaden’s theory became the “official” explanation and
puzzled journalists and TV interviewers would frequently turn to him when the
subject was discussed. On July 17th 1991 a
vast new crop formation appeared in the fields below Barbury Castle Barbury
Castle
The Milk Hill Script
In early August 1991 a strange new crop formation looking
like a line of some unknown script was found in a wheat field below Milk Hill
near Alton Barnes. Croppie John
Martineau, who had been out on Milk Hill in the early hours, was first to
report this and described it as a “line of runes”. Runes are the characters of certain ancient
secret alphabets, consisting mainly of rectangles, with one or two sides
missing and in particular orientations, with such symbols corresponding to the
letters of the alphabet. With his talk
of runes, some wrongly suspected John himself of having hoaxed this formation.
Most
of us were deeply puzzled by the meaning of this weird cipher. In due course The Cerealogist , ‘The Journal for Crop Circle Studies’,
under the editorship of John Michell,
offered a prize of £100 to
anyone who could come up with a convincing solution to the riddle. Many tried but no one succeeded. The best known attempt was: OPPONO ASTOS. This was suggested by the late Professor
Gerald Hawkins, author of the book Stonehenge Decoded. Hawkins claimed that it meant “I oppose acts
of craft and cunning” in Latin, although the accusative plural ‘astos’ is a bit
dubious. The acts of craft and cunning,
he held, were crop circle hoaxes.
Other cryptographers, similarly using a straight substitution code,
produced EFFETE ORDER or else ESSENE ORDER, neither of which seemed
relevant. Few people saw any merit in
these solutions.
Others offered interpretations more in line with their
crop circle beliefs. American
mystery-hunter the late Erik Beckjord had stamped out TALK TO US in a cornfield
a few miles away two days earlier, a message presumably aimed at the aliens or
whatever other intelligence lay behind the crop circles. The Milk Hill Script he saw as a reply,
though curiously he decided that the message was in Korean. Michael Green, Chairman of CCCS, found the
meaning of the crop cipher was in an Atlantean language known only to him. He claimed that the circlemakers’ message
meant “Creator, Wise and Loving”.
The message was bounded by a small circle at each end
and these were not considered part of the text. That was indeed correct. Hawkins assumed that the character ll indicated a word break. It did not.
For some reason he thought the message was in Latin. No, it was in English! More importantly, it was far from clear which
way up the text was meant to be. That
would determine whether it should be read from left to right or from right to
left. In fact the text is the right way
up as it is shown in the accompanying photograph, and Hawkins in producing his
incorrect solution read the text from back to front.
When I was editor of The Cerealogist a year
later, I renewed the challenge to translate the Milk Hill Script and also our
offer of £100. Surely someone must know what these strange
runes meant? I had assumed that by now,
at any rate, the human circlemakers responsible would step forward and claim
the prize. But that was not to be.
Barbury Castle Crop Circle, July 17th 1991 (photo by George Wingfield)
The
Message Revealed
I can now reveal the true meaning of the Milk Hill
Script and I still hope (if I ever get paid for this article!) to award £100 to Steve Marshall of Yatesbury, Wilts, who
was the first person to inform me of it in early 2005. He is not the circlemaker who laid down the
formation and I’m still unsure whether that person --let us call him ‘A’ – was
ever aware of the prize that was on offer.
I used to assume that the creators of those magnificent crop formations
back in 1991, which some referred to as the legendary “A-team” without knowing
their identity, were probably people who were known to the croppies at the
time. These A-team circlemakers if they
existed, I reasoned, would have found it difficult to resist hanging out in
their newly produced formations during the day, and mixing with croppies who
came to wonder at them. They would have
become familiar faces and might even have attended crop circle conferences at
that time. But maybe I was wrong, and
maybe this supposed A-team shrank from public view.
About five years ago another more recent circlemaker ‘B’
was out walking at the Cherhill monument in Wiltshire. He overheard a man he didn’t recognize
talking to some other visitors to the monument about crop circles. He clearly displayed a degree of inside
knowledge on the subject. B waited until
the others had left and then went over and talked with the man who turned out
to be A. When A realized that this was a
fellow circlemaker he became rather more candid. He told B that he and his friends had made
the Barbury Castle
MEADENTALKSSHIT
The A-team’s little joke was to first write the lower
halves of the capital letters of this message up against a tractor
tramline. This would prove
indecipherable –as indeed it did—and then, when it had attracted sufficient
attention, they would return by night and complete it by adding the upper
halves. Lettering of the message used by
the A-team is examined in more detail in the accompanying piece which is appended below (“The Milk Hill
Script Lettering”).
However the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go
awry. The farmer was not at all pleased
by the appearance of this cryptic inscription in his wheatfield or by the
subsequent invasion by croppies keen to examine it believing that it might be a
message from the aliens or from spiritual beings of a higher order. He destroyed it as soon as he could by
harvesting the crop in that field. The
A-team had no opportunity to return and complete their mischief. There were only a few aerial photos taken of
this half-message during its brief existence, such as the one shown here taken
by Jürgen Krönig.
Although neither the aliens, nor indeed myself, would
have phrased it quite so crudely, the message does express a sentiment with
which I would have concurred at the time.
Meaden had indeed talked a lot of nonsense and this certainly helped
give the crop circles a false scientific legitimacy. This is not an attempt to shift the blame for
the madness which the circles provoked at the time, since many of us were
utterly beguiled by them and it took several years for some researchers to come
back down to earth. In 1990 and summer
1991 this madness was at its height and there were few people prepared to even
entertain the possibility that the whole phenomenon might be man-made.
Today there are still diehard croppies who will dispute
what I say, but they will find it hard to reject this solution to the
mysterious 1991 cipher at Milk Hill. And, if they reluctantly accept that, they
should also consider whether A and his friends made the great formation at Barbury Castle
George Wingfield
September 2008
Steve Marshall
The Milk Hill Script Lettering
It can be seen from the photograph that the
lettering used in this message is composed entirely of straight lines and that
no curved or diagonal components are present.
What sort of script lettering did the authors of the message intend
using?
My suggestion is that the intention was to mimic
a basic type of font that is widely employed in displays using LCD or LED
electronic devices, such as digital clocks or signs. The matrix used to represent each letter
might, for example, be a seven-element LED display of the following shape:-
This consists of two squares joined
together by a common side. As an LED
device, each of the seven sides of the two squares can be lit or unlit and the
resulting combinations are used to represent different numeric digits or
letters. When such a matrix is used to represent the digits 0–9 only, the
results are unambiguous and will be familiar to most people since such numbers
are commonly used in digital clocks (with the vertical elements sloped slightly
to the right).
Less familiar is the use of such a matrix to
represent the capital letters of the alphabet.
Clearly some letters, such as those with diagonal components, will be
more poorly represented than those without.
If we equate a “lit” LED with a side being present and “unlit” with it
being absent, it can be shown how characters in this format can be used as an
alphanumeric font. The LED character
shown in the previous paragraph, with all sides lit or present, could be used
to represent the digit 8 or the capital letter B.
Some LED displays of this variety are used to
represent capital letters only. It can
be seen that the capital letters A B
C D E
F G are represented fairly satisfactorily in this
format:
And likewise, the letters H
I L O P S
U are:
One may object to the fact that D and O
are represented identically and the same would be true for A and R. For these reasons a reduced character set of
less than 26 letters must be used if one is to avoid ambiguity. Some of the capitals such as J
K M N
T Y are not so satisfactory but are still
recognizable:
Clearly the representation of N as two verticals
is not ideal, and there are capital letters such as O
R Q V
W X Z which cannot be easily represented without
any ambiguity and are best avoided.
Therefore one’s short message might need to be restricted, say, by using
a 19-character-only alphabet which avoids these letters.
Nevertheless the letters which we have defined
above are sufficient to spell out the crop message. Using this font it appears as:
Apart from the fact that the small gap in the middle was closed up a bit, that is exactly what was found below Milk Hill on that day back in August 1991.
*******************************************
[This article explaining the Milk Hill Script was originally written in March 2005 and was to have been published in Fortean Times by editor Bob Rickard. Despite Bob's assurance that it would be published soon it never appeared in that organ possibly due to the fact that he had handed over most of his editorial duties at about that time. The article was later published in FATE Magazine. I paid Steve Marshall the £100 prize money for this solution to the Milk Hill Script although I had long ceased to be the editor of The Cerealogist. Mr A could have collected the prize money at any time but we have no idea whether he ever knew it was on offer. Mr B (Matthew Williams) could equally well have collected this prize money but unlike Steve he was not the one who told me the solution.]
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