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The Face and the Message

What do They Mean
and Where are They From?

John Michell

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On the morning of 20th August 2001, a new crop formation was found in a wheatfield at Wherwell, a village near Andover, Hampshire. It turned out to be the image of a huge face, made from isolated clumps of standing wheat like half-tone printing dots or computer pixels.

Paul Vigay, director of the Independent Research Centre for Unexplained Phenomena, was called in. He is a computer expert, and he quickly identified and decoded the mysterious script. It was, or it pretended to be, a communication from space - a response to radio signals transmitted from earth 27 years earlier.

On 16th November 1974 a government-backed group, SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), used the giant telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to beam a coded radio message into space. The target was the globular star cluster M13 in the constellation of Hercules, 25,000 light years away from us. The message gave technical details about ourselves and our solar system. The apparent reply, expressed in the symbols of the crop formation, gave corresponding data about another inhabited area of the universe.

In this pamphlet, John Michell investigates this extraordinary phenomenon, looking at the whole subject of crop circles, their conspiracies and hoaxers, and the possibility that this may be a conspiracy by the phenomenon itself or by the intelligence that directs it. A fascinating and highly provocative piece of detective work, this pamphlet will re-ignite the debate on the mysterious artforms that appear annually in our fields and have never been satisfactorily explained.

JOHN MICHELL was editor of the first crop circle magazine, The Cereologist, and has an abiding interest in all strange phenomena, about which he has written several highly respected books. He is also recognised as the world authority on ancient science and religion, and is much quoted as the expert on ancient civilisations and what they reveal to us.

List of contents

Foreword by John McEwen
The discovery
The Face
The construction of the Face
The lay of the face: an account by Michael Glickman
Interpreting the message
Our message from Arecibo
Their message at Chilbolton
What does it all mean?
Hoax and conspiracy
A likely story
What we are supposed to think, and should we?

A sample from the pamphlet

The discovery

On the morning of 20 August 2001 a new crop formation was found in a wheatfleld at Wherwell, a village near Andover, Hampshire. Lucy Pringle, a pioneer of crop circle studies, heard about it and hired an aeroplane to inspect it from above. She saw not one but two formations in the field, about a furlong apart. Both of them were rectangular. One, measuring 90 x 264 feet, reminded her of a computer chip, inscribed with strange symbols. The other was a meaningless mess – or so she thought. But she photographed it, and when the film was developed she recognized the image immediately: it was a huge face, made from isolated clumps of standing wheat like half-tone printing dots or computer pixels.

Paul Vigay, director of the Independent Research Centre for Unexplained Phenomena, was called in. He is a computer expert, and he quickly identified and decoded the mysterious script It was, or it pretended to be, a communication from space – a response to radio signals transmitted from earth 27 years earlier. On 16 November 1974 a government-backed group, SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), used the giant telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to beam a coded radio message into space. The target was the globular star cluster M13 in the constellation of Hercules, 25,000 light years away from us. The message gave technical details about ourselves and our solar system. The apparent reply, expressed in the symbols of the crop formation, gave corresponding data about another inhabited area of the universe.

As if to emphasize their extra-terrestrial origin, these two formations were located in a field adjacent to the Chilbolton Observatory radio telescope. Built in 1965, this installation is used for receiving and analyzing radio waves from space, mainly for the benefit of weather forecasters and satellite controllers. Its management and staff are not trained to study messages imprinted on cornfields, and they paid no attention to the mysterious markings. They said they had noticed the first formation, the Face, a week earlier, on 14 August. But the image is not apparent from ground level, and no one reported it until the Message appeared.

The Face

The reason why Lucy Pringle, Steve Alexander and other photographers did not at first see the face in the dots of corn was that they approached it from the north, where it appeared upside-down. Viewing it in that way, no image is apparent, but you can see how the illusion was created not just by the areas of laid and standing corn, but by the play of shadow and sunlight. In this upside-down picture the light is coming from the top, and the dots of standing corn cast shadows below them.

Turn the picture right way up, and the tones seem to change places. The light still seems to be coming from the top, so that the light-toned areas appear to be casting the shadows. The effect of this is to make the dots recede and appear like holes in a mesh of twisting treads. If you did not know that this was a cornfield, you might well take it for a panel of knitting or lace, loosely woven within a border.

The Face is a marvel – a constantly moving image, varying with the light and changing its aspect throughout the day as the shadows follow the sun. It is a masterpiece of art and illusion, perfectly executed, subtle, witty and original. It is also mercurial and thoroughly deceptive. As John McEwen has written, none of our conceptual land artists has come near to producing work of this quality. It was made of natural, living materials, a simple combination of plants and sunlight. And it only lasted for a short time. The field was soon harvested, and the Face and the Message survive only as photographs. That is evidently what the artist intended.

But the artist is anonymous. Nothing is known about him, her, it or them. Is the Face a self-portrait? If so, it gives nothing away. Everyone sees it differently – as either male or female, black or white, sinister or benign. lt could be EIvis, or a young beauty, or a hoodlum in dark glasses. Perhaps it is a composite picture of the human or some other race. Most people agree it is a youthful face. Like the Message, it is evidently designed to have meaning. But it is totally enigmatic.

The construction of the Face

The face appears within a rectangular frame, 145ft. wide and 186ft. long overall, the frame being 10ft. wide. Filling the inner part of the picture, drawn diagonally to the frame at an angle of 45 degrees, is a square grid, made up of 29 lines from top right to bottom left, and 29 lines at right angles to these. The result is a net of 412 small squares, each containing an isolated dot of standing corn. The dots are graded in different sizes so that, together with their shadows, they create the image.

Each dot seems to have been formed separately within its square, with no sign of any mechanical process. After a careful inspection, Lucy Pringle wrote: "The lay (of cornstalks) in the Face was one I had not seen before. It seemed as though the flattened, swirled crop around each standing tuft had been laid individually... None of the stalks were broken in either formation; they were bent at the base." Another experienced researcher, Michael Glickman, said he had never before seen such a pattern.

Beneath the laid-down stalks was found a network of thin lines, corresponding to the square grid. The lines were no more than 4 inches wide (Lucy Pringle says 3½ and sometimes as narrow as 2 inches). Maybe a dainty foot, carefully placed, could have made them, but surveyors who inspected the under-lines disagreed. The grid was apparently too thin and regular. Similar 'construction lines' have been uncovered in crop formations. Like everything to do with this phenomenon they are enigmatic and ambiguous. The evidence of thin under-lines has been used by hoax theorists, by believers in laser devices and in support of nature spirits as the makers of crop circles.

The Message

The Message panel is unique. Nothing like it has been seen before. Within a narrow border of laid down corn is a rectangle of lines and dots, so precise and faultless that it looks like a mechanical work rather than man-made. That was how it appeared to researchers who inspected the lay of the crop.

This new stage in the phenomenon was not entirely unexpected. Over the last few seasons there have been signs of a developing script or coded communication in the crop formations. A notable example appeared on 2 July 2000 at East Kennett in Wiltshire. A square within a swirled circle was divided into 20 x 20 or 400 cells. It was a work of amazing subtlety. The cells were of different kinds, some of them negative images of others. They were grouped with others of their kind in square or rectangular blocks. But it is hard to make out their divisions, because at the borders of the blocks the different types of cell merge into each other, allowing different groupings.

One way of seeing this formation is as a tray of printer's type. It seems to be a preparation for some form of meaningful writing, which has now duly appeared in the Message.

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