More Rendlesham binary code questions
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This is a continuation of my earlier post on the subject — The Rendlesham UFO spoke in binary code.
To recap — U.S. Air Force personnel John Burroughs and Jim Penniston experienced a close encounter in the Rendlesham forest around 3 am on December 26, 1980. The two men had been sent out to investigate strange lights in the forest and later claimed they had encountered something out of this world.
During their run through the forest, the two men lost each other for about 45 minutes, and it was during this time that Jim Penniston found himself at arm’s length of a triangular craft. He touched the craft and claims to have received a message that he later recorded in his notebook.
Now, 30 years later, the notebook is brought into the limelight with a little help from a certain Linda Moulton Howe and the Ancient Aliens series airing on The History Channel.
As I wrote yesterday, the numbers that Mr. Penniston recorded in his notebook revealed a set of geographical coordinates. In the Ancient Aliens episode, the numbers were decoded by Nick Ciske, and the coordinates that were found seemed to point to a location west of Ireland.
Linda Moulton Howe, however, had her own analysis done. She contacted retired American astronomer Michael A. Reed and former Australian astrophysicist Horace R. Drew to perform the analysis. They came up with a different set of coordinates that points to the town center of Woodbridge, Suffolk County, England.
Ms. Howe explains on her website:
The Ancient Alien latitude and longitude was further west off the coast of Ireland in the ocean. That difference appears related to the fact that some of Jim Penniston’s zeros and ones were not perfectly clear.
So, Nick Ciske and the Ancient Aliens proponents say the coordinates point to the mythical island of Hy Brazil, while Ms. Howe’s people believe they converge at small town of Woodbridge, England. Why the discrepancy?
Well, look at this image of the analysis made by Ms. Howe’s experts.
We can clearly see which sets of binary numbers make up the coordinates. But how do we know where to put the decimal points? The binary code does not tell us this — 52.0942532 could as well be 5.20942532, which would then place us smack in the middle of Cape Coast, Ghana. Or what if 1.3131269 would instead be 13.131216? Well, then we find ourselves west of Ireland and where the ancient astronauts theorists want to place Hy Brazil.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the coordinates derived from the decoded binary numbers are very much open to interpretation, making it difficult to draw any conclusions about a certain location or place. I think it’s also safe to say that the Ancient Aliens producers interpreted the coordinates in a way that is in line with their goals and theories.
Who knows, maybe all this will be explained when/if the complete message is released for all to see. But until then, I’ll be taking any “analysis” of the code with a grain of salt.
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Why would the message use 8 bits to a byte (or an equivalent to a byte)? Using 8 bits is an agreed convention for human based technology. If this message is ‘Alien’ in origin, it could be that any number of bits would make a byte, for example it could be ’13′ bits to an alien byte. The second question raised by this binary message is why would ‘Aliens’ not only use an 8 bit convention, but then compound this curious behavior by also using plain old ASCII to encode their message. The source of the binary message may or may not be Alien in origin, but the interpretation smacks of (human) wishful thinking. It is also useful to keep in mind that Mr. Penniston may well have interpreted the Alien message as binary code, because that is what it most resembled, rather than what it actually was. For all we know when he touched the craft he may have been perceiving a type of ‘hand shake’ protocol.
I agree, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered before any of this makes sense. During his hypnotic regression in 1994, Mr. Penniston said the craft had actually been sent by future humans, so maybe that can explain the use of 8-bit technology…
It’s a good story, albeit rather light on important details at the moment.
Hey I think a bigger question is – why ascii – which is a man made code? Well the obvious answer is because the visitors wanted to communicate with us, and learned this from our culture, or maybe the arecibo message which was in 8-bit binary. Yeah I know this is a big “if”, but I have an open mind and believe it is not too crazy a story.
I don’t get what the experts are saying claiming here. How can you confuse 1 for 0 and O for a 1? I can see them clearly out this page no problem, the 1 and O if there not clear that doesn’t make a difference a 1 will always look like a 1 and 0 will always look like a 0 a straw argument that one.
These so-experts might be messing with the results here.
Agreed. Looking at the relevant pages of code, they all look perfectly clear to me as well. I can’t find any segment where it would be difficult to discern the numbers. The difference in location of the coordinates has more to do with interpretation, I think.
Clearly, the occurrence of a message in20th century English language coded in 20th century binary code brings up all sorts of questions. However, it must be concluded that the message was meant to be read this way, because the chances of any other code translating into a coherent 99% correctly spelled and logically relevant message are virtually nonexistent. It is possible that the apparent spelling “mistakes” are simply glitches in Penniston’s memory of the message.
There are a limited number of interpretations of the longtitude/ latitude coordinates (given the varous placement of the decimal points , but again, the chances that one of these interpretations would point out a town so close to the encounter site are also vanishingly small.
I agree that the Ancient Alien people are pretty full of shit, and spew all sorts of half truths and speculations. Researching a lot of their claims reveals that they do a lot of heavy stretching.
In my mind, this bullshit is a great disservice to the search for answers in this field.
On another note: any second grader could “translate” the binary code to letters and numbers. You just have to match up every consecutive eight digits with the corresponding letter or number on the chart. It ain’t rocket surgery, as a friend of mine likes to say. I also see no ambiguous digits. Hard to confuse a one with a zero.
Also, there was a crop circle formation recently that contained a message in ASCII (along with a big Alien face). I figured that was a man made hoax, because it was just too “in your face”.
But I tend to believe the Rendelsham guys are for real. They would make some serious enemies if this turned out to be a hoax.
Finally: if the “Beings” could put a coded message into Penniston’s mind, and compel him to write it down, it seems to me they could also “program” him to reveal the message at a certain time, namely now, 30 years after the event.
It strikes me as bizarre that he never thought of showing anyone the code before this year. Perhaps he was “programmed” to not reveal them BEFORE now, for some reason (which I hope isn’t apocalyptic).
It seems clear that the message was “downloaded” for a reason, and intentionally.
Regarding the “Time traveller”, “genetic band aid” statements that Penniston made under hypnosis: I don’t understand how the beings could use the band aids if they could not go back to their time.
Unless they are taking genetic band aids from humans before a calamity and applying them on damaged humans after the calamity. However, if I were collecting human genes from past humans, I would probably collect them from pre industrial humans, as their genome is likely more robust than our present day genome.
Let’s hope it didn’t mean to say “EXPIRATION OF HUMANITY”
It’s interesting that we all seem to interpret the binary code as a message, however I can’t help feeling this is an assumption on our part. For example, why would the message be in ASCII when the hieroglyph on the craft has no known meaning? Why should we consider the binary code as anything other than noise, when the makers of the craft could have written any message on the outside of the craft (In English, like the binary “Message”) It seems like an abuse of technology to go through the extra steps of encoding in binary, then telepathically implanting a message that has dubious meaning when two minutes with a can of spray paint and a stencil would have done the job a thousand times better. If there really was a message here the ‘aliens’ or whoever they may be are doing a sloppy job of getting it across, it seems they can travel light years, (or centuries) to get here, but are hopeless at communicating anything.
Yes it is bizarre that they used ASCll, but If this is not a hoax, consider how improbable it would be that the zeroes and ones should translate into perfect (and appropriate) English words and phrases using the most ubiquitous code in human history. It would be like a monkey randomly typing Shakespeare in one sitting.
Each eight bit sequence can represent 256 different characters letters, numbers, symbols and commands.
Even the series of numbers is clearly deliberate. What are the chances that nearly twenty sequences of eight bit code should translate in a row should translate to NUMBERS instead of letters or symbols?
It starts to make sense, if you take the approach that its meant to be nonsense. I am not one for conspiracies but, hypothetically, if you wanted to muddy the waters, and discredit the original sighting then to plant this idea (the binary message) in someones head would be good place to start. I think Mr. Penniston was witness to something unusual, but now he is being toyed with by some mischievous force that would prefer he is viewed as a fool. I know it seems a little like LSD in the drinking water, but perhaps that sort of manipulation is actually taking place. I also can’t help noticing the coincidence of this “binary code” meme, and the “Rendlesham was a prank with an Apollo capsule” meme, both seem highly unlikely explanations of events.