Couple things:
1) Unless I'm missing something, you're talking about the "Arecibo Response" formation, right? That didn't show up a year after our message went
out. That formation appeared in 2001, and the original Arecibo message went out in 1974 I believe.
2) There's just no way these are real formations, IMO at least. They're impressive, sure, but it's extremely hard for me to believe that an
incredibly advanced civilization would want to respond to our "request for contact" with an explicit and obvious modified version of the original
message, and then half-ass it by making it appear in some little field. Sure, you could say it's part of some kind of "incremental disclosure"
wherein they make their presence known in small steps, but that's just way too convinient.
If I were a crop formation maker, that's exactly what I'd do, because it'd be so easily interpreted by the believers.
3) Formations of this scale and type have already clearly been made by people, such as:
www.ufoarea.com...
This is a huge formation with more "binary data" and an alien face, but the alien face is the giveaway. It's a dramatic, human-style "drawing"
that I've seen on about a million t-shirts. That exactly image. I refuse to believe that the aliens would reveal themselves by depciting their face
exactly the way a T-shirt maker would. Maybe these particular aliens are still in high school or something.
Anyway, there are some thought-provoking crop formations out there, but there are too many reasons to dimiss these particular examples. Extremely well
done, but also extremely fake (again, IMO).

