If this strange message is real it was possibly from galaxy Messier 13.  The S.E.T.I. program received a strange message many decades ago.  Although there has been much debate, no one can prove the origins.  It is very contyroversial with many people saying it was a hoax or a misread.  However there are a lot of folks who still think this was real:

In 1974, the Arecibo Radio Telescope received a major technological overhaul resulting in a massive boost in transmission power. To celebrate the upgrade, Doctors Frank Drake and Carl Sagan created an instellar greeting message, and translated it into a universally understandable binary code template capable of being transmitted to distant galaxies.

This is absolutely fascinating.  Do you think this is real?  Here is some more background on the findings:

The message is easily rendered into an infographic of humanity.
It starts with a basic binary count from 1 to 10, which serves as a built in decryption key to translate the message into a graphic form.

It then lists the atomic numbers for the most basic chemical elements that make up DNA, and describes the building blocks of DNA by giving the specific nucleotide formulas and showing the double helix DNA structure of every living thing on Earth.

Twenty seven years later, we received a reply.

Scientists at the Chilbolton Radio Observatory showed up to work as usual one morning in 2001, to discover the most detailed crop formation ever had appeared overnight in the wheat field next door. Overnight surveillance cameras didn’t see a thing.

Here is a great pic of center of galaxy Messier 13

This is hard to believe but since no one can really prove where this came from, it is worthy of further discussion.  Plus this galaxy is 43,960 light years away so we would have had to send the message double that time ago to get a reply??  And here is a description of things from S.E.T.I.:

The broadcast was particularly powerful because it used Arecibo’s megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna. The latter concentrates the transmitter energy by beaming it into a very small patch of sky. The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo’s.

The message consists of 1679 bits, arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line (these are both prime numbers, and may help the aliens decode the message). The “ones” and “zeroes” were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes. A graphic showing the message is reproduced here. It consists, among other things, of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life. Although it’s unlikely that this short inquiry will ever prompt a reply, the experiment was useful in getting us to think a bit about the difficulties of communicating across space, time, and a presumably wide culture gap.

We hope you like the video and feel free to comment with your ideas on this controversial topic!

thanks to seti.org for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic