Decoding the Known: Internet Mysteries We Totally Solved

When I was but a wee lad, one of the most fascinating sites in the world to me was Hell.com. For starters, I was like 12, so Hell was still a pretty naughty word. But also, the site was intentionally mysterious.

I first discovered the site during its initial iteration, when there was nothing on the site other than a warning stating that you were not invited and to go away. Over the years, however, more content became available. It seemed to be like a secret, exclusive club, and I wanted in.

I never was able to become a member, but that’s for the best as I would not have fit in there anyway. You see, Hell.com was not an occult website full of angst ridden teens that wanted to feel cool and special, it was a digital space for artists. The site was owned by artist Kenneth Aronson, and it was absolutely playing into the name Hell and people’s lack of understanding of technology.

As the general population became more technologically savvy, projects like this simply become less viable without being much more elaborate.

Just look at the classic 1982 movie Tron. While a visually impressive film that was pretty groundbreaking at the time for its use of special effects, the plot is incoherent gibberish that relies on the viewer having no idea at all how computers work. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is absolutely true, but creators have taken this to mean that they can treat technology as though it is actually magic, which is nonsense. If you show a reasonable person something seemingly magical, they will assume it is just technology that they don’t understand. The converse is not true, however. If you show a reasonable person technology that they don’t understand, such as the inner workings of a computer in the early 80’s, they are not going to assume that it is magic. It’s a good thing they never tried to revive Tron well after the year 2000 when the average person had a much greater understanding of how the insides of electronics worked, because that would’ve been downright silly.

With technology rapidly advancing, so too must internet humbuggery advance if the creators seek to deceive people. There are a lot of mysteries in both the physical and virtual worlds, but more mysteries have been solved than not. And the less magical technology appears to us, the more easily the virtual mysteries can be solved. As a fan of this channel, you are likely a fan of other mysterious content. Well stop it, because Simon makes enough videos to keep you busy. But if you insist on watching other videos as well, there are plenty of lists of “unsolved internet mysteries” out there that feature nothing but solved mysteries. To save you some time so you can focus on quality, well researched, and truly unsolved content like we offer here at Decoding the Unknown, here are some of the most pervasive solved mysteries that lesser YouTubers might try to clickbait you with.

Webdriver Torso

Webdriver Torso is a YouTube channel that was created in March of 2013, and started uploading videos in September of the same year. The channel uploaded lots of short videos, most about 11 seconds long, that appeared to be nothing but a series of slides featuring a white background with a red rectangle and a blue rectangle in various sizes and positions. There were also tones included in the videos, each a simple sine wave or square wave, and the tones would normally change with each slide. There was a lot of speculation regarding Webdriver Torso. Was it an internet numbers station? A recruitment tool like Cicada 3301? A form of alien communication? No, no, and please see a therapist.

The mystery behind this strange YouTube channel was extraordinarily banal. The channel was created by Google and used as a means of quality control. That’s it. When YouTube was asked for comment about the channel, their reply was “We’re never gonna give you uploading that’s slow or loses video quality, and we’re never gonna let you down by playing YouTube in poor video quality.

That’s why we’re always running tests like Webdriver Torso.” Cute, but if a statement to the press is going to include a Rickroll, I prefer it to be read by Melania Trump.

11B-X-1371

Also known as “The Plague Doctor Video”, this entry enjoys extreme longevity because it is just so damned creepy. Still, the mystery was solved in all of three months after going viral, when the creator revealed himself.

The video itself is shot in black and white and features a man in a plague doctor mask and a hooded cloak standing inside an abandoned building. The audio is an obnoxious and disturbing collection of noise, seemingly designed to irritate people. Like dubstep, but with less bass. The video’s title, when converted to binary and then to letters, translates to “muerte”, the Spanish word for death. When the tech news site GadgetZZ ran an article about the video on October 12, 2015, the video blew up and was viewed over 700,000 times in one week. GadgetZZ had received a DVD of the video in the mail from an anonymous sender in Poland.

Immediately, Reddit was on the case, trying to decode the messages hidden in this mysterious video as well as identify the location it was shot. Embedded throughout both the video and audio are a number of hidden messages, discovered using steganography, spectrogram analysis, and deciphering Morse code. The messages were threatening, and the images were of murdered and mutilated corpses. Fear not, however, the video was not made by a murderer, and the images are all stills from horror movies, plus one image of a victim of the Boston Strangler. They also identified the location the film was shot as an abandoned sanitarium in Otwock, Poland.

Three months after the video went viral, and attention had begun to die down, an individual going by the name Parker Warner Wright claimed to have created the video. Parker Wright was also the name of the channel that hosted the original upload, so this wasn’t already much of a stretch. He uploaded a sequel video, and challenged anyone at home to make an exact replica of the home made plague doctor mask he wore in the videos. He wound up doing an interview with the Daily Dot in January of 2016, in which he explained that it was all an art project, inspired by cryptography. He had originally finished the video in May of 2015, at which point he left two DVDs out in public in Poland, one on the subway and one on a park bench, and posted the other to 4chan. When it failed to gain attention, he mailed a copy to someone at GadgetZZ. Why did Wright choose that specific person to send this video to? Because at a booth at some tech show, Wright had been handed his business card.

The real name of Parker Warner Wright is unknown, but that’s not important. He’s an American citizen living in Poland, and this was his art project. And since we know he’s not opposed to doing interviews, maybe someday he’ll give us his real name, but seeing as that is the least compelling part of this mystery, I think we can safely call this one closed.

John Titor

John Titor was not the first internet time traveler, and he would not be the last. He was, however, the first to catch on in a big way. He also was not actually a time traveler. I hate to spoil this one right out of the gates, but come on. Titor appeared on various message boards and forums discussing time travel, why he was here, and what the future was like. He first appeared in 2000, and began using the name John Titor in 2001. Fake or not, the internet phenomenon was big. Really big. Big enough to monetize.

In 2003, the John Titor Foundation was created and they published the book John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale in December of that year. The name John Titor was also a registered trademark, though it has now been abandoned. This is an old mystery that was debunked almost two decades ago when literally nothing that Titor predicted was even close to accurate, so the biggest mystery here is why this still finds its way onto lists of internet mysteries. The two men behind these works of fiction, an entertainment lawyer and his computer scientist brother, made the right call by trying to cash out in 2003. After all, the second American Civil War that Titor predicted, which would also lead into a nuclear World War III, was set to begin as a result of turmoil surrounding the 2004 election, so it was best to rake in all the cash possible before all the claims became demonstrably false.

While time travel stories are rarely believable, and this one was no different though I do remember finding it extraordinarily fascinating at the time it was happening, I’ve gotta give credit to these two brothers. They made bold predictions with a pretty small window of time before it proved untrue, which is mostly to be expected of time travel hoaxes, yet they still had enough time to profit off it. Despite the popularity of Back to the Future, which is an all time classic movie, they claimed that the time machine was housed in the back of a 1966 Chevy convertible. It takes some brass fucking balls to make that claim and try to play it straight.

Geedis

Geedis first popped onto the internet scene in 2017 when comedian Nate Fernald posted a picture of a metal pin containing a character named Geedis on it. He randomly came across the pin on eBay and thought it was interesting, so he had bought it. Actually, he didn’t buy a metal pin. He bought 75-80 metal pins. A plethora of Geedises, if you will. His Twitter post was simple: “What the fuck is Geedis?” It turns out, nobody knew. Or at least, none of his followers knew, which is a far cry from nobody. Shockingly, however, he had been unable to find any information about this anywhere online. Searching for Geedis yielded zero results, which just doesn’t happen. Still, these existed, so someone had to know, right?

Right. The search went viral, and this only took about a month to solve. Geedis was a character from “The Land of Ta”. Okay, cool, so what’s “The Land of Ta”? It was a set of stickers for kids with a fantasy theme. Of all the stickers, only Geedis got made into a pin. The stickers were created by artist Sam Petrucci. Sam is most famous for his work on G.I. Joe, but he also made logos and designed packaging for countless companies and organizations, such as Friendly’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Ocean Spray, Gillette, Charleston Chew, and Harvard. If you’ve noticed a link between all of those names, yes, Sam Petrucci was a local boy. Local to me in Massachusetts, not to Simon in Prague. Technically, who produced the Geedis pins is still unknown, but the internet as a whole seems to be pretty happy with the results we’ve found.

Dark Web Red Rooms

The Dark Web, home to every illegal and immoral thing your black little heart can imagine. Or so people believe. A lot of the rumours are true, and there is definitely a lot of illegal stuff on the Dark Web. There’s also a lot of lies. There are pages upon pages of scams, trying to separate people from their hard mined bitcoin. Because of the notoriety of the Dark Web and people’s ability to buy anything there from drugs to hired guns (at least allegedly), it was only a matter of time for urban myths to emerge.

So enters the Red Room. A Red Room is a chatroom and stream on the Dark Web where you can pay to watch victims tortured, raped, and murdered, and donate bitcoin to control the action. It’s like Chaturbate for psychopaths.

It’s also 100% fictitious. How can I be so sure, you ask? Have I spent hours upon hours searching the Dark Web trying to find these things?

No, of course not. But for the sake of research, I have spent a little time on the Dark Web. Feel free to give it a try, it’s mostly harmless.

You can download Tor, pop on The Hidden Wiki to find a starting point, and go from there. The first thing you will notice is that the Dark Web is pretty boring. It’s a lot like the surface level web, except much harder to navigate and the banner ads are for cocaine instead of weight loss supplements, although in a way I guess that’s not even a difference.

The second thing you will notice is that it is so God damn fucking slow. With Tor’s technology, a live stream from a Dark Web website is virtually, if not literally, impossible. There are a lot of scary things and scary people on the internet, but fortunately this is not one of them.

Literally Everything By TheTekkitRealm

I spend a lot of time doing research for these videos, but as I’ve covered most of the more prominent unsolved internet mysteries already, I spend a lot more time researching what other mysteries there are on the internet I may not have heard of yet. Sometimes, finding a topic to write about can be really difficult, and generally exhausting. While I choose either to persevere or to quit and take a nap, it turns out there was a third option available to me all along: make shit up.

TheTekkitRealm is a channel with almost 1.5 million subscribers, but unfortunately they seem to be predominantly of the opinion that his videos are real. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with writing fiction, but it’s generally nice to present it as such. I’ll never forget the embarrassment of making it halfway through the audiobook of Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way before realizing it was a satire of celebrity memoirs and not a genuine account of events. But thanks to Tekkit’s YouTube Unsolved series, I get to relive that feeling again and again.

Multiple times I had stumbled upon internet mysteries that were so interesting and exciting that I couldn’t wait to write about them, only to trace back all the leads and discover the source of everything was a single YouTube video talking about a mystery that there was no evidence of ever having existed before the video was made. Credit where credit is due, the stories are absolutely engaging and entertaining, but you should avoid this channel if you want to learn about real unsolved mysteries. As a fan of this channel, and presumably of Fact Boy in general, I assume you are interested in facts, but if you’re more interested in fiction, be sure to GET IN THE COMMENTS and let us know. Maybe next time instead of the normal, educational fare, you can listen to Simon read my novel about four strangers accidentally becoming the four horsemen of the apocalypse and destroying all mankind.

Bonus Facts

While born and raised in Massachusetts, at the time of his death, Sam Petrucci was living in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I had never heard of Scranton before the American version of The Office, but I swear to God it comes up in the research for nearly every single script I write for Simon, whether it shows up in the finished product or not.

Tor stands for “The Onion Router”, and is required to visit .onion websites on the Dark Web. It works by routing your signal randomly through a large network of servers to improve your privacy and security. The technology that protects your privacy and security is also the technology that makes something like live streaming a Red Room impossible.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the purpose of the Webdriver Torso YouTube channel?

The Webdriver Torso YouTube channel was created by Google as a means of quality control for YouTube’s uploading and video quality.

Who was behind the Plague Doctor Video?

The Plague Doctor Video was created by an individual going by the name Parker Warner Wright as an art project inspired by cryptography.

What was the real identity of John Titor?

John Titor was a fictional character created by an entertainment lawyer and his computer scientist brother to monetize the time travel hoax.

What was Geedis?

Geedis was a character from ‘The Land of Ta,’ a set of stickers for kids with a fantasy theme created by artist Sam Petrucci.

What are Dark Web Red Rooms?

Dark Web Red Rooms are a fictitious concept of chatrooms and streams where users can pay to watch victims being tortured, raped, and murdered. They do not exist in reality.

What is the purpose of the Tor network?

The Tor network, which stands for ‘The Onion Router,’ is used to improve privacy and security by routing signals randomly through a large network of servers. This technology makes live streaming on the Dark Web virtually impossible.

What was the initial content of Hell.com?

Initially, Hell.com featured nothing but a warning stating that visitors were not invited and to go away.

Who owned Hell.com?

Hell.com was owned by artist Kenneth Aronson.

What was the purpose of the TekkitRealm YouTube channel?

The TekkitRealm YouTube channel presents fictional internet mysteries as if they were real, often leading viewers to believe they are genuine unsolved cases.

What was the significance of the 1982 movie Tron?

The 1982 movie Tron was visually impressive and groundbreaking for its use of special effects at the time, but its plot was incoherent and relied on the audience’s lack of understanding of how computers work.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Decoding the Known: Internet Mysteries We Totally Solved
• Hero image source by Decoding the Gurus / openverse, by.