These Internet Mysteries Actually Got Solved...

We’ve covered a lot of different types of mysteries on this channel. Some of them were centuries or even millennia old, which means there is unlikely to have been any major updates since we initially talked about them. When it comes to internet mysteries from recent years, however, there’s always the chance that major breakthroughs will have been made, or that they will even be completely solved.

As such, for today’s video we’re going to revisit some of the internet mysteries I’ve written about in the past to see what progress has been made. This is something I’ve wanted to do for over two years now, for reasons that will become immediately apparent in our first entry, but until two major breakthroughs this year I wasn’t sure that there would be enough new information to justify a full video.

To date, there have been four internet mysteries I wrote about that have since been completely solved. Not only will I be taking you through these solutions, but Simon and I will have the opportunity to grade our own past performances as well. Since we both tend to give our opinions at the end of the script about what the solution might be, we can see how well we each fared.

Of course, there’s a limit to how well either of us could have done, because one of these stories took a turn that I don’t think anybody in the world would have possibly predicted. And if anyone did predict it, they should probably go touch grass. Anyway, it’s time now to look at these solutions chronologically in the order in which they were solved.

Unfavorable Semicircle

This mystery has been an endless source of frustration for me for the past two years, and not because I’ve spent that entire time obsessively trying to crack the code hidden within the videos from YouTube’s most mysterious channel. Allow me to explain my frustration by presenting you with a little timeline.

February 17, 2022 at 10:09 am: I completed my script about Unfavorable Semicircle so I could send it to Simon

July 22, 2022 at 5:00 pm: the episode was uploaded to YouTube.

Now don’t get me wrong, my complaint isn’t about how much time there was in between finishing the script and it getting uploaded. It’s no secret that it can take a while for videos to make their way through the pipeline, especially when there are multiple of us writing for this channel and filling the queue with scripts.

Hell, by that point I hadn’t even been writing for Simon for two months yet and it was already the fourteenth script I had written for this channel, so of course it was going to take a while to come out. No, my frustration was not with the five months it took for the episode to get published, it’s because of what happened in between those dates.

June 9, 2022, at 8:23 am: the creator of Unfavorable Semicircle revealed all of the answers they had about why the project was created and what it all meant. Hence my annoyance.

But let’s start with a quick refresher, for those who may not remember the details of Unfavorable Semicircle. It began as a single YouTube channel, uploading one video every 10 minutes. Each video was only a few seconds long, and they all contained a solid colour with one randomly placed black pixel. The videos each had a single tone or a man’s voice saying one letter or number as well.

After months of uploading and over 70,000 videos on the channel, the rate at which the videos were being uploaded suddenly spiked to three videos per minute. Shortly after that, YouTube killed the initial channel for posting spam. Researchers discovered an Unfavorable Semicircle Google+ page which had text that, when decrypted, pointed to a new YouTube channel and the Twitter account UnfavorableSemi. It also listed a backup Twitter account UnfavorableSem which, at the time of writing the original script, had never posted anything.

Videos kept coming for months across multiple different channels, and some of them had finally gone past the 4 second mark. The two most famous of these videos were LOCK, which lasted almost half an hour, and DELOCK, which was only a few minutes long. The video for LOCK was a bunch of colours flashing, seemingly at random, but when they were arranged into a grid they created a very clear composite image. I mean, it was clear that it was an image, but it was unclear what the image was.

Guesses ranged from it being a watch to a pokeball, but nobody really knew.

There were a number of these different composite images, some of them even making 3D models. It was clear that there was something important here, people just struggled to figure out what. The audio for the video DELOCK was also eventually identified as being a modified version of a song from 1922 called “Homesick”.

And that was about all anyone knew. All of the available composite images were found and a few more specific sounds were identified, but nobody really knew what the ultimate purpose or message trying to be conveyed was. That led us to the theories.

Popular theories included it being alien communications, trolling, penetration tests to try to hack YouTube or other devices, an experimental prototype of noises designed to inflict the Havana Syndrome, or it being an art project. That’s pretty much where we left off, so what did Simon and I have to say about all this?

I’m not gonna lie, I went completely off the rails on this one. While I said an art project was the single answer that fit best, it left a lot to be desired. As such, I concocted a ludicrous theory about Unfavorable Semicircle being the effort of multiple people working in concert, or potentially even in opposition to one another.

I also believed that the creator was probably not a native English speaker and that, unless the creator came forward to help with the search, there was probably a decade’s worth of information to attempt to decode. That estimate was based on the progress that had been made in the previous seven years and the sheer volume of videos produced by Unfavorable Semicircle, but it was way off base.

Simon, on the other hand, took a much more grounded approach. I’m sure you don’t recall what your guess was Simon, but you said that you really wanted it to be the penetration testing because it was the most interesting, but that in reality it was probably just a failed art project. Because that was the most boring answer, and unsolved mysteries almost always have the most boring answer.

So which one of us was closer? Well, seeing as I described myself as going off the rails, obviously the answer was Simon. But while this was just an art project, the full story is a lot more interesting than you might suspect.

The UnfavorableSem Twitter account, which had previously been dormant, made multiple posts on June 9, 2022, with the final one being a full explanation of the project. Or at the very least, as full as they could remember. Thanks to YouTube banning accounts before everything got backed up, many of Unfavorable Semicircle’s videos have been lost to time forever, even to the creator. And because they were writing this so many years after the fact, they didn’t remember all of the details.

But they did remember exactly how it all started.

It began with a simple, somewhat ridiculous idea. Initially, the creator had two simultaneous goals: they wanted to have the channel with the most videos uploaded to YouTube, ideally uploaded as quickly as possible, and they wanted a million views. Their initial goal was to upload a million videos in 25 days, but obviously at one video per 10 minutes that didn’t happen. But regardless of the speed, the plan was to upload one million videos, each containing a single pixel of a composite image.

And hey, even if each video only got a single view, the channel would still hit one million views. Of course, the author did admit that trying to get a million views this way was a pretty silly idea in retrospect.

However, there was a secondary goal. The mystery behind Webdriver Torso, a strange YouTube channel that turned out to exist entirely for YouTube’s internal testing of their compression algorithms, had recently been solved. The creator of Unfavorable Semicircle believed that maybe their channel could fill the void left behind by Webdriver Torso and give people a new internet mystery to play around with. Once people discovered the channel and took such a massive interest, this actually became the main goal.

In fact, the entire thing was playing off of itself. The post claimed that, at least for the first couple years, the creator read every post on Reddit and on the associated Discord. They wanted to see what hidden secrets people were finding and what aspects of the mystery they enjoyed, then just give them more of the things that they liked to keep it interesting. Basically, it was a mystery just for the sake of a mystery, and the author was making sure to give the people exactly what they wanted to keep them engaged.

That said, there was still an overarching artistic vision behind it as well. The creator wanted to try to get into the mindset of an alien making contact with humans and communicate messages in a very “unhuman” way. I’d say that this is why so many people believed the channel was actually alien communications, but the real reason people thought that is because they’re over-imaginative idiots. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be as skeptical as Simon and I am, but there’s still a baseline level of skepticism that everybody should really possess, for their own good.

The alien wasn’t the only character behind these videos though. There was also a numbers station operator, an AI communicating with the internet, and a Canadian who retired to Maine to make outsider art. I think it’s nice that the creator of UFSC decided to push themselves creatively and get into the minds of different characters while making these videos, but that last one seems weirdly specific.

Like, I get the numbers station operator. Some of the videos had numbers station style voices in them reciting strings of random numbers, so that one was right on the money. And I could maybe even see how some of this was meant to simulate the creations of an artificial intelligence, or at least what humans assume those creations might look like. However, none of the composite images contained within the videos gave me the distinct impression that, “Oh, this artist must have only moved to Maine later in life, because I can tell by their use of colours that they are obviously Canadian.”

Despite all the different characters the creator tried to get into the mindset of, though, they played into the alien angle the most. It was what people engaged with the most and seemed to find the most interesting, so got to give the people what they want.

Going back to the composite images though, there were a lot of them. And naturally every new image brought with it the question of “what in the Hell is even that?” As it turns out, for many of the images there was no answer. The creator made it sound like the vast majority of them were entirely original artistic creations just made to look cool, and those that were based on source material were so heavily modified and distorted that the original image wouldn’t have been recognizable anyway.

There was one notable exception, however. I mentioned it before, but you may all remember this image:

This was the composite found within the video LOCK, and it’s the one people speculated was a watch or pokeball or something. However, there’s another detail about the composite images that the viewers at home might remember from our original episode on this topic, though I’m fairly confident that Simon will not.

The composite images were created by taking each frame from the videos and turning them into a rectangular grid. But if you recall, the exact size of the rectangle could only be determined entirely through trial and error.

Sometimes it would be easy. For example, if the total number of frames was 1,517, which is the product of two primes, then the dimensions would have to be 37 and 41. You wouldn’t know which number was height or which one was length, so you would just have to try both and see what results looked more like an image.

However, if the total number of frames was a highly composite number, meaning one with a fuckload of factors, things got trickier. If there were 1260 frames, that could be 60 x 21, 84 x 15, 45 x 28, any of those options reversed, or a whole lot of other possibilities. To solve this problem, many of the images contained a little flag in the top left corner. This would allow people to know that they had selected the correct dimensions for the image.

LOCK had no such flag, but the image above was assumed to be the correct orientation of the LOCK composite. As it turns out everybody was wrong, but there was no way for them to have known this.

When UnfavorableSem started posting on Twitter, the trail had been cold for months and the Twitter account had never actually been used. It had been officially declared as the backup account quite some time earlier, long before the UnfavorableSemi account was suspended by Twitter, but nothing had been posted there. As such, when it started tweeting, some people were skeptical that it was really the author.

Maybe the account had been hacked, or maybe someone close to the creator had taken control of the account with or without their knowledge. The fact that the entire project had been so cryptic and yet the Twitter account was being completely straightforward in starting to explain everything seemed suspicious, especially because the full explanation was not yet posted.

However, UnfavorableSem posted something that nobody had ever seen before. The above image was 197 x 253 pixels, but those weren’t the correct dimensions. It’s unclear whether the creator intentionally distorted the image to that size to make the resulting image less clear, if they had made an error while encoding the video, or if there was an error uploading to YouTube and part of the original video got cut off.

Whatever the answer was, the composite people were working with was missing a large number of pixels, so the most famous image associated with Unfavorable Semicircle was incomplete and in the wrong dimensions. The Twitter account posted the never before seen full version of the image at the intended 250 x 250 pixels, which looked like this:

That image makes it much more obvious what it was supposed to be a picture of. A number of people had already guessed this, but it was a record. As indicated by the Wikipedia link that accompanied this image, it was specifically meant to be the Voyager Golden Record, a record sent aboard the two Voyager probes that contained messages encoded in a way that scientists believed aliens would be able to decode and understand.

People had long speculated that LOCK (the source of this image) and DELOCK were meant as some sort of encryption and decryption keys that would unlock the meaning of this entire project. According to the creator, however, it was much more simple yet metaphorical than that. LOCK came out when the UFSC mystery was blowing up online, and it was the creator’s way of saying that people were “locked in” to the mystery.

As for DELOCK, it was meant to be the human counterpoint to LOCK. Whereas LOCK was a seemingly alien encrypted message with unclear meaning, DELOCK was designed to have a clearly definable song and image. The reason they chose the song “Homesick” was to represent that lost alien’s feeling of being homesick for their home planet though, so the symbolism of DELOCK as the human counterpoint to LOCK does seem a bit muddled, as it was still created from the perspective of an alien. Nobody was going to figure this part of the mystery out anyway, so it ultimately doesn’t matter if the creator was mixing their metaphors a bit.

As further proof that the account was the real deal, they also showed the complete composite of the BRILL series. If you recall, the videos were broken up into several series, each starting with a different word followed by a string of numbers. While a number of the BRILL composites were found, it turns out that they all fit together to form a larger mosaic. Unfortunately, because much of the BRILL series was lost to time, the full composite was impossible to uncover without UnfavorableSem posting the image.

And really, that was pretty much the end of it. The entire thing was an art project that only ever involved one person, it existed solely for the sake of art and to be mysterious, and not even the creator has the missing files or even remembers everything that they did anymore. According to the creator, pretty much everything on the UFSC wiki was accurate, and by this point the creator felt that the wiki was a better and more complete source of information than they were, given that it had been years since they worked on the project.

However, my assertion that it would take another decade of research to uncover all the secrets held by this channel was way off. The creator said people had already found about 70% of what he had originally wanted them to, and the rest of it was probably unsolvable. They wrote, “the line between comprehensible and noise is a fine one that was crossed a little too often”, meaning some of the mystery was designed in such a convoluted and obtuse way that it would be impossible for anyone to ever solve.

At this point, “anyone” even included the creator, as too much time had passed for them to remember everything. Besides, a lot of it would be meaningless anyway. The original mystery pointed people to Google+ and Twitter, and apparently there were other hidden messages pointing to websites and accounts that have long since been deleted at this point.

Whoever the anonymous creator behind Unfavorable Semicircle was, they unfortunately failed to reach their goal of having the most videos uploaded to YouTube. That record is currently held by Roel Van de Paar, a tech tutorial channel that really just posts images of questions and the corresponding answers from Stack Exchange (which he is allowed to do thanks to a Creative Commons license).

But while that was the initial goal of the channel, their secondary goal of creating an internet mystery to fill the void left behind by Webdriver Torso was wildly successful. It was a very fun and technically involved mystery that I really enjoyed diving into on this channel, and I am glad that we finally have a definitive solution. I just wish the creator could have kept his fucking mouth shut until after our video released.

Kate Yup

I mentioned in the original video how much I hated researching this, because I find mukbang videos to be insufferable. For the most part, that hasn’t changed. For some reason the YouTube algorithm started feeding me competitive eating videos by BeardMeatsFood, which I’ve found strangely fascinating, but those videos all feature voice over narration rather than making you listen to the chewing noises. Having to revisit this story and listen to all of Kate Yup’s wet, sloppy chewing noises has again been a waking nightmare, so you’re welcome.

Or I’m sorry. I’m not even sure.

Anyway, a quick refresher on this story for those who don’t remember. Kate Yup started off as a typical mukbang creator who uploaded videos to YouTube. Her channel mainly featured her eating massive quantities of seafood, especially raw salmon. The only thing that set her apart from other mukbangers was that she wore a mask to hide her face and never spoke in the videos, instead communicating with the audience through overlaid text on the videos and responding to comments.

Even for fans of mukbang, I’m pretty sure there was nothing terribly special about Kate Yup’s channel. It wasn’t until people started questioning what was really going on here that the story and thus the channel took off as an internet mystery. People noticed things like bruises on Kate’s arms and the sounds of whispering in the background. Or at least people assumed they were whispers.

I’ve seen it suggested that the alleged whispers were just noises from Kate’s mouth being picked up by her hyper sensitive microphone, and by seeing written words accompanying barely audible dialogue our brains all just heard what we were told was there. While that is a well known phenomenon and something I could have fallen victim to, I am still confident that I very clearly heard a male voice whisper “suck my cock” in one of her videos. I figured the alternate theory was worth bringing up, but I’m not convinced it’s really the case.

Regardless, people began to assume that Kate was clearly in distress. The presence of other people in the room could only mean one thing: she had been the victim of a kidnapping and was being forced to eat massive quantities of food for YouTube videos so that her captors could make money. Soon, the comments section of every one of her videos was filled with people asking if she was okay and discussing what horrible torture was being inflicted upon Kate off camera.

It didn’t help matters that, once this theory went viral across the internet, Kate began to leave what looked like messages in the videos. Or maybe it did help, depending on what theory you believed. Kate’s narration appeared to be written by someone speaking English as a second language, and all sorts of random letters were capitalized.

Eventually, people noticed what seemed to be hidden messages in the videos, with the capitalized letters spelling out things like “SOS” and “HELP”. A number of people also believed she was tapping Morse code on a bowl in one of her videos, but I cannot emphasize enough how much that was not the case.

There were a couple specific theories surrounding Kate, such as her being UFC fighter Joanna Jedrzejczyk or a missing teenage girl from California named Karlie Gusé. Neither of these ideas really made any sense in the first place and were easily disproven, but there was one thing that that people were sure of: she was absolutely the victim of kidnapping.

Okay, maybe not everybody thought that, but it was definitely the prevailing theory (something that Simon found rather difficult to believe last time around). Another theory was that she was just a girl with an eating disorder, probably bulimia, which was why she ate so much without getting weight and lost multiple teeth during a video.

The third theory was that it was all a troll. It had started out as a regular mukbang channel, but once the comments flooded with people thinking Kate was a kidnapping victim, she leaned into it by leaving cryptic messages in the videos as a sort of marketing. Simon and I were very much on the same page last time, both believing this to be the case.

Our initial video on this mystery released on May 20, 2022. That was over two and a half years since Kate’s final video was uploaded in October of 2019. What nobody expected, however, was that Kate would return to YouTube in October of 2022, just a few weeks shy of the three year anniversary of her disappearance. And this time, some changes were made.

One of the things that people found so bizarre about the original channel was the use of stock images for the channel’s banner and icon. Since returning, she now has an icon that says “Kate Yup”, placed beneath a gaping cartoon mouth. There are two lines tangential to the mouth, because it is meant to be both the right half of the K and the upper left portion of a lowercase y. Personally I think that’s not obvious enough to be useful as a logo, but I’m not a designer so fucked if I know.

Here, Simon, you can tell me what you think:

The channel’s banner image was updated as well, showing a table covered in seafood. In the center was a white oval with “Kate Yup” written in script, and above it were the letters K and Y drawn to look like they were written with salmon, her favourite food.

Most importantly, however, was how the new videos changed. People believed that Kate was a prisoner, so her first new video (and a few subsequent ones) opened with her at a market or buffet or something picking out all the food she would be eating in that video and shoveling it into little Tupperware containers to bring home. As for the main content of the videos, however nothing really changed. It was still just Kate eating massive amounts of seafood for the viewing pleasure of her audience.

And as soon as she began posting again, people began making claims that something was wrong. They argued that it wasn’t her hands that were serving the food, instead believing the hands belonged to a man. They also suggested that the girl eating in the videos wasn’t the original Kate Yup and that she had been murdered and replaced. Note that they made this claim despite Kate still having the same identifiable marks on her neck and the same tattoo on her wrist.

Her first video back received 5.6 million views and over 40,000 comments, most of which were still discussing the same conspiracy theories as before, so she titled her third new video “I AM NOT KIDNAPPED”. The top comment on that video with over 12,000 likes is that “I am not kidnapped” is exactly what someone who had been kidnapped would say. Kinda like how a person denying they have a drinking problem is often seen as a sign that they do in fact have one. And while that indeed often is a sign of a problem, denying it is also a sign that they don’t have a problem; that’s why they’re denying it.

Regardless, Kate was much more upfront about her situation this time around. I mean sort of. She was still attempting to remain anonymous, but she offered a little more insight into her mental and physical health.

In her first stint on YouTube, Kate had said that she was fine eating this much food, and that her metabolism had adjusted to it. In a new video titled “this is why I don’t get fat…”, she claimed to have a hyperactive metabolism. This is a real condition, most commonly caused by hyperthyroidism, not to be confused with hypothyroidism.

Seriously, one of those conditions should really have a different name to make them easier to differentiate, since they are the exact opposite of one another. But the most obvious sign of someone having a hyperactive metabolism is excess consumption of calories without gaining weight, or possibly even while still losing weight.

In addition to this medical explanation for why she needed to eat so much despite not gaining weight, Kate also described having a manic obsession about eating food. Not only did she love to eat, but she had horrible feelings of being unsatisfied if she didn’t eat everything that was put in front of her. And as someone who grew up being read Disney’s Elegant Book of Manners, I get it.

It’s not a manic obsession, but I was definitely trained at a young age to feel terribly guilty about not eating everything placed in front of me, both because it’s rude to the server and because it’s wrong to waste food. Admittedly, this was probably not the healthiest lesson to teach a child, but whatever.

So Kate seemed to have a good reason for why she needed to eat so much without gaining weight, one that did not involve her having an eating disorder. She showed herself (or at least a pair of hands that she claimed belonged to her) out in public buying food to demonstrate she was not a prisoner, and she was insistent that she was filming her videos alone and nobody else was there. Of course, there was at least one video where she clearly stopped eating to turn around, seemingly because someone else entered the room, and another video featured an edit in which the tail end of her talking to someone else can be heard and seen. And this was definitely a sloppy edit, and not something deliberately left in to gain attention.

I say this because it seems like she was up to her old tricks again. On March 16, 2023, Kate uploaded a video titled “Everything I eat to become a Sumo”. The video opened by showing her walking around her kitchen preparing the meal, something that was to become common on the newly revived channel. She made a colossal bin of rice which was then covered in oil, cheese, like an entire bag of sugar, and a stick or two of butter.

Along with that she had 20 eggs that seemed to be barely cooked, a block of blue cheese, and some cheddar cheese.

While beginning to eat, the text on the screen said “thiS is just my lunch, tonight I gonna eat another One with more proteins”. Note that a random S and O were capitalized in that sentence. The next capital letter didn’t appear until about 4 minutes later, when the caption read “I think it’s wormS cause it moving”. This once again spelled out S.O.S.

Oh yeah, and also she thought there was a worm in her eggs, not that this stopped her from eating. Why would it, when it had instead given her the perfect clickbait for her thumbnail!

By this point Kate was already advertising her TikTok account in her video descriptions, and on April 5, she would go a step further. In the video entitled, “What I eat to become a sumo” Kate began to advertise not just her TikTok but her GoFundMe. This self promotion wasn’t just in the video description either, her opening captions said her TikTok and GoFundMe links were in her bio.

First of all, those are some horrible video titles. You can’t just keep uploading new videos with nearly identical titles, swapping out one synonym for another. And second of all, who is going to put up with a YouTuber saying their GoFundMe link is in their bio in every video? I can’t even imagine what type of person would so shamelessly promote themselves like this.

She may as well change her channel name to “Kate Yup (GoFundMe in Bio)” or something ridiculous like that. [Note for Simon: not actually hating, the overly derisive tone there is to set Julian up for a sight gag since my display name on both YouTube and Discord is literally “Kevin Jennings (Patreon in Bio)”]

Anyway, as we mentioned, she had lost a couple teeth while filming one of her videos a few years back. In the time since then, Kate explained that she had lost four more of her back teeth and that it was getting difficult to eat certain types of food.

She desperately needed expensive dental care to get her teeth fixed, which is why she set up the GoFundMe. And it’s definitely possible that this was true. Not only did we get to see her lose two teeth in a previous video, but in one of the new videos she broke off a crown (which she described as annoying but not painful or anything).

However, a week later in the video “I eat a lot and very fat… day 3”, Kate revealed herself to be an unreliable narrator. In her opening captions on the video, she wrote, “I will reveal my face when the [GoFundMe goal] will be reached, to thank you. Lot of people will be shocked cause I am world famous. Some of you guessed who I am. Thank to them for keeping the secret.”

Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s safe to assume this is total and complete bullshit. Or at the very least deliberately misleading. Kate has enough identifiable marks and tattoos that, were she some world famous celebrity, people would have figured it out. Internet sleuths obsessed over this mystery for years, and these types of people have found a lot more with a lot less.

Also, if she was actually some sort of celebrity, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have needed to start a GoFundMe to raise the money she needed for dental work.

Of course, technically her statement would be true regardless. Kate is world famous in her own right, so even if nobody recognized the face under the mask, it would still be true that the person they were looking at was world famous. Like I said, that’s deliberately misleading and not how most people would interpret it, but she wasn’t technically lying.

Regardless, it doesn’t really matter which way she meant it, because it never came up. Despite having 1.75 million subscribers on YouTube, Kate’s GoFundMe only raised €265, falling well short of her €30,000 goal. She also got booted off TikTok, possibly for making disturbing content. I never got to see her TikTok videos since it has all been deleted, but in her YouTube descriptions she said she was going to include a lot of stuff about her dental issues in addition to more mukbang videos on TikTok.

The YouTube video in which Kate lost her teeth was removed, so it’s possible that TikTok removed her channel as well if there was too much gross teeth stuff on it. I’m not sure when dental horror stories became the line in the digital sand, especially considering the sort of shit that is allowed on these platforms, but this is the best I could come up with since there’s no definitive answer as to why she got banned.

Unfortunately for Kate, her new videos weren’t doing well. I mean they still were getting hundreds of thousands of views, but that was a sharp decline from the 5 million views her return video received or the tens of millions of views some of her old videos got. There seemed to be a couple reasons for this.

To start, the videos just weren’t the same anymore. Kate’s original channel was viewed as an ASMR friendly mukbang channel that focused on Kate eating seafood almost exclusively. The portions were huge, but she was eating at a relatively normal pace. Just for much longer than most people could keep that pace.

On her return, however, she seemed to be employing the same sorts of strategies and techniques as competitive eaters like BeardMeatsFood. The video at least sometimes seemed to be running back at an increased speed as well, making her eating appear even more frenetic. It was not the relaxing experience her fans had grown accustomed to, and this was the first thing that started to turn people off from her channel.

The second was the departure from seafood. That’s not to say that Kate wasn’t still eating seafood, but she also seemed to be eating whatever random crap she could find. In one video she just bought 15 items from McDonalds, including the Goat McWrap and the Croque McDo, which are apparently things that exist in France and Belgium. For those curious, the Croque McDo is McDonald’s version of the croque monsieur, similar to what we’d call a Monte Cristo sandwich over here.

Anyway, Kate mashed all of these items up into a disgusting paste, tossed some eggs on top of it, and called it an omelet. There were lots of weird combinations of food like this, and for a lot of her old fans this was strike two. They wanted to see her eat seafood, or at least normal food. Nobody was interested in watching Kate eat whatever the Hell that was, or seeing her eat a sandwich where the bread was replaced with sticks of butter.

But the final straw was the GoFundMe, as evidenced by the fact that it barely made any money. In these new videos, Kate was pouring mountains of sugar on everything. For example, she made a vegetable lasagna and then covered it in a pound of sugar, sprinkling a generous portion of sugar on her eggs as well.

As it turns out, people have very little sympathy when someone asks for charitable donations to solve a problem that was very much their own creation. You can’t roast a chicken stuffed with sugary candy, cover it in whipped cream and jimmies, then complain that you need help because you inexplicably are having problems with tooth decay. And yes, that is a very real and very gross recipe that she ate in one of her new channels.

Kate had made a name for herself, and presumably a shitload of money, off of her original videos. An ordinary mukbang channel inexplicably became the center of a major internet conspiracy, so Kate ran with it. And I don’t fault her for that in the slightest. I absolutely would have done the same thing. With her return, however, the truth was finally revealed once and for all, and the story took a turn that absolutely no one would have guessed was coming five years ago.

The world finally accepted that Kate Yup was not the victim of a kidnapping, she was just a grifter. Is that being a little too harsh on her, considering I said I would have run with the conspiracy angle as well in her situation? Allow me to answer that question with the following screenshot, taken from a video Kate posted to YouTube on September 5, 2023.

That’s right, after being kicked off of TikTok, Kate instead went to OnlyFans. Also, while I realize this was posted on YouTube to get people to buy additional content on OnlyFans, I don’t care. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: no free feet on the internet. And yes, Simon, she did eat all that salmon afterwards.

Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with how OnlyFans works, creators can set a subscription price to view their page as well as locking individual posts behind a paywall. Many creators will make their pages free to subscribe to so you can see tame or censored images, then charge per explicit image or video you want to see. This was the route Kate went as well, so I poked around on her OnlyFans page to see what she was offering.

Even though I can’t actually see any of the content, assuming the descriptions are correct it’s basically all fetish stuff. There’s a lot of stuff involving feet, as well as videos where you can see her stomach before and after consuming massive amounts of food or liquid. Because feeding fetishes are also a thing.

There were a couple photosets that contained bikini photos and allegedly her face, and one mukbang video that also allegedly showed her face. While $8 is much cheaper than the €30,000 it would cost to hit her GoFundMe goal, that’s still much more than I was willing to pay for this, even if it would be a tax write off. She also heavily insinuated that you could personally request pretty much any type of explicit content that you wanted from her through DMs and private payments.

I wasn’t interested in that either, but I did try to reach out to Kate for comment through her OnlyFans page, as this is the only known way to contact her. She hasn’t posted content there since March of 2024 so I’m assuming the account is no longer active, but I’ll keep you all updated if I ever get a response.

With that said though, I think we can say that the mystery of Kate Yup has definitely been solved and can finally be put to rest. Sure, there are still people out there who believe that this isn’t the real Kate or that these videos were all recorded years ago and Kate is long since dead, or those who are still convinced she is a prisoner, but they are very much the minority. Most people have accepted that Kate was just another mukbang YouTuber who saw tremendous but fleeting success, disappeared, then returned for one last failed cash grab.

Celebrity Number Six

So for this entry, there’s no way to grade Simon and my performance from last time since neither of us really had a guess as to who Celebrity Number Six was. That said, let me give a quick rundown of where we left off.

Oh, but before we get started, Simon, please take a look at this image of Generic Bald Bearded YouTuber Number Six. Is this picture you from earlier in your career? Those of you watching at home are free to make your guesses as well.

Anyway, in 2020, Reddit user TontsaH posted an image of a shower curtain he had purchased back in 2008 or so. The curtain featured the images of eight celebrities in a pop art style, with everything being various shades of white, blue, and black. It was an impulse purchase TontsaH got because he thought it looked cool, but he didn’t actually know who all or possibly any of the celebrities on it were.

When he posted to Reddit, TontsaH was trying to identify all eight celebrities. It didn’t take long for seven of them to be identified along with the original source images used for the art, but there was one celebrity that remained: Celebrity Number Six. As a reminder, here is that image:

Over the years that followed, countless celebrities were proposed. Everyone from Evangeline Lilly from Lost to Jean Claude van Damme. There simply wasn’t enough detail in the image to figure out exactly who the person was, not even their gender. Brad Pitt came up multiple times in the search with images that looked very similar to this, but nothing was ever an exact match.

And that’s pretty much where we left off. There were a lot of guesses, but very little to go on. All we knew for sure was that these were people who were famous in the mid aughts, which was also the rough time frame the source images had been taken during. It was also all but certain that the source image was not something that appeared online anywhere.

In early 2023, it seemed like there had been a major breakthrough. A lot of people believed that Celebrity Number Six was a model, and Reddit user Paint_Her suggested that it was someone who had modeled for Ralph Lauren. All of Ralph Lauren’s models from that time period had a very similar look, and they all bore a resemblance to Celebrity Number Six. Granted a lot of people bore a resemblance to this image, but it was still something to go on.

Of all the possible Ralph Lauren models, the one people took the most interest in was French model Filippa Hamilton. She had come up in the search before, but the lead never really went anywhere. This time things were different though. There were a lot of images of Filippa that looked very similar to Celebrity Number Six, possibly having been from the same photo shoot. None of them were perfect matches, especially the clothes, but people really believed they were on the right track.

Users created overlays of Celebrity Number 6 and Filippa, and the facial features seemed to line up really well. Much of the community was convinced that they had found the right person, they just hadn’t found the source image yet. So, wanting to put this mystery to rest, someone posted the Celebrity Number Six image on Instagram, tagged Filippa, and asked if it was her. She confirmed that yes, the image was her, and so the user asked if she had the original image or other pictures from a specific photo shoot that they believed the picture had come from.

Filippa even took to Instagram and posted the following image:

So that’s it then, mystery solved, right? Not only does the image look like Filippa, but she even verified that it was her. However, there were just a couple issues remaining. The image of Filippa from the Glamour cover matched the facial position and expression (or lack thereof) most closely, and the shadows seemed to line up perfectly. But it was that top left image that most resembled the outfit Celebrity Number Six was wearing.

Some people argued that perhaps the artist who made the pattern used on the shower curtain had combined the two images, but this seemed unlikely. Simply put, that would be way more effort than this particular artist seemed to be willing to put into their work. In the original script on this topic I covered the changes that the artist made to the other seven source images again, but as a quick refresher they basically ranged from non-existent to extremely minor.

There was a more pressing concern though: what made Filippa any more qualified than the rest of us to definitively state whether or not the image was actually her? It’s not like someone was asking if this was a childhood photo of her, it was essentially a drawing. Sure it was created using a source image, but it’s effectively still an illustration rather than a photo.

To demonstrate my point, let me draw your attention back to Generic Bald Bearded YouTuber Number Six. I know you’re not an idiot, Simon, so of course you’re now well aware that the image isn’t you. If it was, it wouldn’t help me prove the point I’m trying to make right now. Regardless of whether or not you originally believed it was an image of you, I’m sure you had to at least think about it.

Unfortunately, there was no way for me to set up an ideal experiment. I suspect that you had to think about your answer a little bit and maybe even believed that the picture really was you, but that you ultimately would have meta-gamed the situation and assumed that I wouldn’t have asked the question unless it was someone else. Many of our viewers who were less skeptical of my motives may have believed it to be you as well.

The point is, even though Filippa believed that it was a picture of her, that still wasn’t proof. Until the original image could be found, there was no way to be 100% sure. For the record, here is the source image of VSauce used for Generic Bald Bearded YouTuber Number Six.

Anyway, as it turns out, this was not where the mystery ended. Even though a large portion of the community believed the mystery had been solved, people kept looking. After all, if they had identified the model and narrowed down one or two photo shoots that the source image most likely would have been from, it seems like the original image would have been discovered shortly thereafter. But it never was.

So people kept looking, tracking down whatever leads they could think of. And their methods were getting more sophisticated. The process of turning a photograph into the sort of monochrome image used on the fabric is pretty simple, so people tried the process in reverse. This was a method that had been tried in the past without achieving any meaningful results, but user StefanMorse was apparently better at it than everyone else.

Stefan coloured in the Celebrity Number Six image to look more like a photograph, then repeated the process until he had six different images he could work with. He then ran these through PimEyes, a facial recognition tool, to see if it could match his image to anyone.

PimEyes matched Stefan’s attempts to a number of different people, but it returned seven images of the same person. Not only was that more results for this person than for anyone else, but getting that many results from a single person was extremely rare. Clearly there was something here, and so Stefan shared his results with someone who then posted them on Reddit.

The woman in question, Leticia Sardá, was a 43 year old waitress from Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But 20 years ago, she was a model. Here is a side by side of Celebrity Number Six and one of the images PimEyes provided, first posted to Reddit on September 9, 2024.

It was obviously not the original image, but it looked a lot like the same person. In one of the initial photos found by Stefan, she also looked like a dead ringer for Evangeline Lilly, who had been one of the frontrunners for Celebrity Number Six for a while.

Leticia wasn’t a well known model, but internet sleuths were quickly able to find more photos of her. One of those was on the cover of the Summer 2006 issue of Tendancias, a supplement about fashion trends for the magazine Woman. These were Spanish language publications, and the photographer for the cover, Leandre Escorsell, was Spanish as well.

This led user IndigoRoom, a fellow Spaniard, to reach out to Escorsell. He wanted to see if Escorsell recognized the image and if it had perhaps been included in that issue of the magazine. Note that at this point people had found the cover online, but nobody involved in the search had an actual copy of the magazine to look through.

Much to Indigo’s surprise, Escorsell responded to the e-mail almost immediately. He essentially said, “Yes, I took that photo of Leticia. Also, who the fuck was reproducing and selling my work without permission?” Indigo asked if Escorsell knew where he might be able to find a copy of the 2006 supplement containing Leticia, but instead Escorsell just sent him this image, saying he hoped it would successfully bring their search to a close.

On September 8th, just four days after the first time Leticia’s name was mentioned on the subreddit, Indigo posted this image and declared that Celebrity Number Six had been found. And this was met with a lot of strong and surprisingly diverse reactions.

Some people were immediately convinced this was the real deal, while others, including one rather vocal moderator of the subreddit, believed that it was an AI fake. Some found it suspicious that the photographer was able to find a picture he took 20 years ago so quickly, which is baffling to me. I can easily find any script I’ve ever written, and I wouldn’t expect that to change no matter how much time has passed. It sounds like the people who were nay saying for that reason just need to be more organized.

Of course, others took the photographer’s response as obvious proof that this was the real deal. Not the fact that he provided the source image for Celebrity Number Six, that part was secondary. But the fact that Escorsell’s immediate reaction was “who stole my fucking work” was instant proof to some people that this really was the photographer behind the picture. And honestly, that would have sold it for me as well if I had any doubts about the picture itself.

The argument over whether this was real or fake got extremely heated, with people threatening to kill each other and for some reason themselves over it, but it wasn’t going to last long. Another Redditor had reached out to Leticia on LinkedIn and gotten ahold of her, asking if she had the original photo. As Leticia would explain in a Vanity Fair interview the very next day, this person had worked hard to find her and she wanted to make him look good in front of his friends, so she went to her old modeling agency that she hadn’t been to in years to find the original photo. She then sent him this image of herself holding the image.

Even though the situation had been explained to Escorsell and Leticia to some degree, neither of them fully understood the magnitude of what was going on. Leticia, who described herself as a very private person, thought she was just doing something nice for a fan. She had no idea that within 24 hours she would have been interviewed by Vanity Fair or that strangers would start talking to her on the street because they recognized her from an internet mystery.

Leticia went on to host an AMA on the Celebrity Number Six subreddit, and was just really pleasant. She explained how she had worked as a model from the age of 13 until she was 30, giving it up in 2009 when her grandmother became ill. She talked about how shocking it was to discover that she was the subject of a lost media search and to suddenly be recognized on the street every day, but that it wasn’t as scary or overwhelming as she had expected it to be.

People had approached Leticia to handle her social media, assuming that she wanted to parlay this sudden fame into something bigger, but she wasn’t interested. She said that she just wasn’t ready for anything like that at the time, and she was happy living her quiet life. In fact, she had just dropped her kids off for soccer practice before sitting down for the Reddit AMA.

That said, Leticia did still manage to capitalize on this a little bit. She set up a website to sell autographed prints of the original photo, although honestly this was probably more to make her new fans happy than for financial gain, as I doubt it was overwhelmingly profitable.

The moderators of the subreddit also set up a GoFundMe for Leticia as a farewell gift and a thank you for being so cool about everything once she was discovered. She also offered to give away signed prints of her photo to some number of random donors to the GoFundMe, so even when people were just trying to give her a present, she still wanted to give something back. And even though the GoFundMe only raised €2,225 of the modest €5,000 goal, that’s still almost ten times as much as Kate Yup got from hers.

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

When I wrote about this topic the first time, I mentioned the discovery of a 16mm film in my grandparents’ attic labeled “AVCO Missile Systems Division”. I’ve received a lot of follow up questions about this in the couple years since that episode released, so I figured I’d give you all an update here. I still have no idea what’s on the film, which is a source of constant frustration. I know that’s disappointing and not the answer people were hoping for, but maybe everyone will stop asking me about it now.

But with that pointless update out of the way, let’s get back to the real mystery: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet. This mystery began in 2006 when a man named Darius began digitizing a bunch of cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio back in the 1980s. Most of the songs had the artist and song listed on the tape, but some had a question mark for one or both of those.

In 2006 Darius started a website where he could upload the songs and have people help him identify them, and his sister Lydia took to Usenet and other websites to try to find information as well. They continued searching for years with many of the songs being found, but a decade later there was one that not only remained unsolved, but that became a viral sensation. That song became known as The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.

Analyzing the tape gave conclusive evidence that the song had been recorded off the radio station NDR, and people with 1980s synthesizer knowledge were able to identify that the synthesizer used in the recording was a Yamaha DX7, which was a really high end synthesizer released in 1983. There were a lot of leads being followed and bands that had been investigated and ruled out, but that was all we really knew for sure last time.

Simon and I both made some pretty specific predictions about this one. I believed it would be solved in the latter half of 2023, which was off by a full year. I also suggested that it would not result in any sort of band reunion because the band members would all have white collar jobs and not give a shit about this anymore.

I didn’t specifically guess how it would be solved, but Simon did. Simon’s prediction was that the mystery would be solved by someone listening to that episode of Decoding the Unknown, their dad hearing the song, then their dad saying, “Wait a minute, that’s my old band!” It’s not an unreasonable guess, but that’s never quite how these things work out.

The main source of research since we last talked about this mystery was NDR, the radio station on which it aired. NDR became involved in the search themselves to an extent, but more important were the NDR archives. NDR had meticulously catalogued every song ever played on their radio station, and they were still sitting on all of those records from decades ago. This was huge, especially since the presence of a DX7 in the recording and other songs on Darius’s mix tape had allowed internet sleuths to narrow down the time frame from late 1983 to early 1985.

That was still a lot of songs to search through, but it was hardly an insurmountable task. Between commercials and DJs talking, the average radio station probably plays about 100,000 songs per year. But most of those are just the same few hundred songs on a rotation, so a lot of unnecessary information was able to be eliminated pretty quickly.

However, there was a problem, and a pretty big one. While most of NDR’s records had the song title and artist listed, some of the songs were simply labeled as “Amateurband”. These amateurband listings were often grouped together in blocks, which led people to believe that NDR had a show or a segment on a show that featured amateur bands.

Shows like these are relatively common, and some local rock stations here used to do that. Even before we had this lead, I had mentioned in the original script on this topic how my friends’ band got played on one of these local radio shows, so this was definitely a very real possibility as to the origin of the song. One redditor on The Mysterious Song subreddit by the name of pocotopaug18 even believed they found the exact amateurband block in which the song would have appeared: September 17, 1984.

While the songs surrounding The Mysterious Song, such as “Sunglasses at Night” and “Ghostbusters” were well known and commonly played, there actually were slightly different radio versions that were played over the years. It was believed that the versions on Darius’s tape had been played that September, and the amateurband block was in the perfect spot to slot The Mysterious Song in between the other tracks on the tape. All that was left was to figure out what the Hell that block actually was.

There were a few suggestions thrown out, some more promising than others. The least promising was based on the fact that “band” in German can also mean tape. This led to speculation that “amateurband” wasn’t necessarily an amateur band but potentially a jam session from musicians (possibly amateurs) that was played on the radio. While this would have meant the song would probably be impossible to identify, even if the musicians who played on it heard it again, this possibility never seemed that likely.

While band does mean tape in German, it means adhesive tape. If there’s one thing I know about the German language, it’s that they mash words together to make new, compound words rather than leaving things ambiguous. As such, audio tape in German appears to be tonband rather than simply band, and amateur band translates to amateurband as one word.

This isn’t terribly important in terms of how The Mysterious Song was solved, as it would have been a dead end anyway, but I felt it was worth including for anyone out there interested in investigating other internet mysteries. If you’re going to research lost media or other internet mysteries that aren’t based in the United States, make sure you either understand how a language works or ask a native speaker to translate something, rather than just running wild with the first word you see on Google translate.

Anyway, that suggestion wasn’t helpful, but the idea of an NDR show dedicated to amateur bands was. But there was a much more specific suggestion related to amateur bands that was going to be the key to everything: a little thing called Hörfest. And yes, Simon, it’s pronounced exactly the way it looks. Stop laughing.

Hörfest was an annual concert run by NDR to promote upcoming or lesser known bands that began in 1983. This was a lead that had come up before, but it always felt like a dead end for a couple reasons. First, while NDR did publish compilations of the Hörfest bands, they didn’t begin doing so until 1985, which was after The Mysterious Song would have aired.

Second, it seemed impossible to find a listing of the bands that performed at Hörfest in 1983 and 1984 without those compilation albums. Nothing these lists were published on ever made their way online, and it didn’t seem like there was enough information available online to piece together the entire lineup for the concerts.

However, in July of 2024, another redditor made a discovery. Hörfest 1984 was held on September 14 and 15, and live recordings from the show were played on NDR on the 17th. This must have been that amateurband block that had been identified as almost certainly containing The Mysterious Song, and it was the best lead yet.

All that was left was to find the list of bands. Of course, it wasn’t going to be that easy. Not only was the list of bands that performed at Hörfest ‘84 nowhere to be found online, but there were also about 500 total bands that auditioned to perform there. Even though it seemed the most likely, there was no guarantee that The Mysterious Song was from one of the bands that performed at Hörfest.

It’s possible that some of the other bands that auditioned were also played on the radio on September 17th. Alternatively, if that wasn’t the date that Darius recorded the song off the radio, one of these bands could have appeared in a different block of amateur bands.

Fortunately, another redditor found a potential lead on finding out who all of these bands were. Hörfest was held in Hamburg, and someone discovered the Hamburg State Archive, which appears to be like Hamburg’s version of the Library of Congress. They had pretty much everything ever printed that was relevant to Hamburg’s interests, including the complete lists of every band that performed in or auditioned for Hörfest in 1983, 1984, and 1985.

The only hiccup was that none of this was online. Someone would have to go to the archive in person and pay to get copies of all of the relevant documents, of which there were a metric fuckton. It also cost 60 cents per page to copy them, so that was going to be insanely expensive. Even though the vast majority of documents related to Hörfest were stuff that was unnecessary to this search, like financial records, permit applications, and other bureaucratic nonsense, the relevant information was still about 1,000 pages long, which would’ve cost $600 to copy.

Plus, that was a lot of information to go through.

That did eventually happen, but in the meantime another lead was discovered. Somebody found a German newspaper article that mentioned a band called Twilight who were scheduled to perform at Hörfest. They reached out to one of the band’s members, Peter Jack, and lo and behold Peter still had all of his old stuff from Hörfest ‘84. This included a promotional poster with all 20 bands that performed at Hörfest on it.

It was a huge breakthrough and gave people something to work on, but then the information came back from the archives as well. In total, there were about 900 bands that had performed at or auditioned for Hörfest between 1983 and 1985. So many bands needed to be researched that a spreadsheet was created listing all the bands so people could claim which ones they wanted to look into.

And if you’re wondering why they didn’t just look at the 20 bands who actually played at Hörfest first instead of diving into everything all at once, I’m sure they did. However, while it wasn’t known at the time, the band that performed The Most Mysterious Song was not actually listed on that poster. Or maybe they were and I’m completely blind.

But again, it wasn’t guaranteed that the band behind The Most Mysterious Song actually performed at Hörfest ‘84. It was the best lead anybody had come up with so far, but it wasn’t confirmed. Still, these were all amateur bands playing in the right area at the right time period. Even if it wasn’t one of them that recorded the song, surely someone would know something. It was just a matter of doing the legwork and seeing what people could figure out.

For the next few months, the subreddit was dedicated to looking into these 900 bands to see what they could find. On November 4th, a user named marijn1412 posted about a discovery they had made. They were researching bands for Hörfest and came across an article about a band called FEX [Pronounced fex, not F-E-X] from Kiel in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Marijn had been searching for articles about rock and noticed that this headline also had the word “wave” in it.

Admittedly, that didn’t mean much by itself. The phrase “rock with wave and pop influences” doesn’t just describe The Mysterious Song, it describes like 90% of music from 1984, especially music coming from Germany. It was still enough to make Marijn look closer at the article though, and he noticed the name Michael Hädrich. Before Michael was the keyboardist for FEX in 1984, he had been the keyboardist for a band called Phret who performed at Hörfest ‘83.

Marijn reached out to Michael and asked if he had any of his old materials from those two bands, and Michael responded by sending him a few songs from each band. One of the songs by FEX was called “Subways of Your Mind”, which can theoretically be heard here if Simon wants to click on this link. If not we’ll just fix it in post.

https://vocaroo.com/19NFyeqYi7Zj

After 18 long years, the search was finally over. Not only was this The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, but it was a different version than had been heard before. There had always been speculation that the recording we were familiar with was a live recording, and that assumption gained a lot more traction once Hörfest became the central focus of the search. The recording that Michael provided for Reddit was a studio recording off a three song cassette.

Marijn explained the situation that this song was one of the most famous pieces of lost media ever and the subject of a decades long search, but Michael had no idea. It’s not because he and the other band members were too old to use the internet or something, either. Also, I was completely wrong about them all having white collar jobs and not caring about some old band they were in anymore.

Michael did have a white collar job as a software developer, but he was still moonlighting as a session musician as well as composing music for commercials. He also has a YouTube channel called Silk Vision where he has uploaded a few songs. So it wasn’t a matter of being too old to understand technology or anything, he just hadn’t come across it.

After conferring with the other band members, they gave Marijn the go ahead to post the revelation to Reddit including the studio recording of the song. Michael’s daughter posted on the thread as well and said she would try to get her father to do an AMA, which she eventually did. Ironically, his daughter had fallen down the rabbit hole of internet mysteries a few months earlier when she saw headlines about Celebrity Number Six being solved, but she somehow never stumbled across the mystery of her father’s song.

And that was just one of many close calls there have been throughout this search. Unlike when Celebrity Number Six was discovered to be Leticia, a little known model who had never come up in the search before, both FEX and Phret have been discovered as leads multiple times. But whenever FEX came up, the people following the lead always found the same compilation record featuring FEX performing a song called “Jenny”.

This wasn’t a cover of Tommy Tutone’s hit song “867-5309/Jenny”, but it may as well have been because of how little resemblance it bore to The Mysterious Song. As such, whenever a new researcher came across the song “Jenny”, they discard FEX as a possible lead. Honestly, if I heard the other two songs on the tape Michael sent to Marijn, I’m not sure I would have pegged it as the same band either. The style of these song was definitely closer to The Most Mysterious Song than “Jenny” was, but I don’t think it was close enough that I’d have given it serious consideration.

We also don’t even know exactly how much of a stroke of luck finding the song was, either. Michael said that when he was contacted, he just grabbed two random tapes from the material he had for those old bands. It’s not known exactly how many tapes he had for FEX, but had he grabbed a different one, this search might still be going on. Then again the band only recorded six songs, so it was probably 50/50.

As for how the song wound up on the radio, nobody is really sure. It wasn’t recorded at Hörfest, and Michael speculated that their agent might have leaked the live recording to NDR in the hopes it would get some play and attention. If that was the goal it certainly worked, the attention just came a few decades later than they planned.

On November 7th, just 3 days after the news broke on Reddit, Michael went down to NDR along with singer and guitarist Ture Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann. They were excited to talk about the experience of suddenly discovering they were world famous, and they performed an acoustic version of the song on the air as well. Unfortunately, they had all last touch with drummer Hans Sievers, who they assumed was no longer involved in music.

The next day, Hans opened up his morning newspaper and discovered that his old band from the 1980s was making international headlines, so he called up NDR for an interview and to be put into contact with the other band members. As it turns out, not only did he also still have his old FEX cassettes, he still had the original drum kit he played on the recoding set up in a hayloft. Hans was a farmer now, but he kept the drum kit assembled and would still occasionally go up there to bang around a bit before getting back to farm work.

With all four members now reunited, there are plans for them to perform some sort of reunion. Or at least there are concepts of a plan. At time of writing it’s only been 12 days since the band made contact with their drummer again, so there hasn’t been enough time for any real details to be set in stone yet. Whether they perform a single concert or attempt some sort of world tour remains to be seen, but fans are excited to see what the future holds.

And although Simon and I were both wrong with our guesses about this mystery, I do find it a bit funny how close we were about certain aspects. Although there were indeed white collar jobs involved (though not for all four), they all very much still cared about music. And while the mystery wasn’t solved by one of their kids watching YouTube videos about internet mysteries, that is exactly what Michael’s daughter was doing. She just hadn’t found this mystery yet.

Wrap Up and Minor Updates

It seems 2024 was a massive year for internet mysteries, especially lost media. In addition to the four we talked about today, this year also saw solutions for “Zoltan”, “Everyone Knows That”, “La Cancion del Alicia”, and The Backrooms. We never talked about those in the first place so I couldn’t revisit them here, but maybe that’s a topic for another episode. Spoiler alert, Simon: one of those was discovered to be from the soundtrack of a 1980’s porno film.

And while they weren’t solved, there have been some major updates to other internet mysteries as well. A lot of ground has been made in the search for the original Jeff the Killer image and people believe they have found at least the subject of the photo if not the original photo itself, but it isn’t 100% confirmed.

We’ve also seen developments in the case of Dr. Gloves, which was pretty exciting. The most notable development I’ve seen is that there was some amount of lying going on by supposed investigators. The alleged story was that police and the FBI had been contacted, but nothing Dr. Gloves was doing was illegal so authorities were powerless to investigate the matter. Both Simon and I had a difficult time believing that was the case, and it turns out we were right to be skeptical.

Not only were crimes very much committed, but Dr. Gloves has been the subject of an active investigation for some time now. Authorities are convinced that Dr. Gloves was not an employee at the hospital as had been the prevailing theory, which raised the question of how this person gained access to the children.

Also, it has been determined that not all of the images were actually of the criminal. Some appear to have been added into the Dr. Gloves photoset for shock value and came from educational sources or something like that.

Those were the other internet mysteries I’ve written about on this channel that seem to have had the most progress made, but it’s unclear how close we are to a solution on either of them. Perhaps 2025 will be another big year for internet mysteries and I’ll get the opportunity to bring you more solutions to your favourite unsolved internet mysteries. Or maybe nothing new will be discovered and I’ll just have to write about Bigfoot instead.

In fact, let’s do that. Next time you’re in the states, Simon, let’s grab a camera, go to the Pacific Northwest, and hunt us down a sasquatch. I hear they taste delicious.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the initial goal of the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The initial goal was to have the channel with the most videos uploaded to YouTube, ideally uploaded as quickly as possible, and to get a million views. The creator wanted to upload a million videos, each containing a single pixel of a composite image, to achieve one million views.

What was the secondary goal of the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The secondary goal was to create an internet mystery to fill the void left behind by Webdriver Torso, giving people a new internet mystery to play around with.

What was the significance of the LOCK and DELOCK videos in the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

LOCK was meant to symbolize people being ‘locked in’ to the mystery, while DELOCK was designed to be the human counterpoint to LOCK, representing a lost alien’s feeling of being homesick for their home planet.

What was the creator’s motivation behind the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The creator wanted to try to get into the mindset of an alien making contact with humans and communicate messages in a very ‘unhuman’ way. They also wanted to give the people exactly what they wanted to keep them engaged.

What was the creator’s reaction to the community’s engagement with the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The creator read every post on Reddit and on the associated Discord to see what hidden secrets people were finding and what aspects of the mystery they enjoyed, then gave them more of the things that they liked to keep it interesting.

What was the creator’s explanation for the composite images in the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The creator made it sound like the vast majority of the composite images were entirely original artistic creations just made to look cool, and those that were based on source material were so heavily modified and distorted that the original image wouldn’t have been recognizable anyway.

What was the creator’s explanation for the LOCK composite image?

The LOCK composite image was meant to be the Voyager Golden Record, a record sent aboard the two Voyager probes that contained messages encoded in a way that scientists believed aliens would be able to decode and understand.

What was the creator’s explanation for the DELOCK video?

The DELOCK video was designed to have a clearly definable song and image, with the song ‘Homesick’ representing a lost alien’s feeling of being homesick for their home planet.

What was the creator’s explanation for the BRILL series in the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The BRILL series videos fit together to form a larger mosaic, but much of the BRILL series was lost to time, making it impossible to uncover the full composite without the creator posting the image.

What was the creator’s reaction to the community’s theories about the Unfavorable Semicircle project?

The creator played into the alien angle the most because it was what people engaged with the most and seemed to find the most interesting, giving the people what they wanted.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: These Internet Mysteries Actually Got Solved…
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.