Unfavorable Semicircle: The Most Bizarre YouTube Mystery

Originally, my intro for this episode was going to include a bit of inside baseball about the writing, or more specifically proofreading, process for these scripts. While I have completely redone the intro, I recently learned that Simon is a huge fan of the phrase “inside baseball”, so I wanted to at least leave the phrase in instead of cutting it from the second script in a row. Onto the personal anecdote!

My friends and I were gathered together for our weekly game of Magic: the Gathering. The game was normally secondary, and we were really just hanging out and talking, having a grand old time. Somehow we got onto the topic of comparing horror stories from work. One of my friends interrupted and asked, “You know, we’re a group of nerdy creative types and programmers who hate their jobs. Why don’t we just make a video game together?” He had a point.

There was Steve, the overly excitable artist and graphic designer. Fahey, the one who suggested the idea, was currently pursuing a degree in video game design. I, your theoretically humble narrator, am a writer of both words and computer code. And then there’s my brother Mike, who specializes in thinking so far out of the box that I have to rein his ideas back to being at least tangential to reality.

It was honestly a really good idea, and something that our combined efforts were more than capable of making happen. We never spoke of it again, but I’ll come back to that in about 70 minutes or so. Fortunately, I managed to find a new job, and it’s still so new and remarkable to me that I can work doing something I love here on YouTube.

YouTube is a pretty magical place, with a seemingly infinite amount of content. There are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, half of which is posted by Simon. With that massive amount of videos, it is literally impossible for a company to watch them all and approve them for upload.

In fact, if YouTube hired 10,000 employees to do nothing but watch videos for approval, after a single hour that legion of workers would already be 20,000 hours behind schedule. To keep up with this massive load of videos, it would take the entire population of Monaco working 18 hour days, year round, to diligently monitor content. That’s unrealistic, so YouTube found a much more elegant solution: everyone can upload whatever they want, and it’s up to us to sort it out!

Technically it’s more complicated than that and there is an automated monitoring algorithm, but that’s pretty much the guiding principle, and it’s how a channel like Unfavorable Semicircle was allowed to come into being.

The First YouTube Channel

On March 30, 2015, the YouTube account named Unfavorable Semicircle was created. Logically, this implies the existence of a favorable semicircle, but I have no idea what either of those phrases means. On April 5, the channel began uploading videos.

Lots of videos.

There was, on average, a new video every 10 minutes, which was a truly massive volume. A channel with that sort of output certainly had the chance to be extremely engaging, but the videos were pretty formulaic and derivative. Nearly every video was just 4 or 5 seconds long, featured either noise or a man’s voice saying a single number or letter, and had a video that was just a solid colour with a single black pixel in a seemingly random position.

The video titles were largely uninspired as well. The original videos all were named using the astrological symbol for Sagittarius, followed by a six digit number. I’m a Sagittarius myself, and I find it quite fitting that I would be represented by the centaur archer, because I like to shoot things and I’m hung like a horse. I can feel you rolling your eyes Simon, so don’t worry, I don’t actually believe in astrology.

For the remainder of this episode, if I mention the name of a video just assume that the Sagittarius symbol preceded whatever name I gave. I’m not going to make Simon keep repeating a five syllable word a thousand times, but I promise you it is at the beginning of each video title.

Occasionally videos would break this normal format, and instead of only being a few seconds long, they would reach as much as 11 hours in length. Some longer videos would contain an extremely long string of the man’s voice repeating a series of 0’s and 1’s. No matter what the videos contained, there did not seem to be any obvious meaning to them. Nearly a year went by with the channel being relatively unknown, and there is no evidence that whoever was responsible for Unfavorable Semicircle ever attempted to publicize it or even wanted anyone to find it.

In February of 2016, Unfavorable Semicircle started to gain attention. Whatever it was they were trying to do, they knew their time was running out and YouTube was going to bring the hammer down on them. The channel had already uploaded roughly 72,000 videos in 7 months, but on February 5, it was time to up their game and show they were serious.

The previous upload rate of one video every ten minutes suddenly shot up to three videos every minute. The videos, previously titled almost exclusively with numbers, all now contained the word “Brill” between the Sagittarius symbol and the number. The channel received more and more coverage until finally, on February 25, 2016, Unfavorable Semicircle was suspended from YouTube for “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations.”

Given that they were now at well over 100,000 videos, it was probably spam.

Much of the earlier speculation surrounding Unfavorable Semicircle was that it was just a test channel akin to Webdriver Torso. This speculation went right out the window as soon as the channel was taken down. After all, YouTube wasn’t going to suspend their own quality control channel just because people noticed it was there. So if all the early speculation was wrong, just what the Hell was this channel?

Real-life Sharing Rethought For the Web

If that slogan sounds familiar to you, then congratulations! You are one of the 17 people who enjoyed using Google Plus, and one of the others was none other than Unfavorable Semicircle. On March 14, just a few weeks after YouTube had suspended the original channel, the Google+ account made its first post. The post was a bunch of garbled text that, when decoded, revealed a link to a Twitter page and a new YouTube channel, both just named Unfavorable Semi.

God, I used to get those in gym class all the time, it was so embarrassing. Shortly after the Google+ post was found it was deleted, but clearly someone wanted it to be found and was monitoring the situation.

At the time this new YouTube channel was discovered, there were four videos posted. One was titled Brill 49999, which was posted the same day the other channel was taken down. Another, named N* Brill was nearly 7 hours long and appeared to be every video from the original channel whose name began with Brill, just all strung together into one video. The Twitter account, at the time of discovery, had about 7,200 videos posted to it, all in the same style as the original YouTube channel.

Both the YouTube and Twitter accounts continued to post massive amounts of videos, though there were occasionally pauses.

After one multiple week pause, a new channel, Stabilitory Newing was launched, though fans of this mystery wouldn’t have confirmation it was real for nearly a year.

The Strange Reset

Things had continued on as normal for a while on Twitter and YouTube, but then there was a longer than normal pause. After over two months with no new posts, on September 15, 2017, a new video titled Strange Reset YD appeared. Within 30 minutes of the video being discovered, it was removed from the channel.

A few more minutes, and both YouTube channels and the Twitter page would all be manually shutdown by the owners. All that remained was the Google+ account, and of course that is now gone as well since Google finally abandoned that project. Maybe this was all a commentary on the social networking site, and the Unfavorable Semicircle was just your circle of friends, both unfavorable and semi because you couldn’t get anyone to actually join your circle online, because who wanted to use Google+?

A final post on the Google+ account appeared on March 28, and was simply titled REAL. Below the subject line was a list of accounts that were clearly being identified as the real accounts used by the creators of the project. There were many fakes and hoaxes, as is to be expected, so it was nice to have the creators of such a cryptic project set the record straight on the matter.

You know, since they couldn’t be bothered to give a single hint as to what any of this nonsense was supposed to mean. This post mentioned all the accounts we have mentioned so far, specifically noting that the Twitter account was only real until the date of the Strange Reset. Thirty days after a Twitter account has been deactivated, anyone else can come and take that name.

Naturally, someone did and was masquerading as the real Semicircle, so they wanted to be sure to set the record straight that this was total bullshit.

I can’t tell you how many total videos have been created by Unfavorable Semicircle over the years, but it looks to be over 200,000. Because of both the YouTube termination of the original page and the very unexpected Strange Reset, I can tell you that sadly a lot of these videos are lost to the ages. While everything that happened after the original channel was suspended was very quickly backed up by people out of fear of it being deleted again, the archive of the original channel is woefully incomplete.

There are a little over 77,000 video from the original channel archived, which means there’s still tens of thousands of videos potentially lost. Were they all still using the Brill naming convention, then the reupload of those onto the second YouTube channel would have filled in the gaps. Without the files though, we can’t be positive one way or the other.

The REAL Google+ post was the last communication ever received from Unfavorable Semicircle. All of the accounts associated with it are long since deleted, with the exception of a backup Twitter account, @unfavorablesem, which has never posted anything.

Seasons and Series

With hundreds of thousands of videos, there needed to be some way to organize them for clearer communication amongst the solvers. Originally, the community broke the videos into what they considered “seasons”. They noticed that videos posted on the same date or date range would have similarities in the audio or the colours used.

The seasons were given names such as Logic, because the videos were a seemingly endless string of the male voice speaking 1’s and 0’s, or Fumble, because it sounded like someone fumbling with the microphone. These names were cute, but they could potentially obscure whatever the intended meaning of the videos were.

Fortunately, Unfavorable Semicircle took care of that for us. While the original videos were all just strings of numbers, eventually they contained words as well. I already mentioned Brill on the original YouTube channel, but there were many more series on the other channels and on Twitter. All series had simple, one word names, such as Brine, Dual, and Brother. Note that not all of the named videos were part of a series. There were a large number of standalone videos as well.

I mentioned earlier that every video began with the Sagittarius symbol, and for the most part that was true. However, the Stabilitory Newing channel had two series, Brother and Belt. Instead of the zodiac sign, the videos on this channel began with a plus sign inside of a circle, which is the symbol for the XOR (ex-or) logic gate that you may remember from Cicada 3301. If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet from being overloaded with information, you may have noticed that I mentioned the word Brother twice.

Yes, there are two different series both named Brother. But we’ll get back to that when we get to the more mystical portion of this episode.

Lock and Delock

On the original channel, there were two videos of particular interest to people trying to decipher any sort of meaning to this channel. Lock was posted on July 18, 2015, and Delock was posted on December 29, 2015. Given the fact that they had coherent names rather than just numbers, and considering what the names were, it was thought that these two videos were the keys to uncovering what secrets Unfavorable Semicircle might hold.

There is definitely one very important thing we can tell from these names. As our big brain listeners are probably yelling at their devices right now, “delock” is not a word, the word is “unlock”. This almost certainly means that either the creator of these videos does not speak English as their first language, or that Delock is not going to be used to unlock the meaning of anything, and everyone is completely misinterpreting the name.

My money’s on both.

We’ll start with the video for Delock, because it’s the one that we know the most about. The audio sounds like some weird carousel with sound effects being played over it. The male voice from the other videos is once again present, and recites a series of letters over this track as well. The video looks like this:

Over the course of the nearly 3 minute video, the white lines stay completely stationary, but the colours of the other pixels rapidly change. No meaning has been derived yet from the video, shocking I know, but there are a few notable things about the audio.

At first, people thought the audio was taken from “Steamboat Willie”, the classic Disney short. Classic meaning “old”, not “good”. On June 19, 2020, a Discord user discovered that the music was actually a manipulated version of the song “Homesick” by Bailey’s Lucky Seven, which of course was the B-side to their hit single “Carolina in the Morning.”

Another video from Semicircle titled Retio was found to contain the hit song “Away Down East in Maine” by Miss Patricola. Don’t worry, Simon, there’s a very good reason you have no idea what these songs are. These songs were both hits in 1922, which is potentially a very significant year.

As of 2015 when Semicircle was creating these videos, nothing created after 1922 had entered the public domain. The channels may never have been monetized and the audio was distorted, but it would seem that the creators did not want to risk their videos being taken down because of a copyright issue. Or they just picked random, obscure music they didn’t want people to recognize and it was purely coincidence that both songs were from the last year to be public domain.

The letters spoken at the beginning of the video were another major point of contention. With the music and sounds in the background, it was hard to make them out perfectly. Someone decided to visually examine the audio wave, then compare it to the audio waves from videos of the voice speaking letters and numbers without background noise.

If we treat the long pauses between letters as spaces, and I can’t think of any reason why we wouldn’t, the letters spoken spell out “I am not h.” That’s fantastic and this whole video seems like a massive step forward compared to the otherwise indecipherable nature of most of the videos, but who or what is H? If the song title was a clue and the full sentence was supposed to be “I am not homesick”, what does that even tell us?

Is this an alien communication and they just wanted us to know that they like Earth better than their home planet? Of course not, but if I can dispose of the aliens theory here then I won’t have to bring it up alongside the actual theories. No matter how popular a theory it is, and I assure you it is a popular theory, Unfavorable Semicircle was not created by aliens as a means of communicating with us.

If life from another planet was smart enough to conquer intergalactic flight and land on Earth undetected, then they’re smart enough to communicate with humanity without resorting to whatever this is supposed to be.

This brings us to the earlier video, Lock. Lock is 27 minutes long, and the audio is just garbage noise that gets painful after a while. The video on the other hand is much more interesting.

Sort of. The video itself just flashes a bunch of colours, rapidly. At this point I should warn any listeners that want to investigate this mystery more on their own, do not watch these videos if you are prone to seizures.

Anyway, watching the video is not interesting, but creating a composite image of the video is. A composite is created by taking all of the frames and aligning them nicely into a square or rectangle. What size square or rectangle you ask?

Eh, whatever looks pretty I guess. No, seriously, the width of the image is determined by what looks like it is making a picture, and is entirely guesswork. You might be thinking that someone could just place the frames in order and guess different size rectangles until they got something that they felt looked like an image, and you would be correct.

Still, when you have a 27 minute video of seemingly arbitrary colours flashing on the screen and they arrange to make this image, it’s kind of hard to think that it’s an accident or a coincidence:

If you need further proof that this is not an accident, the very first video posted to the second official Semicircle channel was called Relock, and the composite of that video was this same image, but cleaned up to be a bit crisper and more defined. There is no way this was not intentional, but also what on Earth is it? Some of the more popular guesses include a watch, a skull, some kind of coin, or a recreation of the MC Escher painting “Hand with a Reflecting Sphere”.

Another suggestion I have seen batted around, and the one that I embarrassed to say it looks most like to me, is a hand holding a pokeball. It’s probably not that. Regardless of what it is supposed to be, the discovery of composite images for some of these videos was pretty groundbreaking.

Composite Images

Apologies to those listening as a podcast instead of watching on YouTube, but we can’t properly cover Unfavorable Semicircle without going over a few more images. We’ve already looked at one composite and the clearly intentional nature of it. While a lot of these images were very abstract, they were still images that were presumably trying to communicate something. While there are a lot of composites created from these videos, there are three in particular that I would like to highlight.

The first comes from the Breadth series.

Breadth contains two videos, both with very similar composites. While the original composites created looked like little more than a Magic Eye image no matter how they were sized, the breakthrough came when investigators tried plotting them as three dimensional figures rather than 2D images. This 3D figure that Simon might be thinking looks like a ringed planet is in fact an atom.

It’s a lot more clear when you can see it rotate, so I’ll be sure to include the animated GIF for Jen and the viewers at home. These images were a significant discovery for showing the existence of 3D composites within these videos, and because the resulting composites are really pretty.

The next image to take a look at is a composite of Node. Node was a standalone video rather than part of a series, and the resulting composite has been compared to paintings by Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.

Other than being kind of cool looking, despite my hatred of abstract art, there are a few key features here to point out. First, is the striped “flag” in the top left corner. Similar flags are found in other composites, and they seem to serve as a method of verifying that the composite was built correctly.

If you recall, the width of the image is determined simply by guessing, so this is an easy way to tell if they were assembled correctly. You won’t be able to see it without massively blowing up the image, but above the flag on the top row is a series of black and white pixels. This also appeared in many of the composites, and it appears to be binary code.

While many of the messages have just translated to gibberish thus far, the message in Node reads “HE\psoNG”. By changing a single bit in the third character, which may just been an encoding error, it becomes “HELpsoNG”. Okay, so what is the help song?

Well Node also contains something known as “The Melody”. The roughly two and a half hour long video is mostly silent. There are 5 sections with sound, totaling less than a minute.

The majority of the noises have been identified as being sampled from the music video for Aphex Twin’s song “The Windowlicker”, specifically the sounds made by a screeching limousine. Aphex Twins were not active in 1922, but blatantly ripping a sound effect from their video is okay, though using the music would not be. The Melody occurs just 3 minutes before the end of the video, and it is only 11 seconds long.

It has been transcribed to sheet music, but thus far no one has been able to identify the melody itself. The most notable thing that has been discovered regarding the melody is that it is written in 432 hertz tuning, compared to the standard 440 Hz. But we’ll come back to that when we deal with the mystical bullshit later.

The final composite that we need to address is from another standalone video titled Harvest.

You probably think this doesn’t necessarily look like much, and you’re correct. The notable aspects are that this image is broken into 3 distinct panels, and there is again the striped flag in the first panel to ensure that it was decoded properly. The second panel is what we really need to examine, however. It looks mostly black, with some bits of red and white here and there, but there’s also some sort of design near the bottom of the panel.

I’d say it’s hard to tell what it is when it’s zoomed out, but it’s hard to tell what it is when it’s zoomed in, too. If you’re able to get the image to the perfect size and squint just right, you can see that these are actually words.

The words in the image read: “Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts – artworks, expressing the author’s”. While it has since been reworded, at the time Harvest was posted this was the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for art. So is that it then? Is it really that simple and this is all just an art project?

That’s certainly possible, but this could have also just served as a proof of concept that they could encode words hidden within the images. It could also be a decoy to make the less dedicated investigators believe that they solved the puzzle, leaving the true secrets to be revealed to only the most relentless of pursuers.

As is to be expected when examining such a voluminous mystery, there’s no way we can cover every detail. I’ve made sure to hit all the most important information so that you can understand how elaborate both the puzzle and the efforts to decode it have been. What should also be expected, of course, is that when a mystery has such an immense mountain of content with very little known about it, there is also going to be a mountain of theories. Many of the theories we can quickly dismiss, but some of them require a deeper dive.

I hope you’re hyped, Simon, because it’s time for us to dive head first into some astrology.

Astrology

Astrology is as real as ghosts, the Lochness monster, and aliens inhabiting planet Earth. I know our audience has two sets of listeners who are going to both agree with that statement for opposite reasons, but so be it. Still, whether astrology is real or not doesn’t matter. Unfavorable Semicircle does not purport to be some divine manuscript passed down from the Heavens, it is a manmade (or possibly computer script generated) series of cryptic videos.

Whether the person or persons responsible for Semicircle chose to incorporate aspects of astrology in their work is all we care about.

At the very least, they obviously included the symbol for Sagittarius, but is this because they are a firm believer in reading stars? Probably not, but they may have included some astrology anyway because they think it’s neat or whatever. Some researchers made connections between some of the videos and various astrological signs.

We already covered Sagittarius. Next came the series Brill, which is a type of fish. This could be representative of Pisces.

While most sets had unique names, you may recall that there were two Brothers, which would of course be Gemini. Finally that leaves us with the video Harvest, with Virgo being heavily associated with harvest goddess mythology. This set of four zodiac signs gives us two pairs of opposing signs, one sign from each of the four seasons, one sign from each of the four elements, and it is all four mutable signs.

Stop rolling your eyes, Simon, all we had to do to arrive at this destination was cherry pick the data points that we found useful while ignoring the other 150,000 videos uploaded by Semicircle. That, ladies and gentlemen, is called science.

Maybe that ended a bit sarcastically, but these theories aren’t necessarily without merit. While none of this provides any information about who made these videos or why, understanding the meaning or inspiration behind them could very well be the first step to finding those answers.

While we’re on the topic of astrology and other such hocus pocus, let’s quickly revisit the 432Hz tuning. The informal standard for music since 1926 has been to tune the note A above middle C to 440Hz. However, there are those out there who refer to 432Hz as “The God Note.”

It is said to bring about a feeling of calm coupled with a great outlook in life. Scientific research has shown that no, it’s just the placebo effect and nothing different is happening in your brain. I tried listening to the entirety of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” at 432Hz, and it’s pretty much the same.

It sounded slightly off, probably on account of everything being 32 cents flat, but it definitely didn’t make me feel any better about life or the universe. Still, if the creator composed this piece in 432Hz tuning, they may be a believer in fake science like “The God Note”, and if so it gives us solid reason to believe that they are a believer in astrology as well.

Astrology did give us one very important thing, however: the only remotely feasible explanation given for the name Unfavorable Semicircle. Seriously, I have looked everywhere, and I can’t find a single suggestion for the meaning behind the name that isn’t clearly a joke. The irony of this is that if the name actually does come from astrology, then the name itself is intended to be a joke.

There are no semicircles in astrology, but there is a semi-square, which is considered an unfavourable aspect. A semi-square is a 45 degree angle between two planets. It’s similar to the square in that it shows tension, but also challenges that can help us learn and grow.

The difference with the semi-square is that any conflicts felt are more subtle than the square, so it is easy to ignore them rather than actually grow or solve problems. The name Unfavorable Semicircle could possibly be a play on the idea of the unfavorable semi-square, and an allusion to the fact many things in this puzzle are easy to ignore, leaving them missed opportunities for growth or discovery. It’s not only a reasonably plausible explanation, it’s honestly the only explanation we have so far.

Theories Galore

Let’s start off by going through all the extremely unlikely theories that I am contractually obligated to cover just so the comments aren’t filled with people asking why I left out their pet theory. But if I somehow do leave out your pet theory, be sure to GET IN THE COMMENTS and let me know all about it.

Alien communication: It wasn’t aliens 20 minutes ago, I don’t know what you lunatics think changed since then

Viral advertising campaign: Considering how long the project has gone on with no apparent purpose, this is extremely unlikely.

Trolling: Pretty much the same rationale as the last theory. Not that trolling has an apparent purpose other than to annoy and enrage, but this is far too sophisticated and has gone on far too long to have been done for the lulz, especially since it would have required more than one computer dedicated full time to uploading videos.

Recruitment Puzzle or Test: The sheer complexity of this mystery is reminiscent of Cicada 3301, but normally a recruitment puzzle has some sort of announcement surrounding it. The complete lack of direction or instruction makes it unlikely this is being used as a recruitment tool; why would anyone waste their time on something so complex and potentially meaningless if they had no reason to believe they were being recruited for something?

Alternate Reality Game (ARG): We’ve seen some convoluted ARGs over the years, but like a recruitment puzzle, they generally have some sort of direction or narration. A game that ran as long as this did without ever giving a single explicit hint, despite the lack of progress being made, would be extremely poorly thought out. Unfavorable Semicircle may not make a lot of sense, but someone can’t upload three videos per minute that assemble into the composite images we saw and be accused of not having thought things out.

Before the more substantial theories, there’s one other so called “theory” that I need to address. Whenever there is a mystery, especially an internet mystery, one of the theories is always “work of a disturbed mind”. This seems to be a catch all phrase that means “I don’t understand or approve of what you’re doing.”

Galileo’s assertion that the Earth revolved around the sun, Picasso’s abstract paintings, and John Nash’s contributions to game theory and mathematics were all considered works of disturbed minds. (If you’re trying to remember who John Nash is, that’s the guy the movie “A Beautiful Mind” is based on) Any mental illness, real or perceived, that these people suffered with should not take away from the works they created. It does a disservice both to yourself and the creator to write something off as being the work of a disturbed individual and assuming it has no merit.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Numbers Station

One of the earliest theories of any merit was that this was some sort of online numbers station. Numbers stations were cryptic, short-wave radio stations that would broadcast repeating series of numbers. They would sometimes employ a “handshake”, a signal designated to authenticate a broadcast, before an important sequence of numbers. These stations were particularly popular during the cold war, though some are still in operation today.

Some of the Semicircle videos include a handshake followed by a list of numbers, so the parallel was quite apparent.

There are some definite benefits to a numbers station hosted on YouTube rather than via short-wave radio. There’s no infrastructure cost, as all the hosting and broadcasting is done by YouTube. A huge benefit is that there’s no geographic restriction. Traditional numbers stations require agents to be set up within range of the transmission, but by doing it online, they can be anywhere in the world.

It also makes the broadcast harder to track since there’s no physical transmission site. Much like with a traditional numbers station, a user who stumbled upon this channel would have no way to decode it without the key, leaving it an internet curiosity.

Once the station went viral and was subsequently shut down, there were the Google+ posts directing to new locations. This indicated that the creator wanted people to find it, but the posts were also always deleted shortly after creation. A possible explanation for this would be that they wanted to ensure that their agents had time to find the new stations, but they wanted it to remain publicly available for as brief a period of time as possible to avoid another potential shutdown.

Notably, while the Twitter account was immediately given by Google+ and subsequently led to the second YouTube channel, the third and fourth YouTube channels were not confirmed to be real until after the Strange Reset when everything shut down. Any agents utilizing this numbers station would have likely been informed of the additional YouTube channels by a decoded message long before this happened. But if this was a secret numbers station, why would they confirm that these other channels had been part of it, and why specify that the Twitter account was no longer under their control?

Still, this also would give a good explanation for why most of the uploads were clearly done by a computer script, as there is literally no way this could have all been done manually without an army of people involved, yet there was still evidence of human interaction. Most notably the Google+ post and the creation of new outlets for the videos after the initial channel was terminated, but also the very occasional renaming of existing videos.

It’s a plausible theory overall, but it has some holes. A common theme among all of these theories is that none of them fit everything perfectly, and as such a lot of information will just be classified as red herrings. The composite images? The Melody? The Wikipedia entry for art? In this theory, all of those are red herrings to distract people from the true meaning of Semicircle and distract internet sleuths from potentially uncovering the secret. Satisfying? Not really, but it’s well within the realm of reason.

Penetration Test

No, not the sort of penetration test you may see take place in a fake classroom setting uploaded to PornHub. Sorry, Simon, I couldn’t help myself. As penance, I will spare you the extremely technical details of what a penetration test is. The short version is that it is a test or series of tests to find exploits or vulnerabilities in a computer system that would allow a bad actor to deploy a payload of malicious code to the system, or use the system to deploy that malware to other users.

If that’s still a little complex, the even shorter version is “let’s fuck with YouTube and see if we can break in.”

There are a few different possible end goals here, but they’re all connected in that the purpose of the videos was malicious hacking. Before some software engineers roast me in the comments, yes I realize that pen tests are traditionally considered ethical hacking, but this obviously wasn’t authorized by YouTube or the original channel never would have been shut down.

Anyway, the first possible goal was that they were trying to find a way to make the videos contain a nefarious payload. If such an exploit could be found, this would be a huge deal. This is not entirely unsubstantiated, either. Android users reported difficulties and strange behaviour with the channel, such as videos causing their phones to crash or videos continuing beyond the stated run time.

While these events definitely happened, there is no way to know whether Semicircle was explicitly focused on this or if it was just an accident. The Semicircle videos were full of small encoding errors, and Android is notorious for problems in how the system parses videos. It keeps getting fixed, but then a new variant will emerge and it’s the same problem all over again; it’s the Covid of Android exploits. Still, there is no way to know if this exploit showing up was intentional or an accident.

The other slightly less malicious goals of a penetration test would be to reverse engineer YouTube and Twitter’s internal systems. One of the biggest clues that this could be a possibility is that the videos contain compression artifacts (noticeable distortions) when encoded by YouTube’s proprietary video codec, and someone could be reading those artifacts to reverse engineer the codec. They could use similar methods of analysis to reverse engineer other internal processes.

Once again, we find ourselves meeting a plausible theory that has to hand wave a bunch of details as being red herrings.

Havana Syndrome

In August of 2017, reports began surfacing that American and Canadian diplomatic personnel in Cuba were experiencing strange and unexplained health problems, the problems having begun in late 2016. The original events all started with personnel hearing strange, grating noises, some records of which were later identified as sounds of crickets. The noises lasted anywhere from 20 seconds to 30 minutes, and happened when the diplomats were either in their homes or in hotel rooms.

Other people nearby were not affected, and it seems that most or all of the affected people were wearing earpieces, a combination of diplomats, CIA, and secret service. The symptoms that followed included pain in one or both ears, feeling pressure or vibrations in the head, visual problems, nausea, cognitive difficulties, and dizziness. Some people even suffered brain damage or other permanent impairments.

These attacks began well after Unfavorable Semicircle had gone viral, and the Strange Reset occurred very shortly after reports of Havana Syndrome were known, at which point the whole project had already gone silent for over a month anyway. This theory is definitely a bit out there, but if you needed a testing ground for the effects of audio and visual stimulus on unsuspecting people, what better way to do it than a series of viral videos on a website with 122 million daily users?

It didn’t take long for people watching and trying to decipher these videos to report some issues. Nothing as intense as Havana Syndrome, but definitely pain, dizziness, and just generally feeling off. One video that affected me pretty intensely is Brother 31. If anyone at home wants to test it out, it happened for me at around the 3:30 mark, and several seconds later for the person who “recommended” that particular video to me.

He described it as a slightly painful, uncomfortable feeling in his left ear. For reasons unknown to myself, I just watched the video again when I began writing this section even though I already tested this days ago, and 30 minutes after listening to it my ear is still in pretty intense pain.

I recognize this sounds like a total tinfoil hat theory, but the timeline can’t be ignored. The creation and termination of Semicircle fit a little too perfectly. They uploaded thousands of videos with very similar but slightly different noises, threw in enough clues to keep people focused on any possibility except this, and monitored all the investigations for people reporting any ill effects and what videos caused them.

Unlike with the penetration test theory, it also gives a good reason why they wanted to alert people where to go to continue watching the videos after YouTube took down the original channel. I don’t want to consider this theory as the most likely, but it’s not something I’m willing to completely dismiss offhand either.

The Eye of the Beholder

I have a suspicion that Simon has already proclaimed this his front runner, but possibly the cleanest theory for this whole mess is that it is simply an art project. A very weird art project. The beauty of calling this art is that, in a very vague and abstract way, it explains everything.

Any question one could possibly ask regarding the contents of these videos can be brushed aside with “It’s an artistic vision, you meandering pedant.” The composite images, the strict adherence to only using public domain music, the text from the Wikipedia entry for art, it all points to one solution. The biggest criticism one could levy is that it seems pointless to create hundreds of thousands of individual pieces knowing that no one could possibly view and appreciate all of them, but the obvious answer is that the work as a whole is the singular art piece, and each individual video is but a brushstroke.

There’s just one more thing. While anything regarding the contents or the meaning can be explained by just calling it art, there’s still the whole process of creating it. Someone would need both an artistic vision and an extraordinary knowledge of programming, steganography, video and sound editing, and a breadth of other extremely complex technical processes. I’m not saying it’s impossible, history is littered with artists who were also scientists, but I am saying that I have consumed far more of this supposed art than I would have preferred, and whoever created this is no Da Vinci.

While the most plausible solution, the biggest thing keeping it from being widely accepted is that it’s too damn boring an answer. People have dedicated thousands of hours trying to decode this, and you expect them to believe it was just one person’s art project? Okay buddy, and next you’re gonna tell me that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

My friend Steve could conceptualize an art project of this scale, and he definitely has the skills to create the digital images that would become the composites. Fahey could break the images back down to the individual frames and do some simple audio distortion effects. Writing the scripts to automate the upload process of the thousands of videos would fall on me.

I also like money, so if I could slip something malicious in to reverse engineer YouTube’s internal processes to sell to the highest bidder, you best believe I would. And because this would be set up on multiple dedicated computers running 24/7, my brother would inevitably sneak in and try to weaponize the whole thing, just for laughs. This is a guy whose favourite type of jokes are puns; not because they’re funny, but because the joke is how angry they make other people.

This is my personal theory, and not one that I’ve really seen discussed. The problem with any of the individual theories is that none of them quite explain everything. The idea of it just being an art project comes closest, but even that isn’t perfect. Nevertheless, I don’t see any reason why it has to be any single theory.

This project was a massive undertaking that definitely required more than one dedicated computer and almost definitely required more than one person. I suspect there was a singular artist with a singular vision: a series of YouTube videos each representing one pixel of a large piece of digital art, waiting for someone to combine them. The project grew to include more than one image, some encoding across multiple videos and others in longer, standalone videos.

I believe this was the artist’s vision, but he needed one or more people to help automate the complex computer stuff that would take an individual person doing it decades. These recruits saw potential in what was being created, and decided to hijack the project to perform a series of penetration tests. This could have happened with or without the artist’s knowledge or permission, and the fact that it was ultimately multiple people working towards multiple different end goals is what makes finding a singular purpose for Unfavorable Semicircle so difficult.

Or maybe I’m wrong and it really is just one person’s art project. But it’s still not aliens.

Wrap Up

Can you believe the average YouTube video about Unfavorable Semicircle is about 10 minutes long? It’s like they’re not even trying to investigate. Still, when it came time to explore the internet’s favourite collection of bleeps and bloops surrounded by flashing lights, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This mystery rivals the complexity of Cicada 3301, but without any of the helpful narration and clues.

Maybe there is a simple answer waiting to be found, a composite image that explains everything in great detail. Even if that were true, the video with that answer could have 80,000 other videos queued up in front of it for analysis. I don’t think this mystery is going to remain unsolved forever, but unless the creator finally comes forward to lend a helping hand, there could easily be a decade of work left to decode it all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Unfavorable Semicircle?

Unfavorable Semicircle is a mysterious YouTube channel that was created on March 30, 2015, and began uploading videos on April 5, 2015. The channel uploaded a vast number of videos, often featuring a man’s voice saying a single number or letter over a solid color background with a single black pixel.

Why was the Unfavorable Semicircle channel suspended?

The Unfavorable Semicircle channel was suspended on February 25, 2016, for ‘multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations.’ Given the high volume of uploads, it was likely due to spam.

What happened after the original Unfavorable Semicircle channel was suspended?

After the suspension, a Google+ account associated with Unfavorable Semicircle posted a link to a new Twitter page and a new YouTube channel, both named Unfavorable Semi. These channels continued to post videos, but there were occasional pauses and eventually a longer pause leading to a ‘Strange Reset.‘

What are some of the theories about the purpose of Unfavorable Semicircle?

Several theories exist, including it being a numbers station for secret communication, a penetration test to exploit YouTube’s systems, a project related to the Havana Syndrome, an elaborate art project, or a collaborative effort involving multiple people with different goals.

What is the significance of the ‘Strange Reset’?

The ‘Strange Reset’ occurred on September 15, 2017, when a new video titled ‘Strange Reset YD’ was uploaded and then removed within 30 minutes. Shortly after, all associated accounts were manually shut down by the owners, leaving only a final post on Google+ identifying the real accounts.

What are composite images in the context of Unfavorable Semicircle?

Composite images are created by aligning all the frames of a video into a single image. Some videos from Unfavorable Semicircle, when composited, reveal intentional images such as a watch, a skull, or abstract art, suggesting a deliberate encoding of information.

What is the ‘Melody’ in the context of Unfavorable Semicircle?

The ‘Melody’ is an 11-second audio clip found in the video ‘Node,’ which is part of a longer, mostly silent video. The melody is written in 432 Hz tuning and has been transcribed to sheet music, but its significance remains unknown.

What is the ‘Lock’ and ‘Delock’ videos?

The ‘Lock’ and ‘Delock’ videos are two specific videos from the original Unfavorable Semicircle channel. ‘Lock’ features rapidly flashing colors, and when composited, reveals an image. ‘Delock’ contains audio that, when analyzed, spells out ‘I am not h,’ but the full meaning is unclear.

What is the significance of the name ‘Unfavorable Semicircle’?

The name ‘Unfavorable Semicircle’ is thought to be a play on the astrological term ‘unfavorable semi-square,’ which refers to a 45-degree angle between two planets. It suggests tension and challenges that can be ignored, aligning with the mysterious and ignored nature of the videos.

What is the ‘Harvest’ video and its significance?

The ‘Harvest’ video, when composited, reveals a hidden message: ‘Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts – artworks, expressing the author’s.’ This could indicate that the project is an art piece or a proof of concept for encoding messages within images.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Unfavorable Semicircle: The Most Bizarre YouTube Mystery
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.