So yesterday afternoon, @nathanfries tweeted the URL to this rather bizarre site: http://stareightsix.com
At first, there appears to be very little on the site but this video:
Below the video is the following message:
Where this comes from or who made it isn’t important. This must seem strange and all, but you’re just going to have to trust me.
All that matters now is that you figure out the solution. Please hurry. I don’t have much time left.
So, having nothing but that to go on, this would seem to be some kind of alternate reality game. If that’s true and you want to figure it out for yourself, you might want to stop reading here, because I’m going to divulge what I’ve figured out so far.
** SPOILER ALERT **
There’s a lot of interesting things about this video. The most obvious is that this footage is pretty old. From my work with as a video artist way back when, I actually recognized one of the clips towards the end as being from the Prelinger Archive. It seems that several pieces of it were taken from a Jam Handy film called Precisely So.
I was also able to glean some other interesting facts by looking at the video on YouTube directly. First off, this is very recent. The video was posted two days ago (November 28th) and has only had 34 views as of this writing. Nathan apparently found the video in the recently posted section of YouTube. The video page has a link to the site in the description as well as the same cryptic message from above.
As an aside, I’m glad people like Nathan are sifting through the raw, unflitered stream of liquid crap that is the recently posted videos section of YouTube. I’m guessing that if there were no YouTube, Nathan’s hobbies would probably include wating near dangerous intersections in the hope of witnessing a car accident. As for me, I’ll wait until things float to the top. I digress.
So, things I learned about this from the YouTube page:
- While the posted date is November 28th, 2008 - the “Recording date” is June 14, 1938.
- The video “Recorded Location” (you have to double click the little map there a few times to see this) is Britton, South Dakota.
- The same message that’s on the site (above) is in the description, along with the site url.
Jam Handy parts of the video were not very likely recorded in Britton, South Dakota. The date on the Jam Handy film is 1937, so that’s also wrong. I had a little trouble figuring out where the other parts of the video (the men working, the guy in the tree) came from at first. I found a lot of similar things, but not the film itself. A google search for “britton, south dakota video” turned up a bunch of stuff within the Prelinger archive. Eventually I did find where some of the other footage came from. It was made by an amateur filmmaker named “Ivan Besse” and was (surprise) shot in 1938-39.
While this stuff was all very interesting (and maybe related) it wasn’t really getting me anywhere. The message on the site mentioned “figuring out a solution”, which I was no closer to than when I started.
It was at this point I decided to try working with the one visible word in the video: “hyperplane”. Wikipedia has some very interesting things to say about hyperplanes, the short version of which (I think) is that they’re “a higher-dimensional analog of a (two-dimensional) plane in three-dimensional space”. Again, very interesting, but nothing useful in terms of a solution.
Then I got lucky. In desperation, I tried tacking on the word “HYPERPLANE” to the url of the site. That’s when things got a whole lot more interesting:
http://stareightsix.com/HYPERPLANE
The above link takes you to a page that looks like this:
I found this early yesterday evening. I shared my findings with Mike, and he and I have been working this thing ever since. We’ve got a lot of theories, but as yet, very few solid facts. I’ll save my (our) theories until we can confirm some of them. I’d love to hear your theories, though. Comment away.
UPDATE: There’s a thread going on about this ARG at unfiction.
