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The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

11/24/2020

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“Are You Ready To Jump Down the Rabbit Hole?”

The song you just heard has stumped the internet. It has been posted, either a portion of the song or the entire song, to numerous places online including: Reddit, a German fansite devoted to eighties synth-pop, a canadian online forum that allows users to upload obscure music in hopes of identifying it, Discord, and YouTube. It even has its own dedicated website. Links can be found in the show notes

Up to this point no one has been able to identify the name of the band or the name of the song. Maybe you will solve this mystery.

On this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions:

  1. What is the origin of this song?
  2. How did it go viral?
  3. Who is behind the song?








What is the origin of this song?


This story begins in 1984 when there was no Spotify, iTunes, or even Napster. In the years before the internet and music becoming digital, cassette tapes were sometimes used to record songs when a radio station played them live. This is what Darius did, a lot.

Most of the time he recorded songs from a radio music show called “Music for Young People” which was played on a German public radio station called NDR1. But that wasn’t his only source. Darius loved music and would hit record anytime he heard a song he liked.

On one particular cassette tape, labeled #4, was an unknown catchy tune recorded in between songs from XTC and The Cure. Darius would later digitize this song along with others he knew little about and call it his “Unknown Pleasures” playlist. This was in reference to the record of the same name by the English New Wave - Post Punk band Joy Division.
 
In 2004 Darius’ sister Lydia bought him a domain name as a birthday present. Initially Darius wasn’t sure what he would use the domain for. Eventually he decided to upload his “Unknown Pleasures” playlist in the hopes that someone on the web would be able to help him identify these songs.

One song really stood out to Darius’ sister. She tried in vain to find out who the band was or what the name of the song was. She searched the lyrics and found nothing. That’s when she decided to upload a snippet of the song, under thealias Anton Riedel, to German fansite devoted to eighties synth-pop and to a Canadian website devoted to identifying songs uploaded by fans called “The Spirit of Radio”. Still Nothing.

It even made it to youtube in 2011. But still no one came forward to claim it or claim to know who was behind the song. It was as if the song was the giant squid of the music world. Visiting us from another dimension.

That’s when things really went crazy.








How did it go viral?

In april of 2019, the most mysterious song on the internet took on a life of its own thanks to an unassuming 16 year old student in Sao Paulo Brazil. Gabriel da Silva Vieira loves music, as do most 16 year olds. He particularly loves post-punk bands. He was watching a Youtube Channel when a song caught his ear. He liked it so much he wanted to find out more about it’s unknown history. He ended up posting it up on his own YouTube channel and also posted it to 44 different Subreddits. That's when it went viral.

It caught some fire on Reddit and then YouTuber Justin Whang posted an episode of Tales from the Internet. Since July of 2019 the video has over 716,000 views. This created a frenzy. Several thousand users on both Reddit and Discord have been feverishly trying to discover the truth behind the song, but to no avail.

There have been some discoveries. The Reddit u/johnnymetoo posted the entire song after he had found one of Lydia’s old posts on Usenet.








Who is Behind The Song?

One of the many problems surrounding the song is that we just don’t have much information to go by. It was most likely recorded off a German public radio station, but that deoesn’t mean the band is German. The regional accent of the singer is not easily identifiable. He may be German. But he also may be Polish or Austrian. Or perhaps even from Switzerland. Nobody can quite agree on this.

What about the DJ, Paul Baskerville who still works at NDR, who was in charge of playing music in 1984 on the German program ““Music for Young People”. In an interview he gave in a Rolling Stone article he said “has no memory of the track and isn’t even sure he played it on his show”.

This may be true because in July of 2020 Reddit user u/FlexxonMobil uploaded a complete list of songs Baskerville played on his show in 1984. After much digging through by internet detectives, they concluded that the song was not on the list.

Paul Baskerville contacted Gabriel Vieira on July 24th of this year saying he had played the song on his current radio show. He said that responses from listeners suggests that he may never have actually played the song between 1982 to 1984. Baskerville told Gabriel that he thinks the song is a hoax.

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Sad Satan

11/18/2019

2 Comments

 
Sad Satan
This episode has graphic descriptions of violence, illegal content, and adult material. Please be advised.

There is a horror video game that can’t be bought at any brick and mortar store or even online on a video game digital distribution service like Steam. It was allegedly found via a link on an internet forum found only on the Dark Web. One version of the game displayed visuals of violent gore and child pornagraphy. The game came to light after being covered by the Youtube Channel “Obscure Horror Corner” on June 25th, 2015. It would be the last video they would post before going dark.

Are you ready to jump down the rabbit hole?


Kotaku.com deemed Sad Satan “One of the creepiest games this year” in an article dated july 1st 2015. It is widely considered to not be a very good video game as far as gameplay is concerned. But gameplay isn’t what made the game infamous.

In this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions:
What is the game like?
What makes it, different?
Is it real?


What is the game like?
Before we get to the gameplay, a brief history of its existence:
A user only known as “ZK” purportedly posted a link to the game via a dark web forum. The link was then sent to the owner of the youtube channel “Obscure Horror Channel” by an anonymous subscriber. The owner, first name Jamie, then downloaded the game via a Tor Hidden Service.

Sad Satan is a rudimentary game who’s visuals are grainy and dark.It consists of a first person view of your character walking down hallways. The hallways differ slightly in darkness and aesthetics. From almost completely dark to a hallway with a long streak of blood on the ground leading you to what you assume is the source of the blood.

There’s not much more gameplay than this. Walking forward down creepy looking hallways is all you ever do. But I think the crudeness of the game lends itself to the horror genre in a weird way. It adds to the feeling that this game was found on the deep dark web.

 There are some random still pictures that flash on the screen while walking down certain hallways. There only one that seems to mean something is a photo of Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher than appears for a split second. They both are holding signs that say “NSPCC is great!” NSPCC stands for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. More still pictures include Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris (both of whom were caught in a police investigation into sexual abuse allegations called operation Yewtree), Japanese murderer Tsutomu Miyazaki, Andres Escobar - Columbian football player, killed after an own goal, The movie director Roman Polanski who was charged with the rape of a 13 year old girl, and Images of accident victims and murder victims are also shown, including the aftermath of a person struck by a truck, and a beheading.

Throughout the second half of the game there are “nightmare” children you run into that simply stand there doing nothing except stare at you and cry. The game ends when you encounter a child that decides to do something about you being there. It follows you and creates “contact damage” You have no no way of defending yourself and then, you die.

So the gameplay and visuals aren’t great, but it’s the audio that really gets people. The screaming seems a little too real and interviews with real murderers can be heard in the background. But it’s The overall creepy feeling the game gives is what players remember.

What makes the game, different?
The game footage I saw of the original Obscure Horror Corner playthrough seemed to be making some sort of statement about child abuse. Not in a completely overt way, but in a subtle way. That being said the next editions of the so called “unedited” versions were not subtle in any way.

I have seen conflicting things about what is in the original game and what is not in the original game. We will now dive into what is said to be found in illicit versions of the game.

“a new version of the game was posted to 4chan by someone claiming to be ZK, claiming that Obscure Horror Corner had not been showing their viewers the "true" Sad Satan. Members of the 4chan community downloaded this version of the game and attempted to play it. Some users complained that their computers began running sluggishly, and a few even reported that their computers became completely unresponsive while trying to run the game. A few users even reported that their computer would not turn on anymore after running this version of the game. One Reddit user attempted to play the game from a Live USB instead of their computer's main hard drive. Later, when they tried to boot into their computer as normal, the computer failed to load. This version, dubbed the "clone" by most of the /r/sadsatan community, contained images of violent gore and child pornography, some of which were accessible right from the title screen; resulting in another version of the game with this graphic material removed (which is often called the "clean" version) being created by Redditors and subsequently redistributed.”

Apparently there are many versions of this game that can be found online. But buyer beware, illegal images and malware are in most of them.

Is it real?
This game unlike our previous video game we covered called Polybius is completely 100% real. The question really is do you believe it’s origin story that Jamie from the “Obscure Horror Corner” told in his Kotaku interview. Is it a deep web created game, or did he make the game himself?


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UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon

10/19/2019

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  1. Scotsman Gary McKinnon pulled off one of the greatest military hacks of all time in 2002. In a 13 month period between February 2001 to March 2002, Gary hacked into 97 United States military and NASA networks plus computers. What he says he found, called the “The Disclosure Project”, may be evidence of UFO’s and alien technology.

Are you ready to jump down the Rabbit hole?




In multiple interviews Gary has said he found evidence of both UFO’s and what he says is called “free energy” by easily hacking into their systems. Gary also says there is a cover-up by the United States government and he just wants the truth out. 

On this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions
  1. Who is Gary McKinnon?
  2. What evidence did he find?
  3. Is it real?



Who is Gary McKinnon?
Gary McKinnon was born on February 10th 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, who Gary recounts as being a bit of a UFO buff.

Gary had been introduced to computers when was a young child. At the age of 14 his parents bought him an Atari 400 console to play video games on. But instead of playing video games, he used the Atari to create programs and graphics. He was not your typical 14 year old.

Gary was very much into Science Fiction novels. He devoured books by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. This helped feed into his curiosity of UFO’s. When he turned 15 he decided to join Bufora, the British UFO Research Association. BUFORA describes itself this way: "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma". This organization is still around to this day



In 1983 at the age of 17 Gary saw the Mathew Broderick thriller drama “War Games”. The movie is about a computer whiz kid who is able to hack into a U.S. military computer and in doing so almost inadvertently starts World War III. This movie had a profound effect on the young Gary McKinnon.

At the urging of a friend Gary got a qualification in computers and became a systems administrator at a small company. Then in 1995 he began the journey that would eventually lead him to being labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government and uncovering what he claims as to be evidence of a conspiracy by the U.S. Military to hide the existence of Extraterrestrial technology here on earth.

It all started the bedroom in his then girlfriend Tamsin's aunt's house in Crouch End, London. He downloaded a program that allowed him to search for computers that had Windows installed on them. What he was able to find in this way was networks of computers that were being used by high level government and military network administrators who hadn’t bothered to give themselves passwords.

For the next 7 years Gary went searching through military, nasa, and government files looking for evidence of UFO’s. And he says he wasn’t the only hacker going there. In a 2005 interview with the Guardian Gary said this: “Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand …”

What he says he found is what intrigued people the most though.

What evidence did he find?

Gary claims to have seen plenty of evidence while snooping around those computer networks. Here are some of the more interesting findings:
Gary says he found a list of “Non-Terrestrial Officers”. He continued “It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."
He says he hacked into DARPA and found evidence of "an autonomous machine that would go in and do the dirty work. These things could go upstairs and look for bombs. You wouldn't have to send in real people.”
He downloaded a grainy black-and-white photograph he believed was an alien spacecraft on a Nasa computer housed in the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. He says he knew where to look for this picture because a NASA photographic expert had told him about Building 8 at the Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging.
Gary also says he stumbled upon “The Disclosure Project.” He says “This is a book with 400 testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles. Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse-(engineered) technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft.”



Is It Real?

In 2002 Gary was arrested by the Britain's National hi-tech crime unit after using his real personal email to download a hacking program called RemotelyAnywhere. Later That same year he was charged with seven counts of computer-related crimes in 14 US states by the U.S. Government. Including the shutting down the United States Army's Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours and causing over $700,000 in damages. He could have faced up to 70 years in prison if convicted in an American court.

On 16 October 2012, then-Home Secretary Theresa May announced to the House of Commons that the extradition had been blocked. Gary was not to be extradited to the United States.

Much of what Gary claimed to have found evidence about has yet to be corroborated with hard facts. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not telling the truth.

In fact when he mentioned hacking into the DARPA computers and finding evidence of a machine that would be used to look for bombs, I did a little bit of research. I found that in 1998 iRobot established a contract with DARPA that eventually led to the Packbot. What is a Packbot? Well, the PackBot is a series of military robots. And more specifically The PackBot EOD (explosive-ordnance disposal) can be controlled by radio or wired control to handle situations involving potential explosives, thereby reducing the risk of personal injury.

Gary was right.
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Dear David

9/30/2019

4 Comments

 
There is a ghost on twitter. Or at least that’s what Adam Ellis Tweeted. In those tweets he has decided to share the story of a little boy’s ghost that has been haunting his apartment since 2017.

Are you ready to jump down the Rabbit Hole?




Adam Ellis is a New York cartoonist and illustrator who started documenting his encounters with this creepy ghost on his twitter account @moby_dickhead. He gained quite a following and some notoriety because of his tweets. Oh and did I forget to mention that Adam thinks this dead boy’s ghost is trying to kill him?

On this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 2 questions:

  1. What is the story behind David?
  2. Is it real?








What is the story behind David?

At 8:35 AM on Aug 7 2017 Adam described the Dear David incident in a series of tweets. This is what he said:

(Jeff Voice Over)

Here are some of the more intriguing highlights from Adam’s twitter account:

  • He claims that his cats will go to his door that leads to the hallway outside his apartment and just sit there, looking underneath the doorway. As if something or someone is there.
  • A brand new Polaroid type camera he bought cannot take pictures of his hallway. They just come out black. But the camera works everywhere else.
    • There is a video posted on this timeline tweet that shows Adam taking a picture with the camera of the hallway and it developing black in real time.
  • For some reason static electricity plays a significant role in many tweets
    • Here is a recording he made of the Static sounds he mentions
  • Adam has a dream that he was dragged by David through an empty warehouse by his arm. He wakes up to find his arm bruised.
    • He then finds that a food cart repair depot to be closed on his way to get coffee. The warehouse that housed this shop is now empty. Or so he thinks. There is one solitary green chair in the middle of the warehouse. The first time Adam saw David he was sitting in a green rocking chair in his room.
  • A video taken from a security camera from inside the apartment appears to show the Green Rocking chair start to rock on its own.
  • Adam recounts another dream he had. This time he says in his dream he wakes up to find a severed head and a bloody spine snaking down the bed towards him. The head then look him directly in the face, and smiles.
  • On three different occasions Adams purports to have taken photos of David. Once in November of 2017, then again in December 2017, and finally in Jan 2018
    • The first set of pictures in November are pretty grainy but you can make out something
    • The pictures in December are quite clearer. And you can see David on a chair in Adam’s room. Then you can clearly see David standing over Adam as he sleeps.
    • The one lone picture in January of 2018 appears to show David lying in bed with Adam. David appears above the sheets and seems to be almost hovering, arm outstretched and touching Adam.
  • The last tweet from Adam about David comes in March, 2018 where he says that he is focusing on work and that things have been quite as of late.










Is It Real?

There are convincing moments throughout the twitter story line. I personally love the origin story of David and the 3 questions aspect of it. It harkens back to being a kid and believing ghost stories and the games that accompanied them.

I personally want to completely believe in the tweets. I love a good ghost story. Who doesn’t? 

I do believe something happened. I just don’t believe everything that was tweeted out was true. I think Adam has embellished some of the story here.

Here’s one of the problems I had. If you go through the tweets it sometimes reads like a story. Sometimes too conveniently like a story. The tweets sometimes come off as if he is trying to hard at keeping the tweets coming. Once it started to go viral there must have been an immense amount of pressure to keep going. And so he did. At the expense of what really happened.

The second problem I have is with the photographic evidence. Now I do not know what a real ghost would like like if it were caught on camera. But I do know what a doll in a transparent filter would look like. And unfortunately the pictures look like a doll to me.

News broke in June of 2018 that Buzzfeed Studios and It producer Dan Lin's production company Rideback would be adapting the tweets into a film. In November of that same year New Line Cinema acquired the rights to the film.

Ellis has always maintained that everything he tweeted was true. And that may ultimately be true. And we here at the Clouded podcast most definitely do not want to upset David, that’s why there are only 2 questions not 3 this episode. David doesn’t like 3 questions.

​
Picture
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That Poppy

9/30/2019

2 Comments

 
On November 4th, 2014 a petite blond girl with big brown eyes uploaded a video to youtube. In it she can be seen eating cotton candy in a pink sparkly top for 1:22 seconds. The title of the video is “Poppy Eats Cotton Candy”. This video was followed by many other strange videos including one where she repeats the phrase “I’m Poppy” with different inflections for 10 minutes straight. For years people have tried to uncover the identity of this youtube star. The question is, does she want to be found?








The mysterious girl with a soft voice first appeared on youtube in 2014. She has amassed over 450 million views on youtube. Her ardent followers are known as “Poppy Seeds” and one of them has gone so far as to have created a religion based on Poppy known as “poppyism”. She has released a self published book, Her identity was eventually solved, but to this day she remains an enigma among youtube stars. Mystery still surrounds her. Is this a riddle that’s not meant to be completely solved?

On today’s episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions:

  1. Why is Poppy considered to be different?
  2. What theories are out there that explain her strange behavior?
  3. Who is Poppy?








Why is Poppy considered to be, different?

To understand the sensation that is Poppy you really have to study her Youtube videos. They can be very robotic and eerie in nature. A lot of her videos are just her in a white room talking directly into the camera. Talking directly to you, the listener. Especially her videos that came out early in her youtube career. 

Such as the video titled “Oh No”. In this video Poppy is standing in a white room off center. A few seconds into the video a puff of smoke appears and a second Poppy appears on the opposite side of the original Poppy. They start to look at each other and the first Poppy starts have have blood come out of her mouth. The second Poppy looks at her and says “Oh No”.  The two Poppy’s then stare at each other for about 15 seconds as blood continues to come out of and drip from the first Poppy’s mouth. Then the video abruptly ends. That’s it. No explanation at all about what you just watched.

In Some of her videos she seemingly seems to be answering some of the questions people had about her. A couple of examples of this are her two videos “I Am not in a cult” and “Am I okay?” Here are a couple of audio clips from those two videos:

Audio Clip Here

I also find the videos of “charlotte” interviewing Poppy to be quite odd and a little bit disturbing. In these videos Poppy is being interviewed by a mannequin named Charlotte that has a robotic voice. Charlotte looks really creepy. She just stands there with awful looking curly wig and does not move an inch. Here is a short sample of one of those interviews:

Audio Clip here




What theories are out there that explain her strange behavior?
Let me start this off by quickly dismissing these theories I found online:
No she is not a robot, a government project, nor is she a part of the illuminati. I do realize that there are connections in her music videos and website that gives illusions to the illuminati, but I believe those are all red herrings. She knows you will be looking for them and so, they are placed there. I can also say with some certainty that she is not a Hologram or an alien from outer space. 


That being said, There are strange things I would like to cover that have some people concerned. I the original description of her “I Will Apply for Make-Up” video, certain letters are capitalized. When you spell out only those letters that are capitalized it says “HELP ME”.

Then there's the reddit post that had the title “please help me” with the follow up message of “I’m breaking”.

Finally in her self-published book called The Gospel of Poppy, she references Moloch. This is a bit disturbing because Moloch is a Canaanite God associated with child sacrifice. Eerie to say the least.

I do believe the truth is much simpler. As Occam's Razor states, the simplest answer is usually right. Poppy, I believe, is a character created to not only to be a parody of today’s culture but to also create a youtube pop star.





Who is Poppy?

It has been widely reported that Poppy is the creation of Titanic Sinclair played by musician Moriah Rose Pereira of Boston, Massachusetts.

Corey Michael Mixer, better known as Titanic Sinclair, is a director, musician, and YouTube personality creator. He has previously worked with Mars Argo, who eerily resembles Poppy in both looks and style of videos.

Poppy has grown enormously since her beginnings on Youtube. She has turned into not only a Youtube Personality but also a YouTube music phenomenon. She has released two studio albums, two EP’s, and been on tour 3 times. 

Poppy also starred “I’m Poppy”, a short film and the first episode of a television series of the same name written and directed by Titanic Sinclair, in 2018.

We may never know The reason behind the creation of Poppy by Titanic Sinclair. It could be as simple as to create a star out of a mysterious no one.But no one really knows.

And for some other reason, Corey and Moriah aren’t talking either.

​
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