|
On August 5th 1996 a number of unmoderated usenet groups were bombarded with posts that, to most people, looked like spam. The majority of the posts had the same header “Markovian Parallax Denigrate” and were followed by a seemingly endless string of words that didn’t make sense together. Then around 2006 a new theory emerged from internet detectives: Could these messages have been secretly hiding a deep government secret?
Are you Ready to jump down the rabbit hole? For years people have tried to decipher what the posts meant, but have come up empty. These so called word puzzles have confounded and frustrated all those who have searched for its meaning. On today’s episode of Clouded we try and tackle the indecipherable. We have 4 questions we will attempt to answer:
What exactly happened on August 5th 1996? The Markovian Parallax Denigrate is considered by most to be the first internet mystery. This is mainly because it appeared online before the internet as we know of today existed. The mysterious posts began appearing on what is known as Usenet. Usenet is sort of a messaging bulletin board system that was implemented in 1980 and still widely used in 1996. On August 5th 1996 Several hundred strange messages began popping up inside of different discussions across Usenet. It has become known as the “Markovian Parallax Denigrate” because the majority of these weird posts had it in its subject line. This was followed by a series of words that did not make sense when read as a sentence. Here is an example of one of the many messages that was sent: jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark What are some explanations? The first thought that comes to mind is spam. Strangely enough the very first spamming incident in internet history occurred a couple of years prior MPD, on Usenet. In 1994 over 6000 members in different Usenet discussion groups were spammed by two lawyers. The spam was imploring people to get in line for a green card before it was too late.The duo spammers claimed to have made $100,000 from their spamming effort. And that’s part of the reason I’m not buying the spam angle on this. Usually spam is sent in order to gain something. Whether it be financial, information, or advertising. This MPD incident did none of those. Another explanation is that this might have been an early attempt at some kind of bot. More specifically a chatbot. The reason for this is because of a probablity theory called a “Markov Chain”. This is a calculating process that has been used in programming chatbots. So when people noticed the Markov in Markovian, they theorized that there may be a connection. The problem I have with this explanation is that there were plenty of more “controlled” ways to test out a chatbot. Why create this program only to unleash it to a set of people who probably were not going to interact with your program. If you are creating something like this you want feedback on your hard work. This was not the way to do it. There is also the possibility that that this was the work of an early troll. Someone who found pleasure in causing a little bit a chaos. If this is true, there will never be a way to confirm it unless that perpatrator someday comes forward with some proof. That has not yet happened. Who is Susan Lindauer? Only a few of the original messages remain from the original MPD attack. And one of the email addresses in one of these messages caught the eye of some keen bloggers. The email in question was [email protected]. And if you are a national security buff, the name Susab Lindauer will jump right off the page to you. Susan Lindauer is an American antiwar activist and former U.S. Congressional staffer who was charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government" and violating U.S. financial sanctions during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Susan herself claimed to be a CIA agent. She was incarcerated in 2005 and released the next year after two judges ruled her mentally unfit to stand trial. The government dropped the prosecution in 2009. Thus the conspiracy theory of MPD being a government agent was born. And the conspiracy flourished online and grew rapidly. The internet seems to be fertile ground for growing conspiracies. But this conspiracy was put to rest in a 2012 article on the DailyDot.com written by journalist Kevin Morris. In this article Kevin goes through the history of MPD and dives deep into the mystery of Susan. Near the end of the article he simply points out that there was a Susan Lindauer who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, or UWSP, in 1994. So the email address found by those bloggers, [email protected], was actually the email address that belonged to the student at UWSP. What is the supercomputer known as the Well of Souls? We are about to embark on a ride that goes deep down the rabbit hole. So bare with me and hit that 15 second rewind button on your podcast player whenever need be. There is a science fiction book series called The Well World Series written by Jack L. Chalker. The series involves a planet-sized supercomputer known as the Well of Souls that builds our reality on top of an underlying one of greater complexity but smaller size. Here’s where this series of books and our own MPD connect. The Well of Souls supercomputer was built by a now-extinct race, the Markovians, who developed the Well of Souls with the goal of creating a new species that would transcend their own. My next question was, why would they want to create a whole new species and world? Here is what I found:.”The Markovians achieved the zenith of technological advance, to the point that they had material wealth limited only by their imaginations. They quickly grew bored with material utopia, and decided that in their development they had gone down the wrong path. Their solution was to return to their primitive roots, not as one race but as thousands of races, in the hope that one would reach supreme contentment.” This lends itself to the theory, in our real world where you are listening to this podcast, that we are currently living in a computer simulation. There are some compelling reason why this might be true. We won’t go in depth here on the podcast about this idea but I do highly suggest you do some research on your own. This then made me want to look up the definition of the words Parallax and Denigrate. The definition of Parallax is: “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions”. The definition of Denigrate is: to attack the reputation of : DEFAME When I put all three together it made me think: What if there was a glitch in the sym software we are currently living in? What if the AI tried to communicate with us, but we as humans can’t understand it? Would we see the truth of what we are and where we are if changed our position or view. Would we then like what we saw? Or would we desparage it by saying it wasn’t our truth? For more information and to get some links to articles, pictures, and videos regarding this story please visit cloudedmysteries.com Follow us on twitter and Instagram @cloudedpodcast and like our Facebook page. Lastly Please give us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help get this show in front of more listeners. My name is Victor and this has been another episode of Clouded, where internet meets mystery Article by Kevin Morris: https://www.dailydot.com/society/markovian-parallax-denigrate-spam-mystery/
1 Comment
Elisa Lam
On February 15 2013, the LAPD released a video taken by a surveillance camera of an elevator passenger at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles California. They were asking the public's help in finding Elisa Lam who had gone missing two weeks earlier. Once the surveillance video landed on Youtube and other video sharing sites it became one of the most hotly debated videos of that year. Partly because of the strange and some would say unnatural behavior exhibited by Elisa Lam, and also because of where her body was eventually found. Are you ready to jump down the rabbit hole? The Elisa Lam video caused quite a stir in all corners of the internet when it became viral, . It was even credited by American Horror Story creator Patrick Murphy as the inspiration for the “Hotel” season in 2015. Lots of conjecture and theories were put forth, we will try and get to the truth today. On this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 5 questions:
Who was Elisa Lam? Elisa was a 21 year old student at the University of British Columbia and the daughter of immigrant parents who had opened a restaurant just outside of Vancouver, Canada. What is also known is that she was diagnosed as having Bi-Polar disorder and was prescribed medication to help keep it under control. On January 26th 2013 Elisa arrived alone in Los Angeles after having visited the San Diego Zoo a few days earlier. That same day Elisa made internet reservations for a shared room at the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. She checked into the hotel two days after arriving in LA on January 28th and was scheduled to check out on the 31st. It has been reported that her final destination was Santa Cruz California. What is the Checkered Past of the Cecil Hotel? The Cecil Hotel (Now known as Stay on Main) began construction in 1924. It was being built by hotelier William Banks Hanner and was meant to be a destination hotel for international businessmen and the social elite in Downtown Los Angeles which was booming at the time. The cost of the hotel was 1 million dollars and it was Designed by Loy Lester Smith in the Beaux Arts style. The Cecil opened in 1927 and boasted an opulent marble lobby with beautifully stained-glass windows, potted palms and an alabaster statuary. It was, at the time, a lobby that stood out from the pack. But almost from the beginning the hotel had a tragic history. In 1927, a man named John Croneur was arrested in his room for running from police at the Hayward Hotel and stealing a diamond hairpin at the Rosslyn Hotel. But the excitement and beauty of the neighborhood quickly changed 2 years later when the Great Depression hit. The once elegant hotel was now notorious for housing drug addicts, prostitutes, and adulterous couples. It was also becoming a haven for transients and the homeless, slowly being engulfed by the now infamous skid row. The bad luck of the hotel has a vast history behind it. There have been at least 10 confirmed suicides at the hotel and 3 inconclusive deaths that may have been suicides. Here are a couple of those unfortunate suicides:
One of the more sad and shocking deaths to occur at the hotel was the death of "Pigeon" Goldie Osgood. On June 4, 1964, a hotel worker discovered the body of Mrs. Osgood, a retired telephone operator, dead in her room. She had been raped, stabbed and beaten and her room was ransacked. Osgood was well known around the area and had earned her nickname because she fed birds in nearby Pershing Square. Near her body was the Los Angeles Dodgers cap she always wore and a paper sack full of birdseed. Osgood's murder remains unsolved. The Cecil Hotel also had some shocking guests visit its, some say, haunted halls. In 1947 Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, was rumored to have had her last drink at the Cecil's bar in the days before her notorious and, to date, unsolved murder. Richard Ramirez, also known as the night stalker, made the Cecil his home during his spree of 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries in 1985. Then In 1991, Jack Unterweger — a serial killer who strangled prostitutes with their own bras in Australia — also rented out a room at the hotel. Many believe he stayed at the hotel in homage to Richard Ramirez. What happened to Elisa Lam? Elisa Checked into the Cecil Hotel on the 28th and was assigned a shared room on the 5th floor. Two days into her stay her roommates complained to hotel management about “odd behavior” by Elisa. She was then moved to a private room also on the 5th floor. Lam contacted her parents everyday while on vacation. On January 31st, the day she was scheduled to check out, her parents didn’t receive a call. Lam’s parents contacted police and a search ensued. On Feb. 15th, a full two weeks after she had gone missing, the LAPD released a surveillance video of Elisa from inside an elevator at the hotel. The video was time stamped Feb. 1st and was the last known sighting of her. Elisa’s body was found on the morning of Feb.19. It was located in one of four 1,000-gallon tanks providing water to guest rooms, a kitchen, and a coffee shop. The days prior to this, guests in the hotel were complaining of low water pressure, unusual tasting water, and black water coming out of the faucet. What is in the surveillance video? To say that her motions and reactions in the video are a bit odd is an understatement. It truly is bizarre to watch it. It has a supernatural feel to it, like just off to the side of the camera is the ghost or spirit we are all waiting to see. Here is how wikipedia describes the video. It does not get into the supernatural element of it, which I think is also important to share: In the clip, the camera at one of the elevator cab's rear corners looks down from the ceiling, offering a view not just of its interior but the hallway outside. It is somewhat grainy, and the timestamp at the bottom is obscured. At some points Lam's mouth is pixelated. At the start, Lam enters, clad in a red zippered hooded sweatshirt over a gray T-shirt, with black shorts and sandals. She enters from the left and goes to the control panel, appears to select several floors and then steps back to the corner. After a few seconds during which the door fails to close, she steps up to it, leans forward so her head is through the door, looks in both directions, and then quickly steps back in, backing up to the wall and then into the corner near the control panel. The door remains open. She walks to it again and stands in the doorway, leaning on the side. Suddenly she steps out into the hall, then to her side, back in, looking to the side, then back out. She then steps sideways again, and for a few seconds she is mostly invisible behind the wall she has her back to just outside. The door remains open. Her right arm can be seen going up to her head, and then she turns to re-enter the cab, putting both hands on the side of the door. She then goes to the control panel, presses many more buttons, some more than once, and then returns to the wall she had come into the elevator from, putting both hands over her ears again briefly as she walks back to the section of wall she had been standing against before. The door remains open. She turns to her right and begins rubbing her forearms together, then waves her hands out to her sides with palms flat and fingers outstretched, while bowing forward slightly and rocking gently. This can all be seen through the door, which remains open. After she backs to the wall again and walks away to the left, it finally closes. What she in fear for her life? The official coroner’s finding was that this was an accidental drowning. In the same report it was noted that Elisa was found naked floating inside of the water tank. Her clothes, similar to what she was wearing inside the surveillance video, was also found floating in the water coated with what was noted as a “sand-like” particulate. The autopsy revealed no evidence of physical trauma, sexual assault, or suicide. The toxicology test was deemed incomplete because not enough of her blood was preserved, but it did show traces consistent with prescription medication found among her belongings, plus nonprescription drugs such as Sinutab and ibuprofen. One of the mysteries surrounding this case was how did she access the water tanks? All the doors that take you to the roof are locked and require a key or a passcode. None of these doors were found to have been tampered with and they also had alarms on them that were not triggered. So how could Elisa have gotten around these measures? Simple actually. The roof was also accessible by the fire escape. Lam could have easily made it up to the roof via this method. This was actually shown in a youtube video by a chinese blogger named Kay Theng. In his video he shows just how easy it is to get to these water tanks at the Cecil Hotel. He also shows that two other mysteries in this case could also be explained in the same video. Two other unresolved issues with her death are how did she climb to the top of the water tanks when employees needed to get a ladder to access them? And how did Elisa get into the water tanks once she somehow was able to get on top where the maintenance access doors are heavy and not easy to lift? The same video by Kay Theng and pictures online of the water tank extraction operation of Elisa’s body also gives answers to both of these questions. The top of the water tanks are accessible in two different ways: One way, which is shown in the video, is that above the water tanks is a roof accessible by a ladder on the opposite side of the water tanks. Lam could have gotten up there and jumped down. There is also a second possible explanation, in pictures I found online I noticed that on one side of the two water tanks there is a side railing. Elisa could have climbed this side railing and possibly pulled herself up to the top. Her odd behavior in the elevator is really creepy and a little disturbing to watch. But that may have an explanation as well. As mentioned earlier Elisa had been being diagnosed as bi-polar. If she had stopped taking her medication or if they no longer were as effective as they once were, she may have had an elevated mood known as mania. When an episode of mania hits psychosis may follow with Individuals making poorly thought out decisions with little regard to the consequences. The one thing that I can’t explain is the elevator door. It stays open for a really unusual amount of time. Longer than I have ever seen an elevator door stay open. Now there have been reports, although I have not been able to verify that the video may have been slowed down. Which is totally plausible. But even if true, it’s not significant enough to really notice it in the video or to explain the door staying open for so long. I think the evidence shows in an overwhelming fashion that Elisa was not being chased or that any supernatural events occurred in the video. Unless, of course, the elevator is cursed. For more information and to get some links to articles, pictures, and videos regarding this story please visit cloudedmysteries.com Follow us on twitter and Instagram @cloudedpodcast and like our Facebook page. Lastly Please give us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help get this show in front of more listeners. My name is Victor and this has been another episode of Clouded, where internet meets mystery In 2011 Tim Hart received an email from his close friend Jack Froese, asking him to clean his attic. The only problem was, Jack had died 6 months earlier.
Episode Begins Here In November of 2011 Tim Hart received an email from his childhood friend Jack Froese. The Subject line of the email read “I’m watching” and in the body of the email it said “Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your f—ing attic!!!”. To be fair, Tim Hart had spoken to Jack about his attic being in disarray earlier that year. The unsettling part was that the author of the email, Jack Froese, had died 6 months before this email had been sent. Are you Ready to Jump Down the Rabbit Hole? Tim hart admitted to the BBC in an interview that he turned Ghost White when he first read the email. And who could blame him? I think all of us would be taken aback at receiving an email from a close friend months after he had died. In this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions: Were there any more emails sent from jack’s email account? What are some plausible explanations? Were these emails sent from beyond the grave? Were There Any More Emails Sent From Jack’s Email Account? Jack Froese died of a Heart arrhythmia in June 2011. As mentioned earlier in the podcast, in November of that same year, Jack’s childhood friend Tim Hart received and email from his now deceased friend. But he wasn’t the only one. Jacks cousin Jimmy McGraw also received a chilling email from the same account. And this one is even harder to explain, it read: “Hey Jim, how ya doing? I knew you were going to break your ankle. Tried to warn you. Gotta be careful.” McGraw suffered a broken ankle after Jack had already passed. Jimmy had this to say about the email he received “I’d like to say Jack sent it, just because I look at it as he’s gone, but he’s still trying to connect with me. Trying to tell me to move along, to feel better,” What are some plausible explanations? One possible answer is that Jack used a service called “Dead Man’s Switch”. This service allows anyone to send emails out to pre-selected recipients after they pass away. Here is how the creators of “Dead Man’s Switch” describe how the service works: “ You write a few e-mails and choose the recipients. These emails are stored privately until they're sent. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to... happen... to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an "electronic will", one could say.” The problem with this explanation is that the second email sent to Jimmy talks about an event that occured after Jack’s passing. The email’s written using the dead man’s switch would all have been written before Jack passed away. Making this explanation impossible. The next possibility, and probably the most obvious one, is that either a friend or family member has hacked the email account. But to this date Jack's family members and friends have said that nobody knows the password to get into the email. And that there have been no other signs that show it has been hacked. That by no means shows that this isn’t an inside job. I cannot speculate as to why someone close to the family would want to play such an insensitive joke. But human beings have consistently surprised me in what they are capable of doing. Were these emails sent from beyond the grave? The first email sent to Tim Hart seemed innocuous enough. But was it sent from the grave or by someone else privy to that information?here’s my problem with someone else send such a boring email that’s trying to play a prank: A private conversation between two friends could have leaked out to others around them. But such a mundane comment, I think, would be hard pressed to be passed along to someone else afterwards. It’s just not something most people would bring up in a conversation outside of the person they initially talked to. The second email is in a whole other category. Does this mean that these emails were sent from Jack as a way of communicating with those he left behind? I don’t believe so. But I also haven’t completely ruled it out. Tim also revealed that he had replied to the email he received from jack, but never got an answer back. Two lives were taken from us way too early in February 2017. The bodies of Abby and Libby were found near an old abandoned railroad bridge a day after they went missing and they may have taken a picture of their murderer with their phone.
If you have any information about this case please contact: Tip Line: (844) 459-5786 Indiana State Police: (800) 382-7537 Carroll County Sheriff: (765) 564-2413 Email: [email protected] Episode Begins here On February 14th 2017 two beautiful young lives were taken from us. The bodies of Abigail J. "Abby" Williams and Liberty Rose Lynn "Libby" German were found on a hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana after having gone missing the day before. A picture of their murderer may have been taken by Liberty on her phone the day of their disappearance. She may have also recorded his voice. (play recording) Are you ready to jump down the rabbit hole? Libby German posted a series of eerie Snapchat photos on the abandoned Monon High Bridge right before they vanished. In one of the photos you can see Abby walking on the bridge. In the background, if you look closely, you can see the figure of someone else walking towards the girls. The police have no active suspects in this case. Three men have been investigated in connection with this crime, but none are considered viable suspects. In this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 2 questions:
What happened on that fateful day? At 1:45 p.m. on February 13, 2017 the girls were dropped off by Libby's older sister Kelsi at an abandoned railway bridge where they planned to go hiking. At 2:07 pm the series of social media photos, mentioned earlier, were posted to Libby’s Snapchat. A short time after this picture of Abby walking on the bridge was taken, a closer shot of the man walking on the bridge was taken on Abby’s phone but not uploaded to Snapchat. This picture would then be followed by the deep haunting voice recording, of presumably the man in the picture, saying to the girls “Down the Hill.” The girls were reported missing at 5:30 pm the same day, after they failed to arrive at the designated pick up point. A search party was formed and called off at 11:45 pm the same night, although family members continued to scour the area well past this time. Authorities at first did not suspect foul play as there was yet no evidence pointing in that direction. That completely changed the next day when the bodies of Abby and Libby were found around 12:45pm, approximately ½ a mile from the bridge in a secluded spot. The police have not publicly stated how the girls were murdered, only that is was indeed a homicide. On February 15th the police released the photo found on Libby’s phone and initially said the person was wanted for questioning, but did not designate him as a suspect until a few days later. Authorities have indicated that more evidence relating to the suspect was found on the phone but have not released or talked about exactly what that evidence is. A composite sketch of the suspect was released on July 17, 2017. He is described as a white male between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing between 180 and 220 pounds with reddish-brown hair. Who are the men who have been investigated? There have been 3 persons of interest that the police and FBI have looked into as possibly being involved in the murders. Here are those 3: Daniel J. Nations is a registered sex offender in Indiana who was arrested in Woodland Park, Colorado on September 2017 for threatening people with a hatchet on a Monument hiking trail. Nations was driving a car with expired Indiana plates at the time of his arrest. A bicyclist was also fatally shot on the trail around the same time Nations was allegedly threatening people. An El Paso County Sheriff's official told reporters there are "many similarities" between the cases but stated that Indiana investigators did not want any more information released. Daniel Nations was sentenced to three years probation on January 5, 2018, for the charge of threatening hikers in Colorado, but he remains in police custody because he has an active warrant from another county. Nations was transferred to Indiana custody on an unrelated charge on January 24, 2018. In early February 2018, police announced that Nations was no longer considered an active person of interest in the Delphi murders. Thomas Bruce Thomas Bruce is an unemployed former pastor who entered a Catholic Supply store in St. Louis County, Missouri on November 19, 2018, sexually assaulted two women, and shot a third one when she refused to undress at his command. Bruce has a similar height (5 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall) and wore a flat cap and navy blue jacket during this attack similar to the person of interest in the Delphi case. Police explored his possible connection with the Delphi case in November. In December 4, Bruce was charged with 17 felony counts related to the St. Louis case and could be given the death penalty. Charles Eldridge Charles Andrew Eldridge, 46, was arrested on January 8 during an undercover sting in Union City, Indiana, after he arranged to have sex with a Randolph County Police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl. After his mugshot was circulated in the local news, residents of Indiana began calling in to the tip line at the Carroll County Sheriff's Department. A multi-investigative team in Delphi, Indiana, comprised of the FBI, local and state police opened an investigation into whether or not Charles was involved in the murders of Abby and Libby. As of the recording of the podcast, all 3 are no longer considered to be persons of interest. This case is still open and not considered a cold case. Authorities are actively following up on leads and investigating those who may have knowledge of the double murder. If you have any information about this case please contact: Tip Line: (844) 459-5786 Indiana State Police: (800) 382-7537 Carroll County Sheriff: (765) 564-2413 Email: [email protected] As Mike Patty, Libby’s grandfather, told the Lafayette Journal & Courier: “Someone knows something” For more information and to get some links to articles, pictures, and videos regarding this story please visit cloudedmysteries.com Follow us on twitter and Instagram @cloudedpodcast and like our Facebook page. Please give us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. My name is Victor and this has been another episode of Clouded, where internet meets mystery
A young man was getting off the subway in New York when a homeless looking man approached him. But instead of asking for money he gave the man who exited the train a $50 bill and a note then quickly disappeared. Written on the note was a cipher and, quite possibly, the answer to all of the man's problems.
Follow us on Twitter: @cloudedpodcast.com & Instagram: CloudedPodcast Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CloudedPodcast/ Thanks to Nina Innsted from the Already Gone Podcast for sending me the link to this story Articles: Reddit - Forbes - Mashable Music in this episode: "Crypto" Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 "Creepy" and "Sad Day" by BenSound.com Even When We Fall By Phillip Weigl Sinister Calamity Dark Asylum Music A Human Being Andy G. Cohen |
RSS Feed
