Am I doing this right?

Number 14: “Secret” Livestream

Nothing is secret to 4channers, and nothing is sacred.

No one knows that better than Shia LeBeouf.

LeBeouf and two artists, created an anti-Trump interactive art installation, called “He Will Not Divide Us,” soon after Trump took office in early January.

The installation was first exhibited at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, but when activists from both sides kept butting heads at the exhibit, it was thrown out as a public safety hazard.

The collaborators found another museum to host their exhibit in Albuquerque, but it was soon met with more confrontations, so the group had to figure out a new home for their exhibit before it fell flat.

This is when they tweeted out on March 8th that they would be livestreaming their exhibit from an “unknown location,” so that viewers, art lovers, and supporters could still view their work.

Sounds like a good alternative, right?

Well, it didn’t go as planned when pro-Trump supporters on the /pol/ board of 4chan got involved. Not even 24 hours later, the exhibit’s flag had disappeared.

Where did it show up?

A picture of the taken flag was tweeted right back to #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS. 4channers had uncovered the mystery of the exhibit’s so-called secret location.

How?

A fan of LeBeouf’s had posted a photo of herself with her favorite actor just as the camera feed went live. The photo had been taken at a Greenville, Tennessee diner.

The internet sleuths further pinpointed the exhibit’s location, as contrails appeared on the livestream. With these, they cross-referenced them with flight patterns.

Next, they sent a local member to drive around the general area with his horn blaring.

Once they could hear the horn on the livestream, “He Will Not Divide Us” was as good as gone.

Number 13: The Pyramids

4channer h64 posted a thread of the mysterious sort on the /x/ board one Saturday, and it sent the group into a frenzy.

In the photo there appears two pyramids in the midst of the forest.

Why are these pyramids in the forest?

What were they built for?

Who do they belong to?

You’ve got me.

And you’ve got the /x/ board too.

4channers quickly got to work trying to solve this mystery. They called it “a cult/temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess of war and flame in the woods of Oregon.”

With more than 53 pages of discussion, this 4chan investigation was solved when, at last, they dissected the photo to uncover the property owners’ names, their phone numbers, and their business records.

Still don’t know what’s inside them though…

Number 12: Barbie Mystery

This investigation appeared on 4chan in November of 2016. It involved an image of a blonde amputee woman, whom the board had nicknamed Barbie.

In March of 2017, one user posted a thread titled, “The mystery of Barbie is solved.”. According to the author of the thread the “Russian anonymous team” had solved the mystery of the woman who appeared in Barbie.avi.

The woman’s name was Tammy.

According to creepypasta, she had Body integrity identity disorder, but the investigators found that she’d had no such thing.

When she was 14, she’d lost her arm in a washing machine incident.

The 80’s saw Tammy living in Chicago, where she worked for the agency, “Fascination,” as a model.

During the application process, she’d had several interviews, which the video, Barbie.avi, was created out of.

The author of the post uploaded the interview to YouTube. The OP also noted that Mike Rounds, the Ampix manufacturer, told the woman’s story to him, saying that at 16 or 17 years old, Tammy had been working with an oldschool washing machine with no safety features.

With the washer going, she tried to shift a sheet in the water.

Just as she was doing this, it launched into a spin cycle, trapping her arm in the sheet.

It twisted her arm right off.

Tammy was a bitter young woman at the age of 22 when she was interviewed and had no marketable skills, was uneducated, and didn’t enjoy being a caretaker for pennies.

So that’s how she ended up at the agency.

Unlike 4chan’s first hypothesis, she wasn’t the victim of any crime.

With the mystery solved, the poster noted, “Xenopasta, if you’re reading this, you are fired, however, thank you very much for this mystery. It was really hard to solve it.”

Number 11: Cueva de los Tayos

When an OP posted the Cueva de los Tayos cave in Ecuador, he wondered if it was man-made or natural.

He wondered what sort of technology or who could have made the perfectly flat roofs and cuts.

Of course, the 4channers on the thread had something to say about it. Some thought it was “a place of heavy spiritual concentration,” while others seemed to agree that it was largely man-made, but mostly natural, with some likening it to places in Russia and the Hypogeum in Malta.

Some suggested that “less advanced” people had come along later and drew the crude stick figures on the walls, after a more advanced society had built it.

One poster pointed out that it was hardly anything to freak out over and that ancient humans were fairly smart; they had tools, they had math.

Maybe not as advanced as ours today, but they made the pyramids after all.

In the posters own words: “After all, it’s not like they had a shortage of people or time to make this kind of [stuff].

I think most people underestimate ancient humans because they didn’t have what we have today, but that doesn’t make them [dumb], just primitive.”

The poster agrees with another that the “highly engineered” place must have held some spiritual purpose.

Number 10: SEL and the Wired

One 4channer asked the board if they’d ever heard of transhumanism.

He then said that one anime series has some particularly creepy stuff and is followed by many fan sites.

One of the fan sites requires a login. And it’s strict about this.

At the bottom of the homepage, it reads: “To login you have to have an invite from an existing user. There is no use in trying to beg, ask/request for an invite, we choose our new members with care.”

How do you get an invite if you don’t know any of the users?

Well, you’d probably not want to be part of these online communities in the first place, as it turns out.

One fellow 4channer said that one of the users hacked the admin of a similar site, after which the admin vanished.

This was after the admin had received some monetary donations from the site’s users.

Many think he was a scammer.

Thankfully you asked 4chan on this one, OP.

A cautionary tale is just what obsessives need to keep money in their pockets.

Number 9: Erratas

This internet theory has spent a lot of time on 4chan being dissected, poked and prodded, picked at…and ultimately solved.

Kind of.

Erratas – or Eratas spelled with one ‘r’ – was first described as an algorithm or program whose function is the mystery.

Some say it was used by YouTube to detect copyrighted content.

Supposedly, if you even suggest that you know about Erratas or say the thing by name, you’ll get fired.

Being an internet legend, of course Erratas comes with a lot of theories.

On November 25th, 2015, Erratas was first mentioned on 4chan in a thread about strange work stories.

One user described a friend who worked at something like a chemical plant.

While the user didn’t explain what the program was, he claims employees were flagged if they searched it through some code.

The plant employees reportedly did aimless tasks, which the user calls “kafka-esque.”

The user also mentions forklifts and said this female friend was now homeless and in a band.

This may seem meaningless, but these clues will reappear.

A month later, a user posted a request on 4chan, asking about a strange HR-related program called Erratas.

Another user pipes up with some discussion about Ecolab, Unilever, and UPS.

Again, a month later, on the /mu/ board, Erratas is mentioned in relation to an album and Tod Ellsworth video, which is dated a few days before the first entry on Erratas.

A user responds to someone’s comment, saying that Erratas was a software company, similar to Enron, which was kicking about in the 2000’s.

Supposedly, they fired every last one of their employees.

The Erratas craze moved to YouTube, where a user called ChronosForLife JurassicPark claimed in a cryptic video, entitled “YouTube is MONITORING and controlling my life,” that the company was harassing his mom, because she’d uncovered some secret in the Jurassic Park trilogy.

The rant appears on the video in white text and the video quality is subpar.

The video was removed from YouTube, but the transcript is still available.

Back to 4chan.

In late January, the /mu/ board sees a proposition that the group compose a new music genre called “deep internet,” by using old YouTube videos.

Chronos’ video rant just happens to be one of these videos.

With so many 4channers suddenly viewing Chronos’ video, a new video was posted to his channel called, “Here goes nothing.”

This video contains the first video-mention of Erratas, as well as autocaptions which try to make sense of the video’s rap music.

Instead, they uncover more clues: At 0:12 are the words: “are far from over 200 Corbin KY 40219” At 0:52, the number: “111111”

At 1:46, the percentages: “10.3% 10.4%” And at 2:17, the words: “overthrow the government”

The band, the KFCMC, produced by DJ Rozwell, was a homeless girl band.

Remember the homeless girl in the first thread?

And the above is their address, which was found on Tumblr.

This is when Chronos throws out Unilever (mentioned in an earlier post) as one user of Erratas.

For no reason at all, Chronos also adds that The Lost World is his favorite of the Jurassic Park movies.

Remember Tod Ellsworth, who uploaded the KFCMC video?

Well, one 4channer noticed his name was an anagram for The Lost World.

This gets even weirder.

The Twitter account u/ErratasOrBust was then discovered, which had been opened mid-November and was named Tod Ellsworth.

The profile pic was a creepy black-and-white drawing which 4channers discovered was a 2005 Hawaiian police sketch.

Some 4channers suggested this might have something to do with the Jurassic Park films being filmed on the island.

While Erratas was dissected by 4channers, with many suggesting that it was simply a publicity stunt by the KFCMC group, it would be a bit premature to call this one.

Still, this entry demonstrates how 4channers have a knack for following the leads and connecting the dots.

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