The Strangest Internet Mysteries That Are Still Unsolved

One of the oldest mysteries of the Internet dates back to the mid-'90s, even before the advent of the World Wide Web, when the message board Usenet — basically a great big huge forum, like an early version of Reddit, which has been in existence since 1979 — was still in widespread use. Users could (and still can, with the right service provider) use the protocol simply to retrieve and store text-based messages, and in 1996, a series of such messages began appearing which confounded everyone. They consisted of long strings of seemingly unrelated words, appearing to have no apparent meaning, and they might not even have been connected to each other if not for the one thing they had in common: their enigmatic subject line, "Markovian Parallax Denigrate." 

Despite the best efforts of internet sleuths, nobody was ever able to parse out any meaning behind the posts. Roughly a decade after the fact, the one surviving post on Usenet's archives was found to be associated with an email address once belonging to a Susan Lindauer (pictured). That happens to be the name of a former journalist and well-known conspiracy theorist — but she has asserted that she's not the Susan Lindauer associated with that email address, and whoever is has yet to be found. 

The posts have been the subject of widespread speculation — perhaps they're an early attempt at text generation, some kind of complex cypher, or just the rambling of a troll. Nobody knows, and it appears that nobody ever will.

One of the most bizarre and impenetrable channels on YouTube, "Unfavorable Semicircle" was created in early 2015. It began to upload videos a few days after its creation, and what videos they were. Their imagery, sometimes static and sometimes not, was blurry and nondescript; their audio tracks ranged from total silence to glitchy noise to shrill, high-pitched squeals, and sometimes, a man's voice could barely be heard in the background, reciting numbers or strings of numbers. Their length ranged from a few seconds to over eleven hours — and if it was some kind of test channel, like the infamous Webdriver Torso, it was unclear what it might be testing.

Internet detectives attempted to take the videos apart, using spectrometers to analyze the audio, searching for some kind of clues in the imagery, and poring over the videos' titles — often with names like "BRILL" or "BROTHER" followed by an ascending numerical sequence — to no avail. Some videos somehow went on for longer than their allotted run time, and others, like one titled "LOCK" and its seeming sequel "DELOCK," would even crash browsers or video players. And there was no shortage of videos to analyze, as, at its peak, the channel was literally uploading a new one every ten seconds. 

In 2016, after a BBC report on the channel, YouTube deleted it and all of its videos — and while a meager few have been archived, it seems unlikely that the videos' puzzle, if there was one, will ever be solved.

The story of John Titor is a complex one, but here's the gist. In 2000, somebody with the screen name "TimeTravel_0" began posting on several forums, notably on that of the Time Travel Institute. "John Titor" proceeded to spin a yarn over many posts that was, put simply, unbelievable: he was an actual time traveler from the year 2036. 

In his future, there had been a civil war, followed by a limited nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia. Society was recovering, but there was a bug in "various legacy code computer programs" — one that could only be fixed with an old-school IBM 5100 computer, which he had traveled to 1975 to procure. He was on a brief layover to attend to family business in 2000, and was happy to answer questions.

As one might imagine, there were indeed many questions. "Titor" posted pictures and schematics of his "time machine," went into detail about his worldline (which, he pointed out, would necessarily differ from ours simply by his being there), and eventually disappeared — ostensibly back to 2036 — after bidding his audience goodbye. The veracity of his story and description of his worldline can obviously never be verified, as nobody knows whether time travel is actually possible, but one thing was — the quirk in the programming of the 5100, which supposedly made it capable of interfacing with 2036 systems, was confirmed by an IBM engineer to be real (via Post Bulletin), which was not a widely known detail.

In 2012, the BBC reported on a Pennsylvania man named Jack Froese, who had suddenly died of a heart arrhythmia the previous year. Other than the fact that Froese was only 32, there was nothing unusual about his death. What was unusual was the fact that a handful of his friends and relatives had begun receiving emails from his account, written in his voice, referencing not only events that had happened recently, but things that only Froese was likely to have known.

Now, there do exist services that allow you to compose emails to your loved ones that go out in the event of your death, but this seems highly unlikely given the fact that Froese's death was quite unexpected. There's also the one missive received by his cousin Jimmy McGraw, which lamented that "Froese" had known that McGraw was going to break his ankle and had tried to warn him — an injury which had happened only a week before. Froese's best buddy, Tim Hart, received an email as well — one profanely imploring him to tidy up his attic, referencing a private conversation the pair had had in that very attic just before Froese's death. 

Froese's email account did not appear to have been hacked, and family members such as Froese's mother denied having anything to do with the communications — but as far as Hart is concerned, no explanation was necessary. "If somebody is messing around, I don't care," he said. "I take it for what I want."

In 2015, a YouTuber known only as "Jamie" — proprietor of the channel Obscure Horror Corner — sat for an interview with Kotaku to discuss a series of four recent posts. The posts showed a playthrough of a horror game titled "Sad Satan," which Jamie claimed he had downloaded from the deep web. Based on the videos, the game — in which the player simply moves in first person through a series of dark hallways — appeared to be one of the most stressful video games ever made; creepy in a truly disturbing way, glitchy in a weirdly purposeful way, visually difficult to look at, with an increasingly discordant soundtrack.

Jamie's story got even weirder. Apparently, the first version of the game he played would very briefly flash shocking, violent, and explicit images; the next version, the one made available for reviewers and the like to play, flashed much less graphic imagery (although those images, like one of disgraced British media personality and convicted pedophile Jimmy Savile, stayed in keeping with a theme of child abuse). 

Jamie claimed to have deleted the game from his computer after it kept generating gibberish-laden text files on his desktop, and after the Kotaku piece was published, some claimed to have found the original, graphic version of the game, and that it had corrupted their computers (no evidence of this was given, however). After the "Sad Satan" posts, Obscure Horror Corner stopped posting altogether — and the game, along with whomever might have created it, has since faded into legend.

Of all the bizarre mysteries the internet has ever presented, a website titled 973-eht-namuh-973 is unique for a couple of reasons: for one thing, it's still active, and if you click that link, you can investigate it for yourself right now. If you choose to do so, however, be aware that you might be signing up for a long trip down a very deep rabbit hole, because another thing that makes 973-eht-namuh-973 unique is its immense size: by some estimates, the site may contain upwards of 100,000 links, leading to an untold number of pages.

Pictured above is a typical page on the site, and as you can see, it can't exactly be called gibberish; it definitely has its preoccupations, such as the Egyptian pantheon of gods, numerical sequences and ciphers in which numbers correspond to letters of the alphabet, and in particular, the number 9. The site was allegedly created by a mysterious figure named David Denison, who has had not one word to say about his intent. 

There is, though, a forum where users can discuss their journeys, and yes, there are a handful of posts from those who claim to have "gotten it," to have deciphered whatever message it's trying to impart. As one might expect, though, they're not about to spill the beans, if indeed there are any to spill — because, as one such user put it, "Wisdom comes through work. Should you be granted everything, you wouldn't progress."