Timeline Of Clues
May |
June
2nd May - 16th May |
17th May - 31st May
17th May - Persephone was working her ass off to remain undiscovered, and this was a tricky bit of information to find -guess the Hanso Foundation were starting to make their website more secure, leading her to be more secretive. But I persevered, helped along by you guys. It was over on the Electromagnetic Research Initiative that things started to go awry this time. The image had co-ordinates which changed as you moved your mouse around. The date underneath was also odd - October 62, 9291. Hmm. You had to make the co-ordinates match those numbers, then click a couple of times. You'd then be taken to
www.letyourcompassguideyou.com - see screen grab on right. Clicking on the right hand side, near 108, took you to a load of directories. Tons of stuff here, including a hidden password: 'the mouthpiece'
This time, you needed to go to Hugh McIntyre's biography and enter the password there. Doing so would highlight 'devoted to family values' within his biog, and clicking on that would uncover all manner of dirty laundry on McIntyre - not quite so committed to those values after all, the dirty dog!
18th May - The best site on the internet has got to be
www.savejoop.com - make sure you sign the petition.
19th May - Wily Persephone is getting all the more slippery to trace... there was a cryptic message at
her site on the 19th May which translated to 'A mouse does not rely on just one hole.' Thanks to the intrepid work of you guys, plus some help from my insider pals, we were able to uncover the rather puzzling
Hole 2 a couple of days later - as seen on the right. Frankly, this is all a little obscure, although theories on what the drawing means abound. Some think that this outline is meant to be the guy in the Dharma Initiative induction video, Marvin Candle. I'm not convinced, but then I have been mistaken before...
In any case, soon after our keen eyes (and sixth sense) spotted another clue from Persephone on the Hanso site. This time, we spotted an invisible text box beneath Peter Thompson's bio. The clue was in the faint letters flashing up very quickly across his picture, which if you were able to note down and rearrange, spelt out the password 'survivor guilt'. This was what you needed to enter into the box, and doing so would take you to a desk with papers on it, where a few significant events from Thompson's less-than-spotless past are revealed. What a piece of work he is.
24th May - Quite an eventful day, what with Hugh McIntyre popping up on American chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live, denying that the Hanso Foundation has anything to do with Lost and that the Dharma Initiative, although real, had its funding stopped in 1987. Watch it for yourselves
here.
The other big news was a new
Hanso Careers site - one relating to (would you Adam and Eve it) getting a job with the shady b*ggers. This one was both advertised on TV and on the RSS feed of the Hanso Foundation site. Muchos creepy stuff there if you read the job descriptions, but also... another hidden password from Miss P. If you put together all the greyed out letters within the descriptions, and solved the anagram, you found 'Inmate Asylum'. In order to use it, you needed to locate the hidden link back the Hanso site which sat underneath each of the job descriptions.
Once there, if you went to the Exec Bios section for the Board of Directors and clicked on either Jacob Vanderfield or Lawrence Peck, you simply had to enter 'Inmate Asylum' into the password box (no login required). This then showed you more about the suspect background and working ethics of the Hanso execs. Scary stuff.
25th May - The
www.sublymonal.com site from 9th May changed today. Looked more like an OTT advert for Sprite than much else, as seen in the screen grab on right, but there was a password box and - if you entered '108' into it, you linked through to the second podcast from
DJ Dan. There were also other passwords you could use to access other info (such as 'Persephone' for some background on the Greek mythology). Full list available
here.
Other than that, the publishers of Gary Troup's
Bad Twin over in the US - Hyperion Books - took out an ad in USA Today (American daily paper) defending the book's allegations against the Hanso Foundation.
30th May - All a bit quiet on the Western front between the last hidden clue on the Hanso site and now - but then it all flared up again rather dramatically on the 30th. This time, you wanted to head over to the Mathematical Forecasting Initiative under Active projects, where it now has an interactive map. Some of the stats for countries were missing, but you could find these out pretty easily from the
CIA World Factbook (or by copying them from an email sent in by intrepid fellow dirt-digger!).
Enter '42 000' for US GDP $, '10.4' for Italy's death rate and '2.55' for Sudan's growth rate. After entering these stats, a circle will appear just south of India. Click on it for your message from Persephone - a heavily blanked out letter from Peter Thompson to the Minister for Interior Mugato which indicates it's crucial that 'they' (ie Hanso Foundation) do not appear to be complicit in use of the Hanso population model - especially it it's to be used for pre-emptive strikes. At the bottom Ms P writes 'The Hanso Foundation: Starting wars so you don't have to'. Ouch.
31st May - Whether or not these constitute useful pieces of info or not is still up in the air, but the text at
http://persephone.thehansofoundation.org changed to '+1'. This led to the discovery of
http://hole3.thehansofoundation.org/ and another picture which, when analysed, uncovered the words 'save me'. Jury's out on precisely what this means.