A few unlucky players recently found themselves feeling ill after watching The Wyoming Incident, a short film uploaded to Google Video in August of last year. Whether due to the power of suggestion, an uneasiness induced by odd frequencies, or coincidence, the sensations led curious viewers to further research the information included in the video’s description.
“The Wyoming Incident (or The Wyoming Hijacking) is a lesser known case of television broadcast hijacking/hacking. A hacker managed to interrupt broadcasts from a local programming channel (believed to serve several smaller communities in the county of Niobrara) and aired his/her own video. The video contained numerous clips of disembodied human heads showing various emotions and “poses”. The camera position changed often (usually every ten-to-fifteen seconds) and the video was often interrupted by a “SPECIAL PRESENTATION” announcement…The video is mostly locally well-known, and would probably not even be that popular if it were not for the effects it had on the few residents who watched it for an extended period of time. Complaints included vomiting, hallucinations, headaches, etc. While some believed it was paranormal, specialists have determined that the cause of these afflictions were frequencies played regularly throughout the broadcast.”
Four more videos have been found containing similar images and more cryptic text, and other game elements, including a serial killer forum, creepy warnings of black-eyed children watching player movements, and allusions to mind control have players scurrying to find the true intentions of The Wyoming Incident hijacker.
UnFiction Thread
Happy Cube Forum (In-Game)
UnKnown Videos (In-Game Blog)
subtext game
simulacra
welcome home
meow wolf
field studies institute
generation loss
The Wyoming Incident was a hoax, perpetrated by Something Aweful
Quote from PM:
I was reading one of the older incarnations in the creepy things series when I made up the story about the Wyoming Incident. I picked Wyoming and Niobrara because I knew them both to be rather sparsely populated. I then made some fake screenshots as well as the story of the hijacking. Brief interest developed in the incident, but I forgot about it pretty quickly.
IanJ brought the Wyoming Incident up in the Max Headroom thread. I decided to elaborate further on the story. People became even more interested, so I decided to make a video of it. I recorded the sounds from the WGBH logo (which I altered severely) and used a pitch generator for the actual faces part of the video. I did not use Poser. I used FaceGen Modeller. Frame by frame, I took pictures of the faces, animating them so that they moved a little. I then took the frames into photoshop, clone-brushed the SL logo off of them, and ran them through the reticulation filter. I then put them together through Windows Movie Maker. The text screens were done with courier in MSPaint.
Anyway, I posted the video to Google and then linked to it from SA. It became incredibly popular and appeared on a ton of blogs. The most intelligent discussion about it seemed to be at Unfiction.com. ViralDetector (The Detector) helped me by registering there and posting as a plant. I wrote most of the more literature-based stuff (GMiller’s blog, The Masks We Wear, So Tired). Soon we released the second and third videos. They were made the same way as the previous ones.
We made up a huge mythology around the videos using stuff from Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Greek Mythology, Lovecraft, Modern Conspiracy Theories, Thelema, etc. OC_James worked on most of the mythology, though it became severely altered by the people “interacting” with the story. We pretty much played along with what the players seemed to want, and handed out some arbitrary tasks to people. It should be noted that me and OC_James live in Anderson.
Anyway, we wanted to do all nine videos, but interest in the videos and “game” were waning. We did Children stuff to knock up attention. When I noticed there were 59 people viewing the forums (a high for some time), I sent ViralDetector in to post “YOU WANNA KNOW WHUT” and “FARTZ”. Truth be told, we were getting pretty bored by the end with everyone else.
A lot of the stuff we did was basic psychology. We’re all goons (now), but OC_James has a name he will not give away to anyone and pretty much hates the internet. I think this was the longest he’s been on the internet in about a year.
There’s a possibility it might be continuing. Someone made a new IG post, deleted some old threads, and locked down the forum. Nothing’s certain yet, though.
lol at that PM quote
People really do think they’re important…