In October 2015, a Swedish tech blogger named Johny Krahbichler opened a package mailed from Warsaw: a DVD with a long alphanumeric code written on it, no return address, no explanation. When he played it, he found a two-minute black-and-white video of a figure in a plague doctor costume, standing in a ruined building, holding up a hand with a blinking light — set to loud, discordant buzzing.
Reddit users spent weeks decoding hidden messages layered into the video and its audio spectrogram, using ciphers ranging from Morse code to Pigpen. One plaintext message read "You Are Already Dead." Another decoded to "Strike an arrow through the heart of the eagle." A sequence of coordinates pointed to the White House, and one message was read as an anagram for "kill the president." The video was suspected to be a bioterrorism threat, a marketing stunt, or a Dan Brown movie promotion
Investigators eventually traced the filming location to the abandoned Zofiówka Sanatorium outside Otwock, Poland.
Three months later, a man calling himself Parker Warner Wright claimed he'd made it as an art project, and released a sequel. He wouldn't explain the meaning, telling one reporter, "I see my work as waves on the ocean. Some people look for shells in it, some surf, others — dive."
Previously:
