MORE CLOVERFIELD

[cleolinda]

It's a long post down there, so let's summarize the points, shall we?

1. A picture of the Cloverfield monster?! (Long story short: probably not)
2. Two posts on IMDB from a guy claiming to be part of an invasion and subsequent memory-erasing that already happened
3. Someone points out that the one official site we know to be true indicates that the attack has not already happened
4. Get a phone message from the Ethan Haas guy ("Van Mantra"), who is probably for real because Paramount keeps taking down videos related to him as well
5. An Unfiction.com poster has a video analysis of the whole Cloverfield thing on YouTube
6. Unfiction.com: good people who can smoke out imposters
7. A new email from Van Mantra that I don't know what to do with
8. A "connection" between Ethan Haas and Cloverfield

So, without further ado:

A picture of the Cloverfield monster? It's from a guy posting on IMDB, which automatically makes him suspect, but on the other hand, he's writing in full, articulate paragraphs (as if, IMDB!) and talking about a monster he saw and how his memory was altered and "the documentary coming out on January 18, 2008":

My name is Gerald Webber. I live in New York City. In June of last year, our city was ravaged by a monster that no one knows nothing about. All I heard were peircing screams while I hid in my Manhattan office, waiting for the rampage to end.

After the carnage ended, I tried to find news about the "monster" and the attack. But I didn't find a single newspaper article, or T.V report. There was nothing on the internet. I later found out that the Government went for broke and did everything they could to conceal what happened. I got to hand it to them, they sure know how to cover up news especailly something of this magnitude.

One night, I awoke to find a syringe embedded in my skull.

(Okay, I may have started laughing at this point.)

I asked my Girlfriend to remove it. She gingerly removed it. There was very little blood. I took the syringe to a friend of mine who is a biologist. He looked it over and told me that there were traces of UO126 in the syringe. UO126 is used to wipe out people's memory. I asked him and my girlfriend if this had anything to do with the monster attack. They then looked at me and said, "What monster attack?" Apparently, they had already been exposed to the UO126 and their memory of the incident was wiped clean.

I am the only person who knows what really happened. And I am here to tell all of you to not be duped -- this is not a movie, but a documentary of that day. I know, because I am a part of this documentary and I am using footage from a digital camcorder that I found in a nearby storm drain of that incident to help sell this "movie."

Sincerely,

Gerald Webber

Storm drain? That don't bode well for the folks in the trailer.

Second IMDB post:

Dear IMDb,

It's me, Gerald Webber, again. I just wanted to silence all the skeptics who continually bash me and the truth that I am trying to tell all of you. If you would like to know more about what it is that I am talking about, or if you are new here, just hit the following link:

That being said, I think it's time that I give to you a real photograph of the monster that attacked New York in June of 2006. I was there, and this is an image from a digital camera that I was able to salvage from the primary attack site. The camera was found in a nearby storm drain. It was heavily damaged, but the memory card was still intact. I was able to retrieve these photos of the monster. I warn you, this may be quite farring [jarring? scarring?] for you.

This is a picture of the monster. As you can see, the skin is very chapped and has many crevices to it. And the mouth is monstrous. It is constantly open and just hangs there without closing shut. It's rather menacing to relive this. The picture is quite blurry and was taken in night vision mode. http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/5776/monster14zc5.jpg

The fear that pulsates through my body when I see that image is just excrutiating. You may laugh at me, but you have to have been there on that day to know the fear the succumbs me when seeing this grisly image.

The photo-team is trying to colorize this photo; to give it depth and color so that we can see what the monster looked like in bright day instead of dark night. Once that photo becomes available, I will post it.

More will come when the documentary releases on January 18, 2008.

Sincerely,

Gerald Webber

I gotta tell you, the picture freaks me out because I can't even tell what I'm looking at. Devil's advocate, though: I talked to someone who pointed out that the pictures on the 1-18-08.com site (more on that in a bit) are specifically dated... 1-18-08. Which means that whatever monster attack takes place in 2008, not June 2006 (or did he mean 2007 by "last June"?). Therefore, the 1-18-08 "documentary" cannot be about something that has already happened. Nice try, Gerald. The problem is--and more on this as well in a bit--that, with this kind of alternate reality game, the players have the same access to the medium (the internet) as the "puppetmasters," as they're called in ARG-land, and can put up fake or piggyback sites on their own. CONSTANT VIGILANCE, TRUST NO ONE, etc. Is that picture someone's beanbag chair sculpted into a menacing pose? Only J.J. Abrams knows... I suppose guess.

But then, in the ONTD comments (in which, to my shock, no one bitches about how fat or slutty the monster is, although they are suggesting that it's a picture of a monkfish):

why was this post put up and not mine? I actually have some information not yet posted. here ya go:

A collection of "cloverfield" clues

I'm just as curious and almost absessed as the rest of you. So I've collected links with information. Including the whois registry, with a working phone number to call. You'll hear a message from Van.

For ethanhaaswasright.com:

http://whois.domaintools.com/ethanhaaswasright.com

Van Mantra
2205 Holly Pine Circle
Orlando, FL 32820
(407) 760 2795

Although, the websites IP Address is from Culver City. Very close to the movies production, Paramount. But that could just be coincidence.

for 1-18-08.com:

http://whois.domaintools.com/1-18-08.com
This IP Address is coming from Massachusetts...

Then there is the following we've all seen by now:

ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com
ethanhaaswasright.com
1-18-08.com

analysis of the internet blow up:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ukHbEDPz10U

That last part about the pictures is nonsense and should just be disregarded.

I think the ONTD poster's right about the pictures; they seem pretty obviously to be two different girls. But go watch the YouTube thing linked in that comment, if you can; there's some interesting stuff about the video clips between the Ethan Haas puzzles, and they seem to have them in slightly better quality than I saw on the site. (I've saved the file to disk in case Paramount has that removed as well.) It's made by a member of the Unfiction.com forums; I've been there before, and they're good people. Apparently, for example, http://ethanhaas.org/ may be a fansite rather than an official tie-in; the forumers have an eye for this kind of imposter, so if you're interested, you might want to keep an eye on Unfiction and their researches.

Also? 1-18-08.com has changed; there's now two pictures instead of just one. I also got a fresh email from the character running the Ethan Haas Was Right site, but I don't know what to do with it. I can't get the spacing to come across in text--and I think the spacing might be important--so here's a screencap. "Cleolinda wrote" is just a remnant of my (blank) email to him, by the way.

"View the source [code]" is obviously important, and it seems to point to the idea that it's the code during the second puzzle ("HAAS will open the second key"), but my blood sugar's too low to deal with it right now; I'm off to find some lunch. But is the Ethan Haas thing related to Cloverfield? Someone pointed out that "Ethan Haas" is a character on a now-canceled TV show costarring Lizzy Caplan... who has been confirmed as being in Cloverfield.

I do think it's kind of brilliant that they've dropped all this info, if it all really is related, right now--we don't get extended periods of time off work here in the United States, so a Wednesday holiday probably inspired a lot of people to take Thursday and Friday off as well. So a lot of people, I imagine, are sitting here with a five-day weekend on their hands, in addition to kids and students being off for the summer, and if there was ever a time to drop a complicated ARG on folks, now would be the time.

ETA: Giant e-cookies to chocotaku for finding a fresh copy of the trailer bootleg. Let me know if it goes away, and we'll repost it somewhere.

Comments

[perrie.livejournal.com]

wow. oh man. i don't have a head for puzzles in the slightest, but JJ Abrams definately knows how to fuck with peoples minds! And that monster picture? creepy.

[chocotaku.livejournal.com]

Can you find a version of the trailer online? I keep trying but every version gets taken down before i can grab it from the site.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I know, man--I was finally able to see a copy at Defamer, but they were using a video service that wouldn't let me save it to disk. I'll see what I can find.

[khaman.livejournal.com]

Pity the IMDB dude seems to just be a headcase that likes to screw around; the amnesia drug bit is kinda inspired. Dunno, personally, I think I've noodled up about as much as I can until more hints show up.

(puzzle 5 at the flash site is minorly obnoxious)

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

The thing is, there's a number of problems with his story--the kind of problems you have when you're not privy to the internal logic of the real story. Problem 1: New York was "ravaged" some months ago, but no one noticed? I mean, I'll even go with the idea that they shot thousands if not millions of people up with 0123WTF serum, but what about the millions of tourists that come every year? What about when they woke up the next morning and the city was still "ravaged"? How'd the government manage to undo that? Problem 2: He woke up with a syringe in his skull? What? In the middle of the night? Why? It's just not systematic, you know? And why his skull? And if he was hit by 0123WTF, how does he remember anything to tell us now?

If I had to guess, I'd say the actual internal logic of the story is that something is going to "happen," in the movie universe, on 1/18/08, and because it's fictional, we're allowed to see previews of it. All the internet content, if the Ethan Haas stuff is for real, is predicated on these movie-verse characters knowing about some conspiracy or some threat, but not knowing exactly what will play out or even when. We're basically being given the leadup and a hint of the end result at the same time, and anyone who claims that the end result has already happened (which is usual movie logic: it has to have already happened so we can *create* a movie about it) isn't part of the Abrams story.


(I got through puzzle 5 with a cheat, because I have no shame.)

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Coooooool. Thanks for all the links! This is really neat. I'm almost as excited to see the trailer in a couple hours as I am about seeing Transformers.

The ethanhaaswaswrong blog is pretty funny. It almost does seem like it's not part of the game, but it's the first Cthulhu mention.

And that's bizarre that Ethan Haas was a character on The Class. This is crazy! I don't know that I have time to get caught up in at all, but I hope you'll keep updating. Did you ever play the A.I. game? That was my first ARG, and I've never really gotten into any of the others since. That was an amazing experience, and I only started about a month before it ended.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Dude, I spent so much of--early 2001, I want to say?--watching the Cloudmakers thing. It quickly got over my head, so I basically watched other people solve it and explored the websites, but yeah, it was amazing. And yeah, I'm hearing Cthulhu-esque rumors myself, and--you know, that would pretty much be the one way to revitalize the Godzilla Invasion genre: The Great One From Beyond Space and Time.

FOUND IT!

[chocotaku.livejournal.com]

[fangirlsays.livejournal.com]

Someone's a viral marketing genious.

[chocotaku.livejournal.com]

JJ knows...he's been running a series for 3 years that is nothing BUT viral.

Speaking of how viral this movie is getting...

[chocotaku.livejournal.com]

Re: Speaking of how viral this movie is getting...

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the clip I linked to in the ONTD section. I think Paramount's less likely to take it down, though.

[evilsimon.livejournal.com]

I'm bored, so!

View source on ethanhaaswasright.com:

<body onresize="resize();">
<!-- /helpme/ -->
<div id="flashcontent">
<div id="text">
<p style='font-size:14px;'>...war came, no longer from the elemental nor from the star's rain of fire. The world was again remade, and the glow was as the coming of the sun upon the Earth. The children of the gods were again too few, scattered and divided and among them walked the ancients and those whose thoughts were not as to the towers and the marvels, but to the End and the destruction of the Earth and to the fires from which nothing could escape.</p>

I didn't see anything notable on ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com, and the only thing that caught my attention on 1-18-08.com was this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-2172327-1";
urchinTracker();

which doesn't really tell us anything other than that someone is tracking the site -- not unexpected. No one is using google analytics to track either ethanhaaswasright.com or ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot, though.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Huh. What's interesting about that is that that's actually the first thing I saw when I originally went to the site--because I didn't have javascript turned on:



(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v118/cleoicons/ehwrwarcame.png)

[ironclad1609.livejournal.com]

But...that monster just looks like a deepwater fish...

This confuses me :P

But the trailer looks terrifyingly fun.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, ONTDers were saying it looked like a monkfish. It does seem kind of unlikely that they'd release a picture of the actual monster so soon.

[lyn-thorne.livejournal.com]

I think the monster might be a Chimera. In the trailer, a guy started screaming 'It's a lion. It's huge!' The Chimera had a lion's head. It also breathes fire. And I quote from wikipedia:

Sighting the chimera was an omen of storms, shipwrecks, and natural disasters (particularly volcanoes).

If so, I'm really psyched for this movie now!

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Huh. See, I thought he said, "It's alive! It's huge!"

[perrie.livejournal.com]

That first link to the monster picture is now coming up as 'no such entry'. just so you know. (:

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

I'm on the 3rd level of the flash puzzle. It's annoying me because it's one of those "jump the peg" things that they have in Cracker Barrels that I NEVER CAN FINISH :D

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

GOD, that one was annoying. Particularly since you can't really cheat on that one. Although I do love how everyone calls it the Cracker Barrel puzzle.

[breklor.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that Ethan Haas is their Abdul al'Hazred.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Given that the EH Was Wrong blog says something about his "blasphemous writings," you may be on to something there.

[word-herder.livejournal.com]

ONTD link says there's no such entry...?

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Ooo, the plot thickens. Because I've clicked the link from my journal, and I know it's not my coding.

[maramala.livejournal.com]

The ohnoyoudidn't entries are gone now.

And if you don't mind visiting the self-proclaimed "hive of scum and villainy in the internets", some folks over at 4chan's /m/ imageboard had been analyzing the ethanhaaswasright.com site:

http://zip.4chan.org/m/res/562003.html

[cosette-esk.livejournal.com]

Very strange. This is the first I'm hearing about all this. There are a RIDICULOUS number of things "Cloverfield" is/was/will be related to. Stephen King and memory drugs and exploding devil monkfish... I If it is Cthulu or Lovecraft related it might be worth the flaming golden hoops it's making my brain jump through to formulate some half-way plausible explanation for all this. t'd be nice to have a decent sci-fi horror film although they tend to scare me shitless. The date has a lot of 8s in it... well two. Makes me thing of Terry Pratchett books where 8 is the principal number of all things magical but if said by a wizard is said to attract strangely Lovecraftian tentacle-eyeball-sucker monsters from the Dungeon Dimensions. I am reading WAY to much into this *headdeask*

[melayka.livejournal.com]

4 8 15 16 23 42

Crazy apocalyptic number tie-ins are a solid JJ thing. Will we ever know the meaning behind the madness? No. But it sure sounds awesome when you first hear it.

[somewhatmoot.livejournal.com]

JJ Abrams needs to give me my life back...

[greenwitch.livejournal.com]

Don't have much to add because I have to run -- but check out 011808 for more analysis!

[thansunshine.livejournal.com]

According to teh internets (http://www.alomone.com/p_postcards/database/342.htm), UO126 is an inhibitor of mitogen-activated protein kinases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitogen-activated_protein_kinase). Thanks to the power of Wikipedia, I think it can be gathered that this Gerard guy is wrong about what 0123WTF does. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with memory inhibition. MAPs are growth cell things.

And did you see this phone number: (407)760-2795? It's supposedly on the ethanhaas website (I haven't looked, I'm planning on dedicating all day tomorrow to the website), and it's a recording of the first video. Google tells me the 407 area code is for Orlando, Florida, which makes sense because I read somewhere the IP address for ethanhaas was traced to Florida, a few towns away from the Paramount studios.

/film has a ton of information on Cloverfield, too, including a description of the filming, the casting process, and also another codename for the film: Slusho, which is apparently a ripoff of Slushie, used in the second episode of Alias.

Wikipedia also tells me that it's certainly not Godzilla, seeing as how there's a Godzilla movie in the works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_3D_to_the_MAX). (3D Godzirrra!!!! To teh maxxorz!)
/film also reveals the possibility of it being the Voltron movie. (http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/0727voltron0727.html)

Anyway, enough of that boring stuff. I've seen this around teh internets as I've been googling the hell out of everything, but film.com (http://www.film.com/movies/story/whatisthemysterytrailerbeforetransformers/11597472/15381488) put it best:
"The "date" in the trailer isn't a date at all, but a Biblical reference: the Book of Revelations 1:18 says, "I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades." And Rev. 18:8 reads, "Therefore in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire; for strong is the Lord God who judged her." (Because there are no other lines in the Revelations that sound like the logline for a horror flick.)"

However, here's to hoping it really is the Parasite, an original film for once.

I'll keep an eye on teh internets (and on here, too) for more updates.


(Damn, sorry for such a long post. I got going and couldn't really stop. And this is probably the first time I've posted on your journal. I'm a lurker most of the time, but I got really into this and had to throw in something.)

[thyroyalmajesty.livejournal.com]

Maybe my reading comprehension isn't that good, but what's /film? Is that a site?

Anyone remember ilovebees?

[serizawa3000.livejournal.com]

And behold... the inevitable parody site?

http://ethanhaaswasadouchebag.blogspot.com/

I think I would have just been happy with the weird trailer and say "What was that?" and go from there (the animalistic roar and "It's alive! It's huge!" stuck with me)... but at the same time, little things nibble naggingly at the back of my brain... like I'm of the notion that what appears in a teaser trailer is not necessarily an actual scene from the movie... I mean, why was the head of the Statue of Liberty not to scale? Did... whatever it was somehow *shrink* Lady Liberty's head before hurling it?

I just hope the final film isn't entirely done in handheld... I'd likely get motion sickness... :)

Re: Anyone remember ilovebees?

[thyroyalmajesty.livejournal.com]

I've never been to New York, but there was some discussion about the scale of the Statue on Defamer. I read that the Statue's head is 17 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It did look a little small in the trailer... but not by much.

well then...

[pastry-face.livejournal.com]

Wow... I had no idea there was so much to it. I went to go see Transformers the other night and I saw the trailer. I thought it was supposed to be some Godzilla-flick or something similar [what with the general suggestions of monster-destruction]... I was just annoyed that they didn't tell you the name of the movie or anything.

Apparently, I should pay more attention to the going-ons of the internet.

[lyn-thorne.livejournal.com]

Ok, this is probably really old news to everyone but me, but I never saw anything about it.

Has anyone responded to Van's message 'I will return, stay safe!'? I sent a message telling him to be safe and that I would await further contact. Then, I got a message titled '------------- they found me'

It says 'It's worse than I thought, the Mezin have found my location and hacked into my phone.

I need to go off the grid until I can find a safe location to transmit.

If you need help finding the answers you seek, trust HAAS for the second key, it will unlock the mysteries.

Beyond that, look for other believers.

We are growing stronger everyday, there are many out there that have found the path.


Search and you will find the keys to unlock the puzzles.

-- Van'

I Googled Mezin, and I found this: http://library.thinkquest.org/C006353/mezin.html

Sorry if this has already been covered before.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Wow, good catch. I just have no idea where to go from there.

[thatlizgirl.livejournal.com]

o.O

Wow, okay, so I am pretty sure that I have been bitten by the J.J. Abrams virus, consider the fact... I JUST HEARD SOME SERIOUSLY CREEPY THUNDER OUTSIDE, AND MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS, "OMG CLOVERFIELD MONSTER??!"

Heh. This guy is sick. ^_^

[slash-puppy.livejournal.com]

Okay, I admit I didn't read all of the post... but the picture is definitely a largemouth bass that has been heavily edited in Photoshop.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yeah, at ONTD they were suggesting monkfish, so I'm not surprised.

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

BEHOLD!

The official trailer (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/11808/medium.html)!

Bootleg version begone!