The Crying of Lost 49

Just how clever is the team behind LOST's internet promotions? There have been questionable sites cropping up recently, with much debate over their authenticity. "Official LOST tie-in sites must have a link to ABC's disclaimer!" say some, unaware perhaps that the disclaimer of which they speak is as easy to include on a webpage as a simple HTML link. Others say that the WHOIS information is crucial, and can determine an official affiliation with ABC. These people may not be giving the LOST guys enough credit.

The LOST guys have created a number of official websites, including one for Oceanic Airlines, and The Hanso Foundation. The latter relaunched in early May as part of a web game called "The Lost Experience" with email addresses, phone numbers, logins and passwords, etc. A big LOST-style mystery that is currently being pored over on LOST fan forums. Are there more sites that are or will be incorporated into this "Lost Experience" game?

As c|net pointed out last year, LOST fans are not idiots. They can find out if a site exists, and to whom it is registered pretty quickly. Have the LOST guys learned their lesson?

There is a current LOST book tie-in with Hyperion Publishing (owned by Disney/ABC) for a book by fictional author Gary Troup called "Bad Twin". The manuscript for this book has appeared on a few episodes of LOST, and an official site for the book has been created on garytroup.net. The site claims the author has written a previous book about the so-called Valenzetti equation. (Valenzetti was referenced on LOST as well). The Amazon page for "Bad Twin" includes a short video clip of the 'author' talking about Valenzetti.

With LOST fans beginning to understand that the name Valenzetti will become important to the series, it is not unreasonable to assume that some rabid fans will make websites about it. (Like they have done in the past for Mega Lotto Jackpot and Mr. Clucks, among others.)

It is not difficult to create a website like, say The Valenzetti Foundation, which has generated a lot of controversy in LOST circles. It even includes a note stating that it is not affiliated with ABC, (with "ABC" linking to the official LOST page). But it is not as easy to dismiss as another fanboy fake-out as some have claimed it is.

The Valenzetti Foundation page also includes a reference to GPC - and Widmore Industries, the alleged suppliers of food for Dharma, and a link to the mysterious bigspaceship1.org, as well as other links. That's quite an elaborate web of dummy-sites for a fan-orchestrated hoax. (Accessing the image directory reveals some interesting artifacts not seen on the website itself, including a .tif of a chemical flow-chart with a faded Hanso Foundation logo in one corner.)

Each of the sites linked to from The Valenzetti Foundation reference LOST either explicitly or indirectly. BigSpaceship, for example, has a reference/link to the Hanso Foundation and a reference to 108 (the sum of "the numebrs"). The HTML of the BigSpaceship site includes the following tags for search engines: "The Hanso Foundation, The Hanso Life Extension Project, The Hanso Foundation Electromagnetic Research Initiative, The Hanso Quest for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, The Hanso Mathmatical Forecasting Initiative, The Hanso Cryogenics Development Imperative, The Hanso Juxtapositional Eugenics Development Institute, The Hanso Remote Viewing Training Facility, Dharma Initiative, Alvar Hanso". Weird.


What about Global Paradigms Corp which claims to be an archive from 1995 for a business that went bankrupt. Its list of sponsors includes Coca-cola, The Hanso Foundation and the Valenzetti Foundation.

So how about that "unofficial" Valenzetti Foundation website. We know ABC registered four Valenzetti-related domains, but not valenzettifoundation.org... And that site claims that Valenzetti is related to Rimbaldi, the mythical character that drove J.J. Abram's other series, Alias. That's such a ridiculous shout-out that it has to be bogus, right? But on the ABOUT ME page, the author of the site (allegedly Valenzetti's son) claims his favourite author is S.K. Nave, and he links to Nave's site, hosted on Angelfire.

The S.K. Nave site is very suspicious, not only claiming that these books were insanely popular, but that they are not available on Amazon (or anywhere on the Internet, for that matter). One book, entitled "Here There Be Dragons" is the same phrase written on the blast-door map seen in an episode of LOST. Another deals with a black/white dichotomy that LOST fans will find familiar, and a thid deals with a mysterious force called 'Valences'. The author of the site (Nave's 'granddaughter') includes a link to a geocities site that supposedly belongs to a man she identifies as a crackpot, who challenges the notion that Nave died in the early eighties. Following that link takes one to the crackpot's site. The site then links to its "new location" at accuracyinstitute.org. That site is almost a parody of conspiracy nut sites. (It includes a link to an Amazon.com list (as did Nave's) of favorite conspiracy movies, among them "Closet Land", a real movie about a children's author being abducted and interrogated, which the crackpot describes as being "inspired by the real life abduction (and presumably interogation) of children's author S.K. Nave". His site, which is just a blog, really, includes references to Valenzetti and other LOST lore. LOST fans have begun posting comments and questions, but this guy claims never to have heard of LOST the tv show. The site includes a link to a video on Google Video of a flying saucer, allegedly shot by the proprietor of the Valenzetti site - the video looks official, that is, fake-aged the way the Hanso Foundation's video was in the first episode of LOST's second season. The site also mentions the Hanso Foundation and the Global Paradigms Corp (or, GPC). And thus we come full circle.

Fansite "The Fuselage" is now reporting interesting quirks about the Global Paradigm Corp site, like this employee profile page. The user, Dr. Michael Sontag, pts the image of a barcode as a reply to the question "[what is your] biggest fear?" The ISBN of the barcode references the Disney movie Fantasia. The barcode's alt text is "Mussorgsky", a composer. The composer's music was apparently used in the film Fantasia (which The Accuracy Institute is beginning to name-drop in it's blog as well). The page also includes unreadable white-on-white invisitext about weapons, and a string of morse code that reads "EMAIL GRENDEL AT GLOBALPARADIGMSCORP DOT COM TO FIND HIS CAGE". An email sent to that address prompts a reply sending one to a special secure page on the GPC site. The user page also references S.K. Nave and includes Sontag's comments on each of the books. For "Negative Space" he writes, "I always liked the anthropological depth of this one, especially the concept that "the others" who are sent on the mission basically become pariahs themselves in order to serve the greater good of the tribe." LSOT fans will recognize the term "the others" which is also applied to the show's antagonistic and mysterious island inhabitants.

These sorts of hidden pages, cryptic emails, codes and passwords, coincidences and references (of which all these sites are replete) all suggest that the LOST viral marketing crew have orchestrated a hugely elaborate Internet tie-in to keep fans occupied during the summer before the start of the show's third season. Here's a partial transcript of a podcast from showrunners Lindelof and Cuse:

Cuse: In fact, we are actually... we're gonna kinda let you guys in on a secret. We're involved on a project which is going to involve the internet, that is going to start in May.
Lindelof: in May, but you're gonna have to watch the show and not just the show, but what happens in between the show.
Cuse: between the acts of the show.
Lindelof: fairly carefully in order to sort of begin the path on this... what we're calling an experience.
Cuse: and this internet experience will actually be launched during one of the shows in May and will be a pathway that will lead to a lot of information about the show that we're not going to get to on the show but it's not just a sort of ancillary...
Lindelof: Yeah, it's not behind the scenes stuff either, it's like...
Cuse: It's real mythology.
Lindelof: It's kinda good cool story telling.
Cuse: (overlapping) cool story telling, yeah
Lindelof: and
Cuse: which hopefully is going to in some degree satisfy the need for new material on LOST over the summer. I mean, you know, during the period of time when the show is down before we start the next season, we are actually going to be telling some LOST stories.

The Hanso Foundation site, which was advertised during the show in early May, is clearly part of this. But what about the other sites?

These other sites all look cruddy, and include spelling errors, poor HTML, and links to legitimate non-LOST related websites. They give the illusion of being total fake-outs, but the cross-linking and LOST related references, and sheer number of sites suggest otherwise. Either this is the greatest fan-perpetrated hoax, or the greatest promotional website tie-in ever.

If you had a rabid tech-saavy fan-base, isn't this exactly the kind of thing you'd do? Start crap-awful geocities and angelfire sites to throw people off-track? It's not a bad idea, and I'm pretty sure that's what they've done.

Either way, I'm starting to feel like Mike from the blogThe Misfit Is Here might know what he's talking about, and that guy is like the coked-up Oliver Stone of nut-ball LOST conspiracy theorists. Mike has already mentioned these and other websites on his blog here. Part of this chain was also pointed out on The Hatch, here, dated April 24.

I've only scratched the surface of the intricacies and hidden connections with these sites (and I'm sure there are more sites involved). Has anyone else been looking at these things? Any other leads?

Call it The Crying of Lost 49.