Anomalous Media Part Three

Only 20 this time. I think I've fully worked this concept out of my system, but I might end up posting more in the future. I had a great time writing all of these. 

51. The Kure Atoll Shells (carved sea turtle shells): These shells were found in a tide pool in Hawaii's Kure Atoll. Their artistic style does not correspond to any known human culture. They depict a series of scenes showing an anthropomorphic shark and anthropomorphic iguana, both of whom are always shown either wielding various weapons against vast hordes of enemies, drinking large quantities of alcohol, or meditating. The scenes seem to a comprise a Journey To The West-like narrative when put together. One shell-scene shows the two surrounded by what appear to be soldiers in modern gear and several M1 Abrams tanks, one of which has just been sliced in half by the iguana's halberd.

52. Game 4 of the Pan-Atlantic Cup (television broadcast): This ESPN broadcast, aired on January 5th, 1989 at 2:00 AM EST shows a hockey game between the Jersey Devils and a team referred to as the "Arizona Demiurges", who wear gold and orange uniforms and whose logo is a lion-headed serpent. The game is unremarkable and orderly by hockey standards, though it begins and ends with the sacrifice of a live goat, killed by members of both teams bludgeoning it to death with their sticks. A tarp is placed under the goat during these rituals to keep blood from spilling on the ice. The faces of all of the audience members have been censored with black boxes.

53. The Surf City Photo (polaroid photograph): This night photograph, identified by writing in black pen on its back as having been taken at Long Beach Island's Surf City Yacht Club in 2002, shows a customized Nordhavn 6080 yacht, the name "Avery's Prize" visible on its side, with several people visible standing on its decks and one hovering in the air above it. The people on the decks are holding various firearms, except for one who is drawing a longbow. The floating person's hands are obscured by bright points of light. The sea around the yacht is choppy, and a large indistinct grey shape with a texture resembling barnacle clusters is rising from the sea in front of the yacht.

54. The Mulciber Manor Plans (architectural blueprints): This floorplan details the layout of a massive mansion it refers to as "Mulciber Manor", which is six stories tall and has a base sized 6,666 square feet. The mansion features two movie theaters, a bowling alley, an indoor pool, a chapel, three libraries, several secret passages, and six descending basement levels that seem to have been designed primarily to serve as laboratories, along with several large, empty rooms whose purpose is uncertain.

55. "The Whorl" (radio signal): The name of this ultra-low frequency underwater sound, detected in 2010 by the US National Oceanographic And Atmospheric Administration, was named by the researchers who discovered it for the bizarre effect it has on recording equipment. When the sound is played on a spectrogram, the usual hertz profile will briefly resolve into a whorl-shaped pattern resembling a fingerprint when the sound reaches its highest point. "The Whorl" was estimated by listeners as being at least twice the volume of the famous "bloop" sound. NOAA has never publicly acknowledged it, and references to it online are usually removed within hours or days of their posting.

56. Patrick Bateman Doesn't Coach Little League (paperback): This paperback, branded as one of the "Bailey School Kids" childrens' books, features a plot typical of the series, in which the titular kids investigate the possibility that their Huey Lewis-loving little league coach is actually a serial killer. The space that would normally contain an ISBN instead contains a set of geographic coordinates found to correspond to actor Christian Bale's home address.

57. barrywilmore.mp4 (video file): This grainy four hour long video file, timestamped as having been taken between 11:00 PM and 3:00 AM, shows the exterior of a suburban home and appears to have been taken from a camera mounted in a car parked across the street from the house. The street has been tentatively identified as a suburb in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, the residence of astronaut Barry Wilmore. At 12:03 AM, bushes outside of the house's front window are seen rustling. At 12:05, a shadowy humanoid figure rises from these bushes and appears to press its face against the curtained window. It extends three arms or other appendages, each with three apparent joints, and presses them against the window as well. The shape remains at the window for the next thirty minutes before it retreats from the window and lowers itself back into the bushes and is not seen again for the remainder of the video. The video file achieved moderate notoriety in some corners of the internet shortly after its emergence on December 8, 2020, as a number of early torrents of the game Cyberpunk 2077 contained the video instead of the game's ISO.

58. "Gas Station Man" (urban legend): During the years of 1983, 1984, and 1985, numerous children, primarily those living in or near Los Angeles, Seattle, Phoenix, New Brunswick, Edinborough, and Stuttgart all claimed to have had an experience where they went with a parent or guardian at a gas station and saw that one of the attendants had numerous piercings, tattoos, yellow eyes, and either "really big teeth" or "too many teeth". This man would stand behind the farthest pump from the main station and slowly wave at the child while either smiling widely or whistling. All of the children who claimed to have seen this man also claimed that neither their parents nor any other adults present would acknowledge his presence and would simply deny being able to see anything out of the ordinary. This urban legend is known only from parents, teachers, and others during these years who overheard children talking about it, as all of the children who claimed to have seen the "gas station man" would later deny any memory of these experiences after becoming adults.

59. Papal Musings (set of cocktail napkins): This stack of napkins was found inside an empty fish tank by a group of "storage warriors", hobbyists who buy up storage units to search their contents for valuables. The first napkin is decorated in the manner of the title page of an iuminated manuscript and features the title "Papal Musings". Subsequent napkins feature similar fanciful and intricate margin decorations, clearly made by an artist of some skill. The text is written in Middle English, in a style typical of the early fifteenth century. The author, who identifies himself as "Architeuthis Dux", muses on topics related to Catholic theology and the Avignon Schism of 1378. Dux argues that the holiness of the church is directly proportional to the number of popes currently in existence, meaning that the church was at its holiest during the period in which it had three mutually exclusive popes. Dux recommended that the church should name at least five more popes in order to gather enough holiness to combat "the rising tide of darkness from the west" and "the influence of that accursed brotherhood whose name I shall not write".

60. "Colin Meloy With Three Eyes Holding A Snake" (painting): This painting depicts a three-eyed version of Decemberists vocalist Colin Meloy holding a snake. The snake appears to a juvenile boa constrictor. Colin and the snake are surrounded by whisps of smoke, which are actually made up of millions of microscopic letters. These letters tell the story of the "Five Slave States" and how they were destroyed by the "Saurian Empire Of The Red Tooth" after the king of one of the city-states slighted Empress Snakeheart-Blackmaw The Just And Ruthless II.

61. Salazzletulpa.txt (text file): This text file contains detailed instructions on how to "attune your pneumatic manifestation wavelength to a specific wellspring of the collective unconscious and draw upon a multi-channel eidolon through scalar wave transmissions through a stepped-ladder torsion field portal" in order to summon a tulpa or thoughtform of the Pokemon Salazzle. The Salazzle tulpa is apparently willing to trade "astral weaponry" or "Magonian technology" for rare books, authentic dinosaur fossils, or well-composed original poetry.

62. La Pluralité Des Mondes Habités (leather-bound book): A copy of one of the books written by french astronomer Camille Flammarion, bound in human skin. Genetic samples taken from the skin show strands of DNA with a strange "triple helix" structure with six types of nucleotides instead of four. The book's text is mostly identical to that of other copies, with the exception of an afterward purportedly written by an "admirer" of Flammarion who credits him as their inspiration for becoming both an astronomer and an "anthropodermist". Found in the personal effects of Dr. Anàrion Lowdham, a fringe historian and self-described "Atlantis truther" known for his controversial claims regarding the "true history" of mankind and the locations of several famous lost cities.

63. Innocent's Brief (papal brief): In 1682, Pope Innocent XI released a papal brief in which he annulled several of the decisions made by 1681 assembly of the French clergy. While seen by most historians as merely Innocent's protest against Gallicanism, applying the famous "Speyer cipher" to the text reveals that it contains coded instructions to the Malleus Maleficarum, a secret organization within the church dedicated to the extermination of "extranormally potent heresies". The coded message contains orders for the inquisitors to increase the intensity of their surveillance of the French court and clergy. It also contains a "kill list" for the organization, including several prominent Gallicans such as Gilbert Choiseul du Plessis-Praslin, a number of individuals referred to only with numbers, and an Italian priest named Caraccioli, who was said to have "succumbed to lewdness, heresy, and anticlericalism". Plessis-Praslin was killed and replaced by an imposter intended to spy on the remaining french clergy (as detailed in Volume 27 of the Secret History Of The Catholic Church) while Caraccioli was recorded as having fled the city of Livorno aboard a privateering vessel shortly after the brief was released.

64. Persona 4 Electrum Edition (video game special edition): A special edition of the videogame Persona 4 Golden, briefly available from some online retailers before being removed. It contains several special features not found in the regular collector's edition, including a map of the town of Inaba, a functioning and loaded Nambu Model 60 revolver, a booklet containing instructions on how to modify a CRT television screen to access the "Midnight Channel" featured in the game, a stone slab engraved with the names of the victims of every unsolved murder in Japanese history, and a large quantity of raw beef.

65. Sparkes' Map (map on canvas): This map of the world, dated to the 1690s, was said to have originally belonged to "pirate king" Henry Avery, and was used by Avery to mark sites for his treasure caches and lawless fiefs. The map was later stolen by John Sparkes, a member of Avery's crew, who passed it to an accomplice before his trial and execution. Sparkes' reportedly showed great regret for the savagery shown by the crew in India, but not for the general practice of piracy, and expressed a desire to track down and kill Avery. It shows several islands not visible on any other map, some of them of significant size. The map is also drawn in great detail, with geographical information present that would have been unknown to contemporary European society, such as an accurate depiction of Antarctica. The map's North America also shows the names and boundary lines of the modern states of the USA, rather than period-appropriate colonies, with the exception of Florida; which is labeled "Great Orlando", and Utah; which has been crossed out with black paint.

66. The Shea-Wilson Cipher (cipher key): While this cipher is named for Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (the authors of the Illuminatus! trilogy), who discovered it in 1973 and would later encode it on their writing using a metacypher, it is likely much older. Experiments with the cipher have found that numerous books, plays, essays, and other documents contain secret messages which can be found by using the cipher. For example, the Magna Carta contains remarkably accurate descriptions of several battles of the American Civil War, while each of Shakespeare's plays contains the summary of a Seinfeld episode (Hamlet's is "The English Patient"). Each of the books in the A Series Of Unfortunate Events series by Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket), each contain a set of Cartesian coordinates in a format that includes a fourth number corresponding to an unknown axis of direction. The first ten of these sets of coordinates appear, ignoring the fourth place, to be on earth, while the final three use an unusual numbering system that suggests that they denote a location on the moon. The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, meanwhile, contains several recipes for baked goods as well as confirmation that "pipe-weed" was, in fact, intended to be marijuana. Several books by L. Ron Hubbard also reveal secret messages when this cipher is used, but these messages are all either self-aggrandizement of Hubbard's achievements or enumerations of his personal grudges. They are also poorly spelled, suggesting that Hubbard was less than fluent with the code.

68. "The Evaluator" (walkman): A 1985 Sony WM-101 walkman which was discovered in 2006 at a garage sale in Abilene, Texas. It shows signs of age and wear but is otherwise functional. It includes an additional button located below all of the others, which, when pressed while a cassette is playing, causes playback to stop and a computerized voice with cadence typical of early voice synthesizer software to begin talking. This voice seems to evaluate the "accuracy" of whatever cassette has been placed inside the device. For example, it described John Mellencamp's Jack And Diane as "portraying feelings experienced by a statistically significant number of humans" but strongly criticized the lyrics of MacArthur Park over the "improbability" of someone leaving a cake in the rain. When used to play several songs from Australian band King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard which had been copied from CD to cassette, the voice simply responded "they're pretty close". The voice occasionally adds editorial commentary, such as claiming to have been personally present during the events of the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer song Tarkus and threatening to "detonate" the cassette player after one its owners used it exclusively to play songs by ABBA.

69. "Lunar Grimm" (leather-bound book): This copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales is bound in blank black leather, though the contents are otherwise identical to the 1857 German edition. The composition of the paper has been revealed by laboratory tests to contain trace amounts of crushed lunar rock and dust. The words of the biblical passage Judges 1:19 have been written into the margins at several points, each time next to a diagram of the atomic structure of an iron molecule.

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