On May 3, 2006, during the US broadcast of Two for the Road (episode 2.20) of the TV series Lost, the producers of Lost launched what was known as "Lost: The Experience". A form of "Alternate Reality Game", the Experience would involve web sites, TV commercials, phone calls and other forms, allowing Lost fans to interact with the world of the show.

While there are, by now, probably 4,815,162,342 other web sites devoted to Lost: The Experience, this site is a chronicle of my own discoveries and experience.

For several weeks it had been known that Lost: The Experience (the Lost Alternate Reality Game) would be starting on May 3, along with a warning that everyone needed to watch the commercials during that night's episode.

During the day, various fan sites started reporting that The Hanso Foundation web site, which had been down for a while, was back up in a sophisticated new Flash format. (The Hanso Foundation is, of course, the organization that sponsored the Dharma Initiative, the group that seems to be behind the events on the Island.)

Upon first arriving at the site I was greeted by brief introduction which pointed out the major sections of the site and included a suggestion that I sign up for a newsletter. After looking around the site a bit I went to the newsletter signup link, entered my usual screen name and clicked on "next". At this point, things started getting strange.

Parts of the screen became scratched out and someone or something calling themselves "Persephone" asked if I could read what they were saying. I entered "yes" and they asked for a password. Unfortunately nothing I entered seemed to work. Persephone then told me to call the number from the TV ad and disappeared. There not being much else I could do, I waited for the show to air that evening.

The Hanso Foundation ad did indeed air during the episode. It was the same as the one on the site except that it ended with a screen showing the Hanso Foundation web address and a phone number; "1-877-HANSORG". Unfortunately, when I tried to call the number all circuits were busy.

I finally got through the next morning. The number was to a voicemail system that gave options to reach Alvar Hanso and several other members of the board of directors of the Foundation. It was basically a standard voicemail system but at one point while going through the menus a woman's voice broke in and identified herself as Persephone. She told me that the password I needed was "breaking strain". I returned to the web site and tried signing up for the newsletter again, this time entering the "breaking strain" password.

I was rewarded with several lines of text from Persephone, telling me that I was now logged into Dharma. Persephone then logged off. There was a brief video image showing a screaming orangutan then the site returned to normal.

Well, the orangutan looked like Joop, the orangutan who was part of the Hanso Foundation's Life Extension Project and who had his own section of the site. So, I went to Joop's Corner.

There, I selected the option to send a message to Joop. I entered a message (I used "Persephone sent me") and hit send. The webcam animated briefly then I was taken to a strange display.

After watching what looked like cells dividing for a bit, two circles appeared. I clicked on them and a line was drawn between them, then another two circles appeared. I continued clicking until a red circle appeared. I clicked on it and was taken to another screen.

Here I could see a small section of a letter but by moving the cursor around, I was able to read all of it. The text of the letter read:

Global Welfare Consortium 19 September, 2005
Rue Grande 1623
1221 Geneva 17
Switzerland

To: Dr. Roderick Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Director,
Centers for Disease Control

From: GWC Executive Committee
RE: Violation of Ethical Guidelines / The Hanso Life-
Extension Project

CC: Mr. Peter Thompson, Vice President, General Counsel,
The Hanso Foundation, Hugh McIntyre, Vice President and
Communications Director, The Hanso Foundation

Dr. Johnson;

We have received word of an unfortunate and most alarming
issue in the past days concerning research operations by
The Hanso Foundation in the sub-Saharan region of Africa.
Sadly, we have exhausted our mandate as a watchdog
organization and must petition you for a formal
investigation.

It has come to our attention that a new strain of
meningococcal disease has been reported in the costal
villages of the United Republic of Tanzania. This strain
is particularly alarming in that it has successfully
breached the simian/homo sapiens barrier.

As the enclosed documentation and correspondence
demonstrate, we have repeatedly asked the Executive Board
of the Hanso Foundation for assistance in determining the
possible correlation between the outbreak of this
transgenetic disease and the research being conducted on
primates in their Experimental Station in Zanzibar.
As our requests have been met with utter and complete
disregard, we feel we have no other choice than to demand
your immediate intervention.

As The Hanso Foundation is using primates to research gene
therapies intended for human use, the correlation should
be obvious.

Considering the alarming nature of this outbreak and
the mounting death toll it is imperative that The Hanso
Foundation immediately open the doors of their
Experimental Station for inspection and, should a link be
found between their work and this disease, cease and
desist their activities immediately.

Thank your for your prompt attention to this matter.
Lives are at stake.

(Signed) James Maillot


(I have put together a composite image of the letter assembled from several screenshots if you want to see the original.)

Clicking on the signature produced a second letter, which read:

Global Welfare Consortium 25 September, 2005
Rue Grande 1623
1221 Geneva 17
Switzerland

To: Dr. Roderick Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Director,
Centers for Disease Control

From: GWC Executive Committee

RE: The Hanso Life-Extension Project

Please consider this a formal apology for the heated and
alarmist tone of our previous correspondence, as well as a
formal request for the withdrawal of former Director General
Jacques Maillot's request for an intervention into the
affairs of The Hanso Foundation.

In the time since Monsieur Maillot's letter, GWC's
inspection team has been welcomed with open arms into The
Hanso Foundation's Experimental Station in Zanzibar. Our
thorough examination of the Station has made it clear that
the benign, non-invasive research being conducted there
cold not have possibly resulted in the outbreak of a
transgenic virus.

Because we appreciate the CDC's willingness to intervene
when lives are at stake, the last thing we want is to abuse
our close relationship with your organization -- or sound
alarms before the need is absolutely clear. Once again,
please accept our apologies, and our appreciation of your
diligent response to our correspondence

(Signed) Peter Thompson
Mr. Peter Thompson, Acting Director General
Global Health Consortium


(There is a composite image of this letter as well.)

Peter Thompson's name gets circled in red. Clicking on this causes an additional message to appear:

Finally, clicking on this returned me to the main site. Now some strange markings appeared on Joop's webcam but I was unable to determine if they meant anything.

Looking around the site I noticed a few other things. First, I went to the "Worldwide Wellness and Prevention Development Program" and selected the "World Map". There are three sites located in Africa but I was able to find a hidden hotspot in the Caribbean. Clicking on it caused an empty box to appear and moving the cursor to just below the box caused some writing to appear. It seems to be some sort of code.

(The writing is faint and this image has been contrast enhanced.)

Notice the two sets of underlined numbers? Using a simple code where 1 = A, 2 = B and so on, these sets of numbers translate to "missing organs". Sounds ominous, but I'm not sure what this means.

Next, I looked at the press release on the "Mathematical Forecasting Initiative" page. Several words in the release have been blanked out but I have no idea if this is significant or not.

On the "Mental Health Appeal" page there was another text entry field like the one used to send a message to Joop, but it didn't seem to do anything

Finally, I tried signing up for the newsletter again but only got a message from Persephone telling me "No new messages".

There didn't seem to be anything new on the site at first on Friday, but looking around I noticed that there seemed to be another image overlaid on some text on Joop's Corner.

When to go to send a message to Joop, this text is replaced by the webcam feed, and it sometimes appears to have another image on it as well.

I noticed that when I chose the option to send Joop a message, the text above would wipe away and be replaced an instant later with the webcam. However, during that instant, a faint image could be seen. I managed to get a screenshot during that instant then ran the area through a high contrast enhancement filter. This is what I found.

Oddly, this image looked familiar and a quick look around the site revealed that it was a photograph on the "Mental Health Appeal" page. I was unable to determine more than that however.

Later that day a change appeared on the site. A message appeared on the main screen apologizing for the problems with the site and directing visitors to a press release.

The press release itself was a pdf document that read as follows:

HANSO FOUNDATION APOLOGISES FOR DISRUPTION TO NEW WEBSITE
www.thehansofoundation.org

(May 6, 2006) It has come to the attention of the Hanso Foundation that
our site is experiencing some sort of disruption. The Foundation gives
our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this has caused -- we are
fixing the errors as quickly as we can and will shortly have the site
back in full working order again.

Users of the website can be assured that no data has been compromised,
and the user database has not been penetrated. The intruder has only
managed to breach the primary layer of the site.

Thank you, and namaste.

Hugh McIntyre
Communications Director


About the Hanso Foundation
The Hanso Foundation stands at the vanguard of social and scientific
research for the advancement of the human race. For forty years, the
foundation has offered grants to worthy experiments designed to further
the evolution of the human race and provide technological solutions to
the most pressing problems of our time.

"From the dawn of our species, Man has been blessed with curiosity. Our
most precious gift, without exception, is the desire to know more -- to
look beyond what is accepted as the truth and to imagine what is
possible." Alvar Hanso, Address to the U.N. Security Council, 1967

Media Contact: Hugh McIntyre
(206) 861-5017 / Hugh.McIntyre@thehansofoundation.org


Straightforward enough. However, doing a "Select All" (in preparation for a copy/paste operation) revealed a hidden line at the bottom of the page, apparently from Persephone, which directed me to another part of the site.

Going to the persephone.thehansofoundation.org page revealed this set of numbers.

106 98 111 32 117 98 115 32 114 115 110 102 32 102 118 32 102 118 101 71 32 49 32 108 110 90 32 116 117 98 46 83 69 71 32 103 110 32 111 118 32 116 98 73

I was unable to determine any sense from them.

The only other discovery I made was a hidden text field on the Joop's Corner page but, like the other fields I had tried, it didn't seem to do anything.

Over the weekend a new set of numbers appeared on persephone.thehansofoundation.org.

72 65 83 32 87 73 78 32 72 79 83 84 32 80 67 32 73 78 32 78 73 76 32 85 82 71 69 46 32 56 44 32 110 111 116 32 49 32 97 110 100 32 54 46

Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work with the site. Hopefully more later.

Well, I finally got a chance to look at the site again. A lot has happened in the last few days.

First though, an event has occurred outside of the game. In several papers around the country, an ad from Hugh McIntyre of the Hanso Foundation appeared, saying that the information in the book Bad Twin by Gary Troup is false and that people should go to the Hanso Foundation web site for the truth. (Unfortunately, the ad did not seem to run in the Atlanta area so I don't have a copy of it.)

Bad Twin, as some Lost fans may recognize, was the manuscript that Sawyer was reading on the beach at the end of the episode Two For the Road. The book actually exists and is an obvious Lost tie-in and apparently is part of the game. The author supposedly was lost in the crash of Oceanic Air flight 815.

Anyway, back to the game. On the Executive Bios page I selected Alvar Hanso's picture. A larger picture of him appeared but the date under the image was now a link. Clicking on it produced another message from Persephone.

Persephone points out that the picture of Hanso is much older and grainer than all of the other pictures on the site and wonders what it means. Clicking on the picture produced another image.

A map appeared which showed Alvar Hanso's travels around Europe several years ago. Clicking on each city caused a transit line to travel to the next. The map continued to track his movement until it ended in Madrid on 12/31/2003.

At this point Persephone appears again and wonders aloud where Hanso is and who is really running the Hanso foundation. Her question bounces on the screen for a while. After a while, the question disappears and a pulsating light appears while what seems to be a morse code signal plays. I have not yet tried to translate the morse code.

Clicking on the pulsating light returns to the normal bio pages.

Looking around, I found one other change to the bio pages. The page for Thomas Mittlewerk now has a text input box sitting in the middle of it.

I kept looking around the site for a while, capturing a few more screenshots, when I suddenly noticed that my clock had changed. Instead of displaying the time, it now said "OB:EY".

The clock was now a link. Clicking on it took me to a site called www.subLYMONal.com where six TV screens surrounded the word OBEY. I could click on one screen and clicking on it several times caused it to light up and a second screen to become active. I activated all six screens by clicking on them 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 times.

After activating all six screens I was taken to another screen where a monitor flashed the code "Heir Apparent". There was a hidden link at the bottom of the page that took me back to Mittlewerk's bio page on the Hanso Foundation site.

(Oddly, once back on the Hanso Foundation site, I had to go back to the newsletter signup to continue. I think this is because I wound up with several open windows at this point.)

Since the link took me back to Mittlewerk's bio, I tried entering the "Heir Apparent" phrase into the text box there. Immediately a "hole" appeared in the screen. In the "hole" I could see an image of a woman standing in a closet. (The image here has been contrast enhanced; note the wheelchair on the left).

Clicking on the woman caused her to turn to face the screen. The image zoomed in to show what seemed to be a report from Cal Tech. Persephone notes that, contrary to his bio, Mittlewerk apparently never went to Cal Tech! She wonders if he is really a doctor and if he even has a college degree.

As a final for now, notice the two areas of the report that are Xed out. Under the blue Xes it is just possible to read the phrase "He must be silenced". The red Xes are covering a sentence saying something about Gary Troup.