We all know that the internet can be a scary place filled with all kinds of information; often, there is much more to what we can access on the surface. With the modernization of the web and technological advancements lately, the internet has housed weird phenomena without a clear purpose. Still, it also has complicated ploys to bring together people proficient in the language of technology. In some cases, these mysteries have been solved; for others, there is yet to be an answer. Although there are a plethora of events to be discussed regarding these topics, here are just five of the most interesting ones for me personally.
Cicada 3301
Wikipedia
On January 4th, 2012, an intriguing post appeared on 4chan’s random board. A user, under the pseudonym “3301,” shared a simple black image with white text that read:
“Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”
NPR
Questions flooded in immediately. Who were “we”? And what exactly were they looking for in these “highly intelligent individuals”? Reddit threads popped up almost instantly, buzzing with speculation and analysis as people tried to crack the code.
Only a select few managed to solve the puzzle. When opened in a text editor, the image contained more than just pixels—it hid a cipher. Those who cracked it found themselves looking at a picture of a duck, mocking them with the words: “WOOPS. Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”
Financial Times
So, a dead end… or was it?
Some clever users, well-versed in cryptography and steganography, saw beyond the trick. Using a tool called Outguess, they extracted a new clue from the “decoy” image—a link to a subreddit discussing a book titled The Mabinogion alongside a cryptic code. Deciphering the code led to a phone number, and calling it revealed a prerecorded message:
“Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original Final.JPG Image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a .com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye.”
It felt impossible. But the answer was staring them in the face—the image’s dimensions, 509 by 503, were the other two numbers.
Once they followed the instructions in the message, they landed on a website with a countdown and a mysterious image of a cicada. As the clock hit zero, a list of random coordinates appeared, pointing to 14 locations across 5 countries.
At each spot, they found posters of a cicada with a QR code. Theories about an elaborate prank or internet hoax evaporated. This was real, organized, and probably the work of a group operating internationally.
Scanning the QR codes revealed an image with a riddle that led to yet another book, and from there, to another website. Those who got there first were granted access; the rest were met with a message that read: “We want the best, not the followers.”
A month later, another message surfaced: the puzzle was over, and “they” had found the people they were looking for.
But that wasn’t the end. Exactly one year later, almost to the day, a new puzzle appeared. The format was familiar, but this time, one of the clues led to a runic alphabet. It seemed meaningless—until, suddenly, the puzzle concluded once again.
A year after that one, a third puzzle emerged, following the same steps. This time, the runic alphabet led to a book entirely authored by Cicada, written in those very runes. Of the 74 pages, only 19 have been translated to this day. After that, Cicada fell silent, leaving everyone to wonder if it was a sign that they were waiting for the book to be fully translated.
Even though the puzzles seemed to end, people were still confused about the whole meaning behind it all. What happened to those who reached the end? Did they get recruited by Cicada? Was it all a scam? Suddenly, amongst the subreddits discussing the matter, a user who claimed to have solved one of the puzzles shared the email sent to the winners:
“You have all wondered who we are,” it began. “We are an international group. We have no name, no symbol, no membership rosters. We do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves. We are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves, much like you have, by completing this recruitment contest, and we are drawn together by common beliefs. A careful reading of the texts used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs: that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end, that censorship is wrong, and that privacy is an inalienable right.”
Of course, some people thought this was fake, but those who did believe it were relieved to find that if Cicada was this big underground organization, at least their ideals were actually pretty normal and not part of some creepy ideology backed up by worrying ulterior motives.
After this release of information, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, two other winners came forward and confirmed that after receiving the same email, they were invited to a dark web forum where they collaborated on developing software to protect privacy and freedom of information. Yet, despite the promising start, many lost interest, and the forum was eventually shut down. Other winners said they never got an invitation to the forum at all; instead, they were told to wait for further instructions—instructions that never came.
So, that was pretty much the end of Cicada (that we know of). To this day, people still have not cracked the code hidden in the manuscript.
Unfavorable semicircle
On March 30th, 2015, a strange YouTube channel named Unfavorable Semicircle popped up. It began uploading unsettling content filled with eerie noises and cryptic visuals. And while most YouTubers upload once or twice a week, this channel was dropping 2 to 3 videos every couple of minutes. By the end of its first year, it had posted a staggering 84,000 videos.
Wikipedia
Most of these clips were just a few seconds long, but some stretched for up to 11 hours. The sheer volume of content left people wondering: how was this possible? Who was behind it, and what were they trying to say?
People started to flock to Reddit to start discussions on this. Some went to r/unexplainedphotos, others to r/deepintoyoutube. Eventually, a subreddit page was specifically made for the channel. Theories flooded in as experts in cryptography and steganography tried to unravel the videos’ hidden messages.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly for the channel until it caught the attention of major media outlets like Atlas Obscura and BBC News. Just hours after the press coverage, YouTube suspended the channel in February 2016 due to “Multiple or Severe Violations of the Company’s policy against spam or misleading content.” But was that the real reason?
Luckily, some avid followers of the channel’s activity had archived most of the content on the subreddits. When people revisited the channel’s videos, they noticed some unsettling details. In a few clips, a man’s voice could be heard reading out sequences of numbers and letters. The titles were equally cryptic: composed of strange words, or 6-digit numbers, alongside the zodiac symbol of Sagittarius. Then, there were reports from viewers claiming their devices started glitching after watching certain videos. In some cases, the videos would continue to play even when the duration bar showed they’d ended. It led some to suspect that the channel owner was using these videos to test memory exploits and compression limits in YouTube’s video player.
For some, two videos stood out: “Lock” and “Delock.” Posted in July and December of 2015, respectively, these videos were especially unsettling. “Lock” was a 27-minute sequence of disturbing sounds and visuals, while “Delock” was broken into several parts, each featuring a blurry image of shapes and a faint, echoing scream. After “Delock,” the channel went silent for an entire week. These video mysteries did not stop there, though. A person eventually discovered that if you overlapped the frames from the “Lock” video, they formed images of planets and constellations—fitting, given the astrology symbol used in the titles.
Wikipedia
Due to the channel’s lack of activity after these videos, people started scanning the internet for traces of this channel’s activity elsewhere. Eventually, people found a post on a Google+ page linked to the original YouTube channel. Decoding this post pointed them to a Twitter account, @UnfavorableSemi, which launched on March 7th, 2016. The account announced a new YouTube channel called Unfavorable Semi, which started uploading content similar to the original channel. This continued for about a year, until September 15th, 2017, when something strange happened: a video titled “Reset Strange YD” appeared on the channel. Within half an hour, it was deleted, and the entire YouTube and Twitter accounts were wiped clean.
Just when everyone thought the mystery was finally over, a new Twitter page linked to the old Google+ page surfaced. This one, named Unfavorable Sem, was created in 2019 but hasn’t posted a single tweet. Then, on March 27th, 2019—days before Google+ was officially shut down—the entire page and all its content vanished.
To this day, no one really knows what Unfavorable Semicircle was about or who was behind it.
Paranoia.com
In 1995, a man named Kevin TX launched a website called Paranoia.com. It was meant to be a space where people could express their freedom of speech—a bit like an early version of Reddit. The site’s motto? “Freedom of thought and Eclectic Interests on the Internet.” It seemed harmless enough—until it wasn’t.
What began as a hub for quirky discussions soon spiraled into a dark corner of the web.
It started housing forums for disturbing topics like the “Pedophile Pride movement.” A user named “Stagg Meander,” would even kick off his unsettling posts with this ominous line: “It was very cool of paranoia to set up this server so depraved bastards like me can put up subversive web pages like this one. Thanks, dude.”
Despite its dark underbelly, Paranoia.com actually gained some mainstream attention. The Austin Chronicle ended up giving an award to Kevin TX for “Best Website” in 1996. The site went on to be archived multiple times on the Wayback Machine, preserving its bizarre legacy. But the server eventually became too much for Kevin to handle, and he pulled the plug in the year 2000.
But here’s where things get really strange: the URL isn’t dead. Actually, if you type Paranoia.com into your search bar right now, you’ll be surprised to find that the link sends you directly to none other than… Disney’s Home Page.
Around 2021, people quickly started to find out about this, and a Reddit user named Logical_Elephant made a post on r/InternetMysteries, asking the burning question: Why would Disney buy this domain? The post focused on the oddity of a family-friendly company owning a website that once hosted such controversial content such as pages about prostitution, drug use, the “Church of Euthanasia,” bizarre images, and other disturbing material that sometimes had to be censored from the internet. Paranoia.com wasn’t a place for casual chit-chat; it was a platform for people to post and obsess over deeply controversial topics. The Reddit user even shared a link to a list of URLs that Disney has acquired, hosted on HackerOne. Most of the domains were pretty normal, but Paranoia.com definitely stood out.
Still, the question remained… Why would Disney want this domain? Logical_Elephant speculated that it might’ve been intended for some kind of project. Back in the ’90s, companies were buying domain names left and right, seeing them as valuable digital real estate. But here’s the thing: Disney never launched a project called Paranoia. They didn’t even buy up domains for some of their biggest movies like Aladdin, Snow White, or Fantasia. You can look up Aladdin.com, Snow White.com, or Fantasia.com in your search bar right now and notice that none of these domains lead to classic Disney films.
People were puzzled by this, and many gave up on the search for answers… until someone remembered a forgotten game show from 2000 called Paranoia that aired on Fox Family Channel. You know, Fox is one of the companies that Disney owns.
The show featured a game host encouraging viewers to play along online at paranoia.excite.com. Here’s where it gets interesting: in 2001, the original Paranoia.com domain was redirected to Excite.com. Disney had bought Fox Family that same year, and in that process, they also bought the domain for paranoia.excite.com which later turned into just paranoia.com. Turns out, the creepy old Paranoia.com had no real connection to Disney after all. Nonetheless, it is still weird how fast all of this happened and the fact that Disney bought that domain and not others for some of their most famous projects.
The Dead Internet Theory
The Dead Internet Theory has been defined by Forbes magazine as “the belief that the vast majority of internet traffic, posts and users have been replaced by bots and AI-generated content, and that people no longer shape the direction of the internet.”
It traces its roots back to an anonymous thread posted in 2021 on Agora Road’s Macintosh Café forum. It’s a chilling idea, suggesting that most online activity isn’t even real. According to the theory, the internet as we knew it – the one where humans created content to interact with each other- died in 2016. Since then, much of the web has been overrun by bot activity and AI-generated content, all curated by complex algorithms.
The eerie part? There’s some truth to it. In 2016, a cybersecurity firm called IMPERVA reported that bots—software programs designed to perform automated tasks—were responsible for over half of all online activity. They also discovered that nearly 30% of all web traffic came from what they called “bad bots,” those designed for malicious purposes. And that was nearly a decade ago. Just imagine what those numbers might look like today.
In 2024, Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, gave a keynote speech at the South by Southwest conference titled “Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity on the Web.” It was a wake-up call. He talked about how major social media platforms have shifted to algorithm-based content distribution, replacing the old follow-based feeds. Essentially, we’re no longer choosing what we watch; we end up watching what the internet thinks we want to see based on our ongoing activity on the apps we use. Now, influencers don’t just have to compete against each other. They also have to go against the very algorithms that are supposed to support them. The goal of these social media platforms today is to make money. And the best way to do that is by maximizing engagement, no matter the cost. So what’s really worrisome about this is the rate at which content is produced by these Artificial Intelligence programs and how much it is replacing human interaction on the internet. At this rate, it seems like things will only get worse, and the future where AI finally takes over our lives is nearer than we thought.
Internet Black Holes
This theory is a bit shorter than the rest, but it is equally worrisome. It explains the phenomenon that happens when information sent or posted through social media suddenly vanishes or is rerouted through unknown locations. Where does it go? Who potentially ends up having access to that information? Is it ever really deleted, or is it stored somewhere, hidden?
Some cases have reported instances where the information made it to third-party IP addresses. This represents a potential security breach. It might seem a bit harmless for individuals who might not have compromising or very top-secret information on their computers, but it poses a serious problem for government agencies, the ones who are mostly targeted by this phenomenon.
This leads people to believe that it might not be an internet error but that someone or something is behind all of it and that people end up being specifically targeted for these kinds of attacks.
The bottom line for this one is that we are being reminded of the fact that the internet is never truly a safe space for sharing information and that the websites/web services that you believe protect your data might not be as effective as you’d thought they were, after all.
From multiple-step puzzles to odd content posted on YouTube and weird forums dating back to the 90s, the internet has pretty much seen it and done it all. Although some of these events may cause a bit of worry, at the end of the day, it is very interesting to learn more about things that have happened on the web that have left many puzzled and look further into the layers of how it came to be. If you’re really interested in these topics, some of the subreddits mentioned in this article contain even more discussions about other similar internet phenomena. So don’t be scared to look around through those forums! You never know what you might find.