Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 363: Fiction: Unsolved

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

Mt. Chiliad? Wait, GTA V? Under the Silver Lake? Wait, Andrew Garfield? Like, by David Robert Mitchell? That’s right, weirdies. The Summer of Secrets continues with Alex’s tale of a journey into mysteries of make believe, and find out what unsolved fictional mysteries can tell Mathas and Jesse about our real selves. Do NOT look for the Hiding Man.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODThank you to our sponsors:MINTMOBILE: To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to www.mintmobile.com/chillCASHAPP: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/eikoiw62 #CashAppPodCash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. OFFICIAL MERCH: https://theyetee.com/chilluminatiMike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSHOWNOTESSee ALL links and follow along with the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w7Gvd_1gnWcFvZxhshT_KY0yRPlOvAwU1j2hXhh_a9s/edit?usp=sharing

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulimini podcast. That's so... Oh, he's chugging. 363? That's a crazy one for numerologists, I bet. It is 363. It is 363. It is. Yeah, that's a crazy one for you.

369. 369. 369. 369. 369. 369. 369. Oh, I see what we're going to be doing.

Oh, yes. Hey, everybody. It's Chaluminaati time. welcome back to another episode of Summer of Secrets, which today is kind of a spiritual sequel in a way to my haunted art episode that I did recently. Oh, but also, yeah, but also it's really nothing like it at all

in neither form nor function. And along those lines, if you enjoy bizarre and seemingly contradictory statements, before we start today, let me remind you about all the free content there is out there for paid members at patreon.com slash Chulminati pod where not only do you get sweet, Inside tips on merch sales and bonus playlists and the odd exclusive,

but also every single week we record an extremely formidable bonus minisode, which covers listener stories, bizarre headlines, and disappointing UFO drops in real time as they happen every time we record another episode, which come out immediately for you and much, much later for everyone else. So yeah, thank you for the support. Honestly, everything is so fucking expensive and it means a lot always, but it especially means a lot now when you spend some of that harder and cash on us. So thank you.

Crazy that fake meat is like the same cost as regular meat now. Yeah, I know. Now we're just all in the same fucking boat. Like I got something like, like beyond beef. And it's like the same cost for pound of beef. Yeah,

we're not beyond beef. We're exactly the same as beef. Also, the live show in Chicago, which we will have probably already done by the time you hear this most likely. We'll hopefully be on there soon for free to listen to, just like the last two ones we did on Patreon, which honestly,

I think is pretty cool. So yeah, patreon.com slash chluminati pod. Patreon.com slash chluminati pod. Sign up now at patreon.com slash chluminati pod. Hold on. Hold on. What? What? Yeah, patreon.com slash chlomomit pod. We really love it when people do it.

And now with that out of the way, it's time for this week's episode, which is officially called fiction, Fiction Unsolved. For reasons that will soon become obvious. Okay. Just as soon as I finish this contrived story. What would you consider solved fiction? Is unsolved fiction like Game of Thrones? because it'll never, ever end?

Like, he's going to die before he finishes that series. Okay, so that's a perfect example of like one, you could say, until it is fulfilled, you could say one bit of unsolved fiction is what's going to happen next. Okay, okay. To Westeros. But like, before I get to that, I want to finish this contrived story about how watching the Odyssey

by Christopher Nolan inspired me to convince my wife Kelly to finally watch Christopher Nolan's first movie, Memento for the very first movie, for the very first time. Have you guys seen that movie? Sure. I have not. Yeah, really good movie.

Mathis, this one, genuine recommendation for you, the person, to watch this movie. One of the only, I've seen, there's like two or three in Christopher Nolan films I haven't seen. That, and I know,

I haven't seen Tenet. This one's a hard one. Those are actually two hard ones to watch because they're not really anywhere to watch. I actually maybe Tenets on HBO Max. I don't know, but maybe not. So, more just conceptually hard to watch. Oh, yeah.

Honestly, I thought that's what he meant initially. Dude, you want to know what's so fun. fucking crazy. First of all, before we get into this, I watched them as a double feature the other day, those two movies. Damn, right? And if you haven't seen Memento recently, I want to remind you that it like starts in reverse with a bullet going back into a gun. Like, I was like, whoa. But anyway, and if you've seen Tennis, you know what I mean. But anyway, more specifically, the thing that I wanted to bring up about Memento now was how as I watched it, it started to kind of remind me of the writings of somebody that Mathis definitely remembers and somebody who Jesse would probably

love to forget. And his name is Austin, Osmond Spare. Yeah, who just in case you forgot is sort of like the template for basic thinking behind modern chaos magic. Especially, how. Yes. How? It's especially, especially, especially the idea. I'm currently reading some Philip Carroll books like right now about chaos magic stuff. Yeah. I want to say it's the especially for, for Osman Spear. I want to say it's especially the idea of preserving your intention and your will beyond the realm of your own active awareness or even your memory of, you know, it being your will. Is that a good brief summary? Yeah, exactly.

All right. All right. Let me buckle into some bullshit. Here we go. Is that a good brief summary, though, Mathis, of what he's about? Yeah. You're trying to forget that it was you who started. You're trying to bypass your own.

ego and supplant your own will onto the fabric of reality, whatever that may be. And one of the biggest problems is your own mind and your own thoughts. It all kinds of shit in the way. Yeah, exactly. So, sigilizing an intent and then creating that sigil to represent that intent. And then forgetting the sigil is the most important part. Because the more you think about it, the more you're lusting for a result. And in that case, result never happens.

And now the people who have seen Nemento's minds are starting to turn, which is basically where Memento comes in, because in case you haven't seen the. movie, and don't worry, I'm not going to spoil the ending of the movie or really anything about the movie, other than the basic premise, which is that the main character, whose name is Leonard, by the way, he lived a normal life for most of his life up to a point where he was attacked in the night by some men who broke into his house while he was sleeping and assaulted and killed his wife, which left him with like a permanent brain injury that impedes his ability to make new short-term memories. So that just like they, just like,

say about goldfish about every five minutes to 30 minutes he just forgets everything that's happened to him and just kind of wakes up again wherever he is brand new like he was dozing off for a second this is also the premise of 50 first dates sort of sort of sort of i don't yeah i don't you know what i'm to say drew barry more is not as messed up as this dude it's got a different it's got a different uh theme not a rom-com yeah it's got a different theme to it But there's not a lot of calm in this one. Though Joe Pantiliano's in it. So there's a little.

Joey Pants? Hell yeah. Yeah, Joe Pants, my man. And yet, even with this insane handicap that Leonard has, he still sort of hazily and through repetition knows that someone killed his wife. Because it's kind of up for debate how well Leonard's long-term memory works, right? You know, maybe that's different than your short-to-memory. And he still knows he wants revenge.

So instead of keeping shit, organized. in his brain like most people do because he can't do that. He takes polaroids of shit and he writes notes to himself and even tattoo stuff that he knows about his wife's murderer on his skin so that he can keep track of the hunt through all his brain resets. And the movie even goes backwards in time, scene by scene as you watch it, like a little bit further back each time and catching up to itself each time so that you only ever know as much as Sammy does.

I mean, as Leonard does. Sorry. it's seriously just a real cool movie with a neat story that's absolutely worth watching and because I do hope this will inspire some new people to give it a look I don't really want to get too much more into the specifics of the movie except for one little problem that comes up pretty quickly with this system that he has and which several people bring to his attention throughout the movie almost immediately which is that if he can't make new memories how can he ever trust that anybody is telling him the truth.

If they know he's going to forget, they can just tell him whenever they want. Or for that matter, how will he ever possibly know when he catches his wife's killer? Right? Or when he does it, when he does catch his wife's killer and goes to sleep and he wakes up the next day, what is there to stop him from forgetting that the hunt is over and starting this shit up brand new all over again, looking at the clues again, and chasing somebody else that just so happens to fit his suspect's description. What then, right? Yeah. So, so even more tragically than that is the idea, or possibly even more freeing, if his busted

memory makes the idea of a normal life impossible anyway, isn't this kind of thing, kind of the only option anyway for him finding purpose in his existence that he has left without being able to make up memories? Like, doesn't he kind of have to set himself on some sort of, even if he's, even if it's, even if it's not his, you know, catching his wife's killer, his whole life is just sort of like setting himself on goose chase after goose chase and following the clues with faith without remembering that he's basically his own secret quest giver, you know, and regardless of what a quest may be, likely murder in this case, doesn't that kind of sound like the most powerful chaos magic of all time.

Like if he can, if he can, like, actually set intention and then actually literally forget that he said it. You know? Yes. And then I would posit, though,

if he's forgetting everything, though, and he loses his ability to even assert a will beyond the thing that he has been permanently stuck to, is he really a magician at all? Really good question.

You should watch a movie Memento and then watch the movie prestige right after. And of course, within the world of film nerds. That's the crazy issue I've ever. It's a good question. As a magician, a cast magician, the whole thing is to assert your will.

But if you every morning forget and set yourself on the exact same path every single time, do you have will at all at that point? Great question. And one, you should apply to the film when you eventually watch it. Thank you so much to Cash App for sponsoring today's episode. And a quick one for you guys, if Cash App could put a custom discount on your card

for the one place you spend way too much money, Where's it going? You can drop it in the comments or just keep it to yourself. Mine, you know, maybe you would think books, but it's a coffee thing, honestly. Anyway, that's the fun side of it, but here's something I didn't actually realize. Cash app could do this. Cash app can do way more than you think to make your money work for you. If you direct deposit at least $300 in paychecks each month and use Cash App card for purchases,

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Visit cash.dap slash legal slash podcast for full disclosure. Within the world of film nerds and hipsters, this has over time set up this sort of like Blade Runner-esque like Is Deckard a Replicant type cinematic clue hunt for the audience inside the movie of Memento to piece together. What's really happening? What's Leonard's real memories? What's manufactured memories? What he's thinking of? What is what the real sequence of events is that's happening that we're watching in a weird order? You know, all this stuff.

And all these people have now long ago got together. online. This movie is from 2001. They pulled the footage. They did their posting and discussing. They formed their various theories about what they just saw and whose memories are right and what's really true. And suddenly, like a million rewatches later, in a

two-hour movie that's 25 years old and never going to get any longer or suddenly contain any more answers, there still somehow lives in memento as healthy and as strong as ever. If not stronger, one of the greatest ongoing mysteries

fictional ongoing mysteries in modern film. And really, I think it's become that because just like Leonard from Memento, the audience themselves also kind of tries to have amnesia about who started the hunt in this way sometimes, especially about fiction, aka made up shit written for humans by other humans for fun, right? Because when we forget that the world we're exploring with our brain isn't real, if we allow ourselves to truly like forget that fact and get fully immersed in it pretty soon almost miraculously something inherently limited and finite and far far simpler than real life right like complex reality

something that's made by one person a lot of the time can suddenly feel like it has infinite possibilities and endless potential hiding in it even though it absolutely doesn't right and honestly beyond books and beyond movies and beyond like even internal daydreams probably there is no better medium in the world to forget about reality with than video games then if I'm being real

I think it's especially the larger open world video games that simulate entire other realities like Skyrim cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed stuff like that that do it the best just because it's like such a total and complete fantasy world, right? With all these like crazy systems, there's dynamic stuff happening around you, you know? It's like a complete sensory overload of fiction, like where you can't even possibly fully experience all the fiction that's coming at you. You know, like Zelda one, you're playing Zelda one. You see everything that's happening in like

50 feet in every direction around you. You memorize the map in an hour. You're like doing all the tricks. You could tell somebody else how to play it one day later, you know. It's not like that in these big games. Perhaps most famously of all, this sort of immersive living, made up world was achieved to great infamy in the game Grand Theft Auto 5, which somehow, I haven't heard of it. Impossibly. Yeah. Impossible. Even though it still makes like a billion dollars a day in 2026 with those shark cards, was actually really first released all the way back in 2013 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. when I was 25 years old

and basically doing a baby version of the exact same job I'm doing now. But I won't worry about that part because of the time I also had zero dollars and all the time in the world. And now I have one or even $2 sometimes and I am always busy. And you can get back then.

Nice coffee? It's crazy. Would you believe GTA Online makes about $35 to $40 million a month? So fucking nuts. After this, I fucking would. Can I just really quickly also add hilariously that the federal government has, actually it's a lie, the Georgia state government. I think it's very specifically just Georgia, but they are offering people, I believe in the National Guard there. But I just heard military, but I'm going to assume because it's Georgia's specific.

Oh, I did hear about this. Yeah. You can get four days off to play GTA 6 as long as you reenlist for another two to six. years. That's a bad deal. But that's exactly what I'm saying about alternate. That's what I'm saying about going to alternate realities. If I'm a lifer, I'll be like,

yeah. If I'm already if you're a lifer. Yeah, if you're a lifeer, but if you're not a lifer, listen, it's not even the, you're about to get out. So far, 20 people have taken them up on it. I'm just saying those guys are probably like I'm in for life. Legends. It's like not even 60 frames. It's locked at 30. Like, just wait two years for the PC port. Wait for the PS6

version that's going to be hype. then the number will match. That's the trick. But back then, as a gamer, a new mainline GTA coming out was as close of a thing as we had to like the specialness and worldwide community that happened like when Pokemon Go came out and it almost caused fucking world peace or whatever the fuck happened. It felt like Christmas morning when GTA 5 came out. I swear to fucking God.

Me and my roommates and everyone we knew were like fully obsessed. This was like, I was doing this job. Not even just like the gamer friends though. Like somehow GTA was. would come out and instantly everyone had a PS3 and had always had a PS3. We'd like watch each other played at parties with 20 or more people and like cheer people on against the cops. I remember one time we even did it outside at Joshua Tree on Shrooms.

Or maybe I thought that was GTA. I don't know. You were watching a couple of cactuses and some wind. Yeah. But yeah, I was like, oh, Trevor. But, uh, yeah. I was there in 2013 where the first. first portion of our story begins playing GTA from the very beginning, having a great time,

loving the Tony Soprano, Los Angeles thing, Franklin yelling at Lamar, having a good time. And almost immediately, probably within a few hours of turning the fucking thing on, Bazinga, here comes the greatest mystery in video games history ever, ever, ever. And best of all, this story is all true. We have a chunky one today for you, Daddy, so buckle up. Disclaimer, this story is a fictionalized version of very real events. Certain names, times, and even events were shifted or fabric. for either dramatic or literary purposes, yes, but rest assured that the spirits of it is

true definitely could have happened this way and it basically did enjoy part one, Mount Chilliad. So basically, if you've been living under a rock since the late 90s, the Grand Theft Auto Games are a sort of like violent, irreverent satirical series of real-time action role-playing video games about modern society and the shitheads who live in it. And it's made by rock star games and you play as like flawed career. career criminals most of the time who like rise and fall and get betrayed and play different factions against each other and every other crime movie trope under the sun. And you do that while also stealing cars and doing skill challenges and vehicles and side questing and finding strange

things and challenging ideas hidden among the urban diaspora, eating, drinking, doing drugs, hanging out with other losers and hooking up with sex workers. Honestly, they're some of the best made most heartbreaking and most hilarious video games around. They really are. It's so funny because if you remember where we started with Grand Theft Auto and like how it was a top-down drive your car around and then it became like the game that people knew because of hot coffee

and parents would lose their mind. And then it literally became like one of the greatest. series of all time. It is a cultural phenomenon. More successful than any 20 movies. Yeah. More successful than any 25 movies. They're always so carefully and beautifully written.

They're like huge movies. They look incredible. They're fun as shit. And in the era of like skate magazines and CDs with parental advisory warnings and South Park and jackass, right? They were the most infamous games you'd ever see. And people were always so mad about all these crazy things like playing violent games will turn kids into school shooters and all the shit like it's not just the fact that

America has the craziest fucking gun laws in the free world that makes it so easy for us to kill each other all the time for no reason Jesus fucking Christ you guys anyway back in the day the first couple games were 2D as Jesse was saying they were played from the top down on like PC PS1 at the time and all those games were kind of in the same universe there was one in London there was some cool ones and then the PS2 trilogy of GTA 3 GTA vice city and GTA San Andreas came out and those took the series into 3D and those were all kind of in their same new different universe. Yep.

And then GTA4 came out in 2009 and started a brand new super realistic HD universe version of rock stars fiction version of New York, which is called Liberty City. And then GTA 5 came out in 2013, continued that universe in Los Santos, which is like a fictionalized version of Los Angeles, which itself is nestled within a much larger fictionalized version of California called San Andreas. Then GTA Online started making

money like a motherfucker. They didn't make any more GTAs. And 13 years later, Los Santos in the game has become just as predatory and insane and ruined by rich idiots as the real thing. But also just like real L.A. Somehow, it always just keeps going. Yeah. Somehow, L.A. is still the best

and it just keeps going, despite all that. GTA Online, I've never played it. but back before all that when the game was still but an uncompiled mass on Rockstar's development servers on July 9th 2013 which is my little brother's 23rd birthday by the way

Rockstar released a short gameplay overview trailer which introduced the three main characters of the game which was Michael Franklin and Trevor and it showed off a bunch of the cool new shit that you could do in the world like dynamically switch between the characters on the world map or like switch between them on high these big heist missions where like one dude is sniping while the other dudes like repelling down

the building. You can like scuba dive now off the coast. You can do extreme sports, base jumping. You can do yoga stretches, which is all really cool. But weirdly, it was just a few key moments in the trailer that were really setting the internet ablaze. So first I'm going to just send you the video to look at right here. And then I'm going to tell you that the key moments that we're talking about are at 27 seconds,

two minutes and 36 seconds and three minutes and 19 seconds. Let me know if you guys know what it is. If you guys can't guess. First one, he said 27 seconds. Yeah. Okay. I don't know.

The 27 second one. So at 27 seconds, the very top of a mountain is a square box. Is that what you're referring to? It might be. Do you see that same thing at 236? At the top of the mountain. Yeah.

Yeah. I see like a square up there. What was the other one? 319. Yeah. they angle, it shows you the top of the mountain, there's a box again, up at the top. Exactly, exactly. So it's basically, it's that little house building, structure, shed, looking thing, which careful viewers had noticed sitting atop a large mountain, which was later

confirmed to be the very same Mount Chilliad from the previous universes GTA San Andreas on PS2, which first of all, great name for a mountain, unequivocally. Mount Chilliad feels like we named it. It definitely is, I mean, if we could just integrate. the Chulamani headquarters into that in some way? Yes, that would appreciate it. Yes, exactly. Rockstar, help us out.

But also the GTA 5 version was like just way bigger, better realized, way more real, like looks like a real mountain with like how it would be in real L.A. and it's accessible from the city. And for a while, that's all anybody knew about it. And because we were so excited about Mount Chilia

that we were frothed at the mouth, what else does the fandom do but turn the whole thing into a mean? which I have happily discovered immortalized here on the daily dot from all the way back in 2013 God save us but here you go have a look at the daily dots from what's in the shed memes but as you scroll through here and kind of tell the people what to see and actually just go ahead and let them know what you see so this is amazing because this is from 2013 which like Alex said we're like at the beginning right yeah so games not even out yeah yeah yeah um and they're saying

that on Reddit uh the site's biggest gaming community 3.3 million subscribers have been really interested in the shed. And it calls out the timestamps that Alex called out. And it also calls out like, oh, is that an aerial tramway? Or is that a safe house? Is it a place that you could go to? Yeah. And so, oh, my God. At one point, they're talking about perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they really broke this down. It's literally just a box on top of a mountain and they're doing like like point of view like like p ov based on the pov it's a shak facing a totally different direction not so the it's hard to it's hard to imagine if you are watching this or not watching this but if you're watching this imagine it looks like it's facing

this way but really it's facing this way like it's a totally different direction is what they're saying yeah based on the it's like literally like watching the odyssey from the first row Or when you look at, like, photos of the moon, right? And you see the moon and you're like, oh, that's a thing on the moon. But it's like, actually because of shadows this and this, it's nothing at all. It's actually like a weird-ass angle that you don't even know. Yeah. But yeah, if you click the link, listener in the description yourself and check out this dump of ancient primordial meme content with your own eyes,

eventually you may start to wonder, as Jesse and Mathis probably already have, just why people were so obsessed with the shed at the very top of Mount Chilliad. And as best as I understand it, it is because. on the PS2 version of Mount Chilliad, as the years went on and more and more people played that old game over and over, it became quite a common thing in certain circles that every once in a while, someone would convince themselves that they had in fact seen Bigfoot in the game just like... Just like Real Life. Somewhere out in the woods. Yeah, exactly. And what was so great about that, like Mathis said, is that if in the videos you get, nobody who's filming any of it really expects to be seeing Bigfoot, they're doing something else, you know, and Bigfoot,

surprises them in a way where the final footage really does come across in a similar way to like real big foot footage. So I tried to get a couple examples of this if you want to see. I'm just going to drop them all in. This first one is from a YouTuber called Yulaloub, who came across some big foot footage during a paranormal investigation he was conducting inside of San Andreas the game. This is another one where it's a guy, this is archival reposting of an unnamed YouTuber from 2013 who comes across a possible Bigfoot while flying around the mountain on a jetpack. This is all in the show notes if you want to look for it.

The funniest part is this, the one, the one that's the first video of Bigfoot GTA said Adrae is it looks like the same quality as the original Bigfoot video. Yeah. Yes. It's so funny. Because you're doing the analog to HD thing. It's like all shit. It's probably analog capture because it's 2013.

And then, yeah, this last one is from a small YouTuber I found Tyler Cole Davis, who just kind of goes over a couple types of Bigfoot hoax videos that you see out there, like the different mods and stuff that people use. And a few that he can't prove our mods also. So there's just a lot of examples. And it's just really funny because it really does look like fucking real Bigfoot footage. I'm so glad this video from 16 years ago has the Watermark created with non-activated version of ABS for you. That means it's real.

That's really shit, dude. Anyway, the reason the shed brought up the thought of Bigfoot for me was because, near Mount Chilliad on San Andreas, kind of off the beaten path from everything else. There was this sort of shed house cabin thing, which I think some people referred to as the shady cabin online. And actually there was another identical cabin like it from the one, like on one of the missions too that's actually on Mount Chilliad. And both of those cabins have the same kind of like mid-century look.

And they're both sort of like hot spots of places where this type of activity is centered. And obviously, you know, five years after. playing GTA starting to play GTA 5 I was the kind of guy to start this podcast with Mathis and Jesse and right away I was talking about parallel universes where the Beatles never broke up so you know my mystery senses were tingling about this thing

and I think I think a lot of other people looking at this shed on the top of the new Mount Chilliad in GTA we're thinking about the same kind of stuff right and apparently some others may have said that those people were just crazy and were scaring themselves with CJ's own footprints that they were finding again a little

later and hearing grail and mistaking CJ's hungry tummy grumbles for Bigfoot growls and then doing that thing where you go into the woods in real life and you get scared by everything you see because you're scared of being in the woods. But, you know, it takes all types. Even Rockstar themselves have flat out denied that any sort of Bigfoot was in the game, which is not usually the sort of thing that Rockstar does. And yet somehow, fictional or not, the video evidence is there online now. We just looked at it. Doesn't that blow anybody else's mind, even though it's fake? Anyway, I turned on the game and went to the shed as soon as I could day one.

And it took me a mission or two to get to the point where I could truly like roam free enough to get there, maybe an hour or two of gameplay stood in my way. And it really is kind of far away from anything you do in those early parts of the game. And it does take a while to find your way up because you got to drive through like, fake NorCal a little bit sort of to get there or something. But to my disappointment at first when I got there, it turned out to be like Jesse was saying, maybe just an aerial tramway station where I could like travel up and down

by a cable car to another station like down on the highway so it was a lot easier to get to the mountain which kind of just felt like shit I was just like well fuck is this just nothing however I'm not one to be so easily discouraged so I resolved to explore and enjoy the rewards of my journey

to the top of the mountain anyway started walking around a little and eventually I found an observation deck okay and first of all if you're listening to this and thinking about booting up your PlayStation to reinstall GTA 5 already. I would recommend trying to at least get to the top of Mount Chilliad before you lose interest in it again, especially on modern gen consoles and PCs because dude, it's actually crazy

this view. Like as a Los Angeles person, the manner in which a game like GTA 5 is able to like capture what this extremely huge and complicated city feels like from this angle is like, it should be studied. It's crazy. However, the real reason I'm telling you not to miss. it is because of what it says on the back, scratched into the wood like kids

used to do on tables at school. It's just a simple little message, but it implies a lot because it says come back when your story is complete. And here is a little picture of what it looked like that I got for you guys. You can see what I mean when I say it's a

secret message on the back of an observation platform. Yep. And I, yeah, and I saw this. Yeah, I saw this and it let me know that as crazy as I already felt investigating something so strange. The devs were right there with me, egging me on with a wink, telling me this is something. And, of course, even then, I knew exactly what they were trying to say. They were said, go away for now. GTA is a big game with lots of stuff to do. And that's the whole fucking

point of it anyway. So go and do literally all of that stuff. And when you come back, there will be something special here for you. And to be clear, the reason this is huge, and anyone with a, like, a little bit of brain power will be like, question, why would the developers choose in a trailer for a game to show the same location three times. Yeah, exactly. Everybody's like, do-do-do-do-do-d-do-do-d-d-d-d-d-d. And so following their directions, I turned to leave. But then as I walked away, I tilted the camera down and around a bit. And I noticed something that I didn't expect. And whatever it was, it looked like it was painted onto the ground with red spray paint, hidden where nobody would really think to look on a casual play-through. And here is a picture of what

talking about for you guys to look at in the show notes if you want but these guys will kind of describe it for you know anyway so here it is what would you say that is it looks like the mandolorean symbol yeah exactly to me uh at the time i thought it looked like a giant eyeball kind of sideways if you can see it yeah uh there was a trailhead and a base jumping spot nearby that was called old man's crack and at first you're doing this you'll you'll be able to see it much more clearly in a second uh but there was a trailhead and base jumping spot spot nearby called Old Man's Crack. And at first, I thought this was just a joke telling me to look up my own ass for more shit

to do once I did everything else in the game. But it got me into kind of like a mysterious and exciting mood and the world around me in the game was starting to feel really interesting and like filled with like secrets and information and stuff. Sure. And so when I walked into the tram station and I saw what was painted on the wall there, the secret puzzle ARG lover person within me almost died. So here. Here it is. Here's the mural and you tell the people what you see. Okay.

It looks like I'm, I'm assuming maybe Mount Chilliad because it's like a mountain and at the very top there's a square cube above it. Basically, imagine the symbol Alex showed us earlier that we could barely see was in fact an eye looking thing. A red, very similar. And then this image is of a box on the top of a mountain, but from the sun. side profile and then a secret, what appears to be, underground facility. Yeah, exactly. Like through the box, maybe it leads to an underground at the very bottom of that. There's three pictures. An egg, a UFO, some sort of devil looking thing. The jetpack man.

Yeah, weird little shits down there, like a lot of secret rooms. Imagine when you look at like the side profile of a pyramid. Yeah. It's absolutely crazy. It's Mount Chilliad, roughly down on 2D. The way it's set up, it kind of looks like a. side view of the mountain, possibly several of the trails that run along the mountain surface, kind of like a cross between circuits and tree branches, kind of right angles.

Most of the trails end in a five, like there's five endpoints that are marked with small boxes that each have a red X inside. And near the bottom, some of the trails lead to or maybe start at the three larger boxes that they're talking about, which are all in a row across the bottom, which like they said, the first one has a sort of simple UFO. in it, which might be the same thing that's at the top of the image. The middle one has like a hatching egg in the middle, and the one on the right has like a jetpack man.

It's like a man, like a stick figure man with a jetpack and key, the one with the UFO on the left and the one with the jetpack man on the right are connected by a line underneath. But the one in the middle is not connected to them. The egg is alone and goes straight up only. Also, all around the outside of the mountain is a field of jagged. childlike thunderbolts, like cartoonish ones, like the one on Captain Marvel's chess, like Shazam, Shazam, Captain Marvel. And most excitingly, right at the top was another drawing of the quote, unquote,

I, that I saw painted under the observation deck, and which I now felt probably looked a little bit more like a UFO with little lines drawn emanating from it like it's glowing, right? Actually, for this one, if you can, you might want to peep the show notes. Now that I'm hearing myself talk about it this much, just have a look at the picture. Imagine an eye, like a child's drawing of an eye with a line through it. Yeah, exactly. It has like almost like it's floating in the water.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just listening to myself. Sounds crazy what I'm saying, but honestly the picture. Yeah. When you look at it, it's very obvious. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, I thought I knew a treasure map when I saw one. There it was. So now we are off to the races, baby. At first, I thought it was actually a drawing of something that was down inside the mountain, like, like you were saying, like a network of tunnels or something like that. And so I started looking I started looking around on the mountain for like holes and like hatches and shit

which feels exactly like something that you would find in the middle of the fucking brush hills somewhere in real L.A., like just some dirty ass drain or some shit in the middle of a field. That's so L.A. Just some random pipe you get in and you pop out in Burbank or some shit. But I wasn't finding anything like that. So eventually I gave up on it. And slowly, instead of walking away, again,

I slowed down and somehow I swear to God I simultaneously smoked wheat in my room and pondered the mysterious mysteries of Mount Chilliad at Old Man's Crack at the same time somehow. But slowly but surely things started to emerge. And I began to wonder what direction I was supposed to be looking at the mountain from in the mural. I was looking at the thing and I'm like, okay, so this is from a direction, right? So I headed out into the desert with my fake weird wooden station wagon with the vintage white top. I cranked up Rebel Radio because I liked the country music. And I drove around and got out and looked around at Mount Chilliad and drove around and got out and looked at Mount Chilliad and just did that over and over until finally that motherfucker sort of lined up.

And that's when I started thinking that maybe the lines on the murals were trails like I was saying. And the X's were like X marks the spot at different points on the mountain from this angle. Right? Yeah, yeah. I think you were saying. And so I started checking it out on foot and by helicopter. and by blimp and shit and flying around and trying to see if I could find anything in the X's.

And sure enough, I think I was pretty much right. So now, obviously at the time I was just stone playing PS3 in my room at my desk. So I wasn't equipped to document my findings. But here's some pictures that other people took later of what I found at these spots with the mural there as a nice visual aid so you can explain what you're seeing to the people. It's kind of interesting.

I think I just posted that twice. Maybe not. Okay. I think I did. So on the mountain at different points are, so ignoring, the way the best we describe it is, if you imagine a pyramid, right? The very, very top of the pyramid would be the box, which is the shack, and above that is the eye, right? And then as you go down the pyramid of this mountain, at the very, very bottom, the base is the UFO and the jetpack thing and the dinosaur egg. But along the way are five X's.

and those five Xs are what Alex is showing us in this image, which are one is like the eye with the line through it and a cloud. All of them feature, all of them feature the eye with a line. Yes, but one is like a moon. One is like a guy climbing, I guess maybe. And then there are two that just appear to be the eye by themselves. Yeah.

What it what is popularly appears to be is an eye above like a rain cloud. You can see a little rain coming out of the cloud. There's an eye over like a moon. And then there's an eye over like basically a small drawing of what I believe to be Mount Chilliad again, just like a trail leading up to the top of the triangle. And you'll see why I think that in a minute. But those are the five symbols. They are really there.

You can go look at them. and they are there on the mountain and I did see them and it was crazy. I felt fucking amazing doing this shit, by the way. And now... Indiana Jones style. Yeah, like I fucking... This was like one of the greatest things I ever did. And now that the day was done and my brain was hurting from over-analyzing something,

which in retrospect actually seemed quite straightforward, I took a shit and went on Reddit on my phone and immediately Googled the GTA-5 Mount Chilliad and just disappeared for days. Basically, all of the most... extremely cool people out there and many, many extremely mean and self-obsessed assholes, now truly believing in a larger structured mystery hiding within the game, started going back over things with like a newly enlightened eye as they were playing through the story again, getting the gold medals on the missions, 100% in the game.

And within like fucking days of the game coming out, they began discovering some of the real genuine strangeness, which the seemingly endless map of GTA5 has to offer. to the average mystery enjoyer. And after clues from the Mount Chilliad mural and what was at the X's, especially in those early days, the big thing going on that was literally everybody's first theory was aliens, right? But the crazy thing was, even though when you play through it normally, this game is 100% earnestly, just like a really good, well-written tale of three awful and very different hosts,

I mean people, sorry, discovering themselves and growing through friendship and shared experience, the alien thing was actually totally justified, right? Here's what I mean. First things first. Back on the East Coast, if you know the story, you know that Michael and Trevor go back away and they're like career thieves. So the prologue is like the botched job back in North Yankton, which is basically New Jersey, where the prologue of the game and the later mission, Barry the Hatchet take place at the same heist.

And at one point while driving, you can. go off the main road down towards an icy riverbank, which passes under a nearby bridge. And when you do that, and you go down and you look close enough, you see this. What do you see? Something frozen in ice? Is that like an alien in ice? Yeah, there's like an alien body frozen in the ice in North Yankton in the very first mission of the game and in the flashback of it with Trevor.

Also, once you get access to the little like mini sub guy that you use to do, do the ship heist. You can pretty easily visit this sunken UFO off the coast of the area known as Polito Bay. Here is a good video of a typical gamer YouTuber. I'm just kidding. His name is typical gamer. Finding it almost immediately in this video,

feel free to mute it before you have a look. And I don't even feel bad because he has 16 million subs. And I'm not talking about mini subs, okay? Yep. Within five seconds, this is a saucer under the water. Huge giant, like, cartoon-looking, what you would imagine a UFO looks like, crashed into the ocean.

Also, directly across the desert from Mount Chilliad, which is kind of like a Joshua Tree, sort of Salton Sea, sort of vibe of a desert, directly across from Mount Chiliet, almost to the point that it makes like a tiny mirror image of it is the Beam Me Up art installation, which isn't really much more than some kind of hippie camp with regard to what it is for the game world.

But just look at a few pictures of it here and tell the people what you see. I'm going to just start dropping them in the chat for you here. Just start throwing them down. You can see. Yeah, it's just like on the ground painted like a little park area. It has some gray alien heads. It's like a saucer shaped as like a little saucer car. What is that?

Yeah. Yeah, there's like somebody trans, like put a saucer on the truck. Yeah. truck. It's like, you know, like some people have like broken down cars. They're like cover them and paint and shit and put them by the side of the road and do whatever. It's basically covered in UFO imagery, complete with UFOs and alien heads. And even the code, the numerical code you can see in that last one in that last link very clearly. It's the code from the wow signal. Yeah. Yeah. On the hillside, which is a very famous like alien piece of lore in real life.

We talked about it on the show. Yeah. Also, there's, suggestive alien graffiti everywhere. Aliens kind of looking like they're butt-fucking each other. And a strange, like, non-repeating alien symbol pattern that could be moon phases, maybe, or some sort of language. You guys see that?

Loves alien secrets in all their games. Every one of them. There's always an alien secret. Did you, do you see the, like, little language, right? Yeah, yeah, the little circles and lines with circles and stuff. Yeah. Also, that tree there kind of looks like the branching paths on the Mount Chilliad mural and there may be a scale model of the of the like a 3D model of the actual five boxes also

on this site in the museum portion if you've ever been to the real one but uh probably most important of all it also contains two of the glyphs that i also found on mount chilead in the boxes which you can see here and here which is kind of interesting right because it's sort of like a tiny analog of the big mountain if you want to think about it that way sure yeah i the moon. Or it is connected in that that's the location. If you go to the bigger map, it really is. No, it literally is that. Yeah, exactly.

And also, this place is based off a real life, crazy real life art installation in the deserts of Southern California called Salvation Mountain, which is less alieny and more Jesusy. But it's equally weird. And my wife and I went there with some friends somewhat recently in case you want to look at some pictures and see just how it can you is. Here is a link to my Instagram that you will see in the show notes.

It is fucking surreal this place. Like this does not look like a real place. Look at that shit. Yeah, love is universal. The Holy Bible. Kind of looks like the alien place in the game. It looks like you're walking in a cartoon. It is weird. It's fucking weird. Like

the dude made it by putting bales of hay and then just pouring layers and layers of paint over it. Isn't that crazy? It's also probably worth mentioning that nearby along a dirt road leading to the U-Tool store in Grand Sonora Desert, there is a concrete structure that is painted similarly to beam me up, and which includes a red arrow on top that points to be me up. So I'll give you a photo of that here really quick so you can see what I'm talking about. It's like a little mini version that's like, you want some more of this alien shit? Go over there.

Yep. But also at the base of that concrete structure. at the base of that concrete structure, scratched into the sand is the third glyph for Mount Chilliad surrounded by a couple extra little letters and stuff. Let the people know what I'm saying here.

This is why I think that other one is Mount Chilliad. You see this? This is that glyph much better. This is straight ripped from the game, this texture, so you can see it. That's letters like, O-E-A-U-J-S. Yeah, that's the wow signal again.

Yeah. Not sure what the strange like bar graph shape is on the left. I don't know what that is. There's like a weird sort of like jagged symbol on the left that means nothing to be. Yeah, it looks, it looks literally like the stocks going up on a graph. But right now, what do you guys think those various glyphs mean?

Like, do you guys already know what they mean? Or what do you guys think those glyphs mean? I mean, we keep seeing the moon over and over again. The moon and the rain cloud and the thing on the mountain. I would imagine it's time of day weather in game. Yeah. Yeah, if you're looking for a secret nighttime weather. The third one was what?

It's like on top of the mountain at the top of the top. Maybe it's trying to like low, like telling you where to be. Like yeah, like at a certain time. So you're saying like go at night, go when it's raining. Go to the top of the mountain. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably the most logical.

Interesting. Go on. So like video game wise, what else could you really interact with in a game other than like in like it needs to make sense in terms. of what you're able to do. Right, exactly. Oh, and before we move on, one last thing that's pretty crazy about this place. Speaking of red arrows, if you go back to look at the wide shot of BeMe Up, the first one that I sent you, can you see that red arrow that's like pointing to the staircase right in the

front? It's like pretty big cartoonish red arrow. Do you see that? Which, what is this? If you look at the big picture of Beem Me Up, it's like the very first one that I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of like a big snake and arrow there. So if you, and you know how I said it's like a mirror of Mounted.

Chilead this place. So if you mirror the entire place on itself right there at that red arrow, this happens. Huh. What do you think? If you mirror it on itself, it just makes an alien face.

Does it look legit? Do you think that's real? You think that's peridelia or do you think that's real? If that's paradiglia, that is uh, pretty coincidentally coincidental to be parodelia. You, you're doing stuff intentionally when you're

game devving. So there's clearly something. Yeah, you are, but then you know what I mean? You got to forget. But yeah, anyway, that's beat me up. But alien glyph stuff isn't quite over yet, because next we're going to talk about the altruists camp for a minute. Just to give you a kind of idea of who the altruists are and why they need a camp, here's a quote from their manifesto for Jesse to read, which was translated from the original in Morse code on their website.

Ready? Oh, boy. One can not complain about the decay of traditional values yet embrace technology. A man as an individual working with an autonomous group of individuals, all of whom are naked in spirit and in the cloth remains healthy to himself and others. Sub-40s only exist as subsistence to the altruistic man and gains life from consuming them ban clothes ban lies ban youth ban deceit eat of the flesh drink of the blood because we know altruism the greatest good for all the greatest generation we shall boom again yeah so you get who the altruists are uh but uh nothing here directly connects them to UFO and aliens and admittedly they seem more sun related and I related specifically,

not to mention whoever the quote unquote he is in this quote, but these strange glyphs that are seen all over their camp, and they look too similar to the ones from Mount Chilliad and the hippie camp to not be related in some way. And I think that what you're talking about with the weather might be exactly what that is. But I'm going to drop a couple of these here around so you can see them, just because there's some seriously interesting stuff here.

Right? It's similar. It looks like it's by the same. artist or something if you know what I mean. It's like a sun over the ocean on that first one? Yeah, yeah, it's like you can see them

much more clearly in the later in the later images. They're like textures. You can see them. He has risen, see the eye, praise him, we are his children. Like who's him? I don't know.

What are they talking about? The sun, the god, whatever, I don't know. And this is ripped stuff from the game? Like, is it in the game? Yeah, if you look in the first couple images, they're like in the in the caves and on the walls of the of the place. But these are just the glyphs themselves taken from the from the files. So you can see them clearly.

Some people have reported seeing some type of eye weather phenomenon in the sky here with the correct weather. But I'm not convinced it isn't just some graphical anomaly based on the accounts. And there isn't a killer video of this phenomenon that has actually been filming. at the Altruist camp. So I'm just going to show you some footage of what I believe to be the same thing at our final alien-related location, which is the Galileo Observatory. Now, obviously, observatory, space, space, aliens, blah, blah, blah. But even more controversially, the reason I mentioned the Galileo Observatory,

which, by the way, is completely based off the Griffith Observatory in L.A., which did in fact exist before La La Land. And basically, I've given it away a bit already, but there's many, many theories out there involving the phases of the moon and eclipses and weathers and somebody's eyes, which may or may not be in the sky. And basically, it all has to do with the fact that much like the astronomer's monument at the Griffith Observatory in real life, there is a large tower and sundial in the center of the lawn, which even in real life, has a shape on top, which is almost unmistakably similar

once again to the UFO symbol above Mount Chilliad. So here it is in real life first. So just so you can see that I'm not bullshitting. You can like see this symbol and go, oh, there is the symbol from the Grand Theft Auto game there at the top of that thing. I see it. Where am I looking? Yeah, that's astronomers monument. Right in the middle. There's a monument at the very top. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Sure. So that's on the real Griffith Observer. It feel like that's more of like an optical thing from our angle. Well, here you go. Here it is at the Galileo Observatory in GTA 5, which really looks pretty similar.

Almost fucking identical of a place to the casual observer. And you can see how, based on the picture, that the sun's movements through the sky will move this symbol around in a circle, right? You can see how it's going to do that. It's going to cast a shadow and go around in a circle. Of course, this is the only one way people have used the observatory. in their theories, right? For a while, I was into an idea where people were lining up

the three big boxes on the Chilliad mural with the three domes of the observatory with the eye on the tower in the middle as the eye on the top of the mural, right? Kind of makes sense, right? It's good times. None of it has ever really gone anywhere

definitive, by the way, according to the fandom, just in case you were curious, here some picks of the dome theory for the lulls, if you want to look at them in the show notes later. I'm going to show you guys if you want to see the dome theory.

You get it. You get what's going on here. you look at it, you see it, you go, oh yeah, there's something to this. There's something to this. Yeah, I could see that. I can see there'll be something maybe. Kind of lines up, right? Kind of.

It's a little too wide at the bottom right. Right. I don't, yeah, I, I, it only captured me briefly, but there is a lot of people who think about the observatory when it comes to these mysteries. And anyway, here's that similar eclipse-like event to the one at the altruist camp at Galileo. Apparently, it involves stormy weather. Whoops. Apparently it involves stormy weather at just before full sunset.

But there's been conflicting accounts. Here's one of the clips of it that got everybody talking about whether this was possible or whether it was real or whether it was just part of the game that wasn't meant to be an event that some people just see. But you can just kind of see this is like a picture. This is I think it's Trevor and he goes up to the observatory. And you can kind of like, he goes and he stands on the top of one of the domes of the observatory and he looks in the sky. And he can see this like sort of weird, almost like eye vagina, eyeball, sun vagina eye thing open in the sky. and look at him and just sort of open and then it like goes away right it's like around 30 seconds or so yeah I'm watching that kind of grows it rotates a little bit looks kind of interesting and kind of just kind of

rotates and then it starts closing up so I don't know if that's like something that's like part of this mystery or if that's just something that happens in the weather in this game or something like that but yeah and so now you have a pretty good idea of what kind of UFO theories there are out there and good old Los Santos that I have to do with the Mount Chilliad mystery. But this alien stuff barely even made up half of what was out there to find, right? Completely outside of the main story, by the way. If only you should think to look. And as time went on, people started finding tons of mysterious non-alien shit too,

which, by the way, what I'm about to get into is like the tip of a giant iceberg. And I'm only picking specific ones because they're going to be relevant later. It's in no way comprehensive. We would be here literally all night. I tried to be comprehensive with this. This is just big stuff that I think may connect, or at least contain elements of some of the game's less obvious plots. Thank you to Mint Mobile for sponsoring today's episode.

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Includes up to 20 gig hotspot, capable device required, availability, speed, and coverage. Various cementmobile.com for more details. So first, along the northeast coast of San Andreas, near the smallest of its three peaks, Mount Gordo, you can find a specific rock near the edge of a cliff, which is overlooking sort of like a campsite below, which most of the time just looks like this.

This is what this rock looks like almost all the time. It's just sort of a basic rock, right? Kind of flat. You're looking over a camp. However, between the hours of 11 p.m. and midnight in game, if you return to that spot, a strange sort of like bizarre 2D ghost appears and can be seen floating there,

which disappears when you get close. But even if you get close, while the ghost is there, it leaves behind bloody letters that spell out the word jock. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. Here is a picture of the ghost. Doesn't even look like it's from GGA, but it's real.

And you can see the bloody letters down there. Wow, that's so weird. And you can see the bloody letters down there in that picture, but they're a little bit clearer here. You can see it says jock very clearly. Or I guess jock, yeah, or Jack, but jock, sure. Yeah, that's true. Also, if you go down into the camp and look at it from the bottom,

the ghost seems to kind of glow, which you can see in this picture, which is kind of interesting. And from time to time near the camp at night, you can even hear her ghostly screams and whispers when she appears. And you can hear those at about a minute and 15 seconds in this video here, which is kind of interesting. It's like a straight up real ghost inside of GTA 5. Here is Mathis, by the way, with a quote from the March 15th, 1978 edition of the Signora Beacon, which is a local newspaper from the area that was around at the time.

So here's a quote from Mathis about this death. Tragedy at the cliffs. It was an accident, claims heartbroken husband. A young husband was made a widower yesterday in an incident at the cliffs in eastern Blaine County. John Jock Cranley, 26 and his wife, Jolene Cranley Evans, 22, were walking by the cliffs overlooking the El Gordo Lighthouse when a dispute ended in Mrs. Cranley Evans falling to her death. Mr. Cranley and his wife, both of Sandy Shores, had. been known to be having troubles in their marriage. Mr. Cranley apparently wanted to leave Blaine

County and moved down to Los Santos to pursue dreams of becoming a stuntman while his wife was keen to stay to help look after her ailing parents and run their thriving guest house. Mr. Cranley told reporters outside the police station where he had been released without charge, quote, I'm heartbroken. I loved my wife. I would never throw her off a cliff despite her desire to destroy my dreams of success and happiness. I will miss her always and dedicate my career. to her memory. His wife's father, Jeb Evans, called for police to open a proper

investigation. We will stay with the story. And it's funny because Jock Cranley in the game, who's like an older guy now, is like sort of like a MAGA candidate who like comes on the radio and talks. And so this is like not only a ghost story in the world of GTA, but it's

also his like political scandal and like weird dark political history, like sort of woven to the world of the game. It's pretty interesting. Also, in addition to this clear murder, there also seems to be some sort of serial killer that was or is on the loose in San Andreas, who's often popularly known as the Infinity Killer, thanks to the familiar sideways eight, he seems to be compulsively painting all over town. So here's an example of a trash can with an eight on it, just to see how sly it can be. little eight trash can. And I think a lot of these trash cans were in the PS3 version and then disappeared.

I'm not sure about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's like a weird little like, yeah, eight, I guess, almost very runic looking. And here is some more aggressive graffiti, which once you, like, go look around more in sandy shores, you can find this on the back of a building. and this one you can see what you can try and see what it says there. Basically in this one you can kind of make out the name Merle Abraham, which is a key part of the serial killer mystery.

It says, go away Merle Abraham. You're a wronging. And there's a bunch of eights everywhere. Two, three, four, five, yes, six eights. And if you investigate this building further, you find out that this building was actually Merle Abraham's old burnt out house, which again is often Sandy. shores, which is kind of like I said, the weird salt and sea, like slab city desert nearby,

where I went to visit Salvation Mountain in real life. It's kind of low-key, scary and artsy at the same time. And there's also like meth labs. And it seemed like however this house burned down, maybe it was intentional, right? And inside, you find kind of a warning, uh, which looks like this. You can tell everybody what it says. It's kind of interesting. There will be eight. Oh, and then there were six before. So maybe there were six eights. So there's two MERS left. Yeah, something like that, right? And anyway, nearby this house and pretty close to the Be Me Up installation, actually, is a scary nursery rhyme, which seems to sort of lay out the murderer's ammo a little bit

in which Jesse is going to read for us now. It's kind of weird. It's starting to get kind of narrative in here. One is done. Two was fun. Three tried to run. Four called mom. Five's not alive.

six is Knicks Seven's in heaven Eight won't wait And then a little further south On some more rocks You will then get this message Which Mathis will read for us now They want me they can have

But they'll never get my people Even though I shall leave them Sign enough where they put me Exactly So What the fuck I leave sign enough I leave them sign enough Where they put me

Now where they put me Now, where they put me slightly seems to conjure up imagery of a prison, right? And there is a prison in this game, the bowling broke penitentiary, which is also fairly close by. And if you look around there a bit, sure enough, you get another graffiti, which Jesse will read for us now on the trail of this serial killer. Where water meets land and fire once pewed forth, there the infinite eight shall stay until I return.

Exactly. So now, if you look in the bottom right corner there of that image, you see a small scribble, which I then realized I had already been seeing all over Merle's house without realizing it, thinking it was just some random scribble. But it turns out the shape actually matches a stretch of shore just north of Mount Chilliad, where the flame meets the sea or whatever the fuck he said. And if you go there and start diving off the coast, fairly close to the crash UFO, eventually. you'll find these and you're going to have to scroll down a little bit on this page to see them. But what you're going to find are eight women's corpses, all wrapped in plastic and weighted down to rest on the seafloor. Wow. You can see them all in the image gallery. Yep. Yeah. However, the strange thing is, just a few blocks away from Merle's house and Sandy Shores on the corner of Algonquin and panorama is another burnt out house.

This one in a far worse state. But oddly, this one has a clipping from the 2004 edition of the Sonora Beacon hung up on one of the last support beam standing, which Mathis will read for you now, which kind of confuses things a little bit. Suspected killer, Merle Abrams, dies in prison. Merle Abrams, the suspected infinity killer, passed away last night in a bowling broke penitentiary while awaiting trial for abduction and torture. Abrams 57 was suspected to be responsible for the infinity murders, a series of disappearances that happened. and five years ago. Police believed the eight victims who were all a single young, police believe the eight victims who were all single young men killed while jogging,

were all murdered by the same person and had circumstantial evidence linking Mr. Abrams to the victims. No bodies were ever found, and Abrams never confessed, although he did admit to a weird obsession with the number eight. Right. Now, clearly if you use,

especially if you use mods or like director mode or whatever, you can see that the victims that you find in the water, are women when this article clearly says they were eight male joggers that's weird thing number one and weird thing number two who wrote go away merle abrams you're a wrong and still used all the eight imagery right like maybe all those so my immediate guesses maybe merle was a copycat killer right like maybe those bodies down there which would be way rotted by 2013 when this game takes place if they were all killed five years before 2004 in 1999 maybe these new bodies are the copycat bodies and Merle died, you know, 11 years ago.

Who knows? Either way, I am not sure we have the whole story with this one, and I feel kind of like a detective fly that's caught in some much smarter serial killers web when I think about it. But anyway, speaking of webs, here's another absolutely insane. And as far as I can tell, fully unsolved puzzler, which I probably wouldn't have even put on this list of a similar mystery, hadn't just recently resurfaced in Red Dead Red Dead Redemption. too. But between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. in game at two key places on Mount Chilliad, players can find strange-looking spider webs, which seem to contain more than we as a community have figured out so far.

The first one is attached to a steel beam under a platform at the Mount Chilliad cable car station. That spider web looks like this and is made from like cable in the game that is like in a shape so that it's hard to find it in the game files. Okay, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So that's the first one. The second one is under a wooden bridge near the highway north of the peak, practically

on the border of Mount Gordo and Mount Chilliad regions. And it looks like this with what I might call a conspicuous, like, black widow or like keyhole design if you can see that. This is the other spider web. This one looks very much like something in a specific shape.

Yeah. Yeah. Most people think these probably line up with specific areas on the map, like from above. But people have also found a similar spider web design in the doors of Galileo Observatory. But I think the design of that, the spider web design there, is pretty much identical to the real Griffith Observatory doors. So who knows? I will let you guys be the judge on that. Have a look at this. This is the in-game doors, I think, where you can see the symbols.

You can see the spider web symbols on the middle doors, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, the top of them. Yeah. Yeah. And then here's the real life version of the doors, which is why I don't give too much credence to this. They look almost fucking exactly the same. Oh, it's the same symbol. Yeah. So I feel like they just took that straight out of there and maybe that doesn't have anything to do within it.

Anyway, the last really crazy thing I'm going to bring up comes into the equation now because while it may be directly related to the Mount Chilliad mystery, it's also sort of an origin point for another. sort of gameplay based theory. So let's get into it all at once. And things will slowly become clear as we go. Firstly, look at the chili ad mural again. But this time, focus specifically on that big hatching egg in the box center down at the bottom. I give you the link again there. Okay.

So you got the chili ad mural up and you're looking at the egg? Okay. Now have a look at this giant mural from the game, which you can find near Mission Row in downtown Los Santos, okay? See that? I mean, yes. Yeah, it looks kind of like a cracked egg from a certain point of view, right? So now, you know, it's not really an egg. It's really like arms sort of like reaching up like this, sort of like making an egg in the middle and there's like energy coming up through the middle. But to me, it's suggestive enough of an egg that people are connecting it to this. And now let's have Jesse read the message around the outside, which I have co-related a little

bit here so you can read it more clearly. For when the great scorer comes to write against your name, he marks not that you won, but how you played the game. Right. So even just with this, you can imagine how just like in many giant video game treasure hunts, eventually the idea of a technically perfect game arises. Oh boy. And a canon order of events happens where every character does everything at the right time and makes all the appropriate choices so that not only you get 100%, but every radio update that happens between missions, every mission dialogue. Wait, that's what people took away. They didn't take away.

Yeah, that's crazy. Like, pay attention to traffic laws. Don't get caught up. Like, they didn't take, because it's, to me, it seems one of those like God things where it's, you know, it isn't if you want or lost, but it's, it's, if you were a good person along the way. Right. But how can you be a good person in this game?

Sometimes you have to kill people. Like, I don't know. It's great question. Yeah, but, but yeah, it's, there's no, nobody like, went anywhere. with this. But yeah, the big sort of theory that people talk about is like the golden playthrough, right, where you don't only get 100%, but like I say, every

radio update, every mission dialogue that happens, every website, every social media update that happens in the game, it all makes sense with the course that you do. That's the thing that people are saying. They try to figure out the whole complex interweaving of it in a perfect pattern like the

sacred timeline. Nobody has achieved this. But also, the pattern in the background of the mural does kind of look like the branching patterns on the Mount Chilliad mural, right? Like, if you don't know what I'm talking about, like, look at this gif. Look at this gift right here that people made. Yeah, you can see, it's like very sort of like, there's something else going on there in the back that you can see.

And also, around the, the disc in the middle, that the energy or the cracks of the egg or whatever. Yeah, I'm trying to figure it out. I think I figured out what it says. It says something like, it says if you can't stand. And if you can't stay in the fire, stay out of the kitchen. With men, all are possible. With women, all things are impossible.

Which I don't know how that means anything. And then with like the, the, with GTA 5 in particular. But if you, yeah, I don't know exactly what it means. If you, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Yeah, I don't know. It's something like that, but it's purposefully obscured. Like you can't actually see what it says. also putting some righteous suspicion on this mural is the classic treasure hunt book masquerade

which when solved if you know this book eventually led players to a real life buried treasure in a form of a small gold rabbit all the rich kids had this book because they could afford to go out just buy books for the sake of finding goofy stuff in it yeah so here's a page from it so you can see what i mean how this calls to mind masquerade if you can imagine how they look similar They both kind of have the same sort of like word frame around it and some more intricate things. And they all all of the drawings in Masquerade kind of have the same sort of set up, right? Yep. As you can see, calendar imagery, similar message around the border.

But in this book, The Solve for Masquerade involved following the gaze of the character's left eyes and left hands to point its specific letters around the outside, right? Which doesn't quite work here. And also this mural is clearly based on one from L.A., which isn't around anymore, but which used to be on Broadway downtown, which looked like this. So maybe the masquerade thing is just a coincidence, but I don't think so because the original doesn't have the border. But have a look. You can clearly see that this mural that used to be here down on Broadway. Sure, sure. Is clearly the same.

It's coming from the same place. Yeah. But then again, maybe it's not. And maybe someday when you're investigating this yourself at this. point, you'll start drawing lines between everything. And suddenly, back in front of the observatory, watching fake days fast, much faster than real ones, as you think about suns and moons and days of the week and eclipses and giant eyeballs in the sky. And maybe like you, maybe like me, you decide to go for a swim and find one last thing I forgot to mention, except earlier when I said I was looking for

one, a mysterious hatch leading to nowhere, right? Obviously, I didn't expect to find one where I did at the bottom of the sea. And as a huge fan of lost, when I got close and it started making Morse code noises, I absolutely lost my shit. Here is a picture of the hatch that I found under the ocean.

Except once I went online to see if anybody translated the Morse code, I immediately found my shit and started laughing like the Joker because actually it translates to this, which I'll have Mathis Reed for us now, which some of you may already recognize. Hey, you never call.

How'd you fancy going, bowling. Ha, ha ha. cousin, do you want to go bowling? Yes, it's, it's, it's, uh, Roman, uh, cousin Roman from GTA4, who was famously annoying for, for texting you about going bowling. So anyway, this was the main stuff people were freaking out about for the first few months or so.

And like I said, there's a much more, but I only got one episode to get it all in. So now let's talk about what happened when Rockstar started updating the game. Okay. So first things first, in the first, GTA online content update from November, 2013 beach bums, Bigfoot and the crashed UFO both showed up immediately in some new paint jobs that became available

for vehicles. So you can see that a big part of GT-Online is trolling people who know about this mystery. It's like a huge tradition. You can see them. Look at that fucking mountain that is Bigfoot. Fuck that. Look at that fucking crashed UFO there in the fucking corner. It's dirty.

It's dirty. Next, about a year later, the next gen update came along for when it came out on PS4 and stuff. And we got the Pickett Fence trailer, which goes like this. And seemingly just seems to be showing off some of the games weird or shit and taunting people into trying to find the hidden truth. It's only like a minute long. So I'm just going to say watch it right now. Here you go.

Just see it. It's literally just like, you know, every mystery that I'm talking about in a trailer. Oh, yeah. Literally, I think at one point of guys like, find the truth, man. Yep. That's a flashback. Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to this, the government satellite dish array in the desert was updated to glow green and red, which it did not do on PlayStation 3. So now it looked like this. Nothing really super significant about that, but it's there.

Probably, most importantly, 27 findable peyote plants were added to the game, including a golden one, which seemed to be able to, like, warg players into various animals found in the game. So if you found any of these 27 peyotes, you could like take it and you like warg into an animal. Very like a seagull or a dog or something like that. And the internet was kind of going crazy over it, trying to figure out if there was anything deeper to it. And here's a video with a bunch of footage of these animals in it. So you can see how weird it is to play GTA as like a bird or a dog or whatever. It's kind of funny. I've seen so many of these videos before.

Really fucking interesting. Another one that you just might want to mute right away. Yeah. I like the cut. I like the cut scenes of everybody like, eating the like getting down and eating the peathe is very funny yeah eventually all this new excitement and mystery finally got me to pick up the game again and actually play it myself to 100 which actually is not as bad as it sounds since the 100% tracker is in game and doesn't actually

require you to do every last thing you possibly can it's just like there's like 60 of this do 14 of it like there's 50 of these do 30 of them it's like stuff like that when you do this however even though all your missions are complete and it shows 100% completion in the menu, after a while, one last mission shows up on Mount Chilliad called The Last One. And in it are many references

to not just the fake Bigfoot on Mount Chilliad on PS2, but also to the very real bigfoot's encountered by John Marston in Rockstar's other big open world series Red Dead Redemption as part of the first games Undead Nightmare D.L. Where Marston sort of famously wipes out all the remaining Bigfoots

until he discovers the one who says he's the last of his kind and Bigfoot's didn't deserve to die before putting his life in John's hands John's hands for better or worse and he's like, shoot me human. Shoot me. I'm the last of my kind. It's like that kind of thing. So that's what happens in Red Dead Redemption.

But in this mission in GTA 5, you're Franklin, the character most similar to CJ from the PS2 San Andreas, which I think is the point. And you do indeed chase down the last Bigfoot on Mount chili at you meet a hunter who looks exactly like the hunter from red dead redemption uh he's chasing the big foot he shoots a man just dead ass shoots a man with his rifle during the cut scene he's like i swear

you're a bigfoot but the problem is this entire cutscene just ends up being kind of like a problematic furry joke um so here's the clip of the final show done if you like to see it it doesn't end up it's not a guy it's not a it's not a big foot it's a guy in a suit and he barks like a dog and it's really weird and he's like, I like having sex while dressing up as animals and all this stuff. It's fucking crazy. And you can kill him or you don't have to kill him or whatever you want to do. And it's really weird. And the barking like a dog that this guy does, it's like photo real barking like a dog.

And it does kind of refer back to a moment earlier in the game during Strangers and Freaks mission risk assessment where Franklin follows a dog whose barks he can understand like English through the wilderness to rescue a lost skydiver who then, doesn't know about any dog when when Franklin gets to him and then he turns around and the dog's like gone, you know, but who knows? I'll leave that one to the video essays because I don't know. And now, as far as I was concerned, my story was complete and it was time for me to return to the station platform like it said, right? So, of course, there was nothing there when I arrived, but following the instructions, faster players had now left for me on the internet, I returned back

to the glyphs I had found and saw that the one with the moon meant come at night, like you guys said. And the one with the clouds meant come while it's raining, which I combined with the glyph at the, and of the eye the top of the path and the lightning bolts to actually mean altogether come to the top of the mountain during a thunderstorm at night. Right. And eventually, after much trial and error, I did exactly that. And at 3 a.m. standing on the platform, here is a recreation of what I saw. A UFO. Bang. A UFO. Exactly. though oddly it kind of feels holographic when you finally see it in person which is weird and if you wait there and look at it until morning and it's daylight even more strangely

it seems to have the letters f ib rotating around on the top which is like the fbi it's like the in game it's like the in game version the fbi which is really weird not exactly sure what that's meant to imply unless it means that the whole thing's actually a government sciop but i guess keep that in mind i guess keep that in mind yeah exactly no word yet on exactly what people have agreed on as the meaning of the hatching egg in the mural. Yeah, it was not to do with anything. Yeah. Other than the things we've already discussed and the fact that the crack kind of looks like the path in that one glyph with the wow signal on it.

But some people did eventually decide the jetpack symbol and the UFO symbol meant that there may be other UFOs to find at this point somewhere near the top of the skybox. Like you might need a jet pack to reach. Oh, okay. And amazingly, they were right about this. These two other UFOs do require 100% completion, but do not require specific weather or time of day. And unlike the more holographic ethereal Mount Chilliad UFO, these both seem to truly solidly exist in the world and will even shut down your aircraft or push you away with a force field if you get too close. The first one looks exactly like the one at Mount Chilliad, complete with FIB markings and can be seen very clearly in this screenshot. it is directly, and I mean directly above the hippie camp,

which is kind of an interesting parallel, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Yep. So you can see this one. That clearly means it belongs to the humans. Like, right? Like it clearly means it's FBI technology. Well, you, okay.

So you say that, right? But then the second one looks even more man-made than that. And as somebody whose mom worked for years at Northrop Grumman, I would be remiss if I did not remark on how The second one looks a lot like the B-2 bomber. And even stranger, it's floating over Fort Zankuto military base in the shadow of Mount Josiah, which is where a large portion of the fandom thought the jetpack might eventually be found. And which all signs in the game point to being some kind of riff on Vandenberg Air Force Base,

and which has extremely high Area 51S security as even entering its airspace in game gets you an immediate two-star wanted level before eventually upgrade. trading to four stars and homing missiles. And it's even worse when you approach on foot, since alarms go off, the entire base mobilizes against you. So what do you think of this UFO? This one looks like made by humans,

like full on, right? Like the other one looks like maybe was commandeered, but this one looks like an American military weapons manufacturer made the ship, which is kind of interesting. And I don't know exactly what it all means. But yeah, sometime in early 2015,

I finally saw all these fucking UFOs and shit I was looking for. And hilariously, like a month or two later for the PC release, a sniper rifle skin came out that looked like this, which I thought was cosmic at the time, which now seems very sort of understated now. So you can see it's not the most overwhelming UFO imagery, but it's there. And anyway, within the next few months, it's just like leather. It's like embossed on the leather of the strap very small.

But anyway, within the next few months, players found and then could no longer find some mention of the jetpack in the game files just briefly, which the dev seemingly patched out once they realized that people could see it, which fueled tons of rumors and like a new sort of belief that the jetpack was real. And then crazily, after a few months of drought, another possible breakthrough was discovered when a player found that dialing 1-999-37-67 on the in-game cell phone, aka 1-999 EMP drop, connected you to someone called black cell phones, which caused some kind of invisible object to explode near your character's head and immediately set the phone's theme to gray. However, the number seems to be connected in the game files

to a mission that doesn't exist called Ojasoud, and the 1-999 EMP drop number can easily just as easily be interpreted as 1-999 emperor which when you look at it in the sort, when you look for one 999 emperor in the source code, turns out to have basically just been a game testing cheat that was likely unintentionally left in the game, according to this code for the cheat,

which Jesse will read for you now, which seems to confirm this, which it's funny because so many people still talk about this as part of the mystery, but monochrome cell phone only test cheat, 199 emperor use is bull. Bulg? Is there a space between that?

Yeah, uses Boole G, yeah. Is monochrome cheat active equals false? Exactly. So it's literally just like a test cheat that turns your phone black. I don't know. I don't know about the explosion, but apparently that's what it is. It was also around this time that the golden peyote that I mentioned was finally found in-game when player R.K. Rusty discovered that it only appeared on Tuesday,

mornings in foggy weather from 6 to 8 a.m. And it was revealed that like how the other one warged players into other animals, this one, actually the gold one, warged players into the body of a big foot. And what he didn't know at the time was that actually the golden peyote did appear every day, just not in the same place, which is where players were stuck. And eventually, Rockstar added a message in the game's code referring to Rusty directly, which said, he was wrong to start his hunt on a Tuesday. but it wasn't until like six months later when another player the stoned ape

figured out what it meant and finally ate all seven which eventually led him not the last one to the dead body of the hunter from the last one the mission at the end of the game and that's a crazy shit to have to figure out look like this so this is you'd get there you're the big foot and there's the dead hunter right yep uh and here's some footage as somebody eating all the golden peyotes by the way which is pretty funny because they turn into Bigfoot every time so if you want to see that that's in the show notes anyway after a few days of people

maybe thinking this was a cute little joke and that that's all there was was oh and he killed the hunter at the end a third player called Ma's Machine noticed that when you pressed the Bigfoot's growl button you could very faintly if you listen good enough hear something else growling back

okay and if you use that growl at and growl back system like a Marco Polar, like a Marco Polo like sonar machine, and you track down the source of the roars like hot and cold style, you will slowly come upon a trail of dead bodies, both animal and human, which can take over an hour sometimes and feel quite on purpose circular in where you go until eventually you arrive at the Thompson scrapyard out in the desert, which is like a plain graveyard basically, and where you are basically just, by a character called the beast,

which is basically just the werewolf from Teen Wolf, who you then just have to fucking fight and kill by hand as a big foot, unless you got a gun, maybe. Big foot with a gun, dude. Yeah, and when you do do that, you unlock him in the director mode and the quest is done. Here's a clip of what it looks like to fight the beast if you want to see it. I am not joking when it is when I'm saying,

this dude looks like the fucking werewolf from Teen Wolf, straight up. Yeah. Yeah. He's got the jacket on. He literally has the jacket on. Yanni just jumps. When was this discovered? How long ago?

This was, this had to be, I mean, gosh, 2017 or something like that. I'm not sure exactly. Crazy. And you know, because this was added to the game later when it came to the Mount Chilliad mystery, there's a really great video by game sleuths on Easy Allies. If you want to watch like a really deep cut video about this, that'll be in the show notes. but the peyote plants were added in the November of 2014 and this whole thing was discovered by September of 2015

so actually earlier even than I thought because it was added later not in the original game it came in the update people were split on whether it would have any relevance to the larger Mount Chilliad mystery since it was assumed that the Mount Chilliad mystery would have been solvable from the beginning back on the original PS3 version of the game right? Yeah if you put it in the game you'd hope right

But one of the smartest theories I heard about it at the time was that maybe Rockstar was trying to show players with the Bigfoot Quest, the type of mechanics that are required to complete the Mount Chilliad mystery, which feels extra smart now looking into similar mechanics you can find in the currently ongoing Red Dead Redemption 2 mystery as well, where you're starting to see things in the environment. You're like using like code in the game to make things into shapes rather than hiding shapes in the game's image files. all kinds of stuff like that going on right now in a newly uncovered mystery in Red Dead Redemption 2 that's happening right now in a game that's almost 10 years old. Crazy. And yeah, not just in terms of similar gameplay,

but the way the devs might hide information in plays tight and just the way that it's like a trail that leads from one thing to the next. But honestly, that's a story for another time. I'm not here to talk about Red Dead Red Dead Redemption right now because for now I got to rush you through years of more updates without giving you any good definitive conclusions. So tell you what, if you're listening to this and you are interested in every last thing

out there that's ever been discovered or discussed, which again, a lot of which might just be nothing in disguise, just let me tell you, it's a lot of stuff. But follow the link in the show notes to the Chilliad Mystery Megathread on Reddit. It's about five years old, but it's got a lot of the good stuff still on there. And from there, there's a lot of jumping off points and Google points that you can just go to yourself. This was my main source for this segment of the episode and a couple other YouTube videos out there on this topic that are pretty good. And there's literally so much to read. But otherwise, here is the cliff notes of the rest. Mostly it's like Easter

eggs and paintings and livery and shit, but there's a few big ones in there. In June 2017, in GTA Online, gun running, after doing like 600 resupply missions for your bunker and then running missions between 9 and 11 p.m. There's a crazy mission where you suddenly roll up to a crashed UFO in the middle of the desert. You shoot aliens and you steal a fucking alien egg, which does kind of look like it's cracked in the middle, maybe even in case you were wondering. It looks like this.

It starts around five minutes at 25 seconds in this clip if you want to see what I'm talking about. This is like mask off an alien encounter with guns, but it's in GTA online. And weirdly, you don't really seem to get anything for doing this. It's kind of just treated like an Easter egg for a very long time.

There's a crash UFO with aliens and you shoot it. Yeah. Another one The crazy one comes in December of 2017 with a doomsday heist where it's revealed that a rich Elon Musk type person is doing crazy stuff in his lab which he keeps in an old abandoned military base deep inside hidden tunnels under Mount Chilliad.

So during this DLC, the jetpack, which was a huge part of this mystery for many years, is there a jet pack? For this DLC, they added a jetpack to GTA online purchasable for millions of dollars. the lab itself is covered in strange symbols that seem to mean something, like the little dots and things like that. And most importantly, we get a set of four color-coded murals

which cover this facility all over the place, which seem to reference the various mysteries of the GTA-5 world and possibly hint at what's next. So here is what that looks like. And this is all four of them together, color-coded. You can see this. This is pretty much like the biggest shit that's happened in a long, long time, right? Yep. Oh, wow, yeah. You can see lots of symbols we recognize here for various

mysteries around the map that we both have and haven't discussed. I refer you to the Chilead mural up in the yellow strip that you can see kind of on the left side there in a different art style, the infinity symbol for the infinity killer there in the red strip. I want to point out the keyhole and the balanced scales and the purple. But most importantly, most importantly for all, for all people online is the green strip. Because knowing what we already know, the green strip seems to do entirely with the Bigfoot peyote mystery, right?

Like if you look at it close, it's like 27 Bigfoot DNA. If you zoom in on the letters in the green, it's like Bigfoot 27. You can see man evolving and becoming a big foot. You can see the peyote plant. You can see it's all there, right? It's basically like a narrative

of what happened with this one mystery almost. right? And because of that, right? Normally, I would just look at this and go, oh, cool reference. But based on how it's format and how it looks, isn't it possible really that these strips are showing us everything needed to finish the four main mysteries of the game, right? Like maybe since we know that that's all the Bigfoot one, maybe we also know that the infinity killer and those like hazard symbols and those dot symbols beneath the infinity sign that are in this picture, like maybe that's all one minute. mystery and maybe the yellow is all one mystery and maybe the purple's all one mystery. And if you look at these and you know the mysteries that are from this like internet community, you know this fandom, there are so many triggers on here that just speak to you. Look at the eye. You see that? Like the may, there's this maze that has to do like all these people talk about this fountain in the middle of town at the Penriss building or something like that. Or at that maze bank actually. The bank is called maze bank. And there's like this strange map that you can see.

see if you go high up and look at the fountain. Like there's all these crazy things. There's all these crazy things everywhere in GTA. And this seems to almost organize them and be like, yes, these are connected and these are connected. And to me, that's very interesting. Anyway, amongst many art assets and things, more symbols are added. And the following December in the 2018 Arena Wars DLC, you get symbols in this new area that look just like the ones from the Doomsday.

highest. But even more hilariously, now, one year later, if you have completed that super hard to do alien egg supply run mission in GTA online, sometimes when you get wasted and blackout in the club, you can now wake up in your underwear ditched at the top of Mount Chilliad like you just got probed with a new back tattoo that looks like this and an alien flying off in the distance behind you. So here's the back tattoo that you get. And it's pretty funny. if you know this mystery. Yep, it's the bag, it's the eye. Yeah, and it's funny because it says alien down

and it looks like it's pointing in your ass again. But if you wake up on Mount Chilliad and it says alien back and you look behind you, you see it leave. So it's kind of interesting. Beyond this, there's tons of very obviously online only for fun type stuff that references many of the overarching mysteries of the game. But beyond what I've already mentioned,

the only thing left that I think without question refers to the mystery directly and is part of it. is the Nazar speaks fortune-teller machine that you can get in your arcade. Madam Nazar is a human fortune teller in the Red Dead universe that fits into that world because she is of the time period where you can drive a cart around and have little bibles and tell fortunes. But here, in her Zoltar machine-esque form, she acts more like Mike the liar from Elder Scrolls. Do you know who that is?

He's like a Khagit that's in, he's like a Khashit who's in all. the games that you can like run into and he just says cryptic shit that's like references fan servicey things and like mysteries the fans haven't figured out and like strange bits of lore that barely makes sense that's cool um and in addition of that uh nazar speaks machine also does some silly in game effects here and there for certain lines and you know some of some of the things she does are hints right so here's jesse and mathis uh with some of her greatest hits so you can see what i mean about cryptic lines that refer to things in the game. So both of you guys do your best, Madam Nazar.

I see a face beneath the ice, yet not the face of a man or a woman. I see a web, still tangled after years of unraveling. Will you be the one, I wonder? I see the meaning of a song on a stone. One is done, two is fun. At the stroke of 12, when the moon is fat, the beast will evaken within you. Be fair. not all of his kind

just climb the mountain and ask my poor Jolene. I hear a voice calling again and again forlorn a relative. He wants to do something. He wants to go bowling. After that there's a few more GTA online missions that use

alien assets and more and more art shows up referencing the mystery like these from 2019 which I thought were so on the nose and fucking hilarious. Love these. Kind of looks like Keith Herring or something like that. It's pretty good. But, okay, that happened in 2019.

And then kind of nothing but the odd reference here and there. And then slowly, as it becomes harder to tell what was really part of the game and what was their own imagination, things online started to splinter into different competing theories about what was true. You know, and there's lots of anger and there's lots of bitterness as different ideas take hold. and unhinged, super dedicated people that are way off base, just like drill their theory to death and confuse everybody

and kind of ruin the discourse. And just there the mystery sits, sort of treading water forever, as people would literally log on today in 2020 sticks, still, just to say direct to other people's faces that they should give up and then it's over and say semi-unsubstantiated things, like that it was all just the setup for canceled single-player DLC

with zombies and aliens coming to Los Santos and Trevor was going to be a government operative and they just took all that stuff and rearranged it for the doomsday heist, right? Which was meant to be the end of it all. Or even more tragically, it's quite easy to make a case for how the Mount Chilliad Mystery

can be solved purely by imagining the jetpack means go up high to see the two backup UFOs and that the real final Easter egg and the symbol at the top and the lightning and the shining eye really does just mean come after you 100%

at the game when it's storming to see one at the top of the mountain at night, which is just exactly what they say. At what point, like, what would be the payoff if it keeps going and going and going and going? It's like, what is the ultimate point eventually in a game? Like, what are you hoping for at that point? Exactly. Still no explanation of why they have the logo for the FIB on the side or why there's other UFOs or what it all might mean.

But let's make clear that for this reason and for many other little annoyingly tantalizing reasons like the fact that there's one specific spot that you can stand in the game where you can hit the Zankudo UFO with a sniper rifle or the fact that you can bring Franklin, Trevor, and Michael to the observatory together and they won't necessarily leave right away. People still post today. People still play the game. People still are making connections. You can go on the Chilead Mystery subreddit right now and you'll see a new thread.

GTA online is still dropping content. There was literally a new heist last month on my birthday came out. new videos of different ways the Mount Chilliad mystery has finally been solved just in time for GTA6 are constantly dropping like every day. And those colored murals really are kind of convincing. And honestly, it was while I was standing under the sundial, the Mount Galileo Observatory or Galileo Observatory, I can't remember which, watching the shadows and contemplating an infamous 4chan theory about a drunk rockstar employee, letting things slip about heavenly eyes opening in the sky and saying players missed things and giving out new clues effectively deepening the mystery by either being real and legitimate or just larping and

messing everything up along with our expectations. But what was weird was when I realized that I didn't care which one it was and that I just wanted to keep investigating the mystery because it was fun. And actually, though, I think the real reason all this shit captures me is best expressed by this scene from a movie that I watched recently, which Jesse and Mathis are going to act out for you now. Imagine you guys are hanging out together playing Nintendo. I love playing my Nintendo. You're just hanging out on the ground together by the TV playing Nintendo. Just imagine.

I just remember sitting in my room and making up my own weird little codes and secret language. It felt like there was so much mystery in the world. Things to be figured out and solved. The entire generation of men obsessed with video games, secret codes and space aliens. I couldn't tell you how many nights I spent walking around the woods. waiting for some magical alien to follow me home and be my friend. We crave mystery because there isn't any left. There's nothing that hasn't been explained away or solved by people and machines smarter

than we'll ever be. Listen, a hundred years ago, any idiot could wander into the woods and look behind a rock and find something new, but not now. Where is the thing that's never been seen? The mystery that makes it all worthwhile. Why do you think so many of us are looking for fucking lock-mast monster? Aliens, Bigfoot. We don't want to accept that we're useless, even though we are.

Modern man needs mystery. We need to believe. that there's something worth finding. Yeah, twist the candelabra and the bookcase opens. Yep. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B.A. That's our mantra. How do we get ahead?

Where's the cheat code? Where's the monogram secret treasure? Right. So this movie's called Under the Silver Lake, and it's from 2018. But I only really first noticed it last year when I was telling my cinephile friend Brody about the doors and Laurel Canyon and how the 1960, counterculture could possibly have been completely manufactured and controlled by the government and how Manson was kind of in with all that. And he basically just like stood up and got off his

got the movie off his shelf and said I needed to watch it immediately and turned it on. And now since I first watched it like nine or ten months ago, I don't know. I think I've watched Under the Silver Lake and given it my full and undivided attention somewhere between 35 and 50 additional times. So welcome to part two under the Silver Lake. I'm not going to go too far into what this movie is about. But if you're one of those people who thinks that like any and all information is too sacred for your brain to know before watching something and the only way to truly experience something is blind, go watch the movie now. It's by David Robert Mitchell who made It Follows. He also made The End of Oak Street, which just came out.

It's got Andrew Garfield in the lead role. The movie Rips. Enjoy this movie. Go watch it. Go watch it. But yeah, I'm going to just give you just enough of the premise to get by before we get into what I really. want to talk about, which is what this movie eventually made me go do. But first, we have to talk about Andrew Garfield's unnamed protagonist, who we know from the screenplay is called Sam.

Sam is living in a very nice apartment on the east side of L.A., somewhere in the mix of, like, Atwater Village and Los Feliz, if that means anything to you. And it's specifically set in 2011, which is very important, so that if, like me, who are very close to Sam's age, a lot of what's going on in this movie and in his life rings very true to you at this time in 2011. Sam is seemingly depressed after recently becoming single, and somehow he never seems to work or have any sort of job, even though the landlord is literally at his door shaking him down for his past due rent all the time. And he's lost, and he has a lot of stuff, and he has a lot of movies and music and video games

and shit like that. And he's lost. He's looking for meaning, just like Jesse and Mathis were talking about in that scene a second to go, when all of a sudden, boom, he meets this strange new girl Sarah in his building, and he has a great little night with her before she completely moves out all her stuff from her apartment and disappears without a trace overnight and just disappears, which Sam takes as a sign that he must embark on this strange neo-noir detective-style journey to find out what happened to her and follow the mystery all the way to the top

and find out how it ties into other crazy mysteries uncovering all over the city and all this stuff. But of course, he doesn't work with cops or detectives or anything like that. He works purely with other weirdos like him who write zines and do background work and bit parts in movies and playing bands and write shit and dress weird, go to weird parties. Because as Mathis will read for you now, Sam just doesn't trust the system, man. So I was watching Wheel of Fortune and I noticed that Van der Waite did this little pattern of glances every so often. She looked forward, then right, then left, and then back again. Then I started wondering, is that random, or is there a reason for it?

Is there a pattern behind it? If there is, maybe there's something meaningful in that pattern. So I started taking note of when it happened. For the past seven months, I have a complete record of all of it. It doesn't happen every day. It's literally every three episodes except for one time. Also, it seems to happen most Wednesdays except for last Wednesday, which happened to be a holiday. So I grafted out, and I got some old code books from the library.

and I've been digging through them trying to see if it translates to anything like a word or message something. I mean, I've just been thinking, why do we assume that all of this infrastructure, entertainment, and open information beaming all over the place in every home on the planet is exactly what people tell us it is? Maybe there are people more important, more powerful, or wealthier than us that communicate things or see things in the world that are meant for them and not for us. I think it's fucking ridiculous to assume that media only has one purpose, right? Well, you think that's weird? Yeah, but here's the thing.

Maybe the chick he was talking to thought it was weird, but I did not while I was watching it. And while there is plenty of good stuff to dig into in the movie proper and to speculate on regarding the specific plot of the film, especially the scene involving the songwriter, which I'm literally going to tease as one of the craziest best things I've ever seen in a movie. And I tell you, you should go watch this movie for yourself. Really the most important thing about this movie, though, to me, is what happened after I watched it and decided in sort of a Hail Mary past type way that I would check out the Under the Silver Lake subreddit. And I accidentally seemed to stumble upon the exact time of fucking mystery that I was looking for. And it all starts with a post by Tommy Irb, Martin Nephew, Ali Jaya, and the Dadrin called Biggest Discovery of the Under the Silver Lake Mystery, which is available for you to read in full in the show notes if you want. But if you do that, you really actually should watch the movie first. I'm looking out for you here.

Okay? So just go watch the movie. Anyway, at one point in the film, a prominent billionaire called Jefferson Sevenths goes missing. And there's a story about it playing on the news in Sam's apartment. Okay. But during that story on the like crawling like news ticker thing that's scrolling along underneath it is like a strange headline, which I'll provide a screenshot for and which Jesse will read for us now.

we go weird headline circled in this in this image poly graffiti discovered in right so just in case he was it's not sure it's copioli graffiti yeah yeah copioli which is like a an odd word copiali graffiti what is that so after a quick google search on copioli you can see that it likely refers to a 105 page 18th century german encrypted text discovered during the cold war called the copiali cipher which for 260 years protected the secrets of a secret society called the oculists, who used the language of sight as a metaphor for knowledge, and who also probably would really vibe with the phrage, see the eye from the altruist camp, if they ever got to hear it.

Anyway, it was finally deciphered in 2011 by an international team of experts, led by a man called Kevin Knight of the USC Information Science Institute and the Viterbi School of Engineering. And anyway, while still encrypted, that text looked like this, aka not like letters. But just it looks like it's from mist or some shit. It just looks like fake shit. And so first, active viewers started scouring the movie for what else, but copialli graffiti. And that's exactly what they found in two separate scenes, both containing the same message.

once here on a concrete wall along a stretch of east side sidewalk which you can see in this image and another time here in a Sharpie on a bathroom stall in an overhead shot where he goes in the toilet and you can see that and in the credits

players noticed that the very same players I guess viewers players of the movie game you're doing players of the game yeah they noticed the very same expert who solved the code Kevin Knight was also listed in the credits of the movie as the official cryptography consultant on the film. And rather quickly, using his notes to solve the code, they translated the copioli into the simple phrase,

coffee menu, which pretty much everyone was able to deduce led to one of the very first shots in the film where Sam is tuning out while he's purving on some hot girls or ordering at a coffee shop. And in one shot, we get a clear shot of the coffee menu, and sure enough, check this out. what do you see on the coffee menu? Oh, Morse code. Is it? Oh, okay. Yep, the Morse code. Exactly.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so it's Morse code and obvious is pretty easy to decode Morse code. But at first, the solution was super confusing because it actually decoded to this, X-J-V-O-J-R-Y-X-E-R-S-W, which itself was also an encoded message. At first, people were confused. But remember how I said one of the dudes Sam talked to in the, movie made zines, this character. Well, when he goes over to the dude's house and the guy tells him all the different symbols

that hobos used to use in plain sight to, like, communicate with each other, everything's a mess because the dude is like super paranoid and antisocial, but hidden among all his like weird newspaper clippings on the wall, his comic books, all his video game paraphernalia, Hillion Shield, all the shit sitting around in his house. Hidden among it was the key to a substitution cipher that perfectly matched the code from the coffee menu. So here's a picture of the key. which was in the dude's house on the wall

in a couple places. You can see it here. Okay, sure, sure. So now you can see it. And that's the key. It's not like a straight substitution. It's kind of jumbled, but if you have this key,

you can use it. And suddenly, the message will become this, which Jesse will read for you now exactly as it's written. What threat words? Right. Now, what throw words?

Now, it's easy to just say this probably means what three words and leave it at that. But large portions of the fan base weren't willing to let it go without confirmation, which they eventually found in the form of a new clue which helped them see clearly,

if you know what I mean. And you can see it right here. So go ahead and click that and see what I mean by seeing things clearly. I can see clearly now, it says. It's a billboard ad for contact. Yeah.

So obviously it's a billboard for contact lenses. But if you look down in the lower left-hand corner, E equals E. Yeah, you can clearly see E equals E, which if we apply that. It's like the final missing piece of the cipher. Yes. So if we apply that, what three words becomes what, what threat words becomes what three words, exactly. Which just so happens to be the name of website, which is out there, which can pinpoint you to any three meter square on the planet using coordinates that aren't numbers, but rather three separate words.

Like, for example, the what three words coordinates for the astronomers, Monument, Sundial Tower at the Griffith Observatory is price, card, demand. Okay? So three words can get you anywhere on Earth if you know the right words. Does that make sense? Yeah. Have anybody tried Illuminati, home base? Yeah.

Later in the movie, the logo for this website can actually be seen quite prominently in a fairly pivotal scene in the film where Sam finally climbs up into the hills of Griffith Park on his final quest. though in context it's probably much more of a reference to the hobo code symbol for not a safe place but that's only because they are identical

to each other which you can see here here is the symbol on the wall in the movie this is the hobo code symbol for not a safe place and here is the same symbol on the logo for what three words you tell me is this a coincidence

oh yeah it's three diagonal lines. It's like slash slash slash marks. Yeah. And it's just crazy that the, the cipher in the movie would decrypt to what three words. And then you'd see the logo for what three words at like a climactic point in the film. But yeah, in any case, at this point, everybody's looking, trying to figure out what these three words are. And because it's so open-ended, as you can imagine, this is really where the theories for this one just start to go crazy go nuts. But before they truly do, there is one more concrete element to.

this puzzle that we need to discuss, and that is the Zodiac Killer Movie Star Dolls. In the context of the movie, Sam's new Dream Girl that he meets at the beginning, Sarah, is a big fan of the film How to Marry a Millionaire, which is a real romantic comedy from 1953, which is notable both for its thematic connections to this movie's plot, and for having Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall as its three stars, which is crazy, right? as like the three biggest stars at the time. So because she's such a big fan in Sarah's room, she's got custom Barbie dolls of the main characters on stands

next to the top of her dresser right next to her TV, all in the right outfits from the movie, but also with these like strange little wedding table style name tags at their feet. So here's a picture of that. It's pretty much exactly what I said, but you tell the, tell the people what you see. I'm going to drop that in the chat right now. It's a complex image, but it's exactly what I described.

You already put it in chat? Yep. Yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. It's a three Barbie doll-esques of the, you can see the Barbie dolls, which are actually the, you can actually see that the Barbies actually carry the likenesses of the actresses. And then they each have a name tag, which like,

and then it says the first name and underneath it is code. It's literally like Zodiac code. Yeah. And when I say it's Zodiac code, I mean, it is literally based off the Zodiac 408 cipher, which I talked about in the Zodiac episode, which, yes, if you look it up, was originally solved using something that I don't understand called Bayesian interference by who else, but our man, Kevin Knight, the cryptography consultant for this very film. So, if you solve the name tags in the order they are in this picture using Kevin Knight's notes, they decode to this. which Mathis will read for you now. Betty, Marilyn, Lauren, Tombstone, Sheriff, Entries. Tombstone, Sheriff Entries.

And I did make it a point to specify the order exactly because in the other shots from this film, the dolls are seemingly placed in other orders on purpose to make this whole thing more confusing. Like even in this same shot, like one second later, they show the dolls and then the actual ladies on the screen in another order. It's fucking crazy. And boy, let me tell you, it worked.

other than the fact that there's a sheriff called Barnes in this movie and that there's a super long shot of a single tombstone that says wells on it, this is basically the last time in the process of solving this mystery that we all agreed on one thing before a thousand different theories took us in a thousand different directions because now

everybody is finding words that makes sense to them and finding some crazy way of getting to some solution that means something to them in some way like a fucking Rorschach test. And I was not immune to this. myself. After a few months of investigating for fun whenever I felt like it, I finally decided to get serious about turning this into a story of its own for this show. And when I couldn't settle

on anything myself that felt super promising, I started looking for three word locations people were suggesting in the subreddit that seemed viable and accessible as somebody who lives fairly close to the Silver Lake area and is very familiar with the place where the movie takes place. So pretty soon, I found myself somebody who is called Scruffy Nerf. of all things, who said they had basically figured it out and that they were sitting on a viable answer and had been let down or ghosted by several

parties in the past and was looking for somebody to really give it a shot. Their solution does use the sheriff, Barnes, and the tombstone, Wells, which I like because the spelling of the sheriff's last name Barnes, which is without the E,

works as a coordinate in what three words, but the normal spelling of Barnes does not. So that was a specific choice on the part of the filmmaker to change the name to something weird to make it fit. That's why I think it's a good answer to that clue, right? Same thing with Wells. There is a shot in this movie where Sam falls asleep during a movie screening at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. And he wakes up from like being drunk in the cemetery.

And there is a 16 second shot at that point that just holds and slightly. pushes on this one tombstone that says wells on it. Now, it's a little, it's a little bit weaker than the sheriff because the tombstone really does exist, but it's such a long shot. It's such a long holding shot that it does feel specific. And so that's why I like that clue. For the third clue entries, this guy who I was talking to online, Scruffy Nerf used for used for the word entries the word window. It is a solid guess for the word entries using the context of the movie, and it's practically obvious as a suggestion if you've already seen the movie. It actually does make a lot of sense. Though admittedly, and I was honest with them about this up front, I didn't really see the

word window anywhere in the film like I did with all the other words. So it felt a lot shakier than the other two, which I communicated to this person. Also, one thing that convinced me that the place these coordinates pointed to Wind Wolf's Preserve is the name of it, was the place even though it's over 100 miles northwest of Silver Lake, was that he said, he told me it was a coyote

preserve, which again, within the context of the movie and the symbolism of the movie, which I still refuse to spoil, is overwhelmingly thematically appropriate. Like if this really did point to a coyote preserve and said window

in the movie, this is like a slam done. However, when I looked it up, nothing on the site for the wind wolves preserve specifically mentioned any sort of focus on coyotes and did have a picture or two of one, but the place was actually named after wolves, so I didn't actually think it was that coyote e. And there really wasn't any explanation for that, you know, but I still thought it was the best theory I'd seen in weeks. So I decided to give the Wildlands Conservancy, which ran the preserve, a call. And I was able to speak with a staff member called Megan Ellington, who was super nice. And she said that, she said that though they do get geocaches from time to time, she had never heard of anything

about a movie studio or a production company hiding anything out there in any sort of official capacity, which I feel legally, right, for it to be like a thing that a movie led somebody to go do, it would have to be. It would have to be legally fine. However, I center the coordinates that I was looking at based on the three words, which, was like Windows, Barnes Wells or something like that. I can't remember what order it was in. She said it wouldn't be unthinkable that a human could reach them, the coordinates, if they went on an eight-mile loop hike and briefly went off trail at the spot. And that there's plenty of geocaches already out there and that I probably wouldn't need any

special training or tools besides an accurate handheld GPS device, which I already got. So I was feeling pretty good about it. And I went into the first stages of planning my trip before getting waylaid by, among other things, a gigantic wall of molasses. But once I dried off and got rid of that, sweet molassesy smell, a few days later, Megan emailed me back again with a different message, which I'll have Jesse read for us now. Okay. I spoke with someone, and it does look like this particular area is a little beyond our public accessible areas.

And it's about two miles further from our tool elk trail. Is that it? Is it too lay? Tool elk, yeah. Then I originally thought. I believe the hike round trip would be closer to 10 miles. I attach the screenshot and also am sending a copy of our trail map below. You'll notice that the trail map doesn't include the area where the coordinates lead as it is pretty far from the canyon and our normal trails.

That being said, I honestly don't think anything would be at that spot. and it seems like more than likely it's random coordinates. Yeah. So after a little bit more looking, she like really didn't think this was it. And she really wanted to tell me that. She also mentioned that she wouldn't be able to officially grant me access because technically the area I was trying to get to was sort of like an off-limits area and reiterated that no production had to ever come through.

And then it was extremely unlikely. Anything would come of such a high effort and like not undangerous excursion. And so sort of half-gutted and sort of in denial that everything was over, I started going out and investigating other things myself. My first obsession was a tombstone for a dog called Spot in the end credits of the movie, no spoilers, which pre-guessed his death date as 2029 and claimed that he was born in 1981. This is not only way too old for a dog, but also in the future, especially because the movie takes place in 2011. And when I saw another dog tombstone for spot in the movie itself, like a fake one that's not actually there in real life, placed conspicuously close to the Silver Lake Reservoir along Silver Lake Drive, I almost flipped when I looked it up on Google Maps and saw that it was placed directly in between those two addresses on the street. So I know that sounds kind of confusing as I'm saying it, but I'll show you what I mean. So this is the first bit right here.

the area with the fence that is in this picture here is like where in the movie they are walking when they walk past sort of like a dog that died and people left a bunch of flowers and there was a statue for the dog and it said spot so they so when they when they walk past it's at this point in the fence okay here you go here's the tombstone in the credits okay so it says spot 1981 to 2029 right yep so I'm like maybe this spot is the same spot from that other place in the movie, right?

And so when I put in the address of 1981 to 2029 Silver Lake Drive, right? If you look in this picture, you can see 2029 Silver Lake Drive and you can see 1981 Silver Lake Drive and you can see that the area with the fence

where Spots Grave is is exactly in between those two things. Oh yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Right. Oh, you think that's weird? Oh, you think that's strange? And when that post led me exactly nowhere and got me exactly two interested comments,

I was so desperate to find... I didn't see the two comments. Yeah, I was so desperate to find a mystery that I just got in the car and drove to that side of town. I suited up with Kelly and Smitty, who were as far in as me now because they too had seen the movie secondhand like 25 times each now because of me. We all jumped in my car. We drove all the way... He loves the movie.

Yeah, it's all about like dog murderers. So it's like up his alley. We drove. Yeah. Very anxious. I feel like that would make him very anxious. It's like, you know how like people are always into like murder, but like they don't want to die. Is that why he jokes all the way up?

All the time. He's like, I'm trying to warn you. He thinks that he's like courage, the cowardly dog. So yeah, we drove all the way up to Griffith Park to the site of the pivotal scene with the what three words hobo code logo. We went all the way there up in Griffith Park. I took my reading. led to nothing. Here is a picture of me doing it on Instagram.

Not pictured is me scrambling through the brush so far that my dog got scared and tried to come save me. Dad, dad, no. Literally. He got so scared that he just like almost died trying to climb a wall. God. So you can see in this image, you can see like here's the fence, here's the grave. Yeah.

But also there's the Jesus and the Brides of Dracula. turning teeth, which is like an encoded message song from the movie. There's me taking a picture of the wall from the movie. But ultimately, I achieved nothing by doing this. And eventually, after- You had a good day. You achieved a good day. That's true.

After any tangible clues were left, I started following trails in the park, just remembering moments from the movie and kind of like going off vibes and recognizing shots, like this one specific one of B-Rock that I put the Instagram post, for example, the very first shot is kind of like a holy looking rock just because it felt significant in the film. And it just sort of slowly set me on a trail to nowhere.

And it was getting hotter and it was getting steeper. And I got so bit up and we walked through fucking poison ivy. And I got all cut up and almost stepped right on a snake. And I was so sweaty, I couldn't keep my eyes open. And just so you know, I weigh like 275 pounds and it is not all muscle. And I was.

dressed for like a fucking afternoon barbecue. Okay. Oh, and suddenly, yeah, I suddenly was overcome with the sense of self-awareness, right? I was like, it's over,

Sam. Forget about Mount Chiliad. You killed the guy who murdered your wife already. Let it go, Indiana. You know? And I did. I walked happily back to my car,

feeling lighter than ever and thirsty as fuck. And I wasn't on a treasure hunt. I was just on a fun sightseeing tour of shooting locations from one of my, for movies under the Silver Lake. Isn't that fun? And hey, no spoilers. But remember that scene where he has to go rub the head of James Dean that is at the Galileo,

I mean the Griffith Observatory? That was like my favorite scene of the movie. So before I go home, I better go do that myself, right? Just because I'm doing a pilgrimage now for the movie, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there I was standing at the Griffith Observatory, rubbing James Dean's head and slowly accepting with a growing sense of shame

that I was just leading myself on and that nobody was watching. me and that the magical king of hobos wasn't going to appear out of the bushes now that I touched James Dean's head and take me on a magic vision quest. Yeah. And I'm, I'm content. I'm empty. I start walking back to my car. But then the hobo king jumps out. I saw a sign both literally and figuratively in the end. Part three, the epilogue is very short and it is called the hiding man. if you are from Los Angeles, especially if you live on the east side or you're obsessed with a specific movie

and you go to Griffith Parf a lot. Eventually, you will see a sign that looks something like this. And I do mean a sign, not like a weird sky pussy. I do mean literally like a sign. These signs are super weird looking. And at first,

you will ignore them just like all the other weird things you pick up and load into your RAM as you repeatedly go on the same walk, only to be accessed again while you are on the walk. and for months out of the corner of your eye you will see sort of signs like this.

What is it? What is this? And is a picture of, I don't know, a putty from Power Rangers. And it says, do not act like a trash. You will be got by a hiding man

and take to a new life in pipe. He do watch you now from bush and trees. Exactly. So these signs are super weird. Like I said, for months out of the corner of your eye, you will see them. and they will look, there'll be all different ones.

They will look like this. You'll see more, more of them. It's all in the show notes if you want to see. You can see some more signs here. There's some like variations on the theme here. You could read a couple of these if you feel. He do see you. He take pictures.

A hiding man will grab you soon. You will be got. Yeah. And there's basically sort of variations on the theme. Slowly you will put together that there is a man out there who looks after the area and other places. like it. He harshly judges people for all the worst kinds of disgusting, obnoxious behaviors. Literally,

littering, no loud, no spit, no touching, no fire, no litter, no drug. A hiding man will grab you. Do not act, do no act like a trash. You know, like, it's all just sort of like act nice, be good, I'm watching you. Threatening to sort them out with some sort of re-education, which he only refers to as a new life in pipe. Just like I always wanted, actually, going into a pipe. that maybe leads to Burbank or something. I'm not sure.

But still, this is only something you're half absorbing with a fraction of your attention passively in short bursts as you go for a walk until eventually at some point you come to another one that's a little more in-depth than the writing's too small to pick it up while you're walking by. So this time you finally have to stop

and start reading it, and it looks like this. And there's a lot to read. Oh, my God. And you don't have to read this out loud right now, but you can kind of just give everybody sort of like a quick rundown of what the fuck where is this a person's walking up to like an open sewer pipe and says there's somebody living in here or deformed thing and something crawls out it like grabs them he's cheeked up a bit he puts his wet finger in her lips neck it's a lot to it's like mind your business

don't do this not don't be an ass don't you get grab Don't get grabbed. Yeah, don't get grabbed. And this one has a significant amount of text on a significant amount of lore. And as you read, suddenly the urge strikes you to see them all. And you realize it's hard to know where they might be and they pop up literally everywhere. And there's new ones all the time and old ones and new versions of old ones. And the more you look and the deeper you go out there in Los Angeles and even sometimes as far north as Portland, the hiding man is there.

hiding, watching, judging, and preparing new secrets to share. And of course, like all things, eventually my curiosity got the better of me. And I bought the hiding man book. And I read all there was. I bought the zine. I read as best as I could. I watched as the hiding man realized, probably faster than me, that the bigger he got over years and years and years.

And the more online his work got, and believe me, they've been doing this shit for years, the less possible it became for them to control people's need for the mystery. And so lately, the hiding man's been less like a hiding man and more like a discovered man who politely asks that you do not reprint or quote any of his work without express permission in order to preserve the experience of the mystery as a fun IRA thing for people to possibly happen upon. And holy fucking shit, I respect that so much, right? In reality, where we live, real mysteries have definite real answers. But in fiction, where everything is literally an illusion, they do not necessarily have to.

Mysteries without concrete answers can exist in fiction. And so, in other words, with fiction, belief in the mystery is itself a tool which creates and sustains it as a mystery. And people doing their best investigating it becomes a new. collaborative, metaphysical form of alleditary art like the chance

controlled compositions of John Cage where he uses the E. Ching to make decisions for him or the literary cut-ups of William S. Burroughs confusing the notion

of true authorship and short-circiting our ideas of narrative control to reveal unexpected truths, right? So, you know, think about that. And if you're around

Los Angeles and Venice, maybe you'll find a new sign from the hiding man somewhere that you don't expect. One last thing before I go, I just wanted to say, this episode is dedicated to my good friend, Alan Hansen, who died a while back in a shitty way. And writing this made me miss him and a particular happy time in my life on the east side, which I love.

So thank you for listening, The End. Thank you so much, dude. That was crazy. I didn't know where that shit was going to end up. That was... You didn't think it was going to be about pondering metaphysics? No, and you slowly became the hiding man as the sun went down.

That's right. I'm almost completely hidden. You are almost unseeable. This is one of the most synchronicitous experiences of my entire life making this episode. I wasn't doing a working of any kind consciously here with this,

but it just felt absolutely crazy making this because of how many things were layered on top of each other that were the same in some way. And I don't know. I think that that scene that you guys did

it's actually between Tofer Grace and Andrew Garfield So my voice was pretty spot on It was pretty good We crushed it Actually if you see him in the movie It's like you're like you don't realize It's Tover Grace for like the whole movie

Who does? You really realize this Tofer Grace So they're like oh my God That was tough of grace But I think that conversation they had Is like the real shit ever About people like us And why we do this show

And why we like shit like this And why when we play video games We get excited about stuff like this. He was an interstellar. Is he? Yes. Wait. Tofer Grace is an interstellar.

What do you mean? Okay. As far as I know, there's like two guys in that movie. So it's very surprising to me that he's in. But that's how I feel about this movie too. Go watch Under the Silver Lake. Go play Grand Theft Auto 5. Go find the hiding man in the real Griffith Park.

I love you. I love you. We're off to go to a Minnesota. Patreon.com slash Illamini Pod. We appreciate. you'll see you next week. And I'm going to turn on the light in between recordings. Very exciting stuff.

Bye. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night and enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside. And after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up in the sky and fall. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky.

Thank you.