5 Utterly Strange And Creepy Websites - Part 1
You know, the world is a rather scary place. Even now as you casually browse this hub from the comfort (or discomfort) of your mobile device / tablet / laptop / desktop, there is are innumerable scary strange and scary things happening across the world. Murders happening literally every minute, multiple delicate surgeries, magma curling into itself and getting closer to the surface, storms, someone pasting Oprah's face over a pornographic image, etc. As such, the chances that you'll come across a strange or scary thing or event today aren't all that slim, I must tell you.
Since the internet is very much a mighty and ever (exponentially) growing second body of the "real" world we inhabit, its no wonder it has its own scary and strange places and people, that you may eventually come across.
Read on to find out 5 creepy and strange websites you may intentionally or unintentionally visit.
Heaven's Gate
So, unless you're rather young (like myself) or have been living under a rock during a fair bit of your lifetime, you may be aware of the hysteria caused by the surfacing of several strange cults and their extremely damaging effects on people. You must've heard of Jim Jones and his People's Temple, a religious organization that was responsible for the People's Temple Agricultural Project (more commonly known as Jonestown) and the mass suicide of over 900 people, the Waco siege, and, of particular to this hub, the Heaven's Gate religious group.
You see, the Heaven's Gate group was kind of a UFO religious group initially formed out of two people, a couple, who (eventually) came to believe themselves to be higher beings, gifted with greater mental capacity than most human beings, and that the planet Earth was going to be "recycled" soon, and the only way to escape the impending doom was to give up the inferior human ways and dispose of the body to ascend into a new existence, being saved by a spaceship that was going to come close to the Earth for some time.
Eventually, after one of their leaders died, the remaining one grew ever more desperate for proof of their eschatological beliefs, eventually concluding that the only way for them to save themselves would be through the destruction of their "vehicle" (the body), IE suicide. This led to the group's mass suicide through march 24 to 26.
But sir, what the eff does this have to do with scary websites??
Well, you see, the religious group maintained itself mostly by providing programming, system analysis and computer security solutions. They also maintained the cult's website, through which they spread their doctrine to the world.
The website is still up and running.
Complete with a working email adress: rep@heavensgate.com
They will also kindly answer any email you send them.
Not An Actual Cult, But Close Enough
Hey, I don't know about you, but it strikes me as a bit odd and creepy that a cult directly responsible for a group suicide has a perfectly workable (if rather outdated and obtuse) website, even if it hasn't been updated since 1997 (as you have probably noticed from its aged looks). No, its not a creepy form of social marketing or anything, its the legit, real thing.
The website apparently is kept alive by an entity called the "TELAH Foundation", which is apparently linked to the only two Heaven's Gate cult members remaining, whose efforts in maintaining the cult's online message alive have so far been successful.
Why not send them an email?
The "Dying NASA Scientist" Videos
Conspiracy theories were a thing way before the internet came about, and aliens have been a core subjected of several of these "theories" for a good while now. Most of the time, the content resulting from these is mostly harmless... But sometimes, things just get downright creepy and disturbing.
Meet "nasajim108", a youtube channel with videos from a guy who claims to be a "dying NASA scientist", through which he relays "the truth" about "awareness, alien life and the universe". The channel and its videos have become sort of an urban legend on the internet.
The videos themselves consist of strangely arranged clips including edited pictures of Jesus, aliens, clip art from Microsoft Paint, strange diagrams with blurry writing, pictures of animals, Charles Manson's face and other things, all arranged in a psychedelic fashion of insanity while a garbled voice speaks out random bits about aliens. Watching these videos has often been described as an experience akin to having a really, really bad acid trip.
***WARNING: THE CONTENT OF THESE VIDEOS MAY BE DISTURBING AND TRIGGERING TO MOST AUDIENCES. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED***
Totally Not Insane
Its kind of hard to write anything about this simply because there really isn't much about whoever this "dying NASA scientist" may be or what his motives are, mostly since there really isn't anything about it all. Most websites that discuss his videos consist of conspiracy theory forums with people that are almost as insane as nasajim108 or people who are just as baffled and weirded out as you probably are now.
Few things can be said about it all, other than that the content of the videos is considered to be very distasteful and disturbing, and the person behind their creation, as well as his motives, remain unclear.
The Fifth Nail
Very few things provide such insightful windows to the turbulence inside a psychopath's mind like their own vivid accounts of their experiences. Even more rare are the instances in which this becomes possible through an internet blog.
Meet "The Fifth Nail", a blogspot hosted blog created and managed by Joseph Edward Duncan III, convicted serial killer and sex offender currently on the death row.
A long time sex offender, Joseph confessed to his therapist in the Dyslin's Boy Ranch (to which he was taken after being arrested for stealing a car) in Tacoma that he had assaulted several young boys before he turned 16. in 1980, Joseph stole a number of firearms from a neighbor and used them to abuse a boy at gunpoint. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but was released in 1994 on parole. This didn't stop him from committing several other crimes, which eventually led to his arrest and incarceration in Idaho, California, where he's currently serving 11 life sentences.
The blog in question was used to testify against him before his latest incarceration. It includes strange, disjointed rants on justice, mankind, religion and how "the demons are taking over". All of it is written in a detached but somehow still self righteous manner, traits that are commonly associated with the archetypal psychopathic mind.
A rather fun experiment is to start reading from the earliest entry to the last, watching how what appears to be a rather annoyed man's rants on his daily events not so slowly descend into inevitable madness. Keep in mind he was already a registered sex offender at the time of the blog's writing, which were published right before his arrest.
Time Cube
While until now this hub has shown and described websites that can be legitimately weird or scary due to their connections to people who are obviously a little too insane or real life creepy events, this one seems to be the most harmless of them all... Unless you happen to be kind of insane and into physics.
The TIME CUBE (written in all caps, all the time), consists of a series of strange theories about temporal physics, social issues and possible racism, as conceived by their creator, Gene Ray, a man whose ideas became an essential part of the internet's meme lore.
On his website, Otis Eugene Ray, also known as Gene Ray, rants on with multicoloured and enormous font size text mainly on the subject of how, by adopting the generally accepted concepts of physics, "YOU IGNORE 3 OF 4 DAYS - FORCE 4 DAYS ON EARTH, THEY ALREADY EXIST. 4 HORSEMEN HAVE 4 DAYS IN ONLY 1 EARTH ROTATION. 4 ANGLES STOOD ON 4 CORNERS. 4 CORNERS ROTATE TO 16 CORNERS WHICH EQUAL TO 4 CORNER DAYS. TEACHERS ARE EVIL LIARS - THE ONEness OF GOD IS STILLness DEATH".
Your Guess Is As Good as Mine
While Gene Ray is a harmless man with just a few strange ideas (which supposedly debunk all of known physics), meeting the TIME CUBE website for the first time can be quite a shock, specially due to its formatting (or lack of), describing Ray's theories in a single aggressively written and disjointed series of paragraphs full of buzzwords and obscure non-sequiturs.
Gene has also offered $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his theories, so why don't you try? You can email him at oray612959@earthlink.net
Of course, convincing Gene that his ideas may be off the mark may not be as easy as disproving his theories...
Zombo.com
Zombo.com (pronounced "zombocom"), also available in html5, is a strange website that has been around since 1999, when flash animation on websites was the new hip thing to do with your homepage.
It consists of a a multicoloured zombo.com logo (as depicted above) with a simple flash animation consisting of multiple circles flashing rapidly, while a looping record of a man saying things such as "welcome... to zombocom", "anything is possible... at zombocom" and "the only limit is yourself... at zombocom". There are no links to other content anywhere in the website, altough the website will eventualy present you with the option to sign up for a "newZletter" through a link, which will only lead you to the message "Sorry this is not working right now. ThankZ for your patience."
The website's main purpose has been suggested to be a parody of websites from 1999, who adopted heavy use of flash animations, despite the internet connection speeds of the time not being able to properly handle the load, thus slowing down access.
Looking up the HTML code of the website reveals a markup saying "Please visit http://www.15footstick.com/index.php our other website. ThankZ", with said website consisting of a promotional homepage for strange artwork and zombocom merchandise.
...Ok, zombocom certainly isn't the most terrifying website out there, it can most certainly be, with some imagination. Because, after all, everything is possible... At zombocom.
