NIC: As always, we do have a lot to cover, so we’re gonna dive right in with Avery Ellis. You’ll remember this conversation from last week’s episode:
NIC: I spoke with Avery Ellis for more than three hours. We had pie in a nearby diner. And surprisingly, Avery isn’t… well, she isn’t exactly as advertised. Avery Ellis is smart, thoughtful, and not at all the crazy party girl they make her out to be in the media. It’s not the media’s fault; it’s a part she plays and plays remarkably well. But Avery Ellis is a savvy professional and I think her new technology company, created and managed with no help from her famous father by the way, is going to do very well. But what does all of this have to do with Pacifica?
Well, it turns out that Pacifica, the unpublished novel that mentions Tanis, wasn’t written by Avery Ellis. She stole it. It was twelve years ago, she was just a kid, and she’s really embarrassed about the whole thing. She gave us permission to tell you this much, but I’m afraid that’s it. Aside from the fact that she stole it from a Firefly fanfiction forum and just changed the names. She admitted she did the whole thing on a whim to anger her father, and that she’d barely skimmed the manuscript before sending it into an editor. The publishing company rushed to pull the book together because it was Avery Ellis, even after she admitted she stole the material. She told me she didn’t remember seeing the word “Tanis” in the manuscript.
NIC: I’m working on tracking down Julie Sanders, and I have an update on the Tara and Sam Reynolds situation. Last week, I told you I’d set up a meeting with Sam Reynolds in Portland. Well, Sam didn’t show up for that meeting. I’ve left numerous voice, text, and email messages, but I have yet to hear back. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to speak with both Julie Sanders and Sam Reynolds very soon. I’ll keep you posted, of course. In the interim, we’re going to take a trip back in time to 1952, to Pasadena, and Jack Parsons.
By the end of World War II, Parsons, a founding member of both Aerojet and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, had become a world leader in the industry. In fact, many people around this time actually referred to JPL as the “Jack Parsons Laboratory.” JPL eventually helped put robots on Mars, sent probes into deep space, and collected comet dust, but its key founding member had interests outside of satellites, nebulas, and black holes. Jack Parsons wanted to summon darkness, to bring ancient gods and demonic entities to Earth, using a form of elemental magic pioneered by the infamous, English, sex magician, Aleister Crowley.
Parsons’ obituary from the June 19 1952 edition of The Pasadena Independent reads, “John W Parsons, handsome, thirty-seven year old rocket scientist killed Tuesday in a chemical explosion was one of the founders of a weird, semi-religious cult that flourished here about ten years ago. Possibly he was trying to reconcile fundamental human urges with the inhuman, Buck Rogers-type of innovations that sprang from his test tubes.” Pretty salacious readings for an obituary from that time period, but Parsons was a pretty salacious individual. By day he built rockets for the government, and by night he crept out of a coffin to perform strange sex magic rituals. By all accounts, life at the mansion Parsons purchased on Orange Grove Avenue, nicknamed The Parsonage, was essentially the party scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut crossed with a Fellini movie: young, naked women masked or dressed as animals sat beside Manhattan Project scientists and pulp fiction writers. Smiling at all of them from the top of the stairs was Parsons, a figure right out of the pages of a Ray Bradbury or L. Sprague de Camp novel. Bradbury referred to Parsons as, “wonderful,” and Sprague de Camp recalled Parsons as, “an authentic mad genius, if ever I met one.”
Parsons and his group of scientists at JPL were called the Suicide Squad because of their propensity to combine dangerous chemicals that hadn’t been mixed in quite those ways and measures before. Parsons himself continued to mix science and magic, and this conspicuous blending of worlds had drawn the attention of the government. They didn’t like his… extracurricular activities. In fact, Parsons was warned several times to stop drawing unwanted attention to JPL. Undaunted, Parsons continued to wear both the white labcoat of science and the black robes of Aleister Crowley’s dark cult.
Into the ‘50s, years after the end of the war, Parsons fell on hard times. He was forced to sell The Parsonage and was living in the mansion’s coach house. He continued to experiment in his home laboratory, the coach house’s garage. But what experiment was responsible for that fatal result in 1952? This is unclear, as along with his continued scientific experiments, Parsons had also been working on explosive effects for Hollywood during this period. A surprising number of Parsons’ friends at the time believed he was silenced by the government due to some secret project he’d been working on for years. His colleagues said that Parsons had mixed those chemicals a thousand times before; there was no way his death was an accident.
But, no matter how experienced the technician, the chemicals Parsons was working with were volatile, and on June 17, 1952, just around 5pm, a huge explosion ripped through Parsons’ home laboratory. Parsons was still alive after the blast, gravely injured, surrounded in the rubble by scientific papers and occult drawings. He died in hospital a few hours later. He was just thirty-seven years old.
That’s the story of John Whiteside Parsons, called Jack, born, fittingly, with the first name Marvel, famous rocket scientist and infamous occultist. No mention of Tanis anywhere. Yet.
In order to find our way to Tanis, we’re going to have to spend some time with two of Parsons’ roommates from the mansion: the charismatic, young science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, and Parsons’ then seventeen year old sister-in-law, Sara Northrup. Sara was a beautiful and impetuous young woman. Upon hearing of her exploits with Parsons and Hubbard, Aleister Crowley denounced Sara Northrup as a vampire, which he defined as an elemental, or demon, in the form of a woman.
Remember the short story, “Where is Tanis?” published by Strange Worlds Magazine in San Francisco, the literary rabbit hole that started this whole thing? Well, I dug up everything that I could find on Jack Parsons before I started recording this show, and I thought that research was fairly comprehensive, but that was before I met a remarkably resourceful new friend.
NIC:There was a lot of material. But nothing that hadn’t been covered by the other books. I can see why Hollingsworth was frustrated. They definitely beat him to it. The Sara Northrup interview was interesting, however, but like Meerkatnip said, it was long. There was only one brief section that was relevant. In that section, Hollingsworth asks Sara about leaving Parsons for Hubbard. Once again, I’ve asked Alex Reagan to help us out. She’s going to read the relevant passage from that interview.
NIC: In 1946, Sara Northrup and L. Ron Hubbard allegedly eloped with a substantial amount of Parsons’ life savings, and got married bigamously a year later. Before that illegal marriage disintegrated amid accusations of kidnapping and communism, the couple were, by all accounts, happy.
So that’s where the Jack Parsons thread ends. Interesting, to be sure, but it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding or defining Tanis. You remember Karl van Sant, the man who placed that mysterious Craigslist ad? While we no longer had Karl’s extensive audio recordings, we did have a box of documents and photographs of the writing on his walls. We’re still working our way through the documents, but we did find something interesting in some of the writing on his walls. It was something called the Markovian Parallax Denigrate.
Those of you familiar with internet mysteries will recognize that name immediately. It began in 1996, when the web community called UseNet got spammed by mountains of seemingly meaningless messages, all titled Markovian Parallax Denigrate. This was mostly forgotten until about ten years later. By 2006, the event’s Wiki page had grown in popularity. People had become obsessed with a variety of online mysteries. At Google’s public UseNet archive, only one message remained that read, “Markovian Parallax Denigrate.” The name and sender’s email would have been recognizable to anybody paying attention to current events at the time: Susan Lindauer, a former journalist and 9/11 conspiracy promoter, arrested after allegedly serving as an enemy agent.
Susan was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Her father was a newspaper magnate, her mother, a bit of an eccentric, often seen wearing black capes around town. Susan was a free-spirited honors student who eventually moved to, you guessed it, the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, Washington. During her time in Seattle, Susan began exhibiting what her co-workers referred to as strange, erratic behavior. They said there was just something off about Susan. She was the recipient of an anti-harassment order for making phone calls trying to cast magic spells on a rival newspaper.
Apparently, Susan believed she was a CIA asset in charge of high-level, back-channel negotiations with Iraq. In an interesting aside, both Lindauer’s brother and a close friend claimed that Susan warned them to avoid New York City right before 9/11. While working in Washington D.C. Susan acquired the nickname Snowflake. Why Snowflake? Her friend Paul Hoven, who claimed to have given her the name, told New York Magazine it’s because she’s from Alaska, and she’s nuts. Susan was released from custody in 2006, when she was deemed unfit to stand trial due to paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
But Susan Lindauer claimed she didn’t send any of those Markovian Parallax Denigrate messages. She’s confirmed this in countless interviews. She’s heard of this cyber phenomenon, of course, but she says she had nothing to do with it. She’s just as baffled as we are. So, Susan Lindauer didn’t post those messages… or did she?
NIC: The connections in the stuff Meerkatnip dug up were interesting, but like she said, there wasn’t much actually there on that job search board. I’ll upload what I have to our website in the notes section. Basically, there are three postings: two IT jobs from the federal government and one research position at an internet service provider called Parzavala Communications. Meerkatnip called me back about an hour later.
NIC: Coincidence is defined as a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. Avery Ellis’ father Cameron is a powerful executive at TeslaNova Corporation. Meerkatnip’s friend does highly secretive decoding work for that same company. Coincidence? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. TeslaNova is a huge company, what you might call a conglomerate. So maybe some coincidental overlap is to be expected. Isn’t it?
When I was younger, I was obsessed with UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. For me, the worst part of growing up was the slow realization that these things were probably - almost certainly, in fact - not real. But I’ve never stopped wanting all of that stuff to be real.
And I feel like that’s true for most of us. We want to believe, to stumble into something genuinely mysterious. I suppose that’s why I fell in love with the Tanis myth right away. It just felt different, richer somehow, I dunno. I keep waiting for something to pull back the curtain, to explain away the enigma that is Tanis, but so far, the web of mystery just keeps getting deeper and more complicated. I’d become worried that the internet was draining all the mystery from the world, but after this week’s story, I may have to rethink my position. Between the deep web bulletin boards, the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, and the elaborate strangeness of Reddit A858, the internet just became a whole lot more mysterious.
It’s Tanis, I’m Nic Silver. We’ll be back again in two weeks, until then, keep looking.
SITE NOTE: Thank you to the wonderful Melissa and her editorial eye. This transcript has been updated with minor corrections.
- NIC: Excuse me?
- AVERY: Yeah?
- NIC: Avery Ellis?
- AVERY: What?
- NIC: Avery Ellis?
- AVERY: That’s right. What do you want?
- NIC: Well, I’d like to, um… is it possible -
- AVERY: Are you recording this?
- NIC: My name is Nic Silver. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions.
- AVERY: Cool. Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you to fuck off.
- NIC: It’s about a novel called Pacifica.
- AVERY: [A pause] Meet me outside, five minutes. And turn off that fucking voice recorder.
- NIC: Thanks for meeting with me.
- AVERY: I told you to turn that voice recorder off.
- NIC: Just a few quick questions.
- AVERY: And this is for your podcast?
- NIC: You know about the podcast?
- AVERY: Recorder off!
- [The recording ends.]
NIC: I spoke with Avery Ellis for more than three hours. We had pie in a nearby diner. And surprisingly, Avery isn’t… well, she isn’t exactly as advertised. Avery Ellis is smart, thoughtful, and not at all the crazy party girl they make her out to be in the media. It’s not the media’s fault; it’s a part she plays and plays remarkably well. But Avery Ellis is a savvy professional and I think her new technology company, created and managed with no help from her famous father by the way, is going to do very well. But what does all of this have to do with Pacifica?
Well, it turns out that Pacifica, the unpublished novel that mentions Tanis, wasn’t written by Avery Ellis. She stole it. It was twelve years ago, she was just a kid, and she’s really embarrassed about the whole thing. She gave us permission to tell you this much, but I’m afraid that’s it. Aside from the fact that she stole it from a Firefly fanfiction forum and just changed the names. She admitted she did the whole thing on a whim to anger her father, and that she’d barely skimmed the manuscript before sending it into an editor. The publishing company rushed to pull the book together because it was Avery Ellis, even after she admitted she stole the material. She told me she didn’t remember seeing the word “Tanis” in the manuscript.
- MK: Hey, is this a good time?
- NIC: Yeah. I’m driving, but I’m hands-free.
- MK: Okay. It was her father.
- NIC: Uh, Cameron Ellis? TeslaNova Corporation?
- MK: Yep. That’s the dude. He paid off the company and shut down the publication.
- NIC: Well, that makes sense, I guess.
- MK: There’s more.
- NIC: I like it when you say that.
- MK: There were a few things about the way this Pacifica thing was shaking out that I didn’t like, so I hacked the publisher.
- NIC: As you do.
- MK: I do, and I did, and it was weird.
- NIC: Weird? How weird?
- MK: Somebody cleaned everything. There was evidence that they hired someone, somebody like me, to make sure all of the evidence of Pacifica had been erased.
- NIC: So there was nothing?
- MK: Well, they hired somebody like me, but it wasn’t me.
- NIC: So there was something.
- MK: I managed to reassemble a fragment of an email chain from one junior editor to another. They’re talking about a few things including Pacifica and Avery Ellis. I’ll send it to you.
- NIC: Cool, but could you…
- MK: Yes, I’ll read it, as well.
- NIC: Great. Thank you.
- MK: Okay. Are you ready?
- NIC: Ready.
- MK: [clears her throat] (reads)
- “Can you believe she stole it from a fanfiction forum? And we’re publishing it?”
- “Uh, yes I can, it’s Avery Ellis, yo.”
- “Well, I hate to say it, but I loved it, but I loved Firefly, so, you know…”
- “I loved it, too. It’s too bad nobody’s going to read it.”
- “What forum?”
- “It’s called Serenity Now.”
- That’s all I could salvage from the email.
- NIC: So she stole it from a fanfiction forum? I’ll-I’ll try and get in touch with them.
- MK: That’s not going to help.
- NIC: No?
- MK: No, I’ve been a member of that forum since 2002.
- NIC: You have?
- MK: I fucking love Joss Whedon.
- NIC: Of course.
- MK: Anyway, I spoke with one of the moderators, she did a search, and nobody ever posted anything called Pacifica.
- NIC: Maybe it was deleted or archived or something?
- MK: Maybe. But not likely.
- NIC: So, it’s another dead end?
- MK: Not exactly.
- NIC: No?
- MK: No. I didn’t like something about the email I found at the publishers.
- NIC: What didn’t you like?
- MK: It was too easy. It was as if somebody left it there for me to find. It was hard enough to make me feel like I dug deep and discovered a secret, but it… I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right. So I took another look.
- NIC: And then?
- MK: And then I went looking for stuff they didn’t want me to find.
- NIC: Uh, it sounds like you found something.
- MK: Well, whoever cleaned the publishers was good, I wasn’t going to find anything there. So I cross-referenced some search terms and a whole bunch of archived text surrounding the publishing company, and I got a hit on Pacifica.
- NIC: Uh, what hit?
- MK: A scanned hardcopy of a resume from 2008. It was an editor named Julie Sanders. She had a freelance job listed on her resume from 2003, and the project she has listed? Pacifica.
- NIC: Well, that doesn’t make any sense.
- MK: I just dig it up. You have to sort it out.
- NIC: Well, I guess I need to speak with Julie Sanders.
- MK: Great, then I’ll leave you to it.
- NIC: Thanks.
- MK: No problem.
NIC: I’m working on tracking down Julie Sanders, and I have an update on the Tara and Sam Reynolds situation. Last week, I told you I’d set up a meeting with Sam Reynolds in Portland. Well, Sam didn’t show up for that meeting. I’ve left numerous voice, text, and email messages, but I have yet to hear back. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to speak with both Julie Sanders and Sam Reynolds very soon. I’ll keep you posted, of course. In the interim, we’re going to take a trip back in time to 1952, to Pasadena, and Jack Parsons.
By the end of World War II, Parsons, a founding member of both Aerojet and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, had become a world leader in the industry. In fact, many people around this time actually referred to JPL as the “Jack Parsons Laboratory.” JPL eventually helped put robots on Mars, sent probes into deep space, and collected comet dust, but its key founding member had interests outside of satellites, nebulas, and black holes. Jack Parsons wanted to summon darkness, to bring ancient gods and demonic entities to Earth, using a form of elemental magic pioneered by the infamous, English, sex magician, Aleister Crowley.
Parsons’ obituary from the June 19 1952 edition of The Pasadena Independent reads, “John W Parsons, handsome, thirty-seven year old rocket scientist killed Tuesday in a chemical explosion was one of the founders of a weird, semi-religious cult that flourished here about ten years ago. Possibly he was trying to reconcile fundamental human urges with the inhuman, Buck Rogers-type of innovations that sprang from his test tubes.” Pretty salacious readings for an obituary from that time period, but Parsons was a pretty salacious individual. By day he built rockets for the government, and by night he crept out of a coffin to perform strange sex magic rituals. By all accounts, life at the mansion Parsons purchased on Orange Grove Avenue, nicknamed The Parsonage, was essentially the party scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut crossed with a Fellini movie: young, naked women masked or dressed as animals sat beside Manhattan Project scientists and pulp fiction writers. Smiling at all of them from the top of the stairs was Parsons, a figure right out of the pages of a Ray Bradbury or L. Sprague de Camp novel. Bradbury referred to Parsons as, “wonderful,” and Sprague de Camp recalled Parsons as, “an authentic mad genius, if ever I met one.”
Parsons and his group of scientists at JPL were called the Suicide Squad because of their propensity to combine dangerous chemicals that hadn’t been mixed in quite those ways and measures before. Parsons himself continued to mix science and magic, and this conspicuous blending of worlds had drawn the attention of the government. They didn’t like his… extracurricular activities. In fact, Parsons was warned several times to stop drawing unwanted attention to JPL. Undaunted, Parsons continued to wear both the white labcoat of science and the black robes of Aleister Crowley’s dark cult.
Into the ‘50s, years after the end of the war, Parsons fell on hard times. He was forced to sell The Parsonage and was living in the mansion’s coach house. He continued to experiment in his home laboratory, the coach house’s garage. But what experiment was responsible for that fatal result in 1952? This is unclear, as along with his continued scientific experiments, Parsons had also been working on explosive effects for Hollywood during this period. A surprising number of Parsons’ friends at the time believed he was silenced by the government due to some secret project he’d been working on for years. His colleagues said that Parsons had mixed those chemicals a thousand times before; there was no way his death was an accident.
But, no matter how experienced the technician, the chemicals Parsons was working with were volatile, and on June 17, 1952, just around 5pm, a huge explosion ripped through Parsons’ home laboratory. Parsons was still alive after the blast, gravely injured, surrounded in the rubble by scientific papers and occult drawings. He died in hospital a few hours later. He was just thirty-seven years old.
That’s the story of John Whiteside Parsons, called Jack, born, fittingly, with the first name Marvel, famous rocket scientist and infamous occultist. No mention of Tanis anywhere. Yet.
In order to find our way to Tanis, we’re going to have to spend some time with two of Parsons’ roommates from the mansion: the charismatic, young science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, and Parsons’ then seventeen year old sister-in-law, Sara Northrup. Sara was a beautiful and impetuous young woman. Upon hearing of her exploits with Parsons and Hubbard, Aleister Crowley denounced Sara Northrup as a vampire, which he defined as an elemental, or demon, in the form of a woman.
Remember the short story, “Where is Tanis?” published by Strange Worlds Magazine in San Francisco, the literary rabbit hole that started this whole thing? Well, I dug up everything that I could find on Jack Parsons before I started recording this show, and I thought that research was fairly comprehensive, but that was before I met a remarkably resourceful new friend.
- MK: Dude was into some shit!
- NIC: You can definitely say that.
- MK: Okay, well this guy, Lawrence Wright, wrote a book called Going Clear…
- NIC: Um, I’ve read it. They actually just made it into a movie.
- MK: I did not see it. This other guy, Russell Miller, wrote this other book called Bare-Faced Messiah…
- NIC: Yeah, I’ve read that one, as well.
- MK: Wow, good for you. But there’s this one book on the subject that I know you didn’t read.
- NIC: Are you sure?
- MK: Yes, I’m sure, because it was never published. So this guy, Matthew Hollingsworth, has been working on this book for nineteen years, and just as he’s making the rounds, the other two books came out. So he kept trying, but based on his response, it looks like the Going Clear movie just pushed him over the edge. Two days ago, it looks like he just gave up.
- NIC: Gave up, how?
- MK: Well, he published all of his notes on a blog and then announced he bought a Dairy Queen franchise and quit writing forever.
- NIC: W-really? Well… I’m guessing you found something in his notes?
- MK: Where would you like me to start?
- NIC: Tanis?
- MK: I kinda knew you were gonna say that. Okay, well, Tanis is mentioned very briefly in a section about Jack Parsons and Sara Northrup. Hollingsworth claims Sara Northrup was responsible for most of Hubbard’s Dianetics and even some of his more… out-there science fiction.
- NIC: Really?
- MK: Yeah. It turns out Sara had… visions. Or so she claimed.
- NIC: Visions?
- MK: Visions.
- NIC: Huh. Um, so Sara was with Parsons before Hubbard. Does this mean Sara had Tanis dreams or visions and told Parsons about them?
- MK: Well, it turns out Hollingsworth was able to interview Sara Northrup before her death in ‘97.
- NIC: Really?
- MK: Yeah. He included large parts of that interview on his blog.
- NIC: Could you send that to me?
- MK: What do you think?
- NIC: Uh, you already sent it?
- MK: Yes. Do you want me to read it too?
- NIC: Um, how long is it?
- MK: It’s long.
- NIC: Okay, I’ll go through it on this end first. Thanks.
- MK: Okay, no worries. Have fun.
NIC:There was a lot of material. But nothing that hadn’t been covered by the other books. I can see why Hollingsworth was frustrated. They definitely beat him to it. The Sara Northrup interview was interesting, however, but like Meerkatnip said, it was long. There was only one brief section that was relevant. In that section, Hollingsworth asks Sara about leaving Parsons for Hubbard. Once again, I’ve asked Alex Reagan to help us out. She’s going to read the relevant passage from that interview.
- ALEX: (reads) “It wasn’t like that, exactly. I didn’t leave Jack for Ron. I mean, I did, eventually, but that was later. The three of us were inseparable, for a long time. We’d spent hours, sometimes entire weekends, in bed together, reading and performing magic. Both Jack and Ron became interested in my dreams and visions. They believed I had access to something, some kind of small rip in the fabric in our dimension. I believe I’ve lived other lives, including some concurrent to this one. I remember Jack and Ron would get hand cramps as they scrambled to write down my stories.
- “You see, they came to me fully formed. Ron published a large number of them, and Jack tried as well, with less success. Years later, somebody published some of Jack’s writing. Short stories and poetry. There were a few of mine in there. One story called, “Where is Tanis?” and another fragment called, something like, “Saturnalia.” But it was Ron who really understood the importance of my visions. I believe his entire life was spent trying to find some way to access these visions himself, but he was unable to do so. I think that was what drove him, and finally, pushed him over the edge.”
NIC: In 1946, Sara Northrup and L. Ron Hubbard allegedly eloped with a substantial amount of Parsons’ life savings, and got married bigamously a year later. Before that illegal marriage disintegrated amid accusations of kidnapping and communism, the couple were, by all accounts, happy.
So that’s where the Jack Parsons thread ends. Interesting, to be sure, but it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding or defining Tanis. You remember Karl van Sant, the man who placed that mysterious Craigslist ad? While we no longer had Karl’s extensive audio recordings, we did have a box of documents and photographs of the writing on his walls. We’re still working our way through the documents, but we did find something interesting in some of the writing on his walls. It was something called the Markovian Parallax Denigrate.
Those of you familiar with internet mysteries will recognize that name immediately. It began in 1996, when the web community called UseNet got spammed by mountains of seemingly meaningless messages, all titled Markovian Parallax Denigrate. This was mostly forgotten until about ten years later. By 2006, the event’s Wiki page had grown in popularity. People had become obsessed with a variety of online mysteries. At Google’s public UseNet archive, only one message remained that read, “Markovian Parallax Denigrate.” The name and sender’s email would have been recognizable to anybody paying attention to current events at the time: Susan Lindauer, a former journalist and 9/11 conspiracy promoter, arrested after allegedly serving as an enemy agent.
Susan was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Her father was a newspaper magnate, her mother, a bit of an eccentric, often seen wearing black capes around town. Susan was a free-spirited honors student who eventually moved to, you guessed it, the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, Washington. During her time in Seattle, Susan began exhibiting what her co-workers referred to as strange, erratic behavior. They said there was just something off about Susan. She was the recipient of an anti-harassment order for making phone calls trying to cast magic spells on a rival newspaper.
Apparently, Susan believed she was a CIA asset in charge of high-level, back-channel negotiations with Iraq. In an interesting aside, both Lindauer’s brother and a close friend claimed that Susan warned them to avoid New York City right before 9/11. While working in Washington D.C. Susan acquired the nickname Snowflake. Why Snowflake? Her friend Paul Hoven, who claimed to have given her the name, told New York Magazine it’s because she’s from Alaska, and she’s nuts. Susan was released from custody in 2006, when she was deemed unfit to stand trial due to paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
But Susan Lindauer claimed she didn’t send any of those Markovian Parallax Denigrate messages. She’s confirmed this in countless interviews. She’s heard of this cyber phenomenon, of course, but she says she had nothing to do with it. She’s just as baffled as we are. So, Susan Lindauer didn’t post those messages… or did she?
- NIC: Can you tell me what you found?
- MK: Okay, well, the email address listed in the UseNet archive at Google is clearly from the University of Wisconsin, and there was a Susan Lindauer who attended.
- NIC: A different Susan Lindauer?
- MK: That’s right.
- NIC: Were you able to dig up anything on this second Susan?
- MK: Yeah, a whole bunch, actually. She changed her name, she got remarried, she loves the Packers…
- NIC: And the message?
- MK: She claimed she’s never heard of the Markovian Parallax Denigrate.
- NIC: And what do you think?
- MK: I think somebody probably scraped her address, along with all the others used in those messages, simple.
- NIC: Scraped?
- MK: Scraped. Trawled. Pulled off the internet.
- NIC: Sorry, I don’t understand.
- MK: You use a bot.
- NIC: A bot. Okay, um…
- MK: Yeah, the whole thing was probably just somebody experimenting with a Markov chain.
- NIC: A Markov chain?
- MK: It’s a random process experiment, it’s complicated. Look it up.
- NIC: Okay.
- MK: Okay, there’s one thing though.
- NIC: Yeah?
- MK: I took a closer look at those photos you sent me of the writing on Karl van Sant’s walls.
- NIC: And?
- MK: There’s a number of what looked like onion site URLs. All but one was defunct.
- NIC: What’s an onion site?
- MK: Okay, I’m sorry, I forget who I’m talking to sometimes. An onion is like a .com for deep web locations.
- NIC: Got it.
- MK: Do you? I doubt that.
- NIC: [laughing] Okay.
- MK: Okay, so there’s a connection between Karl van Sant’s crazy wall scribbles and Susan Lindauer. The first Susan Lindauer, the woman from Alaska.
- NIC: Re-really?
- MK: Yeah. So it turns out, Susan number one was a member of quite a few newsgroups.
- NIC: That doesn’t sound out of the ordinary.
- MK: No, it’s not. However…
- NIC: Yeah?
- MK: One of the newsgroups she belonged to was a job search board.
- NIC: Mayb- So she was looking for another job?
- MK: Well, maybe, but I found the address of this particular job search board on Karl van Sant’s wall of crazy.
- NIC: Oh.
- MK: I followed a trail of breadcrumbs, and then…
- NIC: And then?
- MK: Well, it was difficult to track, but when UseNet folded into the internet, this job search newsgroup became a web forum called Fish and Tackle.
- NIC: That’s the Tanis group you dug up earlier?
- MK: It is! Although not the deep web version, that would come later.
- NIC: Well, that’s interesting.
- MK: So, Karl van Sant was one of the first members. I sent you the screen captures I was able to pull from a kind of, um… a wayback machine I accessed in Korea. There’s really nothing left aside from the members list, just a few job postings.
- NIC: Thanks.
- MK: Yep.
NIC: The connections in the stuff Meerkatnip dug up were interesting, but like she said, there wasn’t much actually there on that job search board. I’ll upload what I have to our website in the notes section. Basically, there are three postings: two IT jobs from the federal government and one research position at an internet service provider called Parzavala Communications. Meerkatnip called me back about an hour later.
- MK: Parzavala Communications no longer exists, but I’m sure you already figured that out.
- NIC: Uh, I-I hadn’t, actually.
- MK: Really?
- NIC: Really.
- MK: Oh, okay. Well, that’s not the only reason I called.
- NIC: No?
- MK: No, are you familiar with A858?
- NIC: Uh, sorry, no.
- MK: Wow, okay. Are you familiar with a thing called Reddit?
- NIC: Of course.
- MK: Okay, well, a Redditor named A858DE45F56D9BC9 has been posting strange strings of text to a subreddit of his or her own making for years.
- NIC: You know that number by heart?
- MK: Yeah, of course.
- NIC: Wow.
- MK: Thousands of people have spent thousands of hours working to interpret or decode these posts, but there’s been no progress. It’s like the biggest mystery on Reddit, maybe the biggest mystery on the internet besides Cicada3301. [There is a pause.] You’ve never heard of Cicada3301.
- NIC: [laughing] Should I have?
- MK: Well, you have heard of the internet. I know you have. I send you email.
- NIC: [chuckling] Okay, what about this A858?
- MK: So you know how conspiracy shows always point out coincidences, you know, like those Zeitgeist movies or the Shining room 227 thing?
- NIC: 237.
- MK: What?
- NIC: It’s room 237.
- MK: Okay, so you know that but you’ve never heard of A858?
- NIC: [laughing] Yeah.
- MK: Wow. Okay. Well, what I’m about to tell you is probably going to sound more important than it actually is, at first, the way these things do, but it might not be that important.
- NIC: That’s quite a set up.
- MK: Alright, I have a friend.
- NIC: Another hacker?
- MK: An information specialist.
- NIC: Right, sorry.
- MK: He’s a good friend. About an hour ago, I asked him to look into a Tanis thing.
- NIC: Thank you.
- MK: Like a lot of us, he’s been working on cracking A858 for years.
- NIC: Is this Reddit thing really such a big deal?
- MK: It’s huge.
- NIC: Okay.
- MK: Okay, so he cracked it a few months ago. He broke the code.
- NIC: Wow. Good for him.
- MK: Kind of like the numbers station, a cipher that changes constantly. He managed to crack it, twice actually.
- NIC: Wow!
- MK: Yeah, which is how he figured out it’s repeating the same message, over and over.
- NIC: The same message but using a different code?
- MK: Yes. A unique encryption cipher every time the message repeats.
- NIC: That sounds complicated.
- MK: Well, it’s crazy.
- NIC: This guy must have been popular in hackin- in information specialist circles.
- MK: He used to be, but he’s exclusive to one company these days. He signed an NDA, he hasn’t told anyone.
- NIC: Well, he told you.
- MK: We have… had a thing.
- NIC: Oh.
- MK: Yeah.
- NIC: Okay, so what does, uh, it mean?
- MK: Two things.
- NIC: Okay.
- MK: Well, first the company my friend works for is TeslaNova Corporation.
- NIC: TeslaNova Corporation? Well, that’s… that’s very interesting, actually. I assume that’s the coincidence you mentioned?
- MK: One of them.
- NIC: Uh, the other one?
- MK: The message.
- NIC: What message?
- MK: A858, the numbers and letters are a message. A message that keeps repeating over and over. It’s a story.
- NIC: It- what? It’s a story? What story?
- MK: The short story, “Where is Tanis?” by Jack Parsons.
NIC: Coincidence is defined as a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. Avery Ellis’ father Cameron is a powerful executive at TeslaNova Corporation. Meerkatnip’s friend does highly secretive decoding work for that same company. Coincidence? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. TeslaNova is a huge company, what you might call a conglomerate. So maybe some coincidental overlap is to be expected. Isn’t it?
When I was younger, I was obsessed with UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. For me, the worst part of growing up was the slow realization that these things were probably - almost certainly, in fact - not real. But I’ve never stopped wanting all of that stuff to be real.
And I feel like that’s true for most of us. We want to believe, to stumble into something genuinely mysterious. I suppose that’s why I fell in love with the Tanis myth right away. It just felt different, richer somehow, I dunno. I keep waiting for something to pull back the curtain, to explain away the enigma that is Tanis, but so far, the web of mystery just keeps getting deeper and more complicated. I’d become worried that the internet was draining all the mystery from the world, but after this week’s story, I may have to rethink my position. Between the deep web bulletin boards, the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, and the elaborate strangeness of Reddit A858, the internet just became a whole lot more mysterious.
It’s Tanis, I’m Nic Silver. We’ll be back again in two weeks, until then, keep looking.
SITE NOTE: Thank you to the wonderful Melissa and her editorial eye. This transcript has been updated with minor corrections.