There are few prospects more enticing than the possibility that one has stumbled upon a genuine mystery, one that might be solved with a combination of diligence and brain power. It is the basis upon which countless movies, books, and TV shows are founded, particularly those dealing with spies and detectives. The Reddit community thought it had discovered just such a mystery when, a little over five years ago, a strange subreddit known as r/A858DE45F56D9BC9, containing only strings of letters and numbers, appeared on the site. What happened next is detailed in an investigative piece by Robert Guthrie for The Kernel.
Reddit’s users decided that the seemingly random characters on this subreddit “looked like a code” and thus began to decipher the posts there, in some cases devoting huge amounts of time to doing so. Subreddits about r/A858 sprang up, and theories began to emerge about the original thread’s purpose and origin. It was “an insidious government program,” some said. Others felt that, like Cicada 3301, it was a recruiting program devised by clever programmers. It could even be the work of extraterrestrials. Who knew?