No, “This vehicle brakes for planets”. Brush up on your Martian whydontcha!
I miss the fun of the good old days of UFOs. Back about 50 years ago ,newspaper headlines screamed with UFO stories. Nearly every day one was spotted somewhere in the US. Using that experience , I would say that it is swamp gas. It was always swamp gas.
“New Mars Cola Gives You Lift And Thrust.”
Probing Rectums Since 1953.
{It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought}
I think a reasonable case has been made that this is part of a viral marketing campaign for the video game Halo3.
Here’s another interesting deconstruction .
No case at all. What we have is pretty good evidence that someone’s running a viral marketing campaign for Halo 3, and then we have some site owned by who-knows-whom which looks like it might make some vague reference to Halo 3, and also has one of these pictures on it. Most likely, the only connection there is that whoever owns the site in question thinks that Halo, UFOs, and Hello Kitty are all cool.
They were saying it was a viral marketing campaign for Transformers, until the movie was released and it became obvious there was no connection, so I’m taking all such claims with a grain of salt. I’m not conversant in gamer-nerd-speak, so maybe I’m missing the finer points of the argument, but I’m not seeing how much of a case has been made either.
Pretty much anything interesting and not-immediately-explainable tends to get identified as viral marketing for some upcoming thing or other - Steorn’s Orbo (fiasco) was tagged as a viral marketing promo for the new XBox
I don’t know if I buy that this is a Halo 3 viral marketing campaign, but I wouldn’t be so quick to rule it out.
Halo 1 had viral promotion in the form of a series of cryptic e-mails sent to a fan-site dedicated to in-depth analysis of the storyline and name references in earlier Bungie Sci-fi FPS series Marathon. These were sent from a Bungie e-mail address, and were by “Cortanna.” Cortanna is an Artificial Intelligence that guides the Halo series main hero, but at the time, all that could be drawn from the name was the association with Durandal. He was an AI that took the role of main antagonist through the Marathon series. The association is that Durandal is the sword of the legendary French hero Roland in the (medieval?) Song of Roland epic, and Cortanna was the name of a second sword that shared an origin with Durandal (the third is Joyeus). The text of the letters seemed to fit the themes of the Marathon series very well, stirring up speculation about a 4th installment. As it turned out, it was to raise interest in the Halo series, which is about as related as Gundam Wing is to Mobile Suit Gundam (recycled thematic elements, setting concepts, and aesthetics for an entirely new fictional universe).
Halo 2 had an ARG (Alternate Reality Game, in which e-mails, websites, phonecalls and other means of transmitting clues guide players to find locations in real life or take other actions to eventually find a big reveal at the end) based around a corrupted web-page called “I Love Bees.” The story involved the AI of a crashed human spaceship of the Halo-universe escaping into the internet, and trying to restore itself through the construction of multiple personalities hiding on the server, while pursued by a covenant AI. Players who followed the game to it’s conclusion (which involved things like taking numbers from a clue, plugging them into a gps system and a time-stamp, and going there to answer a call to a payphone at that location and time) found themselves at various theaters where they were given a giftbag, and allowed to play a demo of Halo 2’s multiplayer months before it went public.
Halo 3’s capmaign so far includes an online comic revealing how the forerunners (an ancient alien race who’s ruins gave rise to the Covenant, who worship them as gods and serve as mankind’s implacable foe in the series) came to earth in prehistoric times and built artifacts here, which was revealed in the end of Halo 2 (the Halos are massive ringworlds created to generate an organic-life destroying field to temporarily eliminate all life in our galaxy to stop the Flood, an all-consuming parasitic race remniscent of the xenomorphs from the Alien movies, and a sort of master remote control called the Ark exists on Earth). There is also that fake UFO-enthusiast site connected to it.
This latest fake UFO incident certainly seems to dovetail well with the concept, but I have my reservations since the design doesn’t really look like anything I’ve seen in the Halo games, novels, books of concept art, etc. (Although I haven’t read the graphic novel published by Dark Horse Comics).
At the end of the day, the ARGs and viral marketing are cool, but Penny Arcade said it best when they compared it to the Decoder Ring-Ovaltine sequence in “A Christmas Story”
I still don’t get it. How does it “dovetail well”? Because it’s a UFO, and there are UFO’s in Halo, even though they don’t look anything like this UFO? Seems like an incredible stretch. I don’t think anyone’s saying it’s impossible for there to be a viral marketing campaign for Halo, just that we aren’t seeing any evidence that this is one.
Well, as I said before, I don’t think it is part of Halo 3’s campaign because the art design is very different, and that would seem to be a big flaw in the theory.
But I also wanted to point out the history of Halo viral marketing campaigns, the relative obscurity of them, the tendency to try and keep it from being readily apparent (particularly so with the I Love Bees site, it wasn’t till players had extracted a number of clues and been in contact with the fictitous webmaster via e-mail that it became apparent), as reasons why the idea isn’t completely out there.
As for my comment about it fitting in, aside from the design being different, the occurence of a well put-together UFO hoax, around the same time Bungie (Halo’s creators) are running a fake site about UFO’s, to promote a game about Aliens coming to earth in the past and future, seems to go together pretty well.
Oh, and on a not-really-related tangent, Chronos go to the “Hello Kitty” page again, and click to the link that says “Only winners can go here” or some such; it links directly to a forum for a company that runs ARG’s, so I’m pretty sure that site is connected to the Halo thing (though obviously that says nothing about the hoax and the Halo 3 campaign’s relationship or lack thereof).
Here’s a thought: What’s better than a low-cost viral marketing campaign? An even lower-cost viral marketing campaign. All you have to do is find something weird on the Internet (it’s not like there’s any shortage of that already), then register on a couple of blogs and leave comments that you think that the weird thing you found is a viral marketing campaign for your product. Presto, instant publicity.
I don’t understand your point. You say you don’t think it is, then go on to state why you think it could be. 
What’s not to understand? You basically just reiterated my point.
I’m saying it probably isn’t, but I wouldn’t shut the door on it being a possibility (whereas I think we can all agree that it’s definitely not a government uav or an alien probe).
Isn’t that basically the standard skeptic’s approach (ie, “we don’t believe it, but we’ll look into it in case there’s some better evidence to be found”)?
Check this out! Mystery solved.