About
11B-X-1371, also known by its binary code “01101101 01110101 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100101” (which translates to “muerte”; meaning “death” in Spanish), is a YouTube video featuring black-and-white footage of an individual fully cloaked in a traditional Christian cowl and Venetian carnival mask, along with a series of steganographic ciphers encoded in audio and video. In October 2015, the video went viral on Reddit after tech news site GadgetZZ posted an article about the cryptic footage it had reportedly received in the mail from an unknown sender in Poland.
Origin
On May 9th, 2015, YouTuber Aetbx uploaded a video titled “01101101 01110101 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100101,” which shows a mysterious individual garbed in a Catholic monk’s robe with a light-emitting glove standing in an abandoned building (shown below). On September 15th, a duplicate version of the footage was uploaded by YouTuber Parker Wright under the alternative title “11B X 1371.”
On October 12th, more than five months after the original video was uploaded online, the tech news site GadgetZZ ran an article about a DVD package containing the identical footage it had received in the mail from a mysterious sender in Poland. According to the article, the DVD was labeled with an alphanumeric sequence that could not be deciphered (shown below).
Spread
On the next day, Redditor TropicalJohnsons submitted GadgetZZ’s article to the /r/creepy community, which brought massive exposure to the video for the first time since its upload in May, accumulating more than 700,000 views in the following seven days. Meanwhile on Reddit, TropicalJohnson’s /r/creepy post generated more than 2,200 comments in that same time period, as part of a concerted effort to identify and decipher the meaning of the hidden audio-visual clues embedded in the video footage.
Steganographic Analysis
- On October 14th, Redditor M4nic_H3dgehog posted an Imgur album containing a series of frame-by-frame screenshots from the original video in the comments section, each image annotated with timestamp information for crowdsourced analysis.
- On October 19th, Redditor ryon_sherman posted a lengthy and comprehensive summary of all the potential clues discovered within the video in the comments section, along with strings of codes that have been deciphered using steganographic methods, including spectrograms and the Morse code, by peer Redditors.
- On October 21st, Twitter user @Exen pointed to the now-abandoned Zofiowka Sanitarium near Otwock, Poland as the location where the video was filmed.
External References
[1]GadgetZZ – This Creepy Puzzle Arrived In Our Mail
[2]Reddit – This Creepy Puzzle Arrived In Our Mail
[3]Imgur – You Are Already Dead
[4]Mikro Controller – Mysteriöses Video per Post
[5]Gizmodo – Can You Solve the Creepy Crypto-Puzzle That’s Consuming the Internet?
[6]GeekSnack – Disturbing binary video hides huge riddles
[7]Shortlist – NOBODYKNOWSWHOMADETHISVIDEOBUT IT’S SERIOUSLYSCARINGTHEINTERNET
[8]Metro – Can you solve the riddle behind this truly scary video?
[9]Inquistr – This Scary Video Is Confounding The Internet Like Never Before: Can You Solve The Mystery?
[10]YouTube – Aetbx’s Channel
[11]Imgur – Timestamps of hidden messages in the Odd1 video
[12]Wikipedia – Zofiówka Sanatorium
[13]Twitter – Exen’s Tweet