New Super 8 Viral Details

The viral ad / backstory campaign for the J.J. Abrams film Super 8 kicked into gear in a big way earlier this week with a series of frames at the end of the teaser trailer that point obliquely to a website, ScariestThingIEverSaw.

Quite a few small clues were available at the site right off, but the most significant ones led explorers to a countdown clock. That countdown expired last night, which opened a new section of the website and gave access to a couple of new images, which you can see below.

None of the work uncovering these clues is ours — it has been done by WikiBruce and Unfiction forum members, and collated by MovieViral. For anyone who says that a super-detailed viral campaign is too much for a casual viewer, why not just let the hardcore viral fans have their fun and do the work, and then spend a few minutes perusing the results?

Anyway, what happened is this:

The timer ran down, which led to a command prompt from the PDP-11 display. The one command that has been found to produce a result so far is '.PRINT RSCOM8', which will generate two images. Each is a mocked-up newspaper page, one of which features an ad for a treat called Rocket Poppeteers. There's a Rocket Poppeteers website, but it isn't yet active.

The other page is an excerpt from President John F. Kennedy's address about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which likely dates the pages to late July, 1963.

But there is a mark on each page (an 'X') and if you flip one page and stack the two printouts, the marks align. Then other strikeouts on the pages appear to redact or highlight certain words:

no certainty if a live may be after us we go underground

One combination that seems to make more sense is "No certainty if alive, may be after us, we go underground." So is that a coded procedure, or warning? Possibly from D. Morris, whose name has been associated with the virtual computer interface in the first stage of the viral? And what will the Rocket Poppeteers site ultimately reveal?

There is a PO Box address in the newspaper Poppeteers ad; the zip code points to a spot southwest of Minot, ND — not far from Minot Air Force Base. What happens if you send something to the box? Or visit the area the zip code points to?

Click any of the images below for a full-size version.