The Markovian Parallax Denigrate
The oldest surviving Internet mystery is ominously called the Markovian Parallax Denigrate. It comes from a proto-Web chat community called Usenet, which was popular in the early 1990s.
In 1996, the Usenet community reported unusual spam emanating from the username Markovian Parallax Denigrate. The messages were random words and phrases strung together and distributed among the community, in a way that appeared to suggest the influence of a very human intelligence.
jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark
Hundreds of these messages flooded the Usenet discussion groups. Even though the community was filled with the most talented and intense computer minds of the age, no one could figure out what they meant, or how exactly they were generated and distributed. When the Usenet was eventually displaced by the World Wide Web, most people forgot about Parallax, and the majority of its garbled messages were not archived, disappearing in a trash heap of dead links. But to this day, whenever something strange happens in the world, some former Usenet-er brings up the mystery again. In 2012, the Daily Dot reported a speculative link between the Parallax and Susan Lindauer, a former journalist who allegedly worked as a spy for Saddam Hussein. This piqued interest in Parallax again, particularly because of the pre-existing conspiracy theory that Lindauer somehow knew about 9/11 before it happened.
Maybe a Reddit user called A858DE45F56D9BC9 – who posts nothing but long, incomprehensible strings of numbers – is the offspring of the Parallax, somehow birthed from the Usenet to the World Wide Web?