Last week I came home to find my roommates decoding texts and reading about conspiracy theories online. Apparently, they had been at it for four hours and we continued to talk about it for hours after I joined.
It all started when my roommate came across the recent Reddit thread explaining the Malaysian Airlines conspiracy. Granted, we all know people can take things a little far online, so please try to bear with me on this. I'll try to go slow.
The thread starts with a voicemail sent to Twitter user Ty (who has since deactivated his account). The voicemail is coded in the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, where each letter of the alphabet is matched with a code word (Ex: A=Alpha) that is used to spell out a message. Ty posted the message on Twitter on March 13th and Twitter users quickly helped him decode the voicemail. The message they decoded was chilling: "S DANGER SOS IT IS DIRE FOR YOU TO EVACUATE BE CAUTIOUS THEY ARE NOT HUMAN 042933964230 SOS DANGER SOS."
People aren't sure what the numbers at the end of the message are signifying, but some believe they are coordinates. When plugged in they may either point to locations in Africa or Asia depending on the formatting of the numbers. As for the 'S' at the beginning of the message, it means that the message is playing on a neverending loop, leading people to believe that the message is coming from the black box of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
Twitter user Uzumaki replies to Ty's tweet about the voicemail and explains his theory on the situation. He claims the reason Ty was able to receive the black box signal (if that's what it really is) was due to the recent solar flare activity in the Australia/Southern Asia area. The solar flares increase the electromagnetic activity in the air allowing the black box recording to have a stronger signal explaining why we are just getting them now.
Ty received many DMs over the next few days, one of which is written in Morse code. It translates to a string of numbers: "20.8.5.25 1.18.5 20.1.11.9.14.7 15.22.5.18 41818." A Twitter user decoded this message by matching each number to a letter of the alphabet in order to spell out a message. The message reads: "They are taking over." This furthers the theory of something non-human threatening the world.
The 41818 is written differently than the rest of the numbers though and many people believe it is a date: 4/18/18. This date shows up again when Twitter user @Hijj370 also known as April 2x3+6+6 DMs Ty with another creepy audio recording. When played in reverse, this recording sounds like audio from a flight control tower and the voices mention Malaysian Flight 370 multiple times.
Here's where it gets really confusing. One of the Morse code messages sent to Ty was supposedly sent to him the day before Stephen Hawking’s death on March 14th, 2018. The message reads: “Message received is well related to Stephen Hawking’s death, you are not ready to face them.”
(Just for the record, I could not find Stephen Hawking's prediction of something happening in 2018)
Unfortunately, since Ty has deactivated his account, we are not able to confirm that this message was sent before his death, but the mention of Stephen Hawking is intriguing nonetheless. Hawking had predicted a handful of ways that the world would end and one of these predictions was AI (artificial intelligence). He believed that we should continue developing AI, but he feared that AI would eventually start outperforming humans.
Hawking also warned against trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials. He didn’t believe luring unknown beings to our planet was the best thing for us and I can’t say I blame him. Our lack of knowledge about the possible life forms out there means we can’t reasonably assume that they will be peaceful.
Back in 2010, in a series for the Discovery Channel, Hawking warned us not to reach out to aliens because their intentions are unknown. Rather than trying to reach out to them, he believed we should be doing everything we can to avoid contact. For all we know, we could be leading them here to slaughter us.
Essentially, this conspiracy theory is claiming that something non-human took down the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and is now going to take over the world on April 18th, 2018.
I just want to point out that I don't actually believe this conspiracy theory, although it is pretty fun to joke about with your friends. None of the facts add up, and almost none of the evidence can actually be proven credible. The black box theory might as well be tossed out the window because the batteries on black boxes are only designed to last about 30 days and the flight went missing years ago.
As for all of the strange DMs and messages Ty received, people love to create fake buzz. I would not be the slightest bit surprised if every single one of those accounts was created for the sole purpose of furthering this conspiracy. When I was reading the Reddit thread, I had such a hard time following how everything connected because it all seemed like random junk to me.
I don't see why anyone would believe this conspiracy, but hey, even if the world is going to end on the 18th, at least we won't have finals, right?
