“Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

That is the 2012 message that served as the catalyst for one of the biggest online mysteries. The enigma soon gained a name: Cicada 3301. It was posted by an account with the username 3301 and featured a cicada image as its logo.

Since then, numerous codes have been posted. They exist in various forms and employ numerous methods, like steganography and encryption, to conceal their message so that only the most savvy code breakers would be able to unravel the web, find the solution, and take home a prize.

What occurs if you do it correctly? We are still unsure. None of the individuals that successfully cracked one of these riddles made their discoveries public. Some have conjectured that Cicada 3301 is a very sophisticated recruitment tool used by a government organization like the CIA or MI6, or a private cybersecurity firm, to locate the greatest code breakers in the world.

Some think a more shady organization, such a cult or the Freemasons, is responsible for the puzzles. Cicada 3301 may be the subject of further research in the future, but for the time being, it is one of the biggest online mysteries.

The dark web is a mysterious area of the internet that can't be accessed normally and never appears in search results. Here, you may locate all kinds of illicit items, including drugs, con artists, and even hired killers, even if you have no intention of ever using it. Well, if internet lore is to be believed, Mariana's Web, a considerably darker and more shady online realm, is far more mysterious and frightening than the usual black web.

This website, which takes its name from the Mariana Trench in the ocean, is said to contain sites that are inaccessible elsewhere and are full of highly sensitive information, including government documents, Vatican private archives, and the location of Atlantis. Some claim that an artificial intelligence that has developed sentience entirely controls Mariana's Web.

It should be technically impossible to even visit Mariana's Web because it requires solving some equations that can only be solved by a quantum computer. Many people are still skeptical about Mariana's Web, believing it to be nothing more than an internet boogeyman.

If you consider yourself to be an expert on rare music, particularly 1980s new wave, then this puzzle is for you. Despite the combined efforts of the online community, the song's author and title remain unknown. In 1984, a German man by the name of Darius S. began recording songs from the radio onto his cassette player, mostly from the show Musik für Junge Leute, or "Music for Young People," on NDR station. He particularly liked one song, but he didn't remember its name, so he marked it with a question mark.

Twenty years later, he digitalized his collection, and in 2007, his sister tried to assist him by releasing a clip of the elusive song online. She originally had no success, but such things typically take time to get viral. Until 2019 when the story was picked up and began to take off like wildfire, the recording of this enigmatic song sat in the forgotten corners of the internet for 12 years.

Quickly, the song was discussed on podcasts, subreddits, YouTube videos, online magazines, and Discord servers, yet no one had heard of it. Even the DJ who worked at NDR in the 1980s, Paul Baskerville, was contacted by someone, although he was unaware of it. He said that he occasionally played obscure, underground music that was provided to him from Eastern Europe or from across the Berlin Wall. Although there have been some leads, the unidentified music continues to hold the distinction of "most enigmatic song on the internet" for the time being.

Welcome to what some people refer to as YouTube's strangest enigma, while others describe it as the creepiest channel ever made on the site. Unfavorable Semicircle is the name of the channel, which debuted in 2015. Similar to Webdriver Torso, it began to publish a ton of bizarre movies, but these lacked the former's consistency.

Videos ranged in length from a few seconds to several hours. Some were silent, while others made static or distorted sounds. Some only featured a few dots, while others had abstract images. Nonetheless, the majority of them had titles that combined a random six-digit number with the Sagittarius astrological sign.

The channel posted almost 72,000 films in less than a year, with an average of one video per few minutes at one point. People naturally began to ask what the aim of this was after word of it spread online. Was it a different test channel or a creative endeavor? Was it the work of a troubled mind or did it contain any hidden messages? We never received a response to these queries, in contrast to Webdriver Torso. As it gained attention, YouTube canceled the channel in February 2016 due to repeated rules violations. Unfavorable Semicircle hasn't been claimed since then, and its owner is still a mystery.

Let's move on to a mystery with a humorous component that also has a solution. It all began somewhat innocently in 2017, when comedian Nate Fernald shared a photo of a metal pin on Twitter that featured what appeared to be some sort of fantastical creature by the name of Geedis. He had purchased a few of them from an eBay vendor, but didn't know who Geedis was, so he asked the question online in the hopes that someone might recognize it from an old comic book or even a foreign TV program.

It turned out that neither the eBay seller nor the internet had ever heard of Geedis. As Fernald's post gained a lot of attention, someone added a little more detail. They offered a photo of a sticker sheet with six fantasy characters on it, Geedis being one of them. We at least knew where the odd tiny critter originated because the sheet was marked "The Land of Ta," but that brought up a new query: what was The Land of Ta? Was it an old children's book or a TV show?

The secret wasn't solved until the podcast Endless Thread two years later. Sam Petrucci, a cartoonist well known for creating some of the original graphics for G.I. Joe, created "The Land of Ta." He created "The Land of Ta," a very brief run of fantastical stickers, for the Dennison Manufacturing Company in 1981. Nevertheless, it was only ever available as stickers. Questions like who made the pins and why they only made Geedis pins are still unsolved.

We now move on to a classic, at least in terms of the internet, from 1996, when reading and posting messages on a discussion system called Usenet was still common practice. Usenet was deluged with hundreds of bizarre messages that appeared to be nothing more than a string of random syllables in August of that year. They shared just that one thing. Markovian parallax denigrate appeared in all of them as the subject line, another seemingly random arrangement of words.

The initial posts were all written in 1996, which was a little too early for most internet sleuths, and were all discarded as being meaningless. There is just one that is still in existence, and it has phrases like "jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaboration rue sportswriting rococo," and so on.

Not until many years later, especially after a Daily Dot article on it that was published in 2012, did the online community begin to become fixated on Markovian parallax denigrate once more, treating it like some sort of enigmatic puzzle. While many believe that the posts were merely the output of an archaic spambot or word generator, nobody has been able to uncover any hidden meaning to the message up to this point, which can be significant in its own right. Even now, 25 years later, some people continue to work on one of the first puzzles on the Internet because they think that something might be there, concealed among the nonsense.

The tale of Jack Froese is a well-known ghost story that has been modernized for use today. The 32-year-old from Dunmore, Pennsylvania, passed away unexpectedly in 2011, leaving his friends and family in shock. But, he soon began communicating with them from the afterlife. He used email instead of more conventional techniques like moving objects around the house or assuming the form of a ghostly person.

After Jack's passing, three of his pals claimed to have received communications from him. The most logical explanation would be that a hacker was playing a practical joke on them or that someone else who knew Froese's password was behind it, but they all swore that the emails contained personal information that was only known to them and Jack.

For instance, Jack Froese sent an email to Tim Hart with the subject line "Did you hear me? At your residence, I am. F-ing clean your attic! The two of them spent some time in the attic just before Froese passed away discussing what to do with the vacant area. Ultimately, the recipients of the letters decided not to investigate the sender too further, therefore the true origin of the emails is still unknown.

This internet enigma is officially called as 11B-X-1371, and for a while it was hailed as the spookiest YouTube video. In a two-minute black-and-white footage, a figure dressed as a plague doctor is seen standing inside a run-down structure with a forest behind them. Static noises accompany the footage, and the figure is holding a blinking light in its hand that seems to be transmitting messages in Morse code.

When a tech site called GadgetZZ first made the clip public in 2015, it quickly became popular online. As individuals continued to look into it, they found that the movie had a lot of unpleasant material, including strange words, threats, and even violent images that were encoded in plaintext, Morse code, and the audio's spectrogram.

Online rumor mills suggested that the film might have been a hoax, a student project, a viral marketing gimmick, or even something more serious like the work of a serial killer or a bioterrorism threat. The external pictures of the woodland helped investigators locate the spot where the video was filmed after weeks of searching. It was a defunct psychiatric hospital in Poland that located close to the town of Otwock. Finding the video's creator's identity was the next step.

This proved challenging because numerous people attempted to claim authorship and numerous others produced imitation clips, but a few months later, the author was tentatively identified using the pseudonym Parker Warner Wright. He said he was an American residing in Poland who made the film as a creative endeavor.

In 2011, an unusual subreddit that exclusively included posts made up of strings of numbers and letters appeared on Reddit, sparking a mystery remarkably similar to the one mentioned earlier. The name of the subreddit and the account posting these comments were both made up of a seemingly random combination of numbers and letters, but it was more commonly known by its first four characters, A858.

It took almost a year for other people to become aware of the peculiar tale, but once they did, there was a flurry of eager conjecture about what might be the significance of this peculiar behavior. Shortly enough, a related subreddit named "Solving A858" developed, which was primarily used by amateur codebreakers. Only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of posts on A858 have ever been resolved, however they all seemed to contain unrelated random words or images.

Later, in 2016, a post with the simple title "The A858 Project Has Concluded" surfaced on the subreddit. You have the option to stop receiving updates. A while later, the same user provided a little more detail, admitting that they had been compensated by an unnamed company to post encrypted code puzzles for an unnamed purpose. Some assume this was an unsuccessful commercial prank, while others think the project is still in progress but at a different level.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, Webdriver Torso was the most perplexing internet riddle for about a year. It was what? Basically, it was a YouTube channel that uploaded tens of thousands of 11-second clips with blue and red rectangles in them. That was all there was, but human imagination did the rest, and soon enough, people online were speculating that the channel might have been used by spies sending encrypted messages to one another, or it might have been used for some sort of covert experiment, or, of course, it might have been used by aliens.

Online sleuths finally located the source of this rife conjecture after around ten months, and, spoiler alert, it turned out to be a quality control channel that Youtube utilized to make sure that the videos that were posted online were identical to the original files. What made them choose arbitrary color rectangles? because making them was simple.

The first person to unravel the puzzle was an Italian statistician by the name of "Soggetto Ventuno" or "Subject 21," who discovered that the channel was a part of a YouTube network with Swiss registration that also comprised other channels that published video from the Google offices in Zurich. After that, Google issued a statement that was aptly Rickrolled, reading:

“We’re never gonna give you uploading that’s slow or loses video quality, and we’re never gonna let you down by playing YouTube in poor video quality. That’s why we’re always running tests like Webdriver Torso.”