The Hanso Foundation

While discussing this summer’s “Lost Experience” alternate reality game, some have suggested that the meaning of “Hurley’s numbers” has not yet been explained. I feel that the story behind the numbers has been explained quite well, but since some don’t think so, here is my summary/theory.

As Alvar Hanso explains in the Hanso Exposed video, the numbers have their origin in the secret Valenzetti Equation. An equation which predicts the exact number of years and months until the end of the world. Enzo Valenzetti gave numerical values to the core environmental and human factors in his equation. Those numerical values where 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

Valenzetti’s equation and the doom it predicted was ignored by the United Nations, but there was one man who wouldn’t ignore it - Alvar Hanso. He started The Dharma Initiative, a scientific project on a remote island, with the goal of changing the outcome of the equation by changing one or more of the core factors (each Dharma station/hatch probably represents one of the numbers/factors).

In the video Hanso also explains that a radio transmitter had been erected on the island. The transmitter was intended to only broadcast the core numerical values of the Valenzetti Equation (the numbers). He then starts explaining what will happen when the Dharma scientists manage to change the value of any numerical factor, but in the middle of explaining it, the video gets scrambled and we are unable to hear what should be done. It is my belief that when they are able to change the value of one of the factors, the transmission should be changed to reflect the new result of the equation and by doing so telling the Hanso Foundation that a solution to save the world from destruction has been found.

According to Sam Toomey’s widow, the transmission was heard by Leonard Simms and Sam Toomey while monitoring long wave radio transmissions at a military listening post in the South Pacific. Sam later used the numbers to win $50,000 at a fair. From that moment he was “cursed” with bad luck until he finally committed suicide. Leonard became a patient at the Santa Rosa Mental Institute, presumably because of the numbers. It was there he met Hurley, who used them to play and win the lottery.

From the moment that he won the lottery, Hurley became convinced that the numbers had given him bad luck. He ended up on Oceanic Flight 815 which crashed on the island, where Hurley later spotted the numbers inscribed on the hatch.

The numbers where probably inscribed on all of the stations on the island because the purpose of the various Dharma stations was to change one of the core factors of the Valenzetti Equation. Without knowing it, Hurley had ended up in the place where the numbers started their journey to him.

Was it fate or coincidence? Maybe both.

Are the numbers cursed? This is a tough question, but personally I don’t believe they are. The fact that bad things happen to Hurley and Sam Toomey probably has nothing to do with the numbers. While it sounds strange, the string of bad events is probably nothing but coincidences.

There is probably no reason behind the numbers appearing on the shirts of a female soccer team either. Just like Lost shows that there are connections between people who don’t know each other, I believe that the same numbers can show up in different places without really being related.

It should be noted that this theory relies on that the story from the Lost Experience exists in the same storytelling universe as Lost, but that is a different subject which I will discuss in a later post.

This article reveals parts of Alan Moore’s “The Watchmen”

Since Lost co-creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof has said “The Watchmen is the greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced”, I decided to take a closer look at Alan Moore’s masterpiece, The Watchmen, and I found many similarities between the popular graphic novel and Lost.

In particular, I found many similarities with the recently released Hanso Exposed video featuring non other than Alvar Hanso.

The story of the Dharma Initiative

As we learn in the Hanso Exposed video, the story behind Dharma starts like this:
The United States and The Soviet Union had almost fulfilled the promise of mutual assured destruction through nuclear war, but after the Cuban missile crisis, both nations decided to find a solution.

The solution was the Valenzetti Equation which predicted the exact number of years and months until humanity would extinguish itself. Enzo Valenzetti gave numerical values to the core environmental and human factors in his equation. Those numerical values where 4 8 15 16 23 42.

In The Watchmen, a character named Adrian Veidt forms a theory that war and environmental damage will lead to humanity’s destruction in the mid-1990s. This is how he describes the situation:

Both sides realized the suicidal implications of nuclear conflict, yet couldn’t stop racing towards it lest their opponents should overtake them. Afraid of their weapons, afraid of losing them, afraid to blink or turn their backs…

Meanwhile, expensive arsenals meant less cash to spend on their old, their sick and homeless; on their children’s educations. As stockpiles grew, as computers reduced human involvement, the spectre of accidental apocalypse staled ever closer.

Simply given the mathematics of the situation, sooner or later conflict would be inevitable!

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Apparently there was a Hanso Foundation commercial last night? Brought a lot of confusion and accusations that it was just some rumor, as a ploy to make us watch reruns of LOST, but it seems it was on during the last quarter of the 23rd Psalm, and also may have played before Kimmel.

Honestly, not exactly the most informative of clips, but mentions of “encouraging spirited debate” have brought up speculation about whether some new forum or blog will be opening up soon. There is the site, http://www.hansoexposed.com, which shares the same server as Rachel’s blog, the compass site, and the original THF site before it went down, but no one has yet cracked the username and password.

EDIT 7/13: Also, keep your eyes trained on the ROT site tomorrow. Mandrake (through MySpace) left a msg with one of the friends he’s been corresponding with that there will be an update on Friday.

Possible Spoilers

Yet another update for the webmazers. From a picture which was embedded in the www.thehansofoundation.org site (it was called “hole3″), someone was able to figure out that D20 was the word hidden behind one of the eyes. D20 = deuterium oxide, an isotope of water (involved in nuclear reactors, from what I recall), also called “heavy water” (also something referenced on the blast door map).

Go to the WWP DP page and click on “Press Release”. In the passage, find the word “miracle”; it is clickable. The “heavy water” password leads you to the next hidden pages, where you will see a series of microfiched articles that may explain the idea of where the “Missing Organs” clue came from.

The second update is that DJ Dan has a new podcast, but you have to go through a few steps to hear it. Go to www.djdan.am again, click on the 6/01 podcast link, and you’ll be led back to www.letyourcompassguideyou.com site; from here, you have to once again line it up to 108, click on the number, say “Y” (you “believe”) at the popup window, and go into the directory; from there, open the owelles usr mail file. The YouTube video is the next “podcast” if you can call it that… seems not that interesting, DJ Dan defending against charges he is a sellout. Some of the images are of some interest; including a painting of Persephone, some areal satellite photos, and screencaps from within the webmaze (including one of a Lostpedia entry, LOL).

Enjoy!

Possible Spoilers

New updates, webmazer fans! Well, quite a few, actually.

On www.thehansofoundation.org, the MFI page has now changed. Now if you click the logo, an interactive map pops up. These have facts about the countries they are pointing to. There are 3 which have blanks which ask you to fill in information.

For those who would like to play around with this a little more on their own and find the answers themselves, I’ll leave the answers to the blanks in the comments section.

Additionally, there is an unlabeled clickie on China’s Northern border. I’m from China, and I don’t know of anything in that desolate area except the Gobi desert! Unless it’s a very small landmark, that is. There are no huge rivers that go exactly there. Let me know what you think. The label to the pointer says: “She was a former employee of the foundation” backwards.

Also, subLYMONal.com has changed (this is a little older; it was over the weekend). Courtesy of the nice guys at The Lost Experience Clues Blog, here are the passwords:

Persephone
108
Also: tongue, spray, embed, listen & pulse, bentley, scan, whatthe?, chill, defib, belly, gulp

Most of the latter ones seem to go to ads that are not that interesting. Password Persephone goes to more Greek mythology info, where the voiceover answer to the question on Hesiod’s Theogony is “Demeter and Zeus” (don’t know what the meaning is yet - pertaining to its use in the webmaze, that is). 108 has DJ Dan’s latest podcast, which is interesting, as it talks about a university student who feels like he was building a giant weapon for Widmore Corp (one that could move the moon??).

Possible Spoiler

New update today for Peter Thompson’s executive bio page. If you log in now, you will see his image with several large letters scrolling quickly across, almost too fast to catch. They have been decompiled by our crack team, and spell out SURVIVOR GUILT. This is the next password to be used on the site, and goes along with the “heir apparent” and “the mouthpiece” descriptive themes of the executives.

He does not have an obvious textbox to enter this like the others, and you have to click under his photo to get to a secret hidden textbox. Enter “survivor guilt”, and you’ll be taken to a series of hidden legal files, which show Thompson’s corrupt past, of working with nuclear waste dumpers, Big Tobacco, and helping to bring down the lives of innocent people. It appears that Persephone is the one who is presenting us with this, and at the end, she snidely says of Thompson, “I work for criminals, always have, always will”. Also, in some of the images, you will see flashes of text “Don’t believe his lies” and an image of a man in a lab coat, extremely similar to Dr. Candle’s lab coat in the Orientation film (down to lapel, pen and name tag, but the face is blocked out).

Interestingly enough, some people decompile the .swf files behind these images, and have found some good stuff:

Images from LowKeySoft of Thompson SWF files.

The 3rd & 4th photo down are electron microscopy. But the 4th one, I instantly noticed was familiar to me, but couldn’t remember from where (I have a medical background). I did a search, and BINGO… found it! Same exact photo, stolen from a Scientific American article from 2003:

Virus Engineered to Selectively Attack Cancer Cells

Given the link of the genetic engineering research THF does, and Thompson’s “miraculous” cancer cure which was yet to be explained by science as we know it today; I think the link to the subject of this article is without question.

Possible Spoiler

There were no formal updates to thehansofoundation.org today, that could be seen by the general public. But some people were busy behind the scenes. New code was found that was not there previously, that directs to http://www.djdan.am (the URL indicates it is registered in Armenia, to someone named “Jane Austen” in California). This is now a site which is considered an official part of the Lost Experience, because it is hidden within another official site.

DJ Dan’s site is a conspiracy site, which is made to look amateurish, as if made by a conspiracy nut working out of his basement. He runs a podcast, where he blasts potential conspiratorial agents, including, get this, Alvar Hanso and THF.org.

A few things that jumped out at me:

PODCAST
Tanya is an interesting caller. She reminds DJ Dan that the Red Sox did win the series. Also, this starts up a conversation on cryogenics. He says he believes Alvar Hanso is frozen cryogenically in Phoenix, AZ. He says that right now, is just a virtual figurehead, and actually calls him a “Mr. Cluck“. DJ Dan says he knows that Persephone is working to get information about this.

CONSPIRASPY OF THE MONTH
Pictures of a shark carcass that was found off the Great Barrier reef that had a DHARMA tattoo.

LINKS
Quite a few interesting ones. Haven’t had a chance to explore in detail yet…

EYES ON THE MAN
Photos of Alvar Hanso (same ones).

MYTHIC BEASTIE SIGHTING
Picture of the Mapinguari!!! (People who used to webmaze last year will find this significant — this is a reference to the old oceanic-air com webmaze of last year, where mapinguari is written on the fake script)

MERCHANDISE
One of the t-shirts has a picture of a finger pushing a button.

BIOS
Very interesting section. DJ Dan is from Terre Haute, IN (Link to webmaze — Peter Thompson was also from Terre Haute). He is also an Operation Desert Storm vet (Sayid fought for the other side during Desert Storm & worked with radios; and Sam Austen, Kate’s stepdad, also was a Desert Storm vet).

ICONS
There is a picture of Joop, THF logo, and a similar graph as seen on the Electromagnetism page on the bottom.

There is also a suspicion going around that DJ Dan is Javi. I think this is very likely (from voice clips and photos), regardless of whether or not this site is red herring (which also could be the case).

EDIT: As of 4PM EST of Wed, there’s been another update to THF; Hugh’s bio has been cracked (he’s been having an affair!). Also, links on ERI page to a new site, with a TON of interesting info in the directories. Check

http://www.letyourcompassguideyou.com/

More comments to come later.

New update to Hanso Foundation site today (part of The Lost Experience, see below).

Possible Spoiler

Click on Alvar’s profile in the Board of Directors; click on the date underneath, and you’ll be taken to a series of maps.

Dates & places noted in order:

- London: 14.06.2000
- Copenhagen: 12.11.2000
- Paris: 22.02.2001
- Geneva: 12.07.2001
- Roma: 18.09.2001 (white background)
- Copenhagen: 01.01.2001 (may actually be a typo, speculated that it should be chronologically 2002)
- Madrid: 31.12.2001 (may actually be a typo, speculated that it should be chronologically 2002)

New Updates as of May 9 10PM EST (after U.K. showing of LOST):

1) Hanso ad found in many major city newspapers in A sections, placed by Peter Thompson (against Bad Twin “badmouthing” of the organization). Text of ad within comment section.

2) Mittelwerk’s Executive Bio updated (”hacked”). Now, if you watch the clock in the upper left corner of your screen, and wait until :15 and :42 minutes after the hour (or, alternatively, reset your computer clock to any time ending in that), it will change into OB:EY. Click this and it will take you to a weird page on SubLYMONal, where you have to play a clicking game with items in a wheel (it has to do with The Numbers, but if you keep clicking the different squares, you will get the same results). After you’ve completed this, you will get password “Heir Apparent”, which you can enter into Mittelwerk’s section box (I think you can also use this without going through SubLYMONal). This brings up the picture of the weird spooky girl (very “The Ring” ish) and then a document showing a college transcript questioning Mittelwerk’s credentials, and his title as a doctor. The name blanked out is Gary Troup.

Note: For this to work, you need to be logged on through the newsletter page. Use the password “breaking strain” when Persephone asks for it.

In the Lost episode “Two for the Road”, The Other formerly known as Henry Gale decided to speak, twice. When he attacked Ana-Lucia he said:

“You killed two of us, good people who where leaving you alone. You’re the killer Ana-Lucia”

And when Locke asked him why Henry tried to hurt Ana-Lucia but not him, Henry replied:

“Because you’re one of the good ones John… …none of this matters, I’m dead anyway. The doctor’s gone to make a trade and we both know he’ll come back empty-handed, and then.. I’ve lost my value. So either Jack comes back here and kills me or my people find out where I’m being held and they do it.”

To which Locke replied “Why would your own people wanna kill you” and Henry answered:

“Because the man in charge.. he is a great man John, a brilliant man. But he is not a forgiving man. He will kill me because I failed John. I’ve failed my mission… …When that woman caught me in her trap, I was on my way here John, I was coming for you!”

Then Jack and Kate came running into the hatch with Michael and Locke had to go, but damn if he wasn’t very intrigued by what Henry just told him, and of course - so are we.

Who is this brilliant man Henry is talking about?
An educated guess would be either Gerald DeGroot, the co-founder of The Dharma Initiative or maybe Alvar Hanso, the mysterious man behind The Hanso Foundation which sponsors Dharma financially. Either way, both of them appear to be closely connected.

The other question are who these “good people” are and what makes them good. For some reason I believe Henry when he is talking about good people and I think the good people are simply good, as in not evil. This also points back to the theories on Goodwin simply meaning “Good one”.

From what I understand, The Hanso Foundation wants to create a better society trough their various projects and because of this, the good people are probably persons who would “fit” in this perfect society. Then there is of course the questions of morality when it comes to selecting people who are good or bad. What gives anyone the right to make that kind of choice and why would anyone need to make that choice?

If you look at the new Hanso Foundation website, you will find that they have a project called “Mathematical Forecasting Initiative”. This project predicts the twists and turns of humanities story and tries to help the world adapt to the future. For example - “How can the human race adapt to help the planet support our growing numbers?”.

What if The Hanso Foundation has discovered that the world will come to an end unless there is a radical change? Maybe they are choosing “good people” who will be allowed to live in their Island utopia.

What are your thoughts on the good/bad people thing?

Spoiler

As Andreas just announced, the official LOST webmaze TheHansoFoundation.org has just been relaunched. It relies very heavily on flash, so make sure your flash player is updated with macromedia; it also helps to have a fast connection. For those who are having trouble viewing it, I am going to include a big Easter Egg from the site; for those who want to figure it out for yourself, please be advised that this could be considered a spoiler.

The secret password from the U.K. phone number is “breakingstrain”. After going to Joop’s Corner and sending him a message, you’ll be connected then to “Persephone”, a mysterious individual who will communicate through a computer chat-like interface, and then see pictures of petri dishes with growing cultures; after you click on the circled colonies, you’ll see the following letters. I’ve retyped them from screencaps because the flash “moving spotlight” images can be hard to read. (I cut this article short so that it doesn’t take up too much blog space, please click on the link to read the rest of the first letter and the entire second GWC letter)

Global Welfare Consortium 19 September, 2005
Rue Grande 1623
1221 Geneva 27
Switzerland

To: Dr. Roderick Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Director,
Centers for Disease Control

From: GWC Executive Committee

RE: Violation of Ethical Guidelines / The Hanso Life-
Extension Project

CC: Mr. Peter Thompson, Vice President, General Counsel,
The Hanso Foundation; Hugh McIntyre, Vice President and
Communications Director, The Hanso Foundation

Dr. Johnson:

We have received word of an unfortunate and most alarming
issue in the past days concerning research operations by
The Hanso Foundation in the sub-Saharan region of Africa.
Sadly, we have exhausted our mandate as a watchdog
organization and must petition you for a formal
investigation.

It has come to our attention that a new strain of
meningococcal disease has been reported in the coastal
villages of the United Republic of Tanzania. This strain
is particularly alarming in that it has successfully
breached the simian/homo sapiens barrier.

As the enclosed documentation and correspondence
demonstrate, we have repeatedly asked the Executive Board
of The Hanso Foundation for assistance in determining the
possible correlation between the outbreak of this
transgenic disease and the research being conducted on
primates in their Experimental Station in Zanzibar.
As our requests have been met with utter and complete
disregard, we feel we have no other choice than to demand
your immediate intervention.

As the Hanso Foundation is using primates to research gene
therapies intended for human use, the correlation should
be obvious…

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