LOST Experience Update, 16 May 2006

For those following The LOST Experience, a multimedia "alternate reality game" created by ABC as a tie-in with LOST, here are some recent updates. (Note that most of this won't make much sense without first catching up on what's happened so far. I recommend Lostpedia's coverage.)

As of today, there's a fourth video clip from the Gary Troup interview available here. In it, Troup reveals that Alvar Hanso allegedly purchased every available copy of Troup's nonfiction book, The Valenzetti Equation—and the reprinting rights to it. So far we know little about Valenzetti, other than the fact that the blast door map makes a brief reference to "Valenzetti-related research activity." There was also a Wikipedia article for a short time that allegedly may have been written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a LOST writer/producer (this article is no longer available on Wikipedia, but it has been mirrored in Lostpedia's Valenzetti article).

Also new today: another Web site that has been officially connected with The LOST Experience! http://djdan.am/ The site is that of a (fictional) DJ with a podcast about conspiracies. This month he's focusing on none other than The Hanso Foundation. The site includes an alleged photograph of a shark with a Dharma Initiative logo (which is interesting because the shark that was swimming near Sawyer and Michael after the Others destroyed the raft had a similar marking). I plan to listen to DJ Dan's short podcast tomorrow. A second DJ Dan podcast is due on the 26th of May, according to the site. One more thing: this is almost certainly nothing more than a crackpot theory (or more likely the result of having recently studied the subject), but the image on DJ Dan's site when you click on "Mythic Beastie Sighting!" looks an awful lot like it might contain steganographic clues. Would anyone versed in steganalysis care to test this theory? I did some digging with Google Image Search and found this image, which by all appearances is the original, so it might be helpful to compare the two to see if they're identical. If not, the DJ Dan version could possibly contain a hidden clue.