LRHB Industries Dept. of Public Records

I don’t like TV. As a matter of fact, I don’t like TV at all. I watch The Simpsons, and occasionally The Apprentice here and there, but for the most part, it’s not really my cup o’ tea, so naturally when I find something on TV worth watching, I’m pretty shocked. Yes, it’s in its second season already, but if you haven’t seen it, ABC’s Lost is probably the best thing to happen to network television in a very very long time.

Multiple friends had told me about the show, and how good it is, and naturally I was wary.”It’s just a TV show,” I thought. How good can it be? Thankfully by now, the entire 7-disc set is available from Netflix, so I gave it a gander, and holy crap, it is just as amazing as people say.

But I’m not really here to sell you Lost. What I’m here to write about is the subtle, unannounced viral web content behind the show.

First off, there’s the airline’s own website, http://www.oceanicworldair.com/. Looks nice enough, but click on Contact Us. You get a countdown similar to the one we all know and love on the show. Can’t remember the number? That’s ok… nothing bad happens. Click reset, and you get this? An image at NASA? Okay… go back to the main page, click to search for flights… clicking around, you’ll find a promo video for Oceanic Airlines, a document from the Dept. of Transportation mentioning that the Department of Defense has denied access to the proposed crash site, and other mysterious things here and there.

Alright, the airline has a website. Fair enough. What else?

Well, a quick google search on the president of Oceanic Worldwide produces a link to http://www.pb-sales.com/, “one of North America’s largest management companies specializing in the acquisition, expansion, operation and sale of companies in the transportation, service, manufacturing and technology industries.” Okay… a click on “Businesses” gives us links to two more sites, Merrick Biotech, and Geocomtex. The Geocomtex site has a pretty funny technobabble/Dr. Who inspired FAQ (for example, “Q: The Mimsy’s gone on my Borogrove
A: Ah, that’s ‘cos the Momeraths are Outgrabe. Contact your dealer.”, etc.) and the Merrick site looks nice and normal and then degrades into some anti-clone rant linking to Clone Watch, whose mission is “to fight for the preservation of our world’s natural laws. We are an all-volunteer organization committed to investigating corporations and/or individuals involved with hazardous and reckless scientific experimentation and illegal cloning.” Uh… oooooookay. The site also has a good few videos of purported human cloning facilities…and… are we still talking about LOST here?!?

Man, that is a lot of content behind the show… what’s that though?! There’s MORE?!?!?

That’s right… a little bit of looking around and you’ll also find links to The Hanso Foundation and The Dharma Initiative. On the Hanso site, you’ll find a list of their “initiatives” (The Hanso Life-Extension Project, The Hanso Foundation Electromagnetic Research Initiative, The Hanso Quest for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, The Hanso Mathematical Forecasting Initiative, The Hanso Cryogenics Development Imperative, The Hanso Juxtapositional Eugenics Development Institute, The Hanso Accelerated Remote Viewing Training Facility). On the Dharma site, you’ll find, well… an orientation video, and a login screen requesting a name and password. Does one exist? Who knows…

Oh, what a tangled web we weave! The folks over at ABC and Disney have really put a good amount of effort into confusing the hell and stoking the belly-fires of the “Losties” that post at the Lost message board. We’ve seen similar viral efforts with Halo 2 and the missing Audi in recent times, but those were more publicized than this I think… unless these were made in advance of things to come on the show?

If you’re a fan… no, wait, if you’re a BIG fan of Lost, I’d say take some time to click around and see what other information is out there. It’s the least we could do to honor the hard work someone, somewhere, put in to making all these damn websites happen. A comment to this post lists approximately 20 different sites having to do with the companies in the show.

More on Lost at the official site, and accompanying message boards.

Also: The official site for “Drive Shaft”, Charlie’s band.