11B-X-1371

About

11B-X-1371, also known by its binary code "01101101 01110101 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100101" (which translates to "muerte"; meaning "death" in Spanish), is a YouTube video featuring black-and-white footage of an individual dressed as a plague doctor, complete with a traditional Christian cowl and Venetian carnival mask, along with a series of steganographic ciphers encoded in audio and video. In October 2015, the video went viral on Reddit after tech news site GadgetZZ posted an article about the cryptic footage it had reportedly received in the mail from an unknown sender in Poland.

Origin

On May 9th, 2015, YouTuber Aetbx uploaded a video titled "01101101 01110101 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100101," which shows a mysterious individual garbed in a Catholic monk's robe with a light-emitting glove standing in an abandoned building (shown below). On September 15th, a duplicate version of the footage was uploaded by YouTuber Parker Wright under the alternative title "11B X 1371."

On October 12th, more than five months after the original video was uploaded online, the tech news site GadgetZZ ran an article about a DVD package containing the identical footage it had received in the mail from a mysterious sender in Poland. According to the article, the DVD was labeled with an alphanumeric sequence that could not be deciphered (shown below).

Spread

On the next day, Redditor TropicalJohnsons submitted GadgetZZ's article to the /r/creepy community, which brought massive exposure to the video for the first time since its upload in May, accumulating more than 700,000 views in the following seven days. Meanwhile on Reddit, TropicalJohnson's /r/creepy post generated more than 2,200 comments in that same time period, as part of a concerted effort to identify and decipher the meaning of the hidden audio-visual clues embedded in the video footage.

Steganographic Analysis

• On October 14th, Redditor M4nic_H3dgehog posted an Imgur album containing a series of frame-by-frame screenshots from the original video in the comments section, each image annotated with timestamp information for crowdsourced analysis.

• On October 19th, Redditor ryon_sherman posted a lengthy and comprehensive summary of all the potential clues discovered within the video in the comments section, along with strings of codes that have been deciphered using steganographic methods, including spectrograms and the Morse code, by peer Redditors.

• On October 21st, Twitter user @Exen pointed to the now-abandoned Zofiowka Sanitarium near Otwock, Poland as the location where the video was filmed.

The Sequel: 11B-3-1369

On December 31st, as the crowdsourced efforts at solving the mysterious cipher began to wane in momentum, Parker Wright, the same YouTuber who had uploaded the original "11B X 1371" video in September, released another video with the title "11B 3 1369"^[14] featuring the same individual as seen in the first video and a series of even more encrypted clues (shown below). In less than three weeks, the sequel video accumulated over 211,000 views on YouTube.

In recent days he’s brought his puzzle into the real world more than ever before by hiding USB drives in various locations and then posting GPS coordinates online, leading intrepid explorers to travel from other countries just for the chance at finding them.

Interview with Creator

On January 19th, 2016, The Daily Dot, one of the few online publications that has been investigating the origin of the video and the nature of the embedded messages, ran an exclusive interview article^[15] with the anonymous Polish-American creator behind the two videos (who goes by the pseudonym Parker Warner Wright). According to Wright's statement, the concept behind the videos were conceived as a cryptography-inspired art project from the beginning, rather than an ominous forewarning or threat as some had feared, and the latest release was designed and produced as a sequel installment expanding on themes previously explored in the first video.

External References