Finding LOST: The Unofficial Guide


Amanda Cuda has she’s written about her encounter with Nikki Stafford, the author of the upcoming book Finding Lost: The Unofficial Guide. They talk about their obsession with reading the books referenced in LOST, such as A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down: A Novel, and The Third Policeman.

Nikki’s book hasn’t been published yet, but if you’re an obsessed LOST fan, you might want to preorder it.

LOST: Season Finale predictions

I wrote this last night, and I’m getting this posted before tonight’s episode so we can see how close or really far off I am on these predictions.

The promos for LOST that have been running over the past week make it sound like tonight’s episode is going to be pretty big, and it probably will be. Will we find out everything we want to know…..Well, of course not…. Have you been watching LOST? They never do that.
So, what might they tell us?

Flight 815

From the promos, we’ll find out how and why flight 815 was taken down. There have been many theories about this, but my theory is that some of the people on that flight were guided there, on purpose, by people associated with The Hanso Foundation/Dharma. The best evidence of this is Claire, when the “psychic” (who turns out to be a fake, by his own admission) told her that she had to get on that particular plane, and even bought the plane ticket for her. I think this was done because Dharma bought the plane ticket, telling the “psychic” to get Claire on that plane. Why would they do this?

Well, if you recall, Claire backed out of an adoption at the last minute. Whether the people that were going to adopt Claire’s baby were part of Dharma is unclear (I think they were), but what is clear is that someone really REALLY wanted her on that plane. If Hanso/Dharma had some kind of weapon or method of getting people onto that island, that would be a good way of ensuring they got the child.

Now, how could the plane get so off course in order to actually get it near the island so the break up of the plane could occur? Either sabotage the instruments or, what’s more likely to me, is have a Hanso/Dharma pilot take them off course.

How did the plane break up? Sure there was a lot of turbulence, but enough to break up a whole plane? I’m sure many of you have been on REALLY bumpy airline rides, but I’ve never heard of a plane breaking up just out of turbulence. This leaves a couple of possibilities: 1) There was a bomb on board that detonated at the right moment or 2) The plane was brought down by some kind of weapon on the island. The magnetic field studies that Hanso does (read The Hanso Foundation website if you don’t know what I’m talking about) could have generated some kind of technique or weapon to do something like that. Remember, we only saw the tail section crash. We never actually saw the middle part of the plane crash; we saw the aftermath.

The Button in the Hatch

The promos and last couple of episodes on this have Locke doubting the whole “press the button every 108 minutes” task, Eko buying into it (which is a pretty neat reversal of roles). From the promos, it even looks like Locke is going to smash the computer to make sure no one presses that thing. I think this is a HUGE mistake.

Why do I think that? “The Incident” that “Dr. Candle” referred to in the “Orientation” movie they saw in the Hatch made it pretty clear that they needed to press that button. Dr. Candle had one arm in that film. In the video tape shown in the Observation Hatch, he had both his arms. Also recall that the portion of the film that was missing (and that Eko found in another hatch) said to be sure to NOT use the computer to communicate with anyone else.

If the pressing the button were all a hoax, why would that part of the film strip have been removed? I think it was because someone wanted people to stop pressing the button. If the thing that triggered the first “incident” to happen was communicating to other people on the computer, maybe causing that to happen again would trigger another “incident”.

What’s going to happen? I think if the timer actually goes down to zero, the blast doors are going to go down again, and someone, probably Locke, is going to get stuck behind there, and we’re not going to find out what happens to him until next season. One of the problems with this theory is that Henry wanted to convince Locke that nothing would happen if the timer reached zero. Why would he do that, if he knew something bad was going to happen?

Sawyer and Locke

It’s pretty weird that Locke’s father, used some “con man” terms in a recent episode. Sawyer is looking for a con man and I think he could be looking for Locke’s Father.

Who was Christian looking for?

When Ana Lucia and Christian were in Austrialia, Christian went to someone’s door to try and talk to her. Who was he trying to contact?
My theory about that is he was trying to contact someone associated with Dharma in some way, and since I’m going way out on a limb here, I think he was trying to get to Claire.

Dharma’s really interested in Walt. They’re also really interested in that baby. They even, strangely enough, took blood from Michael when he was brought to camp in last week’s episode. Has Hanso/Dharma been trying to enduce the characteristics that Walt has into other people? Claire might have been part of a big experiment that Dharma was conducting, and the result of that experiment was her baby. Christian might have gone there to warn her. Recall that we really don’t know what exactly happened to Christian; Jack found his wallet in his room which was pretty odd. If Dharma caught wind of what he was doing, they might have killed him for that.

Sawyer, Jack, Kate and Hurley

Why do The Others want them to come with Michael? What’s the relationship?

For a far out guess, I’m going to say that they’re all related because they’re all “first generation” children of Dharma or have parents that were involved with Hanso/Dharma in some way.

Sawyer’s father was a con-man (who Hanso/Dharma might be using to con folks, like Claire); Kate’s father is in the military (who could be involved with The Hanso Foundation because of it’s military weapons background); Jack’s father was a doctor (who could have been helping Hanso/Dharma with medical experiments); Hurley’s father….well, we have no idea about him.

Anyway….those are just some thoughts about the finale. We’ll see how close or far off they are.

LOST: Another new website and more Hanso Foundation Website clues

If you go to the Hanso Foundations “Electromagnetic Research Initiative” project, you’ll notice that the image in the lower right of the earth, there’s a date of: October 62, 9291. You’ll also notice that there’s an “X,Y” coordinate in the upper left hand corner of that image. If you move the mouse so X: goes to 629 and Y: goes to 291, (which is the center of the diagram to the right of the earth picture) and click it, a new image appears. Click on that.

This will take you to the new website: http://www.letyourcompassguideyou.com/. Now, click somewhere on the green part of the screen, and press the “TAB” key on your keyboard. A new image will appear around the compass. Go ahead and click on “108”.

You’ll be taken to a new screen, and the question “Are you one of the good ones?” comes up. Press “Y” on your keyboard.

You’ll be taken to a directory of files. Only two of the directories are open, and contain a few files to look at: hmcintyr and pthompso

Click in the “hmcintyr” link and then click the “mail” link. From there, click the 139191991471518711419.jpg link. That will take you to a rather large picture. If you examine the picture closely, you’ll see the words “The Mouth Piece” near the Buddha statue.

You can also see this same message in the pthompso directory, but in a different form:

Click on the pthompso directory, then “mail” then “Inbox”. You’ll notice a series of ones and zeros. Go to the URL indicated in the mail header: http://www.adcott.net/binary/ and put that series of numbers into the bottom box and click “Decode”

It decodes to the words “The Mouth Piece”.

Now, what does “The Mouth Piece” have to do with anything?

Go to Hugh McIntyre’s Bio on The Hanso Foundation website. You’ll notice his picture is missing, and there’s a password box there. Type in “The Mouthpiece” there, and you’ll see an animation.

You can also see an animation that’s on YouTube (access via McIntyre’s area) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pna5kuVZDXE

LOST: The Hatch: Is it really an experiment?

But do you think it really is a psych experiment?

I don’t think it is. I think the people in the observation station
were place there for three weeks at a time, just so they weren’t there
long enough to observe any long term pattern to what might be going
on. If it were something really important and I only wanted a few
people to know about it, but needed more people to help me do it,
telling those extra people it was all part of some experiment would be
a good cover.

Why would the Egyptian Heiroglyphics be there after zero? Why encase
something in that much concrete? Just for a psych experiment?

Another thing, why was it so important for the people in the hatch to
NOT have access to the outside world (via the computer, as Dr. Candle
warned)? And why did someone (Kelvin?) think it so important to leave
that information OUT of the film strip, and hide it? Was what
happened during “the incident” big enough to blow a big hole in
Dharma/Hanso’s plans? Was the person that hid that snippit of film
hoping that it would happen again?

That’d be an interesting idea…. Set up all this Dharma stuff, doing
whatever sinister wackiness it does. Someone catches on, and doesn’t
like it, and very nearly causes the whole operation to end. But not
quite. They recover just enough to keep going, but at a lesser level
than before, and with new complications. Maybe that smoke monster got
released. Maybe it was the French woman’s expedition.

Is that contraption they’re pressing the button for in the hatch
something that’s concentrating all the energy from the magnetic
fields? I mean, say it’s taking a little bit of that energy at a
time, building it all up, so it can be used in some way? Maybe to
magnify psychic powers (like the healer that Rose met with); maybe if
it’s magnetism, to bring down the plane in a semi-controlled way?

LOST: More Hieroglyphics

A couple of people have asked me where I found the information on Egyptian Hieroglyphics that lead me to the conclusions in my previous post about the LOST counter. I did all that research via Google. Here are some of the pages:

The Egyptian Vulture
Hieroglyphics!
Hieroglyphic Dictionary
Duke Papyrus Archive
Hieroglyphs.net

These are just some of the sites that I looked at. There are quite a few others on the Web that might help you draw your own conclusions about what the symbols mean.


One of the things I didn’t mention before was that apparently there is some controversy surrounding Hieroglyphics found in Australia, and whether they’re real or not. Since some of LOST centers around Australia, it brings up a lot of interesting questions.

There have been a lot of theories about what the hieroglyphics on the “countdown” timer in the hatch mean. The thing that occurred to me wasn’t so much what they meant, but why there were hieroglyphics symbols there in the first place. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that of all thins, Egyptian hieroglyphics would show up on the timer? Why not words? Why any message at all?

LOST: Egyptian Hieroglyphics

On LOST last night, the episode entitled “One of Them” came to a climax where the timer hit zero and a partial display of Egyptian hieroglyphics was displayed.

It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the show as I write this, and someone has posted they’ve discovered what the symbols might mean. Check out this picture of the LOST timer glyphs posted by “onehundredeight” over on http://lost.cubit.net.

I saw this post, and took a look at a number of hieroglyphics sites on the web to see if I could get independent confirmation about what those symbols mean.

First of all, heiroglyphics can be read in several different ways. The biggest question is whether to read these symbols from right to left, or left to right. This is actually pretty easy to determine, even if you don’t have experience with hieroglyphics (and I certainly don’t). The direction the symbols are facing is the direction they should start from. So, for these symbols, you have to read them from left to right.

One of the tricky things about hieroglyphics is that even one symbol change can change the meaning of the phrase. Since we didn’t see the entire set of five glyphs, we have to keep that in mind.

Another thing to notice is that the first three symbols were on a black background, and the fourth and fifth symbols are on a red background. This may mean that there are two glyph phrases. Without the second symbol (which was never revealed), it’s difficult to know if the hidden glyph would make two distinct phrases that make sense.

The first symbol means “to cause”. The last symbol means “enemy” or “death”. Seems like a slam dunk, right? There are a couple of symbols that aren’t used, and like I said, those symbols are important.

I wasn’t able to determinate what the third symbol meant, but the fourth symbol was “the vulture”. One of the heiroglyphics sites (and I’m sorry, I don’t remember which one) described the Egyptian vulture as a bird that will repeated try and open eggs by flying over them with a rock and dropping the rock. Needless to say, this doesn’t work very well, but they continue until they succeed.

So, if we take those two symbols alone, could they mean “drop death”? “Drop death”, as in a bomb? Think about it for a minute. They’re in a hatch near a sealed chamber that’s highly magnetic. There are blast doors in the hatch. Sayid said that there may be nuclear material behind that thick wall of concrete.

Could “drop death” mean “drop a nuclear weapon”? Sure, it’s a variation on “cause death”….but, that’s my theory.

I think the real question that people are overlooking here is not what the heiroglyphics mean, but….. What the heck are Egyptian Heiroglyphics doing on that counter in the first place?

Update 02/23/06 – Read More about the Lost Heiroglyphics

Update 08/22/06 – According to the LOST writer’s themselves, the meaning is “Underworld”. The writers revealed this at this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

LOST: Has Walt met Alex?

Michael’s been gone for two episodes now, and is trying to find Walt. I’ve been hoping that Walt will be back soon, because we might get a better idea of what The Others have been thinking when they tried to grab Walt.

We saw the bearded man (the guy Sawyer called “Zeke”, and that the producers call “Mr. Friendly”), ask Alex to bring Kate to him. Could Walt have met Alex? Might Alex try and leave with Walt to go back to the LOST camp? That sure would make Danielle a larger part of the show.

Nanotechnology, the black swarm, and the Others

If you haven’t read my posting A Theory about LOST, you should probably go read that before you continue reading this page.

In the “23rd Psalm”, we got a really good look at the monster that the crash survivors have been hearing (and seeing) on the island. So far, the only two people that have really stared down the “black swarm” are Locke and Eko.

So, what the heck is that “black swarm”? The nanotechnology theory I posted about previously explains this. The monster appears to be smoke, but is actually made of many tiny machines that communicate with each other.

The idea of many tiny machines communicating with each other isn’t all that far-fetched. Research Smart Dust at Berkeley, and at companies like Dust Networks and Crossbow is being done right now. A few years ago, I worked with some of the Smart Dust “motes”. (I just worked with them, not on the actual project itself…just wanted to make that clear). They’re about the size of a quarter and have a tiny radio built into them. Each “mote” communicates with the other motes within it’s radio range to communicate the data it’s tracking. In the case of the devices I used, they communicated the temperature. The motes nearest to the base station communicate all the data from the rest of the “swarm” to that base station. The base station can then do whatever it wants with the data.

Now, extrapolate the idea of smart dust out in every direction. Make the motes as small as real dust (the size of machine in nanotechnology), increase the processing power, really soup up the software the things run, and it’s not all that far fetched to think that the smoke monster we saw would be possible. All they would need is some sort of propulsion.

I think that’s really what the monster is. A swarm of nanotech machines. “Nanites”, if you want to use a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” term. They’re moving around the island, and they’re smart. Or at least they appear that way. They could just be following their programming and have no real intelligence of their own. Right now, that’s my bet.

Eko stared the swarm down. While the swarm was in front of Eko, we saw a number of images from Eko’s past flash through the swarm itself. It appeared to read Eko’s mind. That could be just the “sci-fi” part of LOST that doesn’t need to be explained, it could be that it read Eko’s electrical brain impulses….however it did it doesn’t matter really. The main point is, it flashed scenese from Eko’s life and then moved on. Presumably, this is the same thing that happened to Locke. What was the swarm doing?

I think it was assessing whether or not Eko was an “enemy”. A enemy of what? ….Well, that’s the question. An enemy to the island? An enemy to something it’s trying to protect? Is it just deciding that anything that’s “hostile” is an enemy?

Well, that very well could be. The pilot was in a military-like uniform that the swarm could have taken as the identifying mark of someone that’s “hostile”.

Say for a moment that all that is true. There are people on the island that the swarm would kill (or worse… more on that in a minute) if it got a chance, and there are people on the island that the swarm would leave alone. If the swarm won’t touch anyone it doesn’t perceive as a threat, the vulnerable people on the island would surround themselves with people that are “safe”. I think that’s a reason they could be taking all the children. What could be safer than a child? Everyone assumes Walt was taken for his “psychic” abilities that everyone think he has; it could just be he was taken because he was a child.

So, what could be worse than being killed by that thing? I think it’s also likely that the swarm might have the ability to take people over, based on what Danielle said to Sayid (see my previous posting ).
In the comments someone asked why the word “quarantine” was inside the hatch, instead of the outside. If the swarm was able to infect people, that would be the reason. It also explains the reason Desmond has been taking the injections. If Desmond spent any time at all outside (gathering fruit, other food, wood, etc), he’d take injections to prevent the swarm from infecting him.

LOST Theories – The People That Were Taken

One of the things the writers on “LOST” do is the introduction of characters that leave you with one initial impression, and then turn that impression around. They’ve done that with Jin, Sawyer, Michael, Kate, and even to some extent Eko.

They’ve done this with the hatch, the “monster”, and even “The Others”.

The hatch turns out to actually have someone living inside it, complete with computers, food, washing machine, etc.

The “monster” that many people suggested was some sort of dinosaur, turns out to be nothing of the sort. In fact, it fits in well with my nanotechnology theory.
But….”The Others”?

Yep. I think that The Others really are taking people away, but not necessarily doing them any harm because there is something about the people that were taken that The Others need. I think it’s even possible that they’re trying to “save” these people, from what is happening on the island.

What’s the evidence of this? Well, a few things.

First, Goodwin, in his last conversation with Ana-Lucia, said as much. Second, if they wanted to out and out kill those people, there are many ways they could have done this already.

The Others had a list of the people they were going to take from the “Tailies” camp in “The Other 48 Days” episode. Those people were specifically taken. Why?

I seriously doubt that every one of them is psychic or has some sort of mental ability similiar to Walt, so we can rule that out.

Would they be pulled into The Other group to convert them to be “Others”? Why would they do that? It has to be hard enough to survive on the island alone, let alone with all the weird stuff that’s happening to them.

My theory on this is that The Others are using these people as a form of defense. Defense from what? Well, the “smoke monster” for one thing. We’ve seen two people, Locke and Eko, stand up to this thing and walk away from it. It could be that The Others have seen that some people can stand up against The Smoke, while The Others themselves can’t.