UFO Unmasked? Marketing Campaign for Halo 3?

Michael VanderZand, a 20 year old marketing and advertising major at Grand Rapids Community College, has received hundreds of calls and text messages on his cell phone. Why? Apparently, “Adjutant Reflex”, the star of the marketing campaign, has been tied through rumors to a gamer profile on XBox.com. In this profile, there’s what appears to be a 10-digit phone number, with the last three digits replaced by XXX (This profile has been removed from the site). Since the last Halo ARG (I Love Bees), involved phone booths all over the country, fans assumed that something similar was going on.

So, in the true form of fans, they began calling all sorts of numbers that fit the redacted number. Imagine one fan’s surprise when he reached a strange voice mail recording made up of snippets from a Red vs. Blue episode. Unfortunately for VanderZand, a huge fan of the Red vs. Blue series, the voice mail was his.


Wednesday, after leaving his business ethics class, he realized that he’d missed dozens of cell phone calls. Then, he kept getting phone calls from area codes all over. He finally decided to answer a few of the calls. After several calls, he got someone to tell him how they got his number. “I end up telling the story to a guy in New York City who is on a 3-way conference call with his friend in California. So the three of us (East coast, West coast, Great Lakes) are trying to figure this whole thing out.”

People have been mentioning that they received an email that pointed them to www.27.com what appears to be the homepage of a little girl. But on closer inspection, the background holds this image:

http://27.com/ar.jpg

^ It looks quite suspiscious, and also it's called 'ar.jpg' and our little anti-hostile friend over at bungie is called AdjutantReflex

Lisa Simpson wants to stop a huge mall development from proceeding at "Sabertooth Ravine" because the ravine is a fossil site. As a compromise, the mall developers decide to let Lisa dig for fossils while they continue to build the mall. While digging, Lisa finds an almost human fossil. Almost, but not quite: in place of arms the fossil has wings. "It's an angel" declare the naive and religiously motivated townfolk. Lisa, who plays the scientific naturalist, will have none of it. She therefore enlists [scientist Stephen Jay] Gould to prove that the fossil is nothing of the sort. Gould claims that the DNA tests he performed proved inconclusive.

Meanwhile, Lisa's father, Homer, takes the angel fossil, and charges admission to his house for people to view it. Homer sets the angel fossil under some fuzzy dice, and surrounds it with cheesy Christmas lights. He also sells various angel paraphernalia (e.g., angel ashtrays). Lisa meanwhile is getting exasperated that the entire town is believing in a supernatural origin of the angel. She therefore sets out to destroy the angel, but on entering the garage where Homer stores the angel finds it missing.

Upon discovering the angel missing and Lisa with a crowbar, the angry townspeople accuse Lisa of destroying it (and that for the sake of science), arrest Lisa, and put her on trial (a clear allusion to the Scopes trial). With the angel missing and the "scientific naturalist" Lisa under arrest, the religious fanatic Ned Flanders inveighs against science likening it to a guy who tells you the end of a movie before you've finished seeing it. At this, the townspeople run amock and destroy Gould's natural history museum and all other symbols of science (as they destroy a robotics lab, a robot exits the burning lab and screams "Why was I programmed to experience pain?").

Finally, Lisa is brought to trial. The judge says that the trial will decide two things, Lisa's fate and the relation between science and religion. As for the relation between science and religion, the judge decides to put a "restraining order on religion" keeping it "500 yards away from science" (note that it is religion that is expected to stay away from science and not vice versa). Just as the trial gets under way, however, the angel fossil is spotted on the top of a hill, though now it is inscribed with the words "The End Will Be At Sundown." The mood in the town now becomes that of a Jehovah's Witness gathering waiting for the Second Coming.

Finally, sundown arrives. At first nothing happens. Then suddenly the angel fossil levitates, and a voice booms claiming the end has arrived. The end of what? Why, the end of "high prices"! It turns out the angel fossil was a fraud perpetrated by the mall developers who used the fossil as a publicity stunt. Are the townspeople upset about the way this stunt flouted their religious sensibilities? Not at all. For the publicity stunt marks the grand opening of the mall, together with 20% savings on all items sold. Thus we see the townspeople, who just moments ago were awaiting the end of the world, rushing madly to a shopping frenzy.