In late 2004 and early 2005, two Fark users – erewhon and wizzywig – repurposed otherwise juvenile and snark-filled forum threads about space weapons and UFOs into something stranger and more compelling: a semi-public conversation steeped in real military jargon, speculative physics, and carefully signaled insider knowledge. Beneath the profanity and humor, they debated plasma stealth, gravity-defying propulsion, classified research culture, and the limits of what can safely be said in public, all while testing each other’s credibility in front of an audience that mostly came for laughs. This blog post unpacks their exchanges across two threads, showing how early-2000s defense anxieties, post‑9/11 secrecy, and internet anonymity combined to blur the line between informed expertise and techno-myth, revealing how, online, the future of warfare could sound at once like sober engineering talk and an elaborate inside joke.
Two Decades Later, Revisiting & Translating Forum Threads on Space Weapons and Beyond
In late 2004, a Fark.com discussion thread about US plans to put weapons in space took an unexpected detour into the realm of clandestine military tech and conspiracy-tinged humor. Amid the usual wisecracks and banter, two pseudonymous posters, “erewhon” and “wizzywig”, stood out. They engaged each other in a sprawling, jargon-laden side conversation as if two insiders had suddenly started swapping war stories and half-coded technical secrets in the middle of a public comedy club. Over the next days, their exchange became a fascinating blend of real aerospace concepts, speculative science, and witty obfuscation, all under the guise of Fark’s irreverent style.
Several months later, in March 2005, the same pair surfaced again in a Fark thread about an alleged “USAF Top Secret Nuclear Powered Flying Triangle Thingy”: supposed photos of a so-called black project aircraft nicknamed “TR-3B” by UFO buffs. Once again, they peppered their posts with tantalizing technical details and in-jokes, though this time their serious points fought to be heard over a sea of tinfoil-hat jokes. Taken together, these two threads offer a glimpse into a unique early-2000s moment: when anonymous netizens with apparent defense expertise commingled with conspiracists and skeptics, engaged in a kind of performative secrecy where knowledge was flaunted and obscured at the same time.
I wanted to unpack erewhon and wizzywig’s messages across both threads, exploring what they wrote, what they appeared to mean, and how they positioned themselves in these forums. I’ll explore how their language, shifting alternately cryptic and comically blunt, echoed real post-9/11 defense research themes, and how they wrestled with the tension between sharing insider knowledge and guarding it. Along the way, their coded messages approach plasma “watermelon seeds,” a vanished anti-gravity scientist, stealth planes hidden in plain sight, and hints of “things I can’t draw for you here”. It’s a story of secrecy versus disclosure, of credibility in an anonymous community, and of the thin ambiguous line between real technology and speculative fiction in online defense discourse.
This challenge highlights opportunities to center data provenance in storytelling, fact-finding, and academic literature, to better triangulate what at first might appear like outlandish claims into something more trustworthy.
Space Weapons, Wet Watermelon Seeds, and RS-232: The 2004 Thread
On November 8, 2004, a Fark user posted a link to a Guardian article titled “U.S. to put weapons in space. Mars attacks, surrenders”. The headline itself invited a mix of dread and satire typical of Fark’s irreverent community, which often responded to current events with one-liners. But as the conversation got going, two specific participants – erewhon and wizzywig – steered the conversation into an unusually technical discussion of military systems and experimental aircraft.
Wizzywig kicked things off by clarifying a misunderstanding about DCGS, the US military’s Distributed Common Ground System (an intelligence data-sharing network). In a matter-of-fact tone, he described DCGS as “a global wireless and wired internet… a fusion of all intelligence disciplines” such that even a field soldier can get all the data they need on a rugged Toughbook laptop. It was a surprisingly straightforward, authoritative explanation dropped amid otherwise snarky comments in the thread.
Erewhon jumped in with a gruff, colorful response that set the pattern for his style. Replying directly to wizzywig, he started with “And while I know you guys will be careful, my God have we seen some lame stuff.” What followed was a mini-war story about a botched Marine Corps project his team had consulted on. In that anecdote, erewhon described how overconfident defense contractors had built a ship’s navigation system with a shockingly primitive and failure-prone setup (“they had done the sail-by-wire… with FARKING RS232. Not even differential. Not even redundant. The message protocol was not even guaranteed safe. Just farking message blocks with no checksums”, he ranted, referencing a rudimentary serial data link ill-suited for critical systems). The result, he implied, was a system that often went haywire and spun the ship in circles. Eerily, he quipped that if “the damn thing started going in loops on the way in (“cycle the damn breakers!”)… I think I’d shoot myself.” This mix of expert detail and dark humor had a dramatic effect: it signaled that erewhon was likely someone with genuine experience in military tech, even as he played to the audience with comedic site-specific profanity.
As the thread progressed, erewhon and wizzywig discovered a shared interest in bleeding-edge aerospace concepts. The discussion took a sharp turn into “plasma stealth” and exotic propulsion. In one memorable post, erewhon sketched out an “ionization trick” for aircraft stealth and performance: “By wrapping the craft in a plasma ball bled from the leading airfoil edges, you can get really good (maybe close to perfect) boundary layer control… which just makes that farker squirt through the air like a wet watermelon seed between your fingers.” The vivid metaphor of a jet popping forward like a squeezed watermelon seed was classic erewhon, making abstruse aerodynamics sound almost slapstick. He explained that the plasma envelope could even absorb radar waves to reduce detectability, especially if one could “steer/stabilize the plasma” over the surface using charged patterns: a very technical idea (charged plasma for stealth) couched in casual language. According to erewhon, the U.S. Air Force’s 509th (the storied stealth bomber unit at Whiteman AFB) had even flight-tested an early version of this on a B-2 bomber a few years back, hinting to occasional reports of mysterious “glowing triangles” in the night sky.
If that sounds far-fetched, erewhon immediately grounded it in a real-world reference. He name-dropped Dr. Ning Li, a physicist known (in certain circles) for research on gravity modification. “Met [her] a long time ago,” he claimed, “she was working on gravitic control using a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate… got nearly ’arf a million from BMDO [the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization] in FY2001.” Dr. Li indeed received Defense Department funding around that time for curious experiments with superconductors and gravity. Erewhon added conspiratorially that after that, “she ‘went away’ and no one knows where she ended up.” To a reader in 2004, this detail was a deep-cut credibility marker. It suggested Erewhon wasn’t just inventing jargon—he knew of actual researchers and budgets, bolstering an insider persona.
Wizzywig engaged with equal parts expertise and self-effacement. He responded to the plasma and antigravity talk by splitting his team into two camps: “Half of my team is still trying to wrap their feeble minds around advanced functions of FPGAs. The other half has either worked for or is working for DARPA… focusing on the fringes of DCGS-A.” With this wry aside, Wizzywig placed himself in the universe of defense R&D, implying he manages a team involved in the Army’s big intelligence system (DCGS-A) and advanced research projects. He then mused about “making non-inertial flight possible for UAVs, maybe manned vehicles too if some Bose-Einstein theories are correct,” and even elaborated on ignoring gravity and air resistance through plasma bubbles and magnetic propulsion. If erewhon’s stealth plasma was one of his “tricks,” wizzywig’s vision extended to almost sci-fi territory, “utilizing newer, cutting-edge magnetic propulsion to make an aerospace platform literally free from physical constraints such as centripetal force, inertia, and more. Good stuff.” The conversation had leapt from space-based weapons to something like gravity-defying craft, seamlessly combining actual physics terms (Bose-Einstein condensates, ionization, plasma) with a sense of some secret Manhattan Project 2.0 quietly unfolding behind closed doors. Throughout, both speakers maintained that nonchalant tone: knowledgeable but playing coy, sprinkling their posts with Fark’s trademark coarse wit.
To other forum members, erewhon and wizzywig’s interplay was both intriguing and perplexing. On the one hand, they had admirers in the thread. A few other participants with defense connections chimed in to acknowledge them. User “jvoight0205,” for instance, jumped in enough to reveal he worked somewhere requiring a top secret (TS/SCI) clearance, and bantered with them about needing a secure JWICS (classified internet) version of Fark. Another user, “heavymetal,” hinted that he too was in a secretive project and found comfort that these two understood the “creepy” nature of working under wraps. Such interactions suggested some readers took erewhon and wizzywig seriously, perhaps recognizing the ring of authenticity in their techno-speak.
Yet at the same time, many Farkers just carried on with jokes, largely ignoring or skimming past the duo’s labyrinthine posts. The thread overall stayed a chaotic mix of chatty one-liners, political asides, and side discussions about treaties or China. This didn’t deter our two confidants—it may even have emboldened them, affording cover to talk shop publicly if few were paying close attention. They occasionally acknowledged their unique situation: at one point, after they lapsed into quoting lines from a Kipling poem about an execution for treason (“Danny Deever”), wizzywig reassured “we have not said anything here that I have not seen on the internet.” The implication: they were self-censoring, careful not to reveal anything truly classified. Still, to emphasize caution, erewhon confessed he was “real nervous about really creepy shiat that can be used in odd ways” and apologized for coming on strong when he feared wizzywig might accidentally start describing too much.
In fact, a recurring theme in the 2004 thread is the dance around secrecy and trust. Both posters signal that they know more than they’re saying. They test each other with pointed questions and cryptic references, seemingly to confirm shared knowledge without tipping fully into forbidden territory. At one point, erewhon asks an encrypted-sounding question involving “tossing electrons down the rathole” with a pitcher, a catcher’s glove, and a “Penning trap” ; esoteric physics jargon disguised as a baseball analogy. He even marks it with “/obfuscator on”, as if deliberately speaking in riddles. These elliptical phrases appear to reference some clandestine research (perhaps a type of particle/energy experiment) at a level beyond most readers’ comprehension, but serve as winks to wizzywig alone.
Wizzywig mostly matches erewhon’s tone, though he often affects a humble posture. When erewhon reveals that he tried to sleuth out wizzywig’s identity (which found almost nothing) wizzywig’s response comes laced with a mix of self-deprecating humor and subtle bragging: “I am but a small pubic hair on the toilet seat that is intelligence,” he writes. He acknowledges that “some of my data has been erased,” confirming that he’s purposely hard to trace. Meanwhile, erewhon expresses shock that even with his investigative skills (which he previously used to dig up the former Homeland Security Secretary’s home address as a prank), he couldn’t “get a lock” on wizzywig. This interplay of casually dropping personal details (like first names or workplaces) while highlighting one’s semi-anonymity was a remarkable tactic: it built credibility (look, I’m a real guy with a commute and a Master’s degree), yet also reinforced the mystique that these could be genuine defense insiders, hidden behind their Fark handles.
Throughout the 2004 space-weapons thread, erewhon and wizzywig’s rhetorical style artfully balanced on the edge of believability. They flooded their messages with ultra-specific technical content, ranging from mil-spec data buses to metamaterials research grants, in a way that felt more like two engineers talking shop than internet randos spinning yarns. At times their enthusiasm and candor make them sound like passionate amateurs, breathlessly connecting the dots on what they think is going on in secret labs; at other times they sound exactly like what they claim to be, professionals intimately familiar with defense technology. They even indulged in “hip pocket” knowledge like R. Lee Ermey’s Mail Call TV show (swapping knowing quips about the famously gruff actor and Marine) and flourishes of poetry. This mixture of precision, playfulness, and caution created a persona of the seen-it-all veteran with a sense of humor.
As the space-weapons thread wound down, the banter between them took on a friendly, almost conspiratorial tone. They parted with inside jokes and a promise of more to discuss later. Indeed, it was not the last Fark would see of the duo.
Reappearing for a Flying Triangle: The 2005 Thread
Fast-forward a few months to March 5, 2005. Another Fark thread appears, this time showcasing a fringe website’s claim of a USAF “Top Secret Nuclear Powered Flying Triangle”. The story is accompanied, unsurprisingly, with grainy photos. In typical Fark fashion, the first wave of replies was dominated by skeptical gags and meme references. Commenters quipped about needing more tinfoil, about the suspiciously identical “two photos” of the craft on the site, and about Wal-Mart being a government mind-control front. A few users recalled real-life “triangle UFO” incidents like the 1997 Phoenix Lights or the 1989-90 Belgian UFO wave.
Into this fray stepped wizzywig and erewhon once again. If the 2004 space thread had felt like a private seminar hidden inside a public forum, the 2005 “flying triangle” thread felt more like two experts crashing a fan convention panel. This time, however, they faced a rowdier crowd and a wilder premise. The duo’s approach adapted to the environment: wizzywig took on a more overt debunker’s role early in the thread—questioning the authenticity of the photos and pointing out that they “clearly” showed the same image reused. He invoked the well-documented Belgian “black triangle” incident, acknowledging that yes, multiple NATO F-16 jets did scramble to chase an unknown triangular craft over Belgium in 1990, but implying that connecting that to these website photos was a stretch.
Erewhon’s contributions in 2005 built directly on themes from the 2004 thread, but with a more openly skeptical, explanatory bent. Early on, he agreed with those who doubted that any nuclear-powered plane would float around over US soil (imagine the liability if it crashed and spread radiation!). Instead, he and wizzywig posited that many “triangle UFO” sightings were likely misidentified advanced aircraft, possibly the then-secret B-2 stealth bomber (which, in its early flights, was indeed mistaken for a UFO by some observers). They also cited the rumored “Aurora” program, a long-speculated hypersonic spyplane, and even more mundane possibilities like a high-altitude stealth blimp. In other words, the two moved to steer the conversation away from aliens and conspiracy toward rational (if still secretive) military technology.
But as the thread wore on and the jokes piled up, erewhon shifted tactics. Leaning into the downright bizarre pseudoscience of the TR-3B lore (the original story claimed the craft flew via a “Mercury plasma” anti-gravity device), he offered his own twist on the physics: The “mercury plasma” bit, he suggested, was likely disinformation. The real method, according to him, involved a rapidly spinning ring of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). If you spin this ultra-cold quantum matter fast enough, he wrote, it could “decouple the [vehicle’s] reference frame from local space”, essentially reducing its inertia (though not its mass) so it can maneuver in seemingly defiance of gravity and momentum. It’s a mind-bending concept, but one that has roots in legitimate physics discussions about superfluids and gravitational effects. Erewhon delivered these claims matter-of-factly, as if describing a known though extremely exotic technology.
Crucially, his detailed explanation came packaged with caveats and frustrations: He noted that such a BEC propulsion would face enormous practical challenges (keeping a condensate stable and cold while spinning it furiously, countering the gyroscopic forces with a second counter-rotating ring, and managing the huge power needed to “displace the spinning plasma” for thrust). And he openly lamented how this kind of nuanced technical talk tends to fall on deaf ears in public forums. To wit, erewhon observed that the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio was near zero— his posts were being overshadowed by the sillier elements of the discussion. “Most people ignore such explanations unless you toss in aliens or shady conspiracies,” he grumbled in effect. This meta-commentary was telling: it showed erewhon’s mix of pride and exasperation about being an “informed” voice in a chaotic online space that often rewarded sensationalism over substance.
Throughout, erewhon and wizzywig kept their trademark humor and caution. Wizzywig gently teased erewhon’s safety, implying in jest that sharing such details might get erewhon in trouble or whisked away (“LMAO, hope you don’t disappear for telling us this!”). And erewhon doubled down on his stance against classic UFO lore: he outright dismissed the famous “MJ-12 documents” (a supposed secret Majestic / MAJIC government file about aliens) as “a bogus sack of crap we made up to throw you off.” This was almost a wink to any fellow intel folks reading: a suggestion that the government itself feeds UFO conspiracy fodder to keep attention away from real projects. In their 2005 posts, the pair essentially endorsed the idea that yes, governments hide advanced aerospace developments, but do so behind noise and disinformation, not crashed aliens.
Interestingly, despite the topic being more sensational, the dynamic between erewhon and wizzywig in the triangle thread was a bit different. In 2004, they found a cohort of like-minded defense insiders to banter with and arguably became the star contributors of that thread’s latter half. By 2005, on a UFO topic, they seemed more marginalized—voices of measured speculation amid a torrent of Photoshop jokes and X-Files references. Their rhetorical performance was still rich with credibility cues (like referencing a real DARPA contract code, “DAAH01-01-9-R001,” or breaking down the physics of “altering the apparent C (speed of light) by a dereferencing angle”). But the broader audience mostly kept the discussion in the skeptical comic register, leaving the duo to talk mostly to each other. It’s as if in this new context, with a topic already seen as conspiratorial, their serious contributions were themselves taken as part of the joke.
Still, the themes and voice of their 2005 exchange echoed the previous thread strongly. Both times, erewhon and wizzywig project a persona of insider knowledge tempered by professional reticence. They reference classified networks and brag about glimpsing things on Intelink-S or JWICS (gatewalled government internets), yet they also repeatedly reassure each other that nothing they’ve said is truly secret (just “stuff I have seen on the internet”). They clearly relish sharing what they can, but they periodically run up against an invisible tripwire – some line that triggers an “okay, let’s not go further here” from one or both of them. “Ask. It cannot hurt. Only answers can hurt,” wizzywig sagely says at one point, acknowledging the risk inherent in answering certain questions.
They also show a strong sense of tribal camaraderie and gatekeeping. In 2004, they semi-playfully probed each other’s identities and credentials, each wanting to be sure the other was legitimate. Erewhon’s snooping on wizzywig’s background and wizzywig’s cheeky self-description as bellybutton lint in the intel world became part of how they earned each other’s trust in front of everyone. It reads like a public ritual: we’re verifying one another, so you can trust us, but also we trust each other enough to not blow each other’s actual cover.
Between Fact and Fiction: Early Cyber-Culture of Military Speculation
Why did these elaborate, half-encrypted tech sermons find a home on Fark at this particular time? Part of the answer lies in the early-2000s context. The US was a few years into the post-9/11 “War on Terror,” with vast funding pouring into defense R&D, some of it undoubtedly black budget. Talk of new stealth aircraft, orbital weapons, and even exotic research like “antigravity” was in the air, both in serious policy circles and on internet message boards where amateurs and insiders mingled more freely than they might today. The Fark community was not primarily a defense forum; it was a general humor/news site. However, its users included many tech-savvy and often military-adjacent folks. The presence of multiple cleared defense employees in the 2004 thread attests to how even serious professionals hung out there for news and banter. This created an environment where a deep-dive on advanced military tech could coexist with Monty Python references and cat memes.
Within that context, erewhon and wizzywig manifested as a specific archetype of early 2000’s internet forum participant: the knowledgeable, possibly in-the-industry expert who shares nuggets of information in a playful way. They weren’t unique – similar characters popped up on other forums dedicated to aviation, conspiracies, or military affairs, prior to the ubiquitous takeover of social media. But rarely did one see such extended, two-way dialogues as occurred in these Fark threads, with both participants feeding off each other’s knowledge and bravado. There was a performative aspect: they clearly enjoyed the audience, even if half-jokingly complaining about it. They cracked nerdy jokes (erewhon once bragged that he used a special thread from “A-field” to “re-stitch buttonholes… so they stay open better”—an absurd metaphor that sailed over everyone’s head) yet also seemed keen to impart some of their perspective to anyone paying attention.
What emerges from their posts is a worldview that sees the cutting edge of military aerospace as far beyond what’s publicly acknowledged. In their telling, a great deal of what the average person might dismiss as science fiction or UFO lore actually hides kernels of truth about secret projects. But rather than aliens or free-energy machines, the real story (they imply) is about humans doing advanced research in physics and engineering under high secrecy. They reference things like metamaterials (calling them “left-handed magnetic material”) that Boeing’s Phantom Works was reportedly investigating in 2001, or the non-linear optics trick by Soviet physicist Zel’dovich (who discovered how to time-reverse light waves, which erewhon explains excitedly over several posts while apologizing for needing to “draw it” to do it justice). These references anchor their musings in actual known science history, lending plausibility. At the same time, they speculate beyond the scope of what was publicly confirmed, suggesting, for example, that some of these advanced concepts have already been tested on military prototypes (“the future happened a few years back, at least in initial tests. Hooah, 509th!” wrote erewhon, cheering on the stealth bomber wing).
Fark served as a bit of an oddity in bulletin board technologies, which may have enticed its users as a safer space. More akin to Reddit’s recency-centered than forums’ last reply organization, older Fark threads could become obscure dumping grounds for niche sets of users to congregate.
Humor as Both Camouflage and Culture
One striking element of these exchanges is how both posters wield humor to serve multiple purposes. On one level, it helps them blend into the Fark environment, where every topic is fair game for comedic snark. By using forum in-jokes, censor-evading swear words (the signature “farkings” and “shiat” sprinkled liberally in their posts), and tongue-in-cheek storytelling, they avoid coming across as self-serious know-it-alls crashing the party. The comedy likely also provided them deniability: should anyone question their more outlandish hints, they could claim it was all in jest.
But their humor also served as a shared language of trust. When wizzywig references a boot camp phrase: “R. Lee Ermey rules, ok”, erewhon immediately signals recognition (“Ah, so few get that sort of humor… /watches too much Mail Call probably”). They riff on obscure military pop culture references and even poke fun at each other’s crypticness. In 2005, after one of erewhon’s denser physics info-dumps, wizzywig quips with mock alarm about how flamboyantly secret-sounding it was, and erewhon responds by half-apologizing, half-laughing at himself for “being so obscure today.” Their banter creates a buddy-cop vibe: wizardly spook (wizzywig) and maverick engineer (erewhon) on a mission to one-up each other with classified tidbits without crossing any lines.
Ironically, the need for secrecy became an inside joke itself. After describing something almost unbelievable (a phase-conjugate mirror that “flips the time axis of photons,” no less), erewhon teased wizzywig: “BTW, congrats to whoever it was in AI [intelligence] that back-trailed you and wiped you off the map. A better job I’ve never seen. You’re not secretly JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] are you? ;)” Wizzywig reacted with confusion and humility (he explained he works for the State Department, still in school, not JCS). But later in the thread, the two circled back to this and had a laugh. They made light of the idea that somebody high up might be monitoring or scrubbing their traces. From quoting Kipling verses about executing traitors to bragging about “Intelink – the networks no one you know will ever see inside of – /Powered by DISA!”, they turned their awareness of surveillance and consequence into part of the narrative. It was as if, by joking about it, they could acknowledge the thrill and danger of knowing things without truly blowing any whistles.
From Secret Tech to Online Folklore
The 2005 “flying triangle” thread ultimately highlighted a shift in how the duo’s messages were received. Despite their best efforts to ground the conversation (with references to the long secrecy of the F-117 Nighthawk and SR-71 Blackbird projects, for example, as precedent for mysterious craft in the sky), the Fark crowd mostly kept to sarcasm. Some mocked the idea that the government could ever keep such secrets (“I don’t think the government can keep a secret for 5 years no matter HOW classified” one user sniffed, to which others replied with examples of the decades-long SR-71 Blackbird cover-up). Many took potshots at the original site’s silly CGI-looking images and fantastical claims about “Hydrogen-Oxygen Variable Vectored Rocket Engines.” In this environment, erewhon’s serious physics explanation came across almost like a piece of performance art—especially when he started throwing around terms like “evoked negative energy states for thrust in a positively curved space” and “alteration of apparent C [the speed of light] as the cosine of the dereferencing angle.” These phrases drift toward techno-babble parody, even if there might be a real concept buried in them. One gets the sense erewhon was half testing how far he could go before someone called him on it, half sincerely trying to articulate a radical idea.
Wizzywig’s final stance in that thread seemed to align with erewhon’s frustration. Both recognized that the crowd mostly wasn’t there for a sober lecture on advanced propulsion. If in the earlier space-weapons thread they’d found an eager micro-audience, in the TR-3B thread they ended up ironically sounding a bit like cranks themselves, albeit highly self-aware ones. E.g., erewhon eventually mused that government disinformation had done its job too well: making any real discussion of novel propulsion an instant magnet for ridicule or yawn. The cure for widespread gullibility about aliens had also poisoned the well for genuine secrets.
Legacies of a Deep-Cut Digital Footprint
Reading these two threads with fifteen-plus years of hindsight, it’s clear erewhon and wizzywig’s forum escapades straddled the line between serious and satirical in a way emblematic of early internet culture. On one level, they were just two pseudonyms spinning war stories and theoretical physics on a comedy website. But they also embody a phenomenon of that era: the semi-clandestine expert who finds an outlet in online communities. In a pre-Twitter, pre-Reddit world, forums like Fark could host surprisingly erudite digressions under cover of anonymity. These posters showcased how niche expertise and over-classification sidesteps often intermingled. Their contributions were steeped in authentic technical references (some of which have only become more publicly discussed in subsequent years, like metamaterials or quantum experiments in inertial mass reduction), yet they were also performing an identity by dropping hints, deflecting questions, occasionally showboating with allusions only a fellow specialist would catch.
By positioning themselves as witty “insider” characters online, they influenced the tone and direction of the discussions. Some readers engaged, others rolled their eyes; either way, erewhon and wizzywig carved a space for a peculiar kind of conversation that was neither fully open disclosure nor pure fiction. Their rhetorical balancing act – public speaking to each other and over the heads of others, blending credible information with playful secrecy – gave those threads an enduring mystique.
Today, the notion of secret space weapons or gravity-defying craft remains in the gray zone between acknowledged military tech and sci-fi daydreams. As for the posters themselves, we still don’t know who they really were. And perhaps that’s fitting: they thrived in the liminal space of pseudonymity and possibility. The magic of their exchange was never about confirming truth or falsehood, but about the thrill of the conjecture – the idea that somewhere, two “redneck engineers” might really be bantering on a public forum about the future of war under our noses, half in jest and half in earnest.
Today’s analogues to wizzywig and erewhon occur on subreddits and 4chan posts. What is missing from those LARPs or disclosures, from the 4chan underwater alien hamburger-shaped stronghold, to subreddit posts of mantle-dwelling non-human intelligence (NHI), are underlying insider knowledge breadcrumbs hinting of exotic technologies that two decades later, feel like plausible breadcrumbs of deeply hidden technological advancements.
It’s a reminder that on the early internet, even the wildest threads could contain glimmers of real knowledge and that even real knowledge might sound like a fark when delivered with a grin and a knowing wink.