Sinister, mysterious clip appears on internet and nobody knows what it means

A strange, cryptic video has surfaced on the internet that has thrown people around the world into a state of confusion and fear as they attempt to decipher the hidden meaning behind the puzzle. The rather sinister-looking video arrived on a CD in the post to a gadget blog and when it was shared online a legion of code-breakers and conspiracists began unravelling more creepy clues.

The mystery starts with an innocuous CD, which arrived from Poland into the mailbox of tech blog gadgetzz. Scrawled on the front was a chain of letters and numbers that resembled a product key. When curiosity took over and the recipient inserted the disc into a computer it became clear it was far more than a product key, it was a clue.

The disc contained a video of a figure standing in a warehouse dressed in a black plague doctor costume. The person stands there with a blinking light emitting from their palm, which is believed to be a clue in the form of Morse code or binary. As the film proceeds symbols flash around the figure, which people have extracted as clues to look at as well as startling audio playing in the background, which some reported sounding like "I would love to kill you" being repeated over and over.

A Reddit thread has seen sleuths run the audio through a spectrogram – something that shows a visual image to the frequencies in audio – and they discovered hidden messages and shocking scenes involving a woman apparently being tortured.

As more and more intrigued people joined the gripping quest to unearth the truth more pieces of the puzzle came to light – and the revelation that this mystery is deeper than we thought. After a user employed computer forensics to decipher the code on the CD and found through some clever encoding workings that it represents '11B-X-1371', it seems this very video was posted on 4chan's paranormal channel back in May. The post claims the CD was found on a park bench and despite also being posted on YouTube five months ago it went unnoticed and we still don't have a clue about what it could be about.

In a further twist, another Redditor captured hidden Morse code messages that flash up throughout the clip reading: RED LIPSLIFE TENTH', which if using ASCII code to read. While this could very well be another clue, it could be more serious after one poster identified the similarity of Morse characters 6 and b, which would relate as the letter K rather than F – leaving the anagram KILL THE PRESIDENT. Of course, this could all be a bit tenuous but also in the video coded GPS co-ordinates were uncovered, which are the exact address of the White House. Hmmn.

Cicada 3301 mystery

This isn't the first internet mystery to get people wide-eyed with cyber wonder and enveloped with Da Vinci Code intrigue. In 2012 the Cicada 3301 puzzle had people on the quest to crack the 'world's biggest internet mystery' after cryptic messages appeared on the web leading people on a spiralling adventure tracking down QR codes around the planet, calling mystery phone numbers, cracking poems and entering the dark web. It is unknown whether anybody actually managed to solve the puzzle as it was taken down after the original poster shut it down after groups collaborated and shared information to solve the riddle, rather than do it on their own. And as to who that original poster is? It's believed it could have been a complex game of cryptoanalytics devised by security agaencies such as the CIA, MI6 or the NSA to find the new talent. Others have claimed it could have been banks, hacking groups or political think tanks.

At this moment no one has any idea what this new mystery means but it remains a compelling story. There are those pointing the source as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, hacking groups or even terror groups. Of course, the sceptic in us can't see past the fact this is starting to gain attention so close to Halloween, it could very well be a rather elaborate publicity stunt. It all just seems a bit too stylised to us, which makes us think it could be related to a movie rather than anything to worry about. We hope.

Have you got any information on this internet puzzle? Who do you think is behind it and what does it mean? Share your thoughts with us @IBTimesUKTech