Notes

r/glitch_in_the_matrix deleted post.

I've heard of this subreddit before, and to be perfectly candid, I'd assumed you were all "kooks" and "conspiracy theorists". Nonetheless, recent events have compelled me to reconsider this position. I'm not sure about the world anymore. The more I read these stories and accounts, the more I feel that it's just the tip of an iceberg, that something of enormous significance is being systematically hidden from us. I've followed slight inconsistencies and oddities in records and government accounts, and they've led me down a rabbit hole that's led me to abandon everything I know -- or I think I know -- about the world. Something happened in December of 2004. Something huge. Something that's been somehow erased from our collective memory. As a theoretical physicist, I've considered bizarre explanations of the phenomena I will describe -- alternate realities, quantum divergences -- but a full understanding eludes me.

I'm a Postdoc in cosmology and theoretical physics at a major American research university. One of my colleagues -- who's studying for a PhD in astrophysics at the same University -- brought to my attention a curious phenomenon several months ago. His thesis focuses on the possibility of an orbiting exoplanet about 54 Piscium, a binary star system located 35 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Pisces. In the course of performing this research, he's exhaustively studied both online star catologues and archives -- which track the proper motion of the stars in this system -- as well as physical records and telescope images of the system. While he was searching for a volume on astrophysics in the University Library, he found an unusual folder of files left in one of the books, marked "astronomical measurements on 54 Piscium -- 1997 to 2004", a remarkable coincidence considering the topic of his thesis. He examined the contents of the folder carefully, finding photographs and astronomical measurements of the motion and position of 54 Piscium, in addition to several other nearby binary star systems. Unfortunately, the measurements in the file ended on December 27, 2004, but this still offered invaluable information for his thesis.

To confirm the accuracy of the contents of the folder, he compared them against the online PPM Star Catalogue, which provides archived data of the motions of stars. Strangely, he noticed a slight discrepancy -- less than one-thousandth of an arcminute -- between the positions measured in the physical files and those from PPM. Stranger still, he found an even larger -- roughly 25% -- inconsistency between the speed of 54 Piscium B in the archived file and that from PPM. He compared both sets of measurements to other stellar archives -- including SIMBAD -- finding a similar discrepancy between the documents he discovered and the "official" archives.

He brought this oddity to the attention of his thesis advisor, and they carefully examined the data from both sources. Strangely enough, after accounting for the relevant variables, they found that the stellar proper motions and positions photographed and archived in the file were exactly those from the "official" account, but a full 24 hours earlier. It was as if an entire 24 hour period had elapsed, and was "erased" from the official records, which were edited to make them look internally consistent. He submitted these files and a brief explanation to higher University staff, inquiring as to their origin, but they never performed an investigation. Both my friend and his thesis advisor received threatening phone calls from anonymous sources, commanding them to discontinue their research on the matter. My friend claims he's seen black vans following him since the incident, but despite this, he'd continued his research, examining old libraries and archives around the country, going to telescopes and looking for stellar photographs and measurements before December 2004. Surprisingly, these old records are hard to come by, but occasionally he's found the misplaced or forgotten record, and each one shows the same "24 hour" anomaly. In March of 2012, his thesis advisor left me a frantic and paranoid voicemail, claiming that "they're on to me" and "don't be surprised when they get me." The following day, he was found dead in his home, three bullets to the head. It was ruled a suicide.

I've continued my colleague's studies, searching for the few astronomical records dating before December 2004. The more I continue this research, the more it seems that such records have been destroyed and erased by the authorities. I've collected what scraps of astronomical observations and eyewitness accounts I could, finding increasingly clear discrepancies with official archives of stellar positions. It's become almost certain to me now that the government records have been deliberately edited after the fact -- adjusted -- so as to erase a 24-hour period from December 27 - 28, 2004. To make the motions and positions of astronomical bodies seem consistent and continuous, they needed to "push back" the data by 24 hours, so that a stellar position originally recorded as being at 12:00 AM on December 28, 2004, for example, would now be archived as being at 12:00 AM the previous day; otherwise, there would be an obvious "jump" in stellar positions.

A "missing day"? Certainly a bizarre prospect, but one that seems ever more plausible given the few actual remaining astronomical records before December 28, 2004. An entire day on Earth, systematically scrubbed from the records as if it never happened. Our memories erased. What happened on that missing day?

Astronomical measurements are just the tip of the iceberg. I've carefully examined government archives, reports of aircraft schedules, and bills of lading (reporting sea shipments), and the same inconsistency has repeated itself again and again. The official reports of plane flights the week of December 28 are particularly a mess. I've poured through old archives, reams and reams of carbon paper, examining plane ticket receipts and flight schedules, comparing them against airline and FAA archives. The official archives have very obviously been fudged after the fact to remove evidence of a missing day. Official records of flight schedules often deviate from old archives by ten hours or more. As with the astronomical data, it seems that most original records -- except in the most obscure places -- have been systematically destroyed. Nonetheless, no matter how hard I look, I cannot find a single record from the missing 24 hour period.

Bills of lading, archives of trucking shipments, military reports in Iraq all show similar discrepancies and signs of fudging and manipulation. Nonetheless, it is in people's memories that the most obvious inconsistencies are found. It seems that most of our memories have been systematically erased, but a few have "slipped through the cracks", as it were. I've questioned people who seem to remember history differently from the official accounts. A similar subreddit, indeed, was built from one such phenomenon; namely, that many remember Nelson Mandela to have died in prison in the 1980s (/r/mandelaeffect). Similar accounts have also come to light, curious discrepancies that suggest official accounts have been manipulated. It seems many of these "Mandela Effect" phenomena culminate -- or otherwise resolve themselves -- in late 2004 or early 2005. An earlier poster himself commented on this fact, expressing the sentiment that something significant must have happened around that time (https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/4l9qsx/the_2005_incident_theory/).

On December 27, 2004, an unprecedentedly high-energy gamma-ray burst struck Earth from the magnetar SGR 1806-20. In my pursuits of theoretical physics, I've discovered increasingly mounting evidence that high-energy particle collisions can "trigger" the creation of alternate realities, or alternate timelines. In the standard many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, each quantum event corresponds to different possibilities, each of which is realized in a separate parallel reality. I've worked on modifying this model with superstring theory, which unites general relativity and quantum mechanics. Under this modification, the landscape of the quantum multiverse becomes much more active and dynamic. Particles can "shift" between timelines and universes under the right conditions. When particularly high-energy events occur, a shift of the surrounding space-time into an alternate universe might be triggered. The more I research this particular topic, the more it seems that it's being actively suppressed by the physics community.

I did see one record from the "missing day", a photograph from a military archive. It shows a horrific sight of human bodies melting almost like fluid, on the streets of what appears to be New York City. A thin orange haze is vaguely visible above the street, and the buildings in the distance seem vaguely twisted in a non-Euclidean way. Although it was firmly imprinted on my brain, I've never seen this image again.

Perhaps most disturbingly, I've consistently found that old population records show roughly 300 million more people in 2004 than is accounted for by official archives.

I'm being followed. My communications are being tracked. I'm not sure if I'll be around much longer. I'm posting this from a throwaway account. Hopefully the "powers that be" won't censor it immediately. If you want to pursue this, above all be careful. Leave no traces.