Thanks to the guys at /film for pointing this out, because it’s actually a pretty cool little “viral marketing” campaign for an upcoming movie. This one just happens to feature North Dakota. It all started with this movie teaser trailer:

At the end of the trailer there’s a flicker of film leader that someone took still images of to get the words “SCARIEST THING I EVER SAW.” From there they decided to visit the website “scariestthingieversaw.com.” On that website was a simulator for a PDP-11, an old mainframe computer like the ones I used to get in trouble on in the 80s. It displayed a timer, and once the timer counted down certain features were enabled. One of those was to print these two images:

 Click to view/download: Image 1 – Image 2

When you print them out, they appear to be newspaper pages from the 1940s that have some hidden features. One of the not-so-hidden features is an ad for Rocket Poppeteers, a popsicle-like treat. JJ Abrams is known to put fictitious foods in his movies and mention them by name, but this one’s getting some prominent treatment. (Yes, there’s a rocketpoppeteers.com website, but it doesn’t do anything…yet.) The ad contains a form to mail in to “Become a Rocket Poppeteer and Join the Race to Outer Space!” Where do you send it? Minot, North Dakota.

Naturally, being the curious sort, I filled out one of these forms to see what might happen. So far, nothing has been mailed back to me. No MIBs have showed up at my house, even ones posing as census workers. If that changes, I’ll let you know.

Why does Minot tie into this? Well, the teaser trailer seems to center around Area 51 and UFOs & aliens. UFO believers have reports of UFO activity around United States nuclear weapons facilities going back for decades, so it makes sense that the movie would include a reference to North Dakota…a somewhat remote, maybe even mysterious to some, place with lots of nukes. The X-Files featured an episode where a UFO was hidden in a hollowed-out nuclear missile silo in North Dakota, so why not take the idea to feature film?

Being familiar with central North Dakota, the presence of Air Force bases and nuclear weapons in our great state, and the whole UFO conspiracy theory subculture to a degree, I got a kick out of this viral campaign. While I’m not one of the UFO conspiracy theorists, I find them entertaining to watch. It’ll be interesting to see where and how far this movie takes this campaign and how heavily it features our great state.