The Mysteries of Beaver: The Sketchy YouTube Video

MADDY KIEFER ‘08

At about 7:00pm last Tuesday, I went to the Beaver Reader website to read the college essay of the day but immediately noticed that something was different. Instead of the normal video player on the home page, there was a different video. There was a bright purple frame around the player, as opposed to the typical blue one, and in it there was a picture of a woman. Curious, I went to the YouTube link that was provided under the frame to see what the video was.

It took me about ten seconds to decide that the link to that video was not supposed to be on the Beaver Reader site. It was basically six minutes of French techno music by the artist “TenDanC'IouS RecorD,” very different from the videos of the talent show or dodgeball games that are typically on the site. Google searches turn up virtually nothing, except for a couple MySpace pages that may or may not be related to the artist. After a minute or so of complete confusion, I remembered something that happened to Dan Katz ’08 a few weeks previously. On a Sunday in mid January, he noticed the exact same video on the main page. He told Jessica Penzias ’08 about it, and she saw it on the site too. Just as Dan was about to log on and take it down, Jessica pressed refresh on her browser and video was gone; the page was back to normal.

As soon I remembered this story, I went back to the newspaper to try and take a screen cap of it to show other people, so we could get down to the bottom of this problem. But, similar to what happened to Dan and Jessica, the video was gone as soon as I got back to site. It’s interesting to note that the user just joined YouTube and posted the video two weeks ago—right around the time Dan first saw it. (Also note Dan’s comment on the video: “who are you, and why does your video come up on my website in place of another video?”)

This is definitely not one of my conventional mystery articles—for starters, it barely has any affiliation to Beaver, except that the video was on Beaver’s newspaper site. However, we would like to get as much information about this glitch as possible, so if you have seen this malfunction before, please leave a comment below. Also, if you see it in the future, try to take a screen cap of the page (for Macs press Apple+Shift+3, for PCs press “Print Screen” and paste it into a Paint document) and email it to someone on the newspaper staff.

UPDATE: OK, thanks to the unparalleled investigative journalism talents of the TBR crew, we now have a screen capture of the home page while "possessed":


We have some ideas about why this may be happening, and we'll continue to look into it. Stay tuned!