As a WMG subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Kris Straub confirmed
on Reddit that it would indeed have aired on the station in the 1970s. This would also suggest that Candle Cove, Local 58 and Broodhollow are all ultimately tied together around the same narrative.
However, one threat that fits the mould of the message (besides the series' obvious threat of general supernatural events) is a betrayal of the U.S. by its allies. It would have to be most or all of the allies, and it would have to be simultaneous, but if those conditions were met, it would be a serious threat to the United States. The allies would know better than any "pre-established" enemy what the U.S.'s war tactics are. An en-masse betrayal would also leave the U.S. to fight completely for itself—after all, it would have no allies. The tactical and combative advantages of the former allies combined with the intelligence and weapons of the existing enemies would leave the U.S. at the mercy of its attackers.
The whole world would have to turn on the United States to leave it as defenceless as the contingency message makes it out to be. That might have been what the government at the time was fearing would happen. Consider that Lyndon Johnson was president the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was bad enough. The Johnson Administration wanted to have plans in case something worse were to happen. Cue "Contingency".
- Given that the message encourages viewers to join their neighbors, family, and God (in death), the implications are either 1. a reassuring "Go peacefully into the next life" or 2. God himself is dead. There is no hope and no other way out. Whatever is taking over the United States has already killed God.
- Considering the alien creature we see on “You Are On The Fastest Available Route,” it may be around the time Weather Service occurs. If the aliens can control mirrors like in Weather Sevice, GPS isn’t much harder.
- I don't think the creature is an alien, but a transformed person, who has stayed away from other people and been affected by whatever that thing in the moon in "Skywatching" is. Straub has said it's a Cosmic Horror Story, and he has also said "we are not dealing with something as mundane as an alien invasion."
Couple this with the animation error of the realistic skeleton being incorrectly overlaid on top of the original animation, the sudden change of the moon's appearance, and the abrupt loss of the audio track two-thirds of the way through... and it's easy to see that this is a heavily doctored cartoon. Either by someone already infected by the Eldritch Abomination or by the DPAD in Contingency.
According to Game Theory, aliens have been hijacking signals from Local 58 and been using its programs in order to manipulate humanity into killing themselves. The video states that during the moon landing in 1969, Neil Armstrong and his crew encountered these aliens and angered them by either invading their territory or some other reason and have decided to attack Earth by using broadcasted signals to manipulate mankind into turning on each other and killing each other. They supposedly tried to create a PSA to convince the American population to commit suicide, taking away people's dreams to increase their aggression and even use subliminal messages in cartoons. But apparently they haven't been successful in that regards and are now taking things into their own hands by using the moon to drive people insane or even attacking people directly by hijacking sat navs to lure them to their deaths.
While the notion of an alien invasion has been debunked by Kris, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t some interference or hijacking by the apparent Eldritch Abomination on, or by, the moon. It’s just “alien” to our understanding.
- Focus on... - A documentary series of various topics. Possible episodes:
- Culture - art, shows and television
- Faith - religions and what they teach; mostly focusing on Mason County and the accepted religions, what they believe and how the people believing them with a bias towards whoever paid for it.
- Community Roundtable - A talk show, featuring the most important people in the county, talking over specific topics of the week.
- The TRI Presents - Infrequent documentaries including various, mostly neurology-based, science videos, with an added service: home VHS videos, which includes the video Real Sleep. The on-air show mostly presents the main bulk, with the cassettes holding personalized experiences.
- Public Eye - local talk show and news, from around the county and neighbors. Early 70s-90s.
- Still Life - vignettes collected in the veins of Night Gallery and The Twilight Zone. Ran from the 50s to the early 70s.
- Some parts briefly shown in "A Look Back" are repurposed footage of One Step Beyond (1959), as the program is now public domain.
- Some parts briefly shown in "A Look Back" are repurposed footage of One Step Beyond (1959), as the program is now public domain
- Mason County News
Other possible shows:
- Know yourself - history serial, from the 60s to the 80s.
- Highlights of Mason County - infrequent documentaries about Mason County and their most proudest, be it natural, built, or just people.
When taking those into account, the general plotline almost reads like "lost episodes" for Arthur and Wile E. Coyote... and the art shifts and morbid tone directly echo a classic creepypasta surrounding a "lost" Mickey Mouse cartoon.
. If we take everything that was said in STATION ID as canon and not just as some Real Life advertisement, this would mean that ''Local 58'' really is an Analog Horror channel at 476MHz in-universe. Which would actually be a pretty brilliant parody of the whole Analog Horror "genre".- Dude, it would be a epic twist if this WMG theory was made canon by Kris.
This is shockingly very plausible. UHF stations in the United States (that is, channels 14 through 79) struggled to survive until the advent of cable television, some needed network affiliations or owners with deep pockets to keep them afloat, and in many cases that still wasn’t enough. On the surface, had a tiny little independent station like “WCLV-TV” signed on in the late 1950s or 1960s, it honestly would have been shuttered in a year or two due to losing a lot of money trying to serve a small, remote area like Mason County, West Virginia with a few live programs and a small assortment of public domain films and travelogues. Logically, it would have probably signed on in the early to mid 1980s in order to have had any chance of success.
Low-power television stations in the United States (which “WCLV-TV,” given its’ apparently very limited coverage area, honestly could have been note ) were not mandated to switch to digital in 2009 like their full-power counterparts. Moreover, some LPTV stations had no choice but to sign off for good after the FCC made channels 52 and above unavailable for broadcasting (but a digital station can still be mapped out to such a high number). And even if “WCLV-TV” had converted to digital, the FCC held an auction starting in 2015 and ending in 2018 where television stations could sell off their broadcast spectrum and either shut down operations, or enter a sharing agreement with a neighboring television station in the same market.
It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for a station staffer to create this bizarre set of retro-themed horror vignettes and insert it on the overnight lineup as “Paid Programming,” knowing no one would actually watch it. What’s to say that the owners of “WCLV-TV” didn’t cash in on their spectrum sale and close down for good as this Found Footage started to surface?
- A lot of the background material seems to imply that Local 58 was a public station funded by public money, donations and focused mostly on local issues. (although seemingly not affiliated with NET/PBS)This makes its survival from the fifties to the early 2000's a little more plausible. In real life a station in Mason county would serve about 60,000 people in two counties and Mason county in some of KS's previous works has some fictional towns inside of it. So it wouldnt be much different from your typical mid sized city PBS stations IRL.
- To be fair, Kris has said that KLCS-TV - an educational station in Los Angeles at channel 58 - is very much the inspiration for the “58” in both here and Candle Cove, with “Local” as a "local to you, the viewer" Captain Ersatz of sorts for PBS note . If the copyright at the end of “Skywatching” is anything to go on, the station license belongs to the “Community Television Foundation of Mason County.” It still doesn’t explain the “paid programming” (a term more common in commercial television) but it’s possible if an outside provider produced a community-related or public affairs program and paid for its’ airing. Regardless, what we’ve seen in that time slot so far sure ain’t Ronco informercials...
- Maybe the CTFOMC is strapped for cash/donations and decided to add other types of paid programming (such as, well, infomercials) to the overnight slots to make money. And the "short horror themed content" was paid for out of the bored station employee's own pocket.
- This would make sense, except for "Weather Service" Which, is essentially a false EAS broadcast. USING ACTUAL TONES! That is in fact a federal crime punishable by a very hefty fine which would put the station out of business. And, since this station employee has been making horror content since at least '71, he of all people should know that.
- Another possibility is that the Moon is just said Eldritch Abomination's domain and that its true form is sleeping underneath the celestial body. Skywatching takes note of a arrow shaped crevice which is referred to "HIS THRONE" which could literally mean it is the unseen god's throne and seat to observe the Earth from.
- Perhaps the Eldritch Abomination is actually Apocolothoth, the Moon God and one of the Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos.
- A parallel here might be with the Heavens Gate cult, who committed suicide in the same "Face up, Feet Together" stance for the purpose of having their souls transferred to another body in the solar system. This opens up the question of what happens to the minds of the broadcast's victims?
- Doubtful. Judging purely based off the sounds of pure fear and terror, the people of Earth are likely going to Go Mad from the Revelation just by looking at the moonlight.
As pointed out by another viewer, the cartoon was a warning: "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE BABY. YOU DIE." Therefore, disintegration happens to anyone that even looks at the baby chicken. The moon effects perception, and from the perception of the moon, anyone that looks at it, including its own moonlight, "dies". It demands people to worship and stare at it so that they stay that way.
Due to its Eldritch Abomination status the moon is able to effect the perception of living beings, which is how it usually kills people. By getting "closer", the toxic fumes from the moon can disintegrate people as it is effectively and literally, right above them.
Oh, and the cameraman's arms disappearing in front of the moon at the end of Skywatching? It wasn't because of the camera's effect, his arms were disintegrating due to him literally touching the moon. At least, from our perspective.
- Then why did the bird thing experience the exact opposite of what the skeleton experienced? And if this theory is true, then does that mean the skeleton is still alive?
In this timeline, radio towers were successfully placed on the moon, and the Moon King (because it's HIS THRONE, get it?) has been sending signals to Earth through television. The transition to digital was an attempt to deprive him of an audience, but the cult that worships him is using workarounds to make sure the Moon King's message/vision is received. "We send signals thru their domain" is in reference to this, and the Contingency video was made in response to the threat of the Moon King becoming hostile: it's better to lie down and blow your brains out than allow yourself to see the moon without even glass between you...
In fact, every big enough celestial body has an Energy Being inside it, made out of electrical and magnetic fields. Mankind is killing the Earth being, not with conventional pollution or climate change, but with electromagnetic pollution. Radio and TV, the electrical fields generated by the ever-increasing amount of machinery, tinkering with radioactivity, all of it is poison. The closest sentient electromagnetic entity being the Moon, it naturally becomes its mission to save its neighbor. The one means of attack it has at its disposal is to induce madness in a way that causes the infection (us) to self-exterminate.
But they aren't all powerful and the human survival instinct overpowers them. This is why the driver was dumb enough to follow the GPS' instructions to go through a creepy route in the woods and turn of his lights, but was able to flee when seeing the monster.
Other agencies have, for lack of a better word, "harsher" sounding names than their real life counterparts. The FCC-equivalent is Federal Communications Governance and the NASA-equivalent is Space & Aeronautics Regulatory Oversight.
The government may have become this way because it became aware of the paranormal activity surrounding analog transmissions and the Moon. This is implied by the warning at the end of Digital Transition saying that receiving any analog transmissions after the digital switchover is a felony, and materials in the ARG suggest that the government had mandated special "vestigial lowband" signal filters be installed in all television transmitters.
