In 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Petraeus' Knot to Untie, Part 3 - Secret Websites, Coded Messages
Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled i am trying to believe. Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing iamtryingtobelieve.com into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site's contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: I'm drinking the water. So should you. Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what? . ~ Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games, by Frank Rose
The story continues in Part Four