onemuse

Many theories…

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Journal

“This should be in a museum!” has been the best possible response to our now-internet-famous Indiana Jones Mystery Journal. We’ve received a number of great tips, ideas, thoughts, and questions to our Jones email address at indianajonesjournal@uchicago.edu, and mentions on more news sites than we can count at this point. Thanks to everyone who shared the story or sent tips. Here are some of our top submitted ideas:

Most plausible, least exciting: someone purchased one from the replica-maker on Ebay that we linked to yesterday, and on its way to the recipient, it wormed its way out of an outside package. Thinking the Egyptian postage was legit, a wayward mail carrier wrote on our zip code and it hitchhiked its way to our office. Certainly less exciting than our other options, but would still be a hilarious end to our vexing problem. If you are the original Ebay seller of this item and have an angry customer who never got their package, please let us know.

An oft-suggested idea: this is a part of an Alternate-Reality Game (ARG). One of our alums has a post up here in an alternate-reality gaming forum to discuss this. And hey, we do offer a class on that…

It is an act of “Art Abandonment”.

Harrison Ford REALLY wants to go on a date with someone in our office and this is how he got our attention.

We have had two sources tell us the text from the page we photographed with our original post is from this website. This doesn’t solve the mystery, but is cool information (and if you like the Ark of the Covenant you can learn more about it there, too).

Someone got us a cool gift from http://www.mysteriouspackage.com/

It is some type of viral marketing scheme for an upcoming Indiana Jones event. We’ve emailed the only contact we could find at Lucasfilm, but haven’t gotten a response yet. **Update— we just heard back from Lucasfilm, they say: “We were just as surprised to see this package as you were!”

It is something that a student submitted as part of their application. One respondent even bet that we’ll receive a series of these from the applicant (but hopefully not a crystal skull). This is a popular theory, and we do say that this fits the idea of a “create your own essay prompt” being in the spirit of adventurous inquiry…

Adam Savage from Mythbusters made one similar to this but from The Last Crusade. Adam Savage, can you bust OUR myth?!?

Not really a clue, but we do have a request for a post up at a forum for “replica movie props” (TheRPF.com— thanks to Whet Moser AB’04 at the Chicago Mag for pointing out this site to us) where we’re hoping someone might have an idea who made this and, perhaps, why we have one.

For anyone who wants to see more pictures of the thing, here’s a link to a DropBox file with many more.

Mystery solved? Not really. But we’re working on it. And really, even if it’s our boring option, it has still made for one crazy day in our office. At the very least, we’re pretty sure the answer isn’t… SNAKES!