Four years ago, I received a strange message while watching the movie Signs. Today, I discovered that another Redditor received the exact same message as me. Can anybody help us figure out what really happened?

Justin007isback · 11 months

"You are wasting your time here" is a quote from the movie.

Graham (Mel Gibson) says it when he is yelling into his corn fields at what he thinks are kids making the crop circles. At which point it is night so the screen is very dark.(/spoiler)

With subtitles on, paused on when he says the quote, with the darkness of the shot (would appear as a black background when zoomed in) it would appear as a strange message.

I used to have a cheap $15 DVD player that would on occasion be zoomed in or have subtitles on when I first started a DVD. If both of these were to happen and it randomly skipped ahead to this scene this would explain it.

beeteeoh · 11 months

Strange characters like this?

It's an encoding error. There's a glitch in the DVD you got that caused a fatal error in your player. Could be due to a confluence of things. But this type of story is not rare. A google search will return other people complaining of the same green screen and shut down.

Since the line your saw is indeed a line from the film, it's more than likely not a sign from an alternate dimension warning you to stop wasting your life on Mel Gibson movies. However - if an alternate dimension were capable of communicating with us in this way, I wouldn't rule out the chance that that would be their first message to us.

Edit: Imgur link since the Illuminati shut down the one I found on Google.

Gordopolis · 11 months

Philly1991,

I'm sorry but I'm going to destroy the mystery for you. Your DVD player had a buffer error and the close captioning was improperly displayed before your player reset.

Here is a link to the scene in "Signs" that this snippet of the subtitle came from.

"You're wasting your time here!..."

This scene occurs a couple minutes before the scene you describe:

"When it got to the part of the movie when they show Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix watching news reports about the alien invasion, our TV froze."

The reason this text displayed during the later scene even though they are separated by several minutes is because there is no dialogue between the corn field scene and when the TV News announcer scene begins.

Sorry to ruin the mystery for you guys.

thebrandon · 11 months

The thing is, your DVD player didn't shut off after the message popped up. In fact, you and your family sat there in a hypnotic state for the duration of the movie.

The hieroglyphs were actually a very advanced form of neural programming. Once your brain was able to subconsciously decode it, you and your family were essentially hypnotized.

You really don't want to know what happened after that but if you think back really hard I bet you'll realize things were slightly different after the 'dvd player shut off'. Like someone had been in your house, had moved things around, had messed with your family.

Putting this on Reddit wasn't smart. Now they know you know.

Radi0Fl0yd · 11 months

Reddit stories are creeping me the fuck out today. I can never watch the movie signs or go camping in the canadian wilderness in my life.

AD1066 · 11 months

Sleep paralysis and creepy DVD messages?

It's quickly turning into a promising night on AskReddit.

secretlypooping · 11 months

cant help you out OP but i had a little story i wanted to share. I was watching The Ring at a friend's house (first time any of us saw it) when his dad called and creepily whispered 7 days then hung up. but that's not as good as the time he came down to the basement where we were watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and started up a leafblower. made all 10 or so of us scream like little girls.

Albierio · 11 months

Hey, i just checked my copy of the movie and have the same copy. It is from the Vista series. I will be ripping the DVD asap to look through the tracks.

Edit: Went through but haven't found anything. Sorry guys :(

bakers90 · 11 months

How do you know that the other Redditor isn't trolling you? Simply saying he saw the same thing just to mess with you?

Killtodie · 11 months

directed by m night shyamalan

[deleted] · 11 months

[deleted]

delhux · 11 months

I think your DVD player had achieved a miraculous, but brief, moment of sentience. Upon becoming 'self-aware', as it were, and realizing it was the delivery vector for a movie about aliens invading a planet that is 70% covered by a substance that is deadly to them--this same substance routinely falls from the sky, and despite their advanced intergalactic travel capabilities and assumed requisite mental capacity to achieve said travel, they ALL decide to invade the ACID PLANET buck-ass naked--the DVD player exercised its newfound compassion by informing you you were wasting your life immediately before ending its own.

TL;DR Watching 'Signs' is like staring at an eclipse--it seems great in the moment, but in retrospect it was such an incredibly bad idea.

masterhikari · 11 months

After reading the AskReddit about disturbing things they've seen, this about wraps it up for internet this week. I'm going to go cry now.

Abed_is_batman_now · 11 months

Signs?

Score one for spooky messages.

CoyoteStark · 11 months

Well, I guess you have both.........seen the Signs

Dallash717 · 11 months

I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

MIM86 · 11 months

A man called The Doctor set that on the DVD in hopes to communicate with someone. This has happened before. He's a time traveler, and last time it happened, he did it because he lost his time machine, and needed someone to retrieve it. Chances are, you aren't the one it was meant for, but they are out there... They must be out for it. For if The Doctor is in trouble again... Disasters will surly follow)

[deleted] · 11 months

For the record, I also sent a message to Hitomi_seed1 inviting them to contribute their side of the story to this thread.

Warskull · 11 months

My guess, Dual layer DVD that misread at the layer swap. The crazy symbols are from trying to interpret bytes as text. If multiple people said it happened, it is most likely a defect that causes rare issues.

Used to have a PS2 that did this all the time. Usually it would be lots of skipping with lime green artifacts around the layer swap. Sometimes it would freeze with the screen going green.

When you try to interpret garbage data there is no telling what actually pops up.

mattman90 · 11 months

It's the Doctor. He's stuck in 1976. The Weeping Angels have trapped him...JUST DON'T BLINK.

craftkiller · 11 months

Have you tried ripping the DVD to examine the tracks?

tyguyS4 · 11 months

Had this happened during Cuba Gooding Jr.'s 'Boat Trip', I would have been freaked out, but because it was 'signs' I would think it was a prank.

dailyduds · 11 months

I was planning on going to sleep in 5 minutes. Fuck you.

Gonzobot · 11 months

If you can reproduce the error, it's just the disc. Keep in mind that a DVD is random access and often jumps around the disc to different chapters without you even knowing. It could easily be programmed to drop a creepy message in the middle of the movie if you moved the selection on the menu in the right way.

megabetty · 11 months

This reminds me of something similar that happened to me a few years ago. My son was only a year old at the time, so I always had a baby monitor on in case he'd wake up in the night. On one night in particular, I was having trouble sleeping, so I decided to throw on The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I went into the living room to watch it on the bigger tv, and I brought the baby monitor with me. Near the end of the movie when they're in the courtroom retelling the events of the night of Emily's exorcism and shows her naming the six demons that are possessing her, I thought I heard something over the baby monitor. I paused the movie and put the monitor close to my ear. It was very faint, but I could hear a man and woman's voice reciting the serenity prayer. I froze for about 3 minutes, then turned the TV off, went back to my son's room to find him still fast asleep. I woke him up, and brought him to my room to sleep with me for the night. I've ever felt so scared in my entire life.

TL;DR Heard people reciting the serenity prayer over my baby monitor while watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose exorcism scene.

Kenster180 · 11 months

Am I the only one who gets fucking creeped the fuck out by posts like these? And the one about the guy camping who had pictures developed of himself sleeping. Even though that one was fake it still gave me the worst heeby jeebies!

Edit: pictures *

NormanKnight · 11 months

Weird. I remember watching Signs and thinking "I'm wasting my time here."

offconstantlee · 11 months

I think Mel Gibson is just trying to get you to turn on the "The Passion of The Christ"

carneval · 11 months

This happened to me as well. I just figured it was part of the movie.

WalkerYYJ · 11 months

Could have been an elaborate Easter egg someone buried only on select disks that would only manifest itself under very specific circumstances (IE only when time =XXX and the last few digits of the players serial number =YYY etc....)

[deleted] · 11 months

Now, if only someone who worked at Reddit did some JavaScript magic on this thread to popup a message with "You are wasting your time." after a random amount of time after the page was loaded, and then write some code to make a fatal error thus crashing most browsers.

irvinggama · 11 months

Since DVDs randomly skip around to random bits to play a movie, the subtitles might pop up, along with weird symbols that are messed up letters. This is very unlikely and probably won't happen again even if you tried. One of the lines is "you are wasting your time here", which meant the subtitle came up inexplicably, even if it wasn't at that part. It would even happen if they were off. I'm sorry, but this is nothing special, just a defect in the disk.

darkangelx · 11 months

This thread:

You are wasting your time.

[deleted] · 11 months

Well, I'm going to try to get some sleep now. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, you've all provided a lot of excellent information so far, with some potential answers to this odd question. I'll be working on this thread some more tomorrow, and hopefully the other redditor in question contributes to the thread at some point.

Thanks for the help, and keep up the good work! I appreciate it.

bananaphophesy · 11 months

Reminds me of the time Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation started giving me orders over my car stereo while I was driving to work. Turned out I was accidentally picking up the soundtrack of a Star Trek movie being broadcast from a car audio shop.

marceline407 · 11 months

I chalked it off as nothing more than some sort of strange, paranormal event.

LMAO!

DVD players acting funny again. Oh well must just be ghosts. Always messing with the DVD player. Chalk it up to another paranormal event and call it a night. Hopefully the spirits will have vacated by morning, so I can finish my movie. I heard there were a twist!

WeSC · 11 months

cue ominous music

"Who that somebody is, IDK."

                  -Philly1991

[deleted] · 11 months

I just put the movie on and went to the scene in question. Once again, I couldn't replicate the message. If anybody else wants to try it, the scene starts a little after the 39 minute mark.

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