Page 116 - Hunter - The Vigil

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Every so often, this video appears on some video-sharing site or another, and it’s really
creepy — it’s dark and it’s badly pixelated and the sound’s all over the place, but holy shit
did you see that the guy just turned into a monster and ran off? Special effects. It’s got to
be special effects. You can do some pretty impressive things with a half-decent video
editing suite. Still. You’d almost think it was real.
Sometimes it goes viral. Sometimes it ends up on a hundred blogs or
more, an embedded video and a comment: Hey! This is really creepy.
How’d they do it?
The answer is: they didn’t. You’ve just seen content from Net-
work Zero, the Secret Frequency (as in, the frequency that broadcasts
secrets, not a frequency that’s secret). For going on 10 years now, Net-
work Zero has been making forbidden content available on the In-
ternet for anyone who’ll pay attention. Before that, it was public
access cable television. And it’s all real.
Jim Harrison first went on the air in the small hours of

nd
the morning on September 22 , 1991, in Dallas, Texas. He
was an independent filmmaker who up, until a few years be-

fore, had created special effects for a dozen or more monster
movies. He received anonymously in the mail three reels of
film, apparently recorded in the mid-1970s, if the look and

sound of the people depicted was anything to go by.
One reel of film showed what looked like an impossibly huge feral dog stalk-

ing around residential streets in what landmarks identify as Philadelphia. An-
other reel showed a man, unnaturally blurry and out of focus, even when the

ground and walls around him were crystal clear. The film showed the blurred
man dissolve into a cloud of mist. The third — weirdest of all — showed a
bizarre thing made wholly of rubbery, translucent tentacles, which emerged
from the ground and reached up and pulled itself into the sky. No faces were

evident; he could discover no identities. As for the film, he literally cut it to
pieces and spliced it back together again, trying to fi nd out how they had done the
special effects. He couldn’t.
He found a public access channel and broadcast all three films a couple of

nights later. He asked at the end if anyone knew about the films, and gave out a
post office box number. He never found out the truth behind those films, but he

received a small sack of letters from people who had stories to tell. Some even
had fi lm of their own.
That was really how it began. Jim began to broadcast regularly and, gradu-
ally, he gained contacts across the USA. He began to think he was on to some-
thing; that he was at the edge of some vast conspiracy behind all these weird sight-
ings. He became obsessed. He barely even noticed when his wife left him.
Meanwhile, many of Jim’s contacts began to go out looking for weird phe-
nomena. By the time Jim started up Network Zero as an Internet entity, back in

early 1999, he had some 74 films from different sources, each showing something
truly bizarre. It went worldwide. Now, Network Zero’s membership spreads across
the world, from Thailand to Alaska, from Rio De Janeiro to New Delhi.
Jim’s now a firm believer, even though he has never knowingly seen any-

thing supernatural face to face. Network Zero operates on a kind of guerrilla
basis now, posting videos and sound clips everywhere it can, often with no in-
troduction or explanation. It sends them to other web communities. Sometimes
it even shares the information it has gathered with members of other monster-
hunting organizations — its members aren’t stupid, and they’re well aware that
these things are dangerous, and that these other organizations exist.
Network Zero invites people to join fairly regularly. With the Web 2.0
explosion, millions of videos and podcasts exist out there, and it’s not hard to
fi nd out if people are on the level. A half-dozen members spend nearly all their
spare time scouring dozens of community sites and search engines, looking for

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