If, while posting selfies to Twitter and reblogging Pacific Rim GIFs on Tumblr, you ever feel a pang of nostalgia for the Wilder Westier days of the Internet, here’s a story for you:

In January of 2012, a mysterious series of advanced cryptological puzzles with a creepy cicada theme led hackers and codebreakers on a chase deep into the darker parts of the web. Then whoever was posting the messages declared, “We have now found the individuals we sought”—only to restart and re-end again in January of 2013.

Is/was it a CIA recruitment strategy? An “I Love Bees”–style stealth-marketing campaign? A bit of performance art à la @horse_ebooks? No one knows.