During the episode an ad for The Hanson Foundation (a fake corporation) was played. The ad displayed a 1800 number and a website for the organisation (thehansofoundation.org). This fake corporation is part of a game called “The Lost Experience”. The callers and website viewers were given clues and hints outside the viewing of the program “Lost”. Alternate reality games or ARG’s combine fictional stories within real world elements.
I advise you to view the Hanson Foundation website to see the efforts that have gone into this. Not only was the Hanson Foundation developed, but around the same time “The Lost Experience” was lunched, a book was also released. The title is Bad Twin and is published by Hyperion, a division of Disney, which just happens to be the owneron Lost’s home network, ABC. In one of the episodes of Lost, Sawyer is glimpsed reading a manuscript called Bad Twin. The books author Gary Truop was said to be one of the passengers on the plane that crashed onto the island. Rearrange Gary Troup and you get “Purgatory”, a theory which is happening to the survivors on the island…. Will we get to a point when we no longer know truth?
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