The Mysterious Swag Box

I received a mysterious package in the mail yesterday. I'm always expecting something from eBay, but I didn't order anything lately that would come in a package this big.



Continue reading if you are interested in the contents. It gets a little creepy.

Under the first layer of bubble wrap and sisal, I found this note:


This jar holds a story - the story of a single tragic incident that needs to be unlocked. Dive in, investigate the evidence and discover what lies beneath the surface of frenziedwaters.com


I unwrapped about a mile of bubble wrap and found this jar.



I pulled out lots of items. First, a boat key (which is neat, because my husband can use a floating key ring for the old boat he bought a couple of months ago). The ring says "Discovery Marina".



Next, a shark's tooth on a copper tag. It's a big tooth, so I put my hand in the picture for reference.



Taking up most of the room in the jar was a swimsuit. Would it fit? I don't believe so, and there's no size tag. My kids were diligent in looking for one, go figure. But it is unusable anyway, as you can see.



There was a folded up piece of paper that turned out to be a sign. My new teenage son will fight to have this in his room, along with the biohazard signs.



As if all those things weren't ominous enough, the small newspaper clipping at the bottom was the real kicker.



My funeral is today? How cool and creepy at the same time! I guess I've joined Jeff Goldblum and P.T. Barnum in that exclusive club of folks who get to read their own obituary. My oldest daughter was pretty well rattled by it. I assured her that since we live about 800 miles from the nearest coast, the chances of me being eaten by a shark are approximately 0%. My real life name and town, which are correct in the clipping, have been redacted for the photo,

Nothing in this package said so, but of course this all has to do with an annual event we've all come to know and love. You can follow the progress of this weird promotion as it unfolds at Frenzied Waters. Thanks, Discovery Channel!

Many blog editors area receiving similar personalized packages. Whatever it is, it is indeed one helluva PR stunt.

Some of the report the package contains GPS coordinates to a point... maybe the place and time where the event rest of this stunt will take place?

Whoever is behind this, certainly has acknowledged that blogs are as important as the mainstreet media nowadays.
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The Terms of Service in the frenziedwaters.com website link to dsc.discovery.com.

Definitly Shark Week!

Have you tried looking up the GPS coordinates in Google Earth? There may also be similarities between your Facebook profile and some of the info in your obituary.
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@Wes

Ops... my bad. I meant mainstream media. Sorry. I was thinking of something else at the time. That's what I get for commenting while working, plus not having English as my 1st language.
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@ nick

i just did. its a really cool recorded message about how several mutilated seal carcasses have been found along with spottings of "large predatory" sea animals.
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This sounds like an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). I got involved in one earlier this year after receiving a box in the mail ( http://www.spacemonkeyx.com/?p=660 ). They can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the game I got into died on the vine, so I never did find out what ever happened to poor Jennifer Summers.
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I agree with SpaceMonkeyX, it sounds like the start of an ARG to me. I've done a couple and they can be a lot of fun but I'm surprised Discovery is doing one for Shark Week, if indeed that's what this is.
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One last time (about 4th time I try- each time it doesn't come through:

Elsewhere I found 3 times w dot techeblog dot com slash index dot php slash tech-gadget slash frenzied-waters ... Copy, fill in proper stuff and check it out...

If the automatic sysop hadn't given such trouble, I found it kind of funny...
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Search on the phone number turns up a number of blogs who got similar boxes.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/08/peter-ha-died-on-july-6-2009/
http://www.marketingshift.com/2009/7/sharkweek-frenziedwaters-viral-marketing.cfm
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We received our package via Fedex yesterday... pretty funny promotion.

The poster and materials will definitely go up in the office at Fear Beneath headquarters. It looks from the website like additional clues will be revealed in the next couple of weeks.
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Sorry if this is off topic, but did anyone catch this release this week? Thought it might be of interest to all prehistoric fans.

ACTRESS LANA WOOD ATTACKED
BY 70 FOOT SHARK

Hollywood actress Lana Wood, who once played Plenty O’Toole opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever, was attacked by what eyewitnesses say was a Megalodon, a 70-foot, 70,000 pound prehistoric cousin of the Great White shark. The attack occurred in the waters off the coast of Monterey, California. . .in the pages of New York Times best-selling author Steve Alten’s new release MEG: Hell’s Aquarium.
Lana Wood, a former Playboy centerfold, has an extensive career in the movies, and wrote a best-selling memoir about her late sister, actress Natalie Wood, back in 1986. She contacted Steve Alten a year ago and asked him to make her a character in his new MEG book, the fourth and best story in the series.

In his review of Hell’s Aquarium, Steve Donoghue, Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly states, “Alten writes the whole thing in hyperkinetic present tense, with turns and twists in every scene until it squeaks…there’s a scene late in the book involving a shark autopsy that any thriller-writer would give a tonsil to have thought up! The whole thing fizzes with the kind of fun delirium only the most effective giant killer shark novels dare to attempt.”

http://www.wix.com/Meg_HellsAquarium/meg
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