Music's Strangest Mystery - Publius Enigma

Hello Chill Fuel, I just wanna stop by and say thank you for going extra mile to adding subtitles to your videos. I'm deaf, and oftentimes YouTube auto captions is not so very accurate so it is very rare to find a channel with high quality content like yours that has subtitles in their videos. Thank you and keep up the good work🙌🏻

This is so crazy, I'm a massive pink floyd fan and have a passing interest in internet mysteries and arg's but I've literally never heard of this before. What the hell lol

Been a Floyd fan for more than 40 years and this is new to me. It brought to mind the backwards message on the Wall album, something along the lines of: “Congratulations, you have found the secret message. Please send your answers to Old Pink, care of The Funny Farm.” It’s on the track “Empty Spaces “. I could have the wording wrong, but you get the idea.

I think this is a great case study in how these things don't really work if there isn't true passion behind them. I think the reason this never really got off the ground is because it was essentially a corporate thing without a genuine purpose. The only person who seemed invested in promoting the mystery was the marketing guy behind it, who even then seemed mostly interested in creating the puzzles and had to sort of invent a purpose to them after the fact. Let's imagine that the band had been involved and were actively participating in the mystery. Maybe the prize could have led fans to a secret show somewhere, for example, which would've been hard to logistically coordinate but not impossible if everyone was on board. Maybe the band could've "accidentally" let more obvious clues leak as the date of the show got nearer; no one would care if the puzzles weren't actually solved Cicada 3301-style, because people would then get caught up in the excitement over the unexpected show in the remote field or small venue or whatever. Maybe the puzzles could've been oriented towards getting the puzzle solvers free tickets, with anyone else who found out about the show needing to buy them to get access. But that's the sort of thing that would really need to come from the band itself, or at least resonate with them enough that they'd put energy into it. It sounds like this was the idea of someone in the marketing department, and the band basically responded with, "Okay, sure, do your thing." The fact that it was still going in 1997, with the hope that leading some fans to meet up in the middle of a forest would still lead to a viral moment three years after the fact, paints a really sad picture for me.

The real kick in the pants seems to be that even if after all these years it is actually solved, i dont think there's anyone to popup and be like congratz! You finally did it! So i truly doubt we ever know for sure... a very melancholy feeling imo...

reminder that Dark Side Of The Moon lines up perfectly with... Paul Blart Mall Cop 2

I'd like to quote the band Kansas to summarize the flaw in this publicity stunt: "There is no answer / when there is no question" There hasn't been any resolution to this mystery because no real mystery, question, or puzzle has been provided. Some guy on the internet said "Hey if someone thinks really cool thoughts there will be a prize!" What's the goal? A crossword puzzle has explicit answers; a maze begs to be navigated; an image of a statue of the villain of a cartoon show for a single frame at the end of the final episode of the show begs to be found. All this superficially mysterious and esoteric talk is just hot air.

As a Pink Floyd fan, I've been reading about this mystery for years and it's just so disappointing. It's basically an abandoned ARG that never even got to the first clue. Everyone generally agrees that some kind of constructed mystery did exist, and it did have a real solution, but beyond that every theory is just desperate grasping at straws. I don't really care about what the prize would have been, I want to know what the clues were and what they meant, how one was meant to lead to the next. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun.

This was everywhere on the Internet back in the days, I remember reading the FAQ with all the theories. I think Pink Floyd/EMI could have toyed with the idea of going viral, but this was so early in Internet history that they couldn’t drive it home to a satisfying conclusion. Remember the backwards message in The Wall?

Pink Floyd actually did release 1 more album after The Division Bell. The Endless River was released in 2015 to little fanfare and doesn't seem to have any clues tied to the Publius Enigma. It's most likely that EMI has just given up on people solving it.

I was on the Echoes mailing list back at the time the Enigma was going on. There were a lot more theories posited, including that Publius was Nick Mason himself. The thing I don't get about it being someone from EMI and a promotional thing is that the people who would have taken interest were likely the ones who would have bought the record already, and most likely go to the shows. Preaching to the choir, as it were. My guess is that it was someone having everyone on, and Marc Brickman, PF's lighting director, heard about it and had a little fun with it.

Been a hardcore fan of Pink Floyd for about a decade and I've never heard of this before. Thank you.

I still think about this from time to time... I remember hearing about it as a teenager, then a friend got the Pulse DVD and we saw the text, which blew our minds. I had a pet theory that each song on the Division Bell has sound bites from other albums and that somehow those were the clues, but I could never put it together into something meaningful. I really wanted there to be some magic solution to it when I was a teenaged Pink Floyd fan, and the fact that I still think about it now as a PF fan in my 40's says... well, it says something 😂

I think the biggest problem that happened was when the church of scientology had the Penet remailer shut down, which was the anonymous remailer that Publius was using to communicate. After he could no longer be authenticated, all established trust was gone. Nobody ever even knew what a final solution looked like. Also, you missed a bit of media -- in the re-release of Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, at approximately 44:44 (while the radio telescopes are turning, just before "One of These Days"), "Publius Enigma" is clearly spoken two times.

I was a 20-year-old Pink Floyd die-hard fan, I remember those days of Division Bell & Pulse and the slowly but surely widespread beginning of the internet. I was in Karachi and had to visit the Internet Cafes. However, the internet in the Internet Cafe wasn't cheap and hence I could only afford 1 visit a week. Yet I tried for a few months to keep up with the Publius Enigma story but to no avail. Today, the moment I saw Publius Enigma, all the memories came along with it. The message to communicate was very much there in Keep Talking. Anyways Thank you @Chill Fuel

So... Basically, what you're saying is... There's still a plot of land with a circle of trees out there for the winning?

Hey man! I love your videos. It seems your views have been down lately. I don't know why but none of your videos were getting recommended to me even though I'm subscribed. But now that I've rediscovered you, I'm going through all your videos of the last year. They're all just as good as before. Keep at it man! You'll make another banger that pleases the algorithm and people will go from that to all the quality content you've been making. Just like I'm doing today. So thanks for the awesome videos. I look forward to watching them for years to come!

Always a good day when chill fuel uploads

"Far away, across the fields, The tolling of the iron bell, Calls the faithful to their knees, To hear the softly spoken magic spells" on the cover of The Division Bell, between the two heads, across the field, there is an old church. people who have visited it in real life claim it has an iron bell...

The answer is in the Pink Floyd biography by Mark Blake ("Pigs might Fly"). Marc Brickman, the lighning director, claimed he was told by the band manager, Steve O'Rourke, to arrange the lights in order to show the "Publius Enigma" phrase. And it was Nick Mason himself who explained the enigma in 2005. It was a puzzle fanatic employe at EMI who proposed the idea. So yep, the Publius Enigma is as shallow as the later Pink Floyd records (wich I love but they're still shallow anyway lol).