SCP-173 (found 4chan post; 2007)

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Original SCP-173 v2.PNG

The original post

Status: Found

Date found: 08 Oct 2018

Found by: Jason Scott


The original SCP-173 post is a 2007 4chan post written by Moto42[1] that inspired the fictional SCP Foundation as well as led to the creation of the SCP Wiki, a popular containment fiction writing community. The post was made on June 22nd, 2007, and deleted a few days later. It was lost for over a decade, before being rediscovered in an archive of old 4chan posts by dasMaymay.[2]

Background

SCP-173 was originally a creepypasta posted to the /x/ (paranormal) board of 4chan at 1:40 on June 22, 2007. The post described the procedures needed to safely contain a paranormal statue that could move and attack people when not looked at. This sparked a popular community of related horror writing in the same format, known as containment fiction. It also directly inspired the creation of the largest containment fiction community, the SCP Foundation.

Details

The oldest surviving text of SCP-173 was posted on June 22nd, 2007, at 12:33 PM Greenwich Mean Time (8:33 AM EST).[3] The original post was thus made on or before June 22nd, 2007.

The author of 173 posted under the username "The U.S.S. Walrus".[4] He initially planned to make a new SCP post every week, but lost internet access for a week and a half and forgot about the SCP Foundation until over a year later.[4] Unfortunately, The U.S.S. Walrus did not re-post the text of SCP-173 in any capacity.

Significance

SCP-173 was posted around the same time period as “Blink”, a Doctor Who episode which aired on June 9th, 2007, and introduced the Weeping Angels. The Weeping Angels are sentient statutes that attack when not looked at, a concept that is very similar to SCP-173. Members of the SCP Foundation claim that the SCP-173 post was made weeks or months before “Blink” aired. However, no physical proof exists to support these claims. The publication date of SCP-173 was in controversy for years, but the original post shows that it was made several weeks after "Blink" first aired.[2]

The text of SCP-173 may have changed over time. The text of the 2008 4chan post, as well as many 2007- early 2008 forum posts, varies from the current text of SCP-173. The original post confirms that the text went through several alterations.[2] All containment fiction communities can trace their lineage to SCP-173 including the SCP Foundation, the RPC Authority, the Backrooms, and the Liminal Archives, among others.

Availability

The original SCP-173 post was made on June 22nd, 2007.[2] 4chan does not save old posts, so any thread that is not externally archived will be automatically deleted. One member of the SCP Foundation Wikidot website estimated that the original post only survived for a few days before being deleted.[5] The text and image used in the post were saved, and can currently be viewed on the SCP Foundation Wikidot website.[6] However, the original post was lost. Since 2007, many members of the SCP Foundation community and fandom have tried to find the original post or information about it.[7][8][9] Several archives such as the Yotsuba Society, the Chanarchive, and many /x/ thread dumps stored on the Internet Archive were searched for the post without success.[10]

On October 8th, 2018, Jason Scott of the Internet Archive posted an archive of about 10 million 4chan posts from 2006 to 2008 onto the Internet Archive.[11] On that day, dasMaymay searched through the archive, found the original thread and posted it to the SCP Foundation subreddit.[12]

See Also

External Links

References