GTA V - Chiliad Mystery & Easter Egg Hunt (spoilers)

[Heran Bago]

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS FOR GTA V!

This post is mostly completely plagiarized from No Mods No Masters's post on Something Awful, which was itself culled from a thread on GTA Forums. I discovered none of this but I find this stuff fascinating and these kinds of big secrets are lacking in modern games.

It's reminiscent of the Bigfoot in GTA: San Andreas hunt. There are tons of serious Easter Eggs in GTA V. There are the makings of a giant, elaborate, interlocking easter egg puzzle in the game, which spergs everywhere are working to piece together as we speak. Alternatively, it might be the beginning of perhaps the biggest troll in gaming history and go nowhere- but don't tell that to the Bigfooters, who will probably be picking this game apart for years. In this thread I'll try to provide a brief summary of what people have found so far.

Stage Setting

If you've played GTA V, then you probably noticed that it is peppered with strange references to aliens. Michael is beamed up by a UFO during a bad acid trip, and fights off waves of aliens when tripping after smoking a bad weed. There are actors in alien suits walking around the movie studio in Los Santos. Out in the desert are strange murals and graffiti of aliens, and if you visit the area as Franklin a man called Omega will give you a quest to collect 50 UFO parts, which rewards a UFO-themed dune buggy that makes ray gun sounds when you honk its horn. If you bought the collector's edition of the game, the included map is covered with all kinds of weird references to aliens when held under a blacklight. All innocuous enough for a GTA game, right? Just Rockstar being cute, surely? Well...

What We Know Part I: Chiliad and the first UFO

On the peak of Mount Chiliad, the tallest mountain in the game, the first and most basic elements of the mystery are plain for all to see.

First, in the lift station atop the mountain (aka the infamous shed from one of the trailers), this grafitti (usually referred to as "the main glyph") is scrawled on one of the walls:

This glyph remains the core of the mystery, and indeed its precise meaning is not yet understood. Evidently UFOs, a cracking easter egg, and what appears to be a man with a jetpack are all somehow interconnected. Some think that this is a map of a complex buried inside the mountain itself. Others have attempted to overlay the main glyph onto the exterior of the mountain when viewed from a certain angle and onto the game map, with mixed success.

But that's not the only thing of interest on the mountain's peak. Underneath the observation deck at the peak, the same drawing of a UFO from the glyph is visible in bright red paint. Scrawled into the wood of the deck reads a message stating "come back when your story is complete".

People did just that-they returned with a 100% save file. When you do so (and the game time is 3:00 AM, and it is raining) something kinda weird happens:



This UFO is noninteractive- get too close and it fades out of existence, hologram style. It also has FIB written on it-the FIB being the game's pastiche of the FBI, who figure heavily into the main plot.

So with this mystifying find the race was pretty much afoot. Now is probably a good time to mention some of the other alien easter eggs that were quickly found: an alien frozen in the ice during the game's intro sequence in North Yankton, and a sunken UFO at the bottom of the game's ocean in the far north of the map:



Now, you might rightly be thinking that all this is kind of a tease. Maybe just teasing DLC, or something for GTA online, or being cheeky. But two subsequent discoveries made things a lot more interesting.

What We Know Part II: The Solid UFOs

The aforementioned area in the desert covered in alien murals (usually referred to as "the alien park") was a natural place for easter egg hunters to poke around. And high in the sky above it, when you have 100%, sure enough:



Note that this is a solid UFO that actually has world geometry, and some strange interactions with the player and vehicles-for example, it will shut off your helicopter's engine if you get too close.

On the other side of the game map, people began poking around the Zancudo military base. There, there is a particular bunker around which conspicuous green lights will begin to flash late at night. Above that bunker, extremely high in the sky, another solid UFO was found:



Note that this one has a different, military-style design (and makes some pretty unsettling noises), but the same strange anti-engine properties. It also requires 100% to see.

These four UFOs and change constitute the total of the air-quotes hard evidence discovered so far. How all of this is related is pretty much totally in question still.

What's Next?

You need only refresh GTAForums to see the ongoing debate about the next step- how to find more UFOs, and how to figure out how, if at all, any of this stuff is connected. There are numerous theories, of course. Loosely speaking they center on a few areas of the map.

There is a mysterious hatch in the middle of the ocean. :lost: reference or something more sinister?



On the western side of mount Chiliad is the fortified base of a cult called the Altruists, who Trevor can interact with during some of his stranger missions. The base and the surrounding woods are slathered with paintings of UFO glyphs, e.g.

The alien park and the surrounding desert are also full of interesting things, such as this code:

Aliens having sex and an arrow pointing to the mountain:

And this apparent reference to the main glyph:

And other weird stuff that may or may not be related, like these:

Conspicuously, a group of FIB agents and scientists appear around one of the satellite relays in the desert, but only after the main plot is completed:

In a recent lead, someone tried tried overlaying the main glyph onto Mount Chiliad when viewed from a certain angle, like so:

Which actually does correspond to several glyphs painted onto the face of the mountain, like so:

This could all lead to nothing but what if it unlocks a Jetpack?

Resources:
/r/chiliadmystery - A subreddit devoted to solving the mystery.
GTAForums - Tough to read but the place where a lot of this stuff was originally discovered.​

 

[ShadowSoldier]

Yeahh I've been checking back there regularly, seeing if there's been any updates.

I hope there's more to it than what we know.

Also the 8 thing, is an entirely different story. That has to do with the prisoner in 9A. People were connecting dots that weren't there and it isn't related to the Aliens at all. I hope that there's perhaps something that we're just missing entirely in this. Or perhaps it has to be continued in GTAO. Or maybe DLC. Knowing Rockstar, they won't be saying anything.

Also that hatch thing, I believe that isn't connected, and rather just a reference to Lost, as if I remember correctly, the Island ends up in the bottom of the Ocean, or it takes place there the whole time. And the "morse code" people were hearing when nearing it, likely them hearing things because the character drowns, or it's just imitating when Locke banged on the hatch.

 

[Heran Bago]

Yeahh I've been checking back there regularly, seeing if there's been any updates.

I hope there's more to it than what we know.

Also the 8 thing, is an entirely different story. That has to do with the prisoner in 9A. People were connecting dots that weren't there and it isn't related to the Aliens at all. I hope that there's perhaps something that we're just missing entirely in this. Or perhaps it has to be continued in GTAO. Or maybe DLC. Knowing Rockstar, they won't be saying anything.

Also that hatch thing, I believe that isn't connected, and rather just a reference to Lost, as if I remember correctly, the Island ends up in the bottom of the Ocean, or it takes place there the whole time. And the "morse code" people were hearing when nearing it, likely them hearing things because the character drowns, or it's just imitating when Locke banged on the hatch.

You're right about both of these. The morse code turned out to be a joke about bowling in GTA IV.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Was a fairly interesting read. While I haven't 100%'d GTA V (and I have no plans to), it would be interesting to see how this pans out.

I doubt all of this effort would be just for a jetpack, if anything I would expect Rockstar to let you fly a UFO (which would be fucking awesome).

I also expect more little easter eggs like this will pop up when Rockstar makes DLC/expansions for this, which would be pretty sweet.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

Was a fairly interesting read. While I haven't 100%'d GTA V (and I have no plans to), it would be interesting to see how this pans out.

I doubt all of this effort would be just for a jetpack, if anything I would expect Rockstar to let you fly a UFO (which would be fucking awesome).

I also expect more little easter eggs like this will pop up when Rockstar makes DLC/expansions for this, which would be pretty sweet.

It really is a good read. I mean, none of it makes sense for Rockstar to just put a picture up in the Cable Car building and it not be about anything. Considering some of the pictures do give clues and have spawned UFO's.

What's weirder is (now I haven't played GTAIV or really played San Andreas) there is no Jetpack cheat, or invincibility cheat. There's a cheat where you can be invisible for like 5 minutes or something but you can still die. That picture is mysterious, and obviously Rockstar wants people to figure it out.

Nothing has changed in the online mode, the picture is still there and everything. I haven't gotten a helicopter or can even tell if there are UFO's in the online yet.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

double post:

So I noticed this today when I was collecting the letter scraps:

Now it could just be a coincidence and just simply be a texture copy/paste, but those bars look a lot like the tops of the UFOs that appear at night at the top of Chiliad, the one above the hippy camp, and the one in the ocean. And the area it's in it's a big large circle about the size if not it, of the UFOs. It's in the construction area near Trevor's airfield: