GTA V Fans Think They Might Finally Solve A Three-Year-Old Alien Mystery

GTA V fans have looked for aliens endlessly since the launch of the game, all to no avail. After years of fruitless searching, fans have finally started solving a three-year-old mystery involving an alien egg in the GTA V code.

For those of you who have followed the Chiliad Mystery, you may already know about the alien egg in GTA V. The egg, which is depicted on the mural itself alongside a jetpack and a UFO, was never found in-game. About three years ago, however, an alien egg model was discovered buried deep in the code of GTA V. At the time, that code egg had no functionality or any scripting attached to it: it was just an unused model with no gameplay significance. In the Gunrunning update, which dropped last week, a team of mystery hunters found new scripts and code that weren’t in the game before. It’s got the GTA community buzzing.

SSJ5_Tadden, who is a part of a mystery hunting group called Team Guru, recently shared the discovery that players have found new data pertaining to aliens, UFO, and the military:

According to mystery hunters, these images were obtained via a tool known as Codewalker, which allows users to load up the GTA map. Through Codewalker, players can explore GTA to a degree they normally can’t in-game, and it also allows them to peer into the game’s code. Using both the code viewer and the model viewer in Codewalker, Team Guru members Tom and Gramz and Codewalker creator Dexyfexy identified a group of new, never-before-seen props.

Kotaku confirmed the veracity of these images with the help of Spider-Vice, a GTA fan who loves digging through GTA code to find secrets and cut content. Spider-Vice was nice enough to share additional images with Kotaku of the new discoveries, which include a damaged UFO.

Some of these models, like the egg, you might recognize. But there’s more to them than meets the eye. The UFO, for example, may seem similar to what’s already available in-game,but it’s actually slightly different—this model is more beat up. Within the code, the prop’s name is “GR_Prop_Damship_01a.ydr,” and players such as Spider-Vice have taken the “GR” portion of that name to mean it is all a part of the Gunrunners update. Meaning, new.

After hours of hard work, Team Guru member Shishya discovered that Rockstar has recently attached “hash IDs” and “scripts” to the egg. Hash IDs are tags that Rockstar uses to spawn or manipulate objects and items in GTA V, while scripts are pieces of code that activate or do certain things in the game. Without any of this stuff, a model is just a static object buried in the code. But now that the egg has a hash ID and scripting tied to it, it appears that Rockstar is gearing up to actually do something with the egg. That’s why people are freaking out about this.

In the Reddit post user SSJ5_Tadden says that each prop has code and scripting that tie them to specific coordinates—which all happen to be near the Fort Zancudo Military Base. Fans found all of the new data, including scripts and even GPS info, in a list of game code titled “case 79.” Cases are lists that contain location data for anything Rockstar needs to spawn, including events. So having all this stuff in tied to one specific case makes mystery hunters believe it’s all connected. The fact it all points to Fort Zancudo specifically is perfect: the base is known for alien activity, such as UFOs.

All of this, combined with the discovery of a damaged UFO, military men, scientists, new lighting props, and the GPS coordinates, has players assuming that Rockstar is planning an alien UFO crash event of some kind.

According to players who have looked at the code, the models are tied to specific scripts and pieces of code which players don’t know how to activate yet (if indeed they can be activated at all.) Players I spoke to are hard at work figuring out how to make this stuff appear in-game somehow, and methods so far have included exploring that area at different times of day and at different weather conditions. Maybe that sounds strange, but then again, you have to consider that the only way to see the UFO on top of Chiliad is at night, at a specific time, when it is raining. No dice yet, though.

While all of this may sound silly—developers always leave stuff inside game code that isn’t meant to be seen, and will never appear in-game—Rockstar has a history with this kind of stuff. The developers haveoutright incorporated GTA V’s code into larger in-game puzzles/mysteries, because they know that players dig through the game’s programming. Players are certain that’s the case here, because Rockstar must be aware that players would freak out about anything vaguely mystery related in the game. Hawk-eyed players catalog every notable code change in the game whenever there’s an update, of course they were going to notice tweaks to the most infamous myth in the game.

For now, nobody knows what it all means, or what Rockstar is planning. Some players are actually upset about the addition of these new assets, because it makes them feel as if the years of searching before this point were for nothing—the real game has only begun now. Generally speaking, though, the community is excited, because it seems like the Chiliad Mystery might be ramping up after nearly 4 years of hunting.

Zack Zwiezen is a writer and critic currently living in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written for Gamecritics, Killscreen and Entertainment Fuse.