Questions

Getting To Know The Town

What is the name of the protestor's relative that was the first to own land on what is now Glen Rock?

The protester, covered in section five, tells Alec that her family has had problems with GRPC for generations. Her grandmother told her that their family was the first people in Glen Rock, and that her great grandfather refused to give up his land for the plant, and it seems they've held a grudge for quite some time.

She doesn't give us her name, just the fact that she's a biology student at Penn State York campus, doing her thesis on biodiversity in Pennsylvania state parks and local lands. She says that she's been followed by multiple cars, all of which are registered to GRPC, and that she has been threated on social media and had a creepy message left on her voicemail.

Going off of the information about being the first people in the town, we can research the town's origins. The basis of the information below comes from the Google search glen rock pennsylvania founding.

According to Wikipedia, Glen Rock was founded by one "William Heathcote" in 1859. This wasn't the answer the challenge was looking for, so we need to dig deeper.

Wikipedia had a dead link to an article about the "History of Glen Rock", which I was able to retrieve from the Wayback Machine and update the Wikipedia page with. Unfortunately, that article also gave us Heathcote's name.

A much more detailed history of the town was located here, and it gives all the influential names associated with the town in its history. The answer they were looking for was found in this article.

Answer: Simon Koller

(Note: The answer was later changed to William Heathcote based on feedback from the beta testers, so we were right the first time!)
What is the name of the main Railroad through town?

This answer can also be found in the detailed link above.

Answer: Northern Central Railway
What is unique about the outside of the town library?

Searching Google for glen rock pennsylvania library gives us the Arthur Hufnagel Public Library of Glen Rock. I did some searching from the Google Street view and was able to make the following observations:

Next to the railroad
Left wall has art/graffiti on it
The building looks like a saloon

But none of those things were the answer. Stumped, I tried the hint option and got "A precise Google dork might be of help". This didn't give me much insight, so I just continued doing what I was doing and trying to hone the search. Next on my attempt list was unique + glen rock + library + pennsylvania.

That search yielded me an interesting article about the history of the library, but didn't provide anything useful for the purposes of the question.

Since I was in the beta, I reached out to zewen with the answers I'd tried and they used that feedback to change the hint and the accepted responses. The new updated hint was a lot more in line with my train of thought: "Observing the library from different angles will be of great help". This brought me to where I was before: Google Street view.

Turns out they were just looking for some specific verbology, which was updated to include a slightly wider range of acceptable answers.

Answer: Paintings

(Note: The question was later changed to What is depicted on the side of the local library based on feedback from the beta testers, which is much more specific.)

Who painted the trains on the library?

Searching Instagram for photos tagged at the library didn't yield any results, nor did the library website or their Facebook/Instagram pages. If there is any kind of signature on the paintings, it isn't visible from the Google Street view.

When I took a break from this question and came back, it had been changed based on our feedback. The new question was Which female artist donated her pastel work "under the rainbow" to the library?. We are able to find the answer to this question very quickly by searching Google for the query "Under The Rainbow" + Arthur Hufnagel Public Library. This leads us to a newspaper article with the answer.

Answer: Maryanne Smith
What is the street name of Maryanne’s studio?

Searching Google for maryanne smith + glen rock + pennsylvania led us to an auction page for a piece of her artwork, which contains the studio's artwork.

Answer: Ronald Street
Where was this taken in town?

Searching for graffiti + Glen Rock Pennsylvania led us to a news article about a local "Ruins Park" that looks very similar to the location depicted. This wasn't the answer, so doing some further digging yielded that it's also referred to as "Ruins Hall".

Answer: Ruins Hall
The protester was attending an event there on June 8th 2018 what was it?

We are able to dig through the old Facebook events of Ruins Hall and find the event that was held on June 8th, 2018. The event in question was an "Outdoor Movie Night" that was held in the park.

Answer: Outdoor Movie Night
Which movie was shown at the event?

We can also get this information from the same event listing above.

Answer: Back to the Future
What was the high temp on that day in Celsius?

Searching Weather Underground for the date of the event yields a full temperature chart for the day. The recorded high temperature was 84°F, which is ~28°C.

Answer: 28

The Employees

Who created this flyer?

We can reference back to the GPRC website from earlier in the investigation for information about the company's employees. From the "Employees of the Month" page, we can see the individual who is in charge of "Event Management".

Answer: Patti Stanton
What is Patti's favorite thing to do?

Her employee highlight also gives a brief description of her hobbies and interests.

Answer: Staycations
What is Patti's home SSID?

Searching Facebook for people named "Patti Stanton" and who live in Glen Rock yields no results.

Reverse searching Google for her employee image also did not yield any relevant results.

One great way to see SSID's is via Wigle. I did some scanning through Glen Rock and there was too much information to sift through, which only left me with a headache. Lost, I decided to get a hint: On Saturdays I like to do the Wigle down Main Street.

That narrowed doen the search field quite a bit, and eventually I was able to locate the correct network. Searching by SSID for terms I thought it would contain didn't work, which was frustrating, but I got it nonetheless.

Answer: Staycation WiFi
What is the BSSID?

Answer: 3C:7A:8A:93:D2:5E
What year was this BSSID first seen?

Answer: 2021
What is the vendor of this device?

We can perform a MAC address lookup to find the vendor of the device.

Answer: ARRIS Group
Who is the parent company of Arris Group Inc?

I was able to just Google this question word for word and find the answer.

New answer: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/5260599

Answer: Commscope Uk Holdings Limited

Campaign Funding

How much money has GRPC donated to Alexander Ross?

This information is posted on the GPRC website under the "Company News" section.

Answer: 1214000
What is the GRPC campaign phone number for Alexander Ross?

This information is also posted on the GPRC website, all the way at the bottom of the page.

Answer: (931) 532-0554
How much did Glen Rock Paper Company spend on PR services in 2022?

We can see this information in their finance report.

Answer: 11576

Rock The Socks

What is the full name of the owner of this email address?

The email address in question is rockthesocks1982@fastmail.com. Searching for the username rockthesocks1982 yields a Reddit account, which links to a Steam account of someone claiming to be in Pennsylvania.

The Steam account has used the following usernames:

pagamer1982
butchcassidy
ThewildBunch82
sloppyfpsgamer1982

None of which gave me any information about the owner of the email address. I tried submitting "Butch Cassidy" as the answer, but no dice. Thanks to Swagalicious~$, I learned that searching to add them as a friend returns additional information about the user. We were able to discover the name "John B" as a result!

Obviously this isn't their full name, so we aren't done yet. The year of birth for this person is likely 1982, so I searched for "John B 1982" on Facebook to no avail. There are no employees on the GRPC website with the name "John" either.

I searched for "John B" on LinkedIn and filtered by location to "Pennsylvania". This yielded a little over a hundred results, and scanning through all of them didn't net anything of interest. Searching for "John" in "Glen Rock, PA" yielded a similarly uninteresting pool of users.

Since this didn't solve it, I decided to take another crack at Facebook. Searching "John B" for "Glen Rock, Pennsylvania" was very helpful, and gave us our target.

Answer: John Banks

What year was he born?

We know this from his various usernames.

Answer: 1982
Which city is John from?

This information is also on his Facebook profile.

Answer: Las Vegas

What Is The Cache?

What is the name of the cache?

The "cache" in question is an image from this Reddit post, which can be seen below:

Manually transcribing the text from the image (to the best of my ability) gave me the following:
```
🏖️⬤◻🛥🧍ⓘ⬤⯀ ◻✓◻🚑🎁 🛡✕🛥🚔 👁 ⏴︎⏮︎🏭 ⏵︎⏩︎🙾⏵︎⏶︎⏷︎ 🕨 _⏪︎⏷︎🏭 ⏶︎🗗🙾⏮︎⏪︎⏪︎
```
The hint tells us Letterboxing meets modern technology, meaning the emojis are likely representative of some form of coordinates. Searching for the coordinates of Glen Rock gives us 39.793158 latitude and -76.73025 longitude, which could be a useful starting point to decipher the meaning of the emojis.

A friend suggested the second word could be "cache" due to the duplication of letters, so I tried using that as a starting point for the decryption.

◻ = c
✓ = a
🚑 = h
🎁 = e

Believe it or not, we were able to find Webdings by searching Google for "font with beach symbol" and it works with our hypothesis! The rest of the emojis can be decoded as follows:
```
Incoming cache drop N 39F 48.456 W 076F 52.977
```
These convert to 39.926667 latitude and -77.138056 longitude, which is "1834 Red Bridge Road, Adams County, PA, 17350". (N 39° 48.456' W 076° 52.977')

Turns out the challenge got broken when I was solving it, funny story there. ANYWAYS, the new image to decode is as follows:

Which can be decoded to the following:
```
Incoming cache drop. Sloppyfpsgamer
```
Searching for "Sloppyfpsgamer" on geocaching.com shows us that they posted one cache.

Answer: GRPC Recon

What are the coordinates of the cache?

You can get the coordinates here.

Answer: N 39° 48.185 W 076° 53.772
What sort of "encryption" was used to mask the original text from the conspiracy forum?

The "decryption key" is this:
```
Decryption Key
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z
(letter above equals below, and vice versa)
```
Which can be decrypted on CyberChef using the ROT13 recipe. As I learned though, I misread the question, as it was referring to the Reddit post text, not the geocache clue.

Answer: Webdings

Interesting Communication Technique

What does the text translate to?

The text in question can be viewed below:

Running the text through dCode tells us that it's likely a ROT13 cipher. Decoding it gives us the following:
```
Next flyover: Lake Marburg
```
What does N1822H reference?

Searching Google for "N1822H" yields a plane, with the letters being the tail number.

Answer: Tail number
What type of aircraft is N1822H?

Looking at their recent flights tells us that it's a Piper Cherokee.

Answer: Piper Cherokee

Come Fly With Me

Which airport did this aircraft fly out of on January 8th 2023?

We were given a ZIP file containing the flight data to help answer these questions. It contains a KML file that can be opened in Google Earth, which shows the flight path of the aircraft.

Answer: Frederick Municipal Airport
Which lake did the plane fly over on January the 8th?

We know this from the decrypted text in the last section.

Answer: Lake Marburg

Unknown Phone Number

Who is the owner of the phone number?

Alec received the following call from "717-320-8621":
```
<Distorted voice>
We know what you're trying to do. Nothing good will come of this. Stop your inquiries right now and nothing more will happen.
Continue on and you will soon learn how much hurt we can do to you and your family.
```
I thought this rang a bell, so I went back to John Bank's Facebook profile to confirm and I was right. John posted that you can contact the "GRPC admin assistant" at that number to donate to the campaign of Alexander Ross.

Going back to the GRPC website, we can check the "Employees of the Month" section and get a name for who that is.

Answer: Aleigha Brooks

Image Exploration

0x

As you can see, the question is very broad for this one. We are given the following image as a clue:

So the text Hoagie215 and a stamp-like drawing of a ship is all we have to go off of. I downloaded the images and ran exiftool on them to see if there was any metadata that could help us, but no dice. I'm guessing the answer won't be in steganography either, since this is just supposed to be something that Lisa texted us.

0x is a common prefix for hexadecimal numbers, indicating that they may play a part here. Unfortunately "H" and "g" are not valid hexadecimal characters, so we can't just convert the text to hex and get a valuable piece of information. If we convert Hoagie215 to hex, we get 48 6f 61 67 69 65 32 31 35, which doesn't seem to be anything special.

If we try to think about it more literally, 215 is the area code for Philadelphia, which is in Pennsylvania. This may relate to the front of the image:

So we've got 215-406 and "Hoagie" to go off of. I puzzled over this for quite some time before giving in and checking the question hint: Some prefer the road, some prefer the forest. Others like the open sea. We have a drawing of a ship, so the "open sea" part makes sense.

When I took a step back, I realized that 0x has to do with the OpenSea cryptocurrency marketplace. Searching "Hoagie215" on OpenSea directed us to their profile, giving us their crypto wallet address.

Answer: 0x446eEB480516B7824C4D938740A5a410CA0cdB34
1

My first thought was that this was related to the "Cool Robot 1" NFT in the "Hoagie215" collection. I copied the Token ID from the page and tried that as the answer, but no no such luck. The question changed to "Image 1" by the next time I checked it, which theoretically means we're on the right track.

The hint reads "LOOK closer", so I tried expanding the image to see if there was anything hidden in the background, and lo-and-behold: there is! I had to adjust the contrast on my monitor to see it, so keep that in mind.

Answer: 15.03.2023
Image 2

Same premise as the last question.

Answer: LU YANG SHUN
Image 3

Same premise as the last two questions.

Answer: 39.264969, -76.598633

Getting To Know The Town

Interesting Communication Technique

Come Fly With Me

Unknown Phone Number

Image Exploration