Last week I went over to San Francisco to see my family. It was a fun trip. While we were in line for bag checking, I noticed a black sticker that said, “Ernest Olkowski Was Right” in plain white text. I gave no further thought to it, thinking he was an activist or something. But then my little sister asked me “Who’s Ernest Olkowski?”
I pulled out my phone to google him. What I saw was not an image of a man, but instead message boards discussing the identity of this “Ernest Olkowski”.
This was interesting.
I clicked on the Reddit link, seeing if they had any insight.
Apparently, travelers across the world have been seeing Ernest Olkowski stickers.
I also learned that if you go to ernestolkowskiwasright.com, you will see an eerie black screen with a number in plain white text ticking down.
The number is about 2 billion at the time this article is being written.
If you dig deeper and click inspect element, you see that the number is counting down to a specific date, March 8th, 2024, at 12:33:21.
I looked up the date, March 8th, 2024, but I got nothing special- although there is an eclipse scheduled for April 8th of that same year.
After that, I decided to see if it was the anniversary of anything important.
There were important things that happened on March 8th, like the establishment of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, or the founding of the New York Stock Exchange, but none of them seemed relevant to this story.
Fun fact- after looking at the 2 billion number, I was skeptical about if it was actually up to 2024. If you convert from seconds to years you get around 68 years.
However, this is irrelevant to the point because this isn’t the second count.
This adds up the total number of seconds, minutes, hours, and days, meaning that there is overlap- explaining why the number is so high.
I was kind of at a dead end with the website, so I decided to look at some more forum posts.
I looked at the Reddit post again and I heard about some invisible text that said “inukijnA”.
One Redditor replied: “Lake Anjikuni is another name for a Lake Angikuni is Canada.”
If you go to the official-looking Instagram account, you see a lot of cryptic and edited pictures.
Take a look at this one for example:
This looks like an odd blob, but it has an uncanny resemblance to something else:
The picture was of Lake Angikuni.
What’s significant about this lake?
Well, the story goes that there was a large village by the lake. One day, an explorer came to it, expecting to see Native Inuit people, but instead, he was met with a barren ghost town.
It was one of the largest mass disappearances in recorded history, and to this day no one knows what happened to the villagers near Lake Angikuni.
At this point in time, the word “inukijnA” has disappeared from the website, which could be a clever allusion to the disappearance of the Inuit tribe.
To prove that it was once there, I went to the internet wayback machine, and there it was.
Going back to the Instagram account, I found a cryptic edited version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” with 2 Illuminati eyes and a Donald duck beak, accompanied by an image of a graph of some sort, possibly a stock. (And an Edward Olkowski sticker)
I’m excited to decrypt all of these photos because this is a mystery I like, but that’s gonna take a long while.
I fished around on the internet a bit longer but I didn’t get any new information.
I found swaths of people musing about the mysterious stickers they’ve found. It felt cool being part of something. I was one of those people- vexed by a mysterious black box with plain white text. I’ve even talked with people who’ve seen the exact sticker I saw. The world is quite small.
While looking at people’s posts I noticed something odd. A majority of the people on the forums were saying they found the stickers in Milan.
This could mean that the center of operation for Ernest Olkowski is in Milan- but we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion too fast. It could be a red herring- or a fluke.
I saw an interesting post that said “Vandalism or Art” above a picture of an Ernest Olkowski sticker right next to some graffiti.
So… who is Ernest Olkowski?
Ernest Olkowski could be a fantastic alternate reality game or a sick practical joke, but it still doesn’t demystify the situation.
How did so many stickers get around the world? How do they get left on places like the security check-in at an airport? What’s the purpose?
This is the first time I’ve been involved with anything like this, and I think I’m gonna follow this story more closely. I can’t wait to get to the bottom of this.
Want to follow this story and look for clues? Check out r/ErnestOlkowskiHunt on Reddit.
Find a sticker? Add it onto this chart to contribute to the database.
Add a photo if you have one!
Update!
Since we all pitched in and made a map we can now see the distribution of sticker sightings. Most of the sightings are in Milan or near it, which affirms my personal theory that it’s based in Milan, but please do gather your own opinion from the data.
