The following images were sent from "Keeper of Flame" to rapture via my person website this morning. It simply had a link to a Flickr account.

The Society of the Ancients have a presence in London. We know that they've hit Times Square in New York. MTV has new coverage here. I wonder if we'll see them in other cities?

It seems that HALO fans and ARG fans are ahead of the game. Literally. We discovered the totally cool HALO 3 comic via someone that got glimpse of a Circuit City ad that is supposed to run this weekend. That ad leads us to the comic that leads us to some numbers that lead us to an IP address: http://206.16.223.65/.

That IP address is owned by Microsoft. Actually, there's a whole block of IP addresses owned by Microsoft. For instance http://206.16.223.11/ is for the game Conker. http://206.16.223.26 is for Games for Windows. http://206.16.223.45/ is for HALO 3.

So, it would make sense that there could be one or more sites related to the ARG in that IP range.

http://206.16.223.63 is in the range and is mysterious. It's the homepage for the Society of the Ancients (SOTA). You can tell that it is related to the ARG if you go to the "evidence" page and see the "sign". The sign is a glyph that we've now seen in several places.

But discovering another page by brute force is kind of lame. We weren't supposed to know that site as an IP address.

It appears that we were supposed to learn of SOTA today via Flyers handed out in Times Square by people wearing yellow shirts. Below is a copy of the flyer posted by a user on the Neogaf forums.

It's the URL "societyoftheancients.com" that we were supposed to discover. Not the IP address.

SOTA today. HALO3.com/comic/ tomorrow. And we are already ahead of the game.

What's next?

It seems that the countdown timer on http://206.16.223.65/ will end sometime on June 21st (thanks for breaking the code, Nathan). Perhaps something will happen then. As for Adjutant Reflex. That user has not posted since yesterday. We aren't used to going this long without a post.

However, Adjutant Reflex did join a Seventh Column Chapter at Bungie.net. The chapter is called "Brute Ghostbusters" and was founded by new Bungie employee Luke Smith. Membership is by application only at this point in time. The motto of the group is:

"Daily(ish) notes from Bungie's Luke Smith about what's going on: at Bungie; with Halo; and other nefarious, mildly- interesting nonsense. Also, there will be shenanigans."

Have we found too much too soon? Does MSBungie have enough in store to keep us busy between now and the 21st? I'm betting that they do. This ARG is getting complex. Just look at the HALO3.com/comic. The artwork is deep. The story is deep. The animations are deep. A lot of time when into that. A lot of time has gone into hidding the "glyphs" on different websites. I bet we'll be busy this weekend looking for more "glyphs".

If you think about it, we might can look at this ARG from the perspective of us (the fans) being inside the HALO story. Forget about what we know about HALO and its future. If we were a part of the HALO story (being just ordinary humans on Earth), we might find mysterious artifacts and think of them as "alien" or "unknown". I think that MSBungie wants us to believe that they were "Forerunner" or "Covenant" technology and that we are in the HALO timeline right now.