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Another exciting development in what has already turned out to be a banner year for solving esoteric internet mysteries: The previously unknown silhouette of “Celebrity Number Six” has seemingly been identified on a 15-year-old piece of fabric, the end to a mystery that thousands of people have been trying to solve for several years.
The saga I’m about to explain to you is incredibly frivolous, but it also says something about how we research and confirm things on the internet these days and about the dynamics of massive anonymous research projects. Ultimately, this mystery was solved with a combination of AI facial recognition software and one photographer's long memory.
Four years ago, a Reddit user named TontsaH posted a plea on no fewer than 13 different subreddits, including r/movies, r/tipofmytongue, r/answers, r/DoesAnybodyElse, r/Models, r/celebrities, r/vikingstv, r/advice, r/whatisthisthing, r/television, r/HelpMeFind, r/WhatIsThisPainting, and r/NoStupidQuestions. They had what was seemingly a simple question: “Who are these celebrities/movie stars in this fabric?” They also made a post on r/findareddit searching for “a sub where people recognize celebrities in curtains with silhouettes of celebrities.”