By Staff Reporter
The New York Times, October 13, 1961
NEW YORK — In a bizarre turn of events that has left scientists, city officials, and average citizens equally baffled, hundreds of arcane, unfamiliar symbols materialized across every major billboard in Times Square early Thursday morning. The incident, which occurred just after dawn, is being referred to by authorities as a “localized temporal anomaly.”
Eyewitnesses first described the glyphs as “tribal,” “mathematical,” and “not of this world.” The towering signs, previously promoting musical revues, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola, were suddenly overwritten by pulsating patterns that defied linguistic classification.
“I was heading to work, same as any day,” said Ronald Halpern, 47, a watch repairman from Queens. “Then I looked up, and it was like the alphabet got rearranged by someone who’d never seen a letter before.”
Despite the dramatic visual transformation, the daily rhythms of the square continued unperturbed. Pedestrians crossed the streets, taxis honked their horns, and the crowds flowed around the eerie language without pause — as though their minds failed to register the shift.
Dr. Helen Morrow, a physicist at Columbia University specializing in quantum anomalies, believes the phenomenon may be evidence of “chrono-syntactic interference” — a disruption in temporal reality wherein alternate timelines momentarily overwrite the present.
“We’re dealing with something akin to a magnetic tape loop unraveling,” said Dr. Morrow. “But instead of sound, it’s space-time itself, and the language of some other possible world is bleeding into ours.”
City workers attempted to paint over the symbols around 10:00 a.m., but reported that the black backgrounds absorbed all pigment, “as if the paint was falling into a hole.” One sanitation employee fainted after making contact with a glyph shaped like a recursive ampersand.
Federal agents arrived by noon. Sources indicate that the area has since been cordoned off for “linguistic containment and pattern analysis.” When asked for comment, an agent in a gray suit offered only this: “It’s not meant for us.”
By sunset, the symbols began to fade, pixel by pixel, returning the Square’s facades to their usual bustle of Broadway lights and blaring typography. Yet many remain shaken — not just by what they saw, but by the feeling they were being read by the symbols, rather than the other way around.
“It was like the city glitched,” said Halpern, rubbing his temples. “Only this time, it didn’t restart.”
Further updates will follow as more information becomes available.
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