Time Slips, Prison Floods: The Data We Can’t Explain

A Stillness in an English Lane

October 1957. Three Royal Navy cadets—William Laing, Ray Baker, and Michael Crowley—wander into the village of Kersey on leave. The air hangs heavy, unnaturally silent. No birds call. Smoke from chimneys seems frozen in place. At the butcher’s window, skinned oxen rot, their flesh exposed in a way that feels wrong for the era. They hurry out, and the world snaps back to normal. The stakes? A brush with something that defies time itself.

In a stark corrections facility, a seasoned officer patrols the block. He’s seen floods before—leaky pipes, inmate sabotage, storm backups. Routine. But this time, water starts pooling in a sealed concrete cell. It builds, rising as if raining upward from nowhere. No pipes burst. No source visible. The cognitive jolt hits: this isn’t the usual drip. It’s something defying the mundane checks he’s trained for.

Late 2015, into early 2016. An internet sleuth hunches over a screen, scrolling through endless short clips on YouTube. Thousands of them, near-identical: blurry static, muffled voices reciting letters or numbers. The channel, Unfavorable Semicircle, pumps them out relentlessly. Community forums buzz. Then BBC coverage drops, and days later, the channel vanishes. The hunt intensifies—what hidden message lurks in the glitchy flood?

What Witnesses and Analysts Report

For the Kersey incident, the three cadets—William Laing, Ray Baker, and Michael Crowley—described an eerie silence, anachronistic sights like rotting oxen in a butcher’s window, and a sudden return to normalcy upon leaving. These accounts come from regional retellings, such as in the East Anglian Daily Times, though they’re mostly retrospective rather than contemporaneous. Community investigators and paranormal researchers have pieced together these details, noting how the story persists in local folklore, but they flag that the names and specifics often appear in later compilations, not immediate reports.

With Unfavorable Semicircle, community sleuths on Reddit and forums documented tens of thousands of short videos, many silent or static, featuring recurring glyphs, titles, and occasional distorted voice tracks spelling out letters or numbers. Viewers proposed ideas like a hoax, automated bot uploads, an alternate reality game, or even a modern numbers station. These analyses stem from direct observations during the channel’s active period, with archivists preserving what they could before the takedown.

In prison water cases, corrections staff and inmates have reported various intrusions—floods from storms, plumbing leaks, or intentional flooding—in documented incidents tracked by groups like the ACLU and NRDC. These are established patterns from firsthand logs and reports. However, the specific claim of water ‘materializing’ in a cell without a source lacks a verifiable primary record; it’s more of an exotic retelling amid broader, confirmed infrastructure issues.

Timelines, Tracks, and Hard Data

The Unfavorable Semicircle channel launched on March 30, 2015, with heavy uploads starting in April, reaching about 72,000 videos by its removal on February 25, 2016, right after BBC coverage. Content often showed blurred visuals and muffled voices reciting letters or numbers, as noted in BBC reports and community archives. For Kersey, the event dates to October 1957, with cadet names like William Laing, Ray Baker, and Michael Crowley appearing in regional press and paranormal sources such as the East Anglian Daily Times and analyses by Mike Dash.

On the prison side, scientific context from NOAA, USGS, and UCAR rules out macroscopic rain falling upward from the ground; they point to phenomena like virga or updrafts for odd water behaviors, but not materialization from thin air. Documented prison incidents include floods and leaks, per ACLU and Corrections1 reports.

To push further, I’d pursue these research tasks: Attempt FOIA requests for prison incident reports, shift logs, and officer statements, targeting relevant jurisdictions if dates emerge. Search archive.org and Unfavorable Semicircle mirrors for video metadata or comments with potential coordinates—the dossier didn’t confirm any Atlantic links. Check 1957 local newspapers, Royal Navy logs, and Kersey parish records for original mentions to distinguish core claims from later additions.

Official Story vs. What the Data Suggests

YouTube’s stance was clear: they removed Unfavorable Semicircle in February 2016, likely for spam or terms violations, as per typical platform actions reported by the BBC. Yet this doesn’t address the channel’s odd patterns or intent, which community data suggests could hide signals—gaps remain in verifying authorship despite fan archives.

Institutional science from NOAA, USGS, and UCAR maintains that precipitation forms in clouds, with no evidence for upward rain from the surface; they cite virga or updrafts for unusual effects, but these fall short of explaining water materializing in a sealed space. For prisons, official explanations point to plumbing failures, floods, or inmate actions, backed by ACLU and NRDC documentation of systemic issues. Still, the specific ‘materialization’ lacks a primary record, leaving witness details unaccounted for.

Kersey’s sparse contemporary documentation—mostly regional retellings—means official narratives might chalk it up to memory errors or folklore, but that doesn’t fully square with the consistent sensory reports from the cadets, creating space for anomaly interpretations.

What It All Might Mean

These cases pull together solid threads: Unfavorable Semicircle’s massive uploads and swift takedown are well-documented digitally, prison water events show up in institutional records as infrastructure woes, and Kersey lingers in regional accounts, though it begs for primary confirmation. Gaps persist— the channel’s purpose, any hidden coordinates in videos, a verifiable report for the prison anomaly, and 1957 logs for Kersey.

They matter because they probe evidence frontiers: digital traces that vanish, institutional blind spots, and memory’s fragile hold. Each highlights how anomalies emerge where records fade. Next, I’d chase primary documents—FOIA for the prison, archives for the channel, Navy and press checks for Kersey. Stay rigorous, mark the unknowns clearly, and weigh competing views on the facts.