An investigation into a guy who sculpted his girlfriend out of Soylent.

Welcome to Is This an Ad? — a column in which we take a celebrity’s social media post about a brand or product and find out if they’re getting paid to post about it or what. Even though the FTC recently came out with rules on this, it’s not always clear. Send a tip for ambiguous tweets or ’grams to katie@buzzfeed.com. THE CASE: Last week, someone posted a photo of a strange flyer to Reddit:

The website listed on the flyer, soylentsculpture.net, was even stranger.

Did someone actually somehow dry out the meal replacement drink Soylent and turn it into modeling clay? I wanted to know, so I called the phone number on the flyer and at the bottom of the website. It had a long outgoing voicemail message from a man named “Bo” asking if you want the sculpture and then also talking about his girlfriend.

Weird, right? What the hell!

It’s so strange that it feels maybe a little TOO strange…like, maybe it’s actually just an ad. THE INVESTIGATION: When I asked Soylent, they sent me this image:

Okaaaaay…... I tried some obvious things: reverse-searching the images (nothing), the phone number (nothing), the URL registration (private). The mystery deepened. In the subreddit r/Soylent where the photo of the flyer was posted, fans of the meal-in-a-bottle drink speculated it was some sort of viral marketing. One redditor said he was sure it was an ad, and it was similar to another flyer about Soylent he had posted in the past.

This flyer gives the URL soylenthog.com.

In the comments, a tech-savvy redditor looked at the source code for the URL and said it was pretty sophisticated — a sign it was probably a professional job. They also noticed that the site was created by something called “Imakesites” — when they searched that, only three sites came up, and they were all related to Soylent. Another redditor posted a screenshot of what happened when they texted the phone number from the flyer, which only added to the mystery:

And then…aha! Someone on the thread linked to a guy named Alan Wagner's Instagram account, saying this was the person who had made it.

Wagner is an artist/comedian/internet genius who makes a lot of these funny flyers and posts them around Los Angeles. Things like this:

Wagner had also made a whole series of flyers about Soylent-related things:

And this one for mitangryducksightings.org instagram.com