The people chasing secrets in Grand Theft Auto think they’ve made a breakthrough. They say they’ve found evidence that suggests that maybe there’s a way to get abducted by aliens in-game...without the help of mods or cheats.


So far, players have found four different UFOs inside of GTA V. The UFOs can light up and make sounds, but you still can’t really do anything with them. Nobody has discovered a way to pilot the ships, or a way to go inside of the ships. But there’s this sense that there’s more to these UFOs—more to GTA V itself, really. Which is why people are still searching for mysteries in a game that might not actually have any left.

The latest effort: yesterday, a Reddit user named trainwreck42o made a thread with an incredible claim: they found code in GTA V that pertains to loading UFO interiors. That is to say, they’re pretty certain there’s something inside of the UFOs; they claim that the game has the capability to load more than what we’ve seen of UFOs thus far. But the only way to view these interiors is to a) not be injured and b) to meet another mystery requirement. Trainwreck doesn’t know what this requirement is. All they know is that once it’s met, the code will recognize it as a specific variable (-1 or 999, to be specific), and it will react accordingly. The assumption is that nobody has met the requirement yet.


“There is a ton of code in the UFO ambient script which we may have never been able to activate, and could contain literally everything we are looking for (at the very least it contains several interior loading scripts which are unique to the UFO script),” trainwreck wrote.

“If we can verify we are indeed un-injured and have the global variable set to either -1 or 999 when viewing the UFO, we can know the interiors are being loaded.

“If we assume we are able to meet those requirements, then the final step is to uncover the warp points which will take us from Mt. Chilliad into the loaded interiors.”

Since this discovery was made, other GTA players are scrambling to figure out what exactly they need to do to fully activate the UFOs. Already, there are theories about how to be warped into the spaceships. Here’s one by KuztomX, which postulates that maybe players need to approach the UFOs in a more natural state:

What if the variable represents your outfit? We know that the Altruist camp has ties to the UFO, and they are nudists. So what can we take from that? Maybe in order to “praise and give thanks”, you have to follow their advice and be nude when spawning the UFO. -1 could be the value for not wearing clothes at all, which happens to unlock once you complete 100% (probably what the TORSO resources are). Why would they unlock the ability to be mostly nude at 100% completion? Alternatively, the value of 999 might be if you are wearing the “100%” t-shirt. Both of these outfits will “prove” to the UFO your worthiness, and that you have completed your story.


A different user thinks that maybe the glyphs that are all around GTA V have some clues about what the remaining conditions are. In short, there’s a lot of speculation going on right now about UFOs, and what players can and can’t do with them. Some people are comparing this thing to the megalodon hunt in Battlefield 4, a mystery that required very specific conditions in order to activate it.

To be absolutely clear here: we can’t verify if any of this is of consequence, or if it’ll turn up anything concrete. The validity of these claims isn’t the point. While it would certainly be amazing if there’s one more secret hidden with GTA, what’s noteworthy here isn’t the ‘discoveries’ that people are making. It’s the dedication. It’s the assurance that this digital world has more to it than meets the eye. It’s this almost spiritual-like journey that players are undertaking once they’ve 100%ed GTA. What else does this digital world hide? Does it resemble the face of God?


For over a year now, certain GTA obsessives have been trying to crack the supposed mysteries hiding within GTA V. It’s meant over-analyzing strange murals and signs laid all across the streets of Los Santos. It’s meant searching high and low for the holy jetpack—which players have seen references to inside the code itself. And yet, despite all of this, not much has really turned up from all the investigations. Not that that’s discouraged anyone from trying.

Top image: GTA Wiki.