21
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The aliens have landed!

You wake up one morning and find yourself in a room with familiar furniture but featureless white walls, strapped firmly to your own bed and hooked up to an array of dials and monitors that are clearly not of human origin. It seems as though your entire bedroom has been snatched away into a spaceship where these extraterrestrials can examine you in order to learn about humans.

Fortunately - whether by oversight or by design, you're not sure - they've left your arms reasonably free to move about and your smartphone within reach of your bed. You grab it and try to access the internet, in the hope of finding out if you're just a lone victim or if this is part of a large-scale invasion. Somehow your device manages to connect to the internet - do aliens have wifi? - but every webpage you try, from countries all over the world, gives you nothing but the same two images:

Europe World

What information can you gain from these pictures? How widespread is the alien incursion?


Out-of-character notes for solvers:

  • You can click on each image to see a full-resolution version. Apologies for the graininess.
  • The URL superimposed on the upper image is not a clue - it just means I swiped these images from http://www.freeworldmaps.net before making my own alterations to them.
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1
  • $\begingroup$ Seal Team Six . $\endgroup$ Dec 9, 2016 at 16:24

1 Answer 1

23
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The countries are:

  1. Dominican Republic
  2. Norway
  3. Turkey
  4. Spain
  5. Iceland
  6. Tonga
  7. Serbia
  8. Turkey
  9. Uganda
  10. Greenland
  11. Estonia
  12. Argentina
  13. Thailand
  14. Iceland
  15. Norway
  16. Macau
  17. Reunion

We can get a message by

reading the two-letter ISO country codes for each country, which spell out "DO NOT RESIST OR STRUGGLE: EARTH IS NO MORE".

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5
  • $\begingroup$ Too easy!!!!!!! $\endgroup$
    – Strawberry
    Dec 9, 2016 at 10:10
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ So they provide an open access point and serve up those images. Why would I believe this? TIME TO RESIST AND/OR STRUGGLE! $\endgroup$
    – Samthere
    Dec 9, 2016 at 10:23
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ By the looks of it creating this puzzle took longer than solving it... $\endgroup$
    – tuvokki
    Dec 9, 2016 at 14:38
  • $\begingroup$ @tuvokki I doubt that is uncommon $\endgroup$ Dec 9, 2016 at 15:49
  • $\begingroup$ @tuvokki Definitely! $\endgroup$ Dec 14, 2016 at 1:47

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