Randonauting

 

Randonauting is the act of using the Randonautica app to travel to random places near you based on a “quantum random number generator and mother nature”, which gives specific coordinates for you to follow. When you open the app — which is available to download in Australia — you start by setting a radius and the generator will spit out coordinates for you to travel to. The app's introduction video claims that these locations can be “influenced by the user's thoughts and consciousness”.

This is why, while setting up the app, it asks whether you’d visit attractors (highly concentrated quantum points), voids (sparse quantum points), anomalies (reported patterns of areas influenced by thought) and urges you to “focus on your intent” while the app sets a location for you. Essentially, the main goal of the app, as discussed in the r/randonauts sub-Reddit, is to “get you out of your routine and go to a specific local place you’ve probably never even noticed”.

While the app does just give randomly generated coordinates to users, some believe that the act of randonauting to blind spots with real intent can help you find the answers you need — whether it’s mental clarity, or a specific sign you’ve been looking for, or a directly related experience. For example, if you think of “creativity” the app may send you to a business that may act as a new place for your to work or provide you with a new inspiring subject matter.

After randonauting, the app encourages you to share your experience through forums. But sharing randonauting experiences, the spooky and scary ones, has become a trend on TikTok. The increased spooky experiences have inspired more and more people to start using the app. With some reporting experiencing alternate dimensions, unexplainable phenomena, and even full-blown crime scenes, randonauting has become increasingly more popular.

One randonauting adventure went viral earlier this week when a group of teens from Seattle posted a TikTok online. After being given their random coordinates, the group drove to their location and stumbled upon a black suitcase washed up on the beach. After inspecting the bag — in the hopes there was money stored inside — the teens saw a plastic stuffed inside and noted that “the smell was overwhelming”. Concerned with the potential contents of the case, they called the police as they feared there could be a dead body inside.

In the same video, as the group of friends leaves the location, emergency services arrive. To act as proof of the events being real, then ended the video with a screenshot of a press release about human remains being found in Seattle. The article that the teens linked to is real and comes from Seattle Police Department Blotter page run by the Seattle government. The article titled ‘Detectives Investigating After Human Remains Found in West Seattle ‘details detectives finding “several bags containing human remains… located near the water” after “receiving a call of a suspicious bag on the beach”.

Now, there is no definitive way to say whether this article was about the TikTok per se — as the investigation is still ongoing with the remains and cause of death still undetermined — but all the details from the video seem to align with the report. In the same way, there’s no definitive way to know whether the teen's “intention” and the energy of “mother nature” while randonauting led them to the crime scene, or if it truly was just a matter of chance that they happened to be on the beach when the suitcase washed up.

But a pattern of death-related randonauting experiences seems to be increasing on TikTok. For example, after the suitcase video went viral, TikTok user @mykenarae alleged that she was sent the coordinates to a man who was dying after choosing the intention of “death”. Recording herself crying while driving, Mykena claimed that she found someone “laying in the gutter with their wife literally on them, holding them”. Alleging that a man was shot, Mykena said that she called the police as her friend wrapped his jacket around the dying man. Again, there is no way to confirm if Mykena is telling the truth beyond her words or to know whether she “manifested” what she found with her set intent.

In another video from earlier this week, two friends claimed they also stumbled upon a crime scene conveniently after the suitcase story made headlines. The pair went on a bout of randonauting where they filmed themselves fleeing after “finding” a shoe that allegedly had a leg attached to it in a pile of dirt. After amassing 2.4 million views, the pair returned to the site to film part two of their video and found that it was just a shoe with no limbs. As randonauting becomes trendy and an easy way gathers views, there’s no doubt that these experiences are going to be fabricated for clout, as seen above. However, the act of randonauting can be dangerous.

Despite the app telling Randonauts to adventure during the day and with friends, there are countless videos on TikTok going against this advice. Venturing to unknown locations alone and at night is, sadly, the perfect opportunity for really bad things to happen. Utilizing the app itself, if people with sinister motives used the app themselves to report anomalies, and you chose to visit this highly reported site, you could be playing exactly into their hands.

So while a random adventure generator does sound like a fun way to pass the time, be sure to keep your wits about you and only do randonauting safely and in groups.