The Lost Experience was the first Alternate Reality Game and took place between the second and third season of LOST. It focused on the background of the Hanso Foundation and its DHARMA Initiative, the nature of the experiments that were conducted on the Island, as well as the significance of the Numbers. The story was told through the eyes of Rachel Blake, who was revealed to be the daughter of the long-missing magnate of the Foundation Alvar Hanso.
The story began with Rachel Blake exposing that the Hanso Foundation, beneath its front of a benevolent organisation, was involved with various horrible crimes such as illegal organ harvesting, imprisonment and exploitation of mathematicians, abuse of mental patients, illegal experiments on animals, and more. All these were committed for the research conducted by the Foundation, and without any respect for human life. Secrecy and bribery allowed them to keep up this scheme.
The focus then shifts to a secret project of the Hanso Foundation: the DHARMA Initiative, the acronym being revealed as standing for Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications. This project is linked to the Valenzetti equation which is believed to predict the exact date humanity will get extinct, through whatever factors. The core parameters of the equation currently happen to be 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 43 – the Numbers. The aim of the DHARMA Initiative was to try, through targeted manipulations in society and environment, changing these paramters and in effect “postpone doomsday.” Research on the project was conducted in underground labs of a highly secret location – the Island on which Oceanic flight 815 crashed. The radio tower built on the island was broadcasting the numbers to the outside world in an encrypted fashion, so that the Foundation would notice once one of the values had been changed. However, everything indicates that the DHARMA Initiative was deemed a failure, and funding has been withdrawn in 1987, the project stopped.
Enter Thomas Werner Mittelwerk, the man who Alvar Hanso himself trained to be his successor, in a great act of misjudgement. Mittelwerk was bent on changing the Valenzetti parameters, no matter the price. Hanso and his morals were just an annoyance to him, so he made him disappear – imprisoning him and keeping him quiet. All the while Mittelwerk started a horrible new attempt to change the Numbers. He was about to test a virus in two villages in Sri Lanka, which is supposed to kill exactly 30% of any population. If the tests had been successful, this virus would have later been let loose on the whole of Earth’s population, as Mittelwerk was convinced that killing 30% of humanity would prevent the end of the world. He thought that saving the rest of humanity was worth killing “some” innocents.
The most important revelations are in the Sri Lanka and Norway videos. Rachel Blake’s uncovering of these facts led to the release of Alvar Hanso, who then set out to restore the Foundation to its former glory based on moral principles. However, Mittelwerk denied to have been defeated completely. It must also be noted that while the events of the show LOST are taking place in late 2004, the story of The Lost Experience was considered to take place in real-time, i.e. in 2006. Hence, the “evil” Foundation being shut down has not yet taken place as far as the events on the island are concerned.
(A minor revelation: the ship stranded on the Island, the Black Rock, is revealed to actually have belonged to Magnus Hanso, Alvar Hanso’s grandfather, who was involved in the slave trade. The ship’s log has since been found, but so far noone ever claimed ownership.)
