It took an army of internet sleuths to find ‘Celebrity Number Six’

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Forty thousand people were searching for a photo he had taken, and Leandre Escorsell had no idea. The Spanish fashion photographer only learned of the hunt for “Celebrity Number Six" from a stranger’s unexpected Sept.

6 email. For nearly five years, the email explained, thousands of amateur sleuths from around the world had been working to identify a mysterious face in a pop-art collage of celebrity portraits. The pattern had appeared, in three different shades, on fabric sold in Europe in the late 2000s.

Now, after hundreds of debunked theories and false starts, the sleuths believed they had found the sixth face in a Spanish fashion spread Escorsell shot in 2006. “It truly surprised me," Escorsell said in an email—not least of all, because the picture had never appeared online, raising questions about how the sleuths found it. Increasingly, however, few mysteries lie outside the reach of the internet’s crowdsourced investigators.

On platforms including Reddit, TikTok and Discord, solving mysteries—from the momentous to the mundane—has long been something of a participant sport. More recently, these self-styled detectives have adopted a range of AI and facial-recognition tools that have supercharged their investigative powers and allowed them to solve stubborn, long-standing puzzles, including the case of “Number Six." “It’s being done in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago," said Kurt Luther, the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab, which researches the techniques of online sleuths. “Here, the crowd was able to piece together many different clues over a number of years…and they were able to leverage cutting-edge technology to do so." The story of