“BRUTALIZING COMELIEST”, “PARAMAGNETIC HYPNOTIZES”, “NECROMANCY LEISURES”. No, they’re not obscure experimental noise albums from late 1960s San Francisco, they’re part of a truly odd “hidden” page on the Centers for Disease Control‘s website that’s sent conspiracy-minded observers into a tailspin.
First spotted by @BUNNICULA, they posted what they accurately billed as a “scary” page they stumbled across:
does anyone want to see the scary ass cdc webpage i accidentally stumbled upon just now
— charlie (@BUNNlCULA) December 18, 2025
You can see the page for yourself here. It’s a long list of unusual words presented in no apparent order and with no obvious connections between them. Theories began to fly thick and fast, with many believing this may be a coded message, or a cipher page to decode other encrypted messages. But why would the CDC need to be posting encrypted messages that sound like something from the Cold War?
More outlandishly, some argued that they may be Winter Soldier style “activation phrases” for operatives so undercover they don’t know they’re working for the government until they hear a some specific words said in a particular order.
An answer?
But, sadly for conspiracy theorists who believed they were about to blow the whole system right open, it seems there’s a more logical reason. Here’s the “official” explanation:
“This file is a publicly archived support file from the CDC’s Mortality Medical Data System (MMDS), legacy software used to code causes of death from death certificates. It contains no personal data and is hosted openly for transparency and reproducibility, not secrecy.”
Perhaps this is indeed the case, but why would anyone’s cause of death contain words like “Churchillian”, “boondoggled”, “cheapie” or “goober”? There’s also a hypothesis that this is the result of words being added to an internal spellcheck program, though I can’t see why that would be public-facing.
It's a spell check dictionary
— Fletcher (@KeyOsc) December 18, 2025
If you go up a directory you get an installer for something called MMDS. I installed it. It's software used to fill in death certificates, apparently.
This program is super janky but it has this:
What's weird is the random order the words are in. pic.twitter.com/aAjxAaQw9q
For now, at least, the mystery remains. Chances are, this bizarre page has a perfectly normal technical explanation. But maybe, just maybe, there’s something more to it and the powers that be are panicked that we’re onto them. One thing’s for sure though, “WHITENS LOUISVILLE WIDDLE TUSSLE” are four words that have never been used in that order before now…
