According to the urban legend, the archive contains three distinct types of files:
A malicious file designed to crash a computer by expanding to an enormous size when opened. 52899.rar
Those who tried to download it claimed it was unusually small (a few kilobytes) or impossibly large (terabytes), depending on who told the story. According to the urban legend, the archive contains
The file was supposedly created by an early AI or a surveillance program designed to catalog everyone who showed curiosity about it. A 20-minute audio file consisting of a low-frequency drone
A 20-minute audio file consisting of a low-frequency drone. Rumor has it that playing the audio through a spectrogram reveals a series of grainy images of a basement or a concrete room.
The string is widely known across internet forums, subreddits like r/creepy, and 4chan as one of the web's most enduring "mystery files."
The most popular version of the "long story" suggests that 52899.rar wasn't a random upload, but a or a "dead man's switch."