The Pearl, what was it's true purpose?

The answer to this question lies in the orientation video for the Pearl. The Swan was built after 1977 (the year of the Incident) and it was after this time that the Pearl became a monitoring station for the Swan (ie the 'psychological experiment').

However this video is heavily edited (bits are cut out, re-spliced, extreme close ups of Pierre's eyebrows) and despite the 'copyright 1980' stamp at the end of the video, it's clear it was originally made prior to the incident as Pierre Chang does not have a prosthetic left arm. He has full use of both arms and hands when he places the notebook in the pneumatic tube.

Further evidence is the errrr... 'fashion' he was wearing. It's clearly early 70's style and not 1980 at all.

It's this 1980 'edit' that we've seen but even with these edits, it's clear it was a monitoring station before this. Just not for the Swan station which was yet to exist.

I know you're asking 'but wait, then why is the Swan station seen in one of the video screens behind Chang?'. Good question. It was green-screened in by whomever edited it using the latest post-1980 technology to make it seem newer. For all we know, it was done in the 90's or later!!!

But it could NOT have been the Swan that was playing in the background when Chang first recorded it in the early 70's because quite simply, it did not exist and Chang still had use of his left hand.

So while the "1980" version has a somewhat sinister tone (aka psyche experiment on the poor people in the Swan pressing buttons every 108 mins), I do believe it probably was a general monitoring station observing several other stations (we know it was linked to several of them) and recording behaviour of people at those stations for the very reasons that Chang mentions.


CHANG: Station five, or the Pearl, is a monitoring station where the activities of participants in DHARMA Initiative projects can be observed and recorded; not only for posterity but for the ongoing refinement of the initiative as a whole. As Karen DeGroot herself has written, "careful observation is the only key to true and complete awareness".


The real question then is, who made the 1980 'edit' and why? Was it Dharma or the Others??? *insert dramatic music*