Ghosthawk112
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Footage Captured from SCP-XXXX, only key frames have been included and the display times of messages increased.

Item#: SCP-XXXX

Class: Safe

Special Containment Features: Under day to day protocol, SCP-XXXX is to be kept inside a standard class B sealed containment vessel, however it is safe for SCP-XXXX to remain outside of its container for extended periods of time during testing as long as proper standards of safety are kept. While removed from its container SCP-XXXX should not be exposed to strong electromagnetic radiation or fields and should not be placed within an analogue video system until all required personnel have exited the room.

Description: SCP-XXXX's appearance seems to be that of an early, ██████-brand VHS cassette tape without any form of labelling on any side. While the tape's serial numbers point to the cassette being manufactured in 1979, advanced dating techniques estimate the date of production to be ███ years earlier.
Upon inserting SCP-XXXX into a video cassette player connected to a television, the cassette will immediately start displaying sets of information on the screen. For each new set produced by SCP-XXXX, an identifiable pattern or object will slowly become visible, drawn over the static. Once the pattern has been completed, a single frame with a message will flash on the screen before a new set of information is produced. There is no recorded event of SCP-XXXX displaying the same information set more than once neither has there been any recorded event of SCP-XXXX's video ending, test-16c showed that SCP-XXXX can play video for more than 5 years, at which point testing had to be suspended.
The viewing of SCP-XXXX's video by a subject for any amount of time results in progressively worse effects on the subject. There have been three distinguishable progressions observed.
The earliest stage consists of minor headaches and mild hallucinogenic effects, subjects experiencing this stage have rarely noticed anything out of the ordinary. Terminating SCP-XXXX's video at this stage will prevent progression to further stages, although it has been recorded that this results in permanent decreases in intelligence.
The intermediate stage is visible to another observer, the subject exposed to SCP-XXXX will start to have muscle spasms across their body, often escalating to full on seizures. It is possible to recover from this stage if the subject is removed from SCP-XXXX's presence immediately.
The advanced stage of exposure to the video consists of violent muscle spasms or a greater magnitude (often resulting in physical injury), constant internal bleeding, complete loss of ability to communicate and brain ischemia. Progression from this stage results in either death or an (as of yet) unbreakable vegetative state. The time it takes to progress from the first to the final stage is a relatively short amount of time, but tests supplying a class-A2 hallucinogen in large concentrations have managed to increase this time to 5 minutes.
Numerous tests have shown that if recordings of the tape are shown at a decreased frame rate to the original, then they can be viewed safely without any obvious side effects.

Addendum 03a
The discovery and further testing of SCP-XXXX has sparked debate over whether the information it shows is truly random or not, some arguing that it is human nature to find these patterns where there are none while others state it's impossible for any truly random sequence to exist. True randomness is chaos, every sequence ever produced by SCP-XXXX in our care has been evaluated by multiple high levels of software and so far, all of them have been found to be incompressible. This means, that without doubt, the dots we see on the screen are completely random. The most recent theory is this, it isn't the fact that the dots are random that has an effect on the viewer, it's the fact that SCP-XXXX can draw patterns in this truly random data. If nothing can become something, what's to say everything isn't anything?