A series of “Google doodles” and cryptic tweets by the geeks at Google set the internet off on one of its favorite pastimes, speculating and concocting wacky theories.

Crop circles, strange geographic coordinates, a decoded “all your base are belong to us” message fueled discussion and guesses as to what Google was marking or hinting at with the seemingly connected elements. Last night, Google finally gave users the answer, and I’m not sure it’s one anyone would have guessed- H.G. Wells 143rd birthday.

Herbert George Wells was a prolific sci-fi author, with notable works such as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Google expressed delight at the flurry of debate and interest in the logo change, and on their blog, explained the choice to honor Wells on the internet’s most trafficked webpage:

Inspiration for innovation in technology and design can come from lots of places; we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond. And maybe have some fun while we were doing it.

The invasion of the logo by alien crafts and pods makes our series complete, but you’ll have to read the book to find out how Wells’ story really ends.

Google explains logo mystery, just in time for 143rd birthday of H.G. Wells is a post from: The Inquisitr

In his post, Duncan mentioned the coordinates from Google’s twitter stream (51.327629, -0.5616088), which takes you to Horsell Commons, the location of the first alien landing in… H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.”

And this is what the UFO and crop circles logos have been all about. Today Google reveals the final logo in the series to celebrate Herbert George Wells’ 143th birthday!

It all started with:

You might have noticed an unexplained set of doodles on the Google homepage and a couple tweets from our official Twitter stream, @google, over the last two weeks. On September 5th, we posted a doodle with the abduction of our second ‘o’ and a coded tweet from its alien captors: 1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19, which translates into “All your O are belong to us” (a nod to the Japanese video game, Zero Wing).

With this picture:

Ten days later, the UFO returned. This time, it was to leave its mysterious mark on the fields. While the link from the doodle to a search for “crop circles” didn’t provide any more clues, we also tweeted the lat/long coordinates of Horsell Commons, the location of the first alien landing in H.G. Wells 1898 classic, The War of the Worlds. Some of you figured out what we were doing, but we weren’t ready to reveal it all just yet.

Along with this logo:

Read the official Google crop circle/H G Wells birthday blog post here.

Google reveals story behind crop circles is a post from: The Inquisitr