Late last week, something very strange happened. A series of Star Trek: Discovery season 3 promotional banners started popping up on social media, and just when people were starting to take notice...they disappeared. I brought you the story last Friday, but at the time I didn’t have any explanation for what had happened, just that the origin of the new key art pieces was unknown.

Thankfully, I have some very clever listeners. Shortly after I published my story, listener Bogle (@trekkiebogle) on Twitter replied to me to say, “Can confirm the DISCO key art is legit. I got a marketing survey from CBS All Access yesterday asking for feedback on them.” Mr. Happy Go Lucky (@thekrishill) agreed, saying, “The images came from the All-Access Insiders survey yesterday.”

Treksphere, one of the earliest posters of the artwork, further explained in a message to me on Instagram, “The art work for Discovery season 3 was legit in terms of where it was from a ‘CBS all access insider email’, however, it was not distributed by CBS and it was unfinished. This led CBS to politely ask those who has [sic] posted it to remove it due to not being finished and should not have been released.”

That’s consistent with Twitter user admiral bongwater’s (@raijuTheHyeju) experience: they saw the artwork early on and created a series of edits that swapped out the Federation flag for the bisexual, transgender, lesbian and gay pride flags. Their edits even got a “like” from Discovery writer Bo Yeon Kim, before they were served with a DMCA takedown notice.

Long story short: I’m calling this curious case closed.