Mission 1: Devil's Spoon

The Mission 1: Devil's Spoon geocache (GCA4B) opened, on 24 May 2001, a publicity operation that has remained unique in the history of geocaching. To launch Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox teamed up with Groundspeak and invented a serial: dissident humans hide the proof of an "Alternative Primate Evolution" in the four corners of the world. Every Friday for thirteen weeks, an ammo can stamped Project A.P.E. was dropped somewhere on the planet, with a genuine prop from the film inside; the first to arrive kept it. Fourteen caches in all, when the game had only just celebrated its first year.

The opening mission plays out above San Francisco Bay, in the state park of Mount Diablo - hence the "devil's spoon" of the title.

The adventure was a short one: at the end of June 2001, several teams came back down empty-handed. On 2 July, the Project APE account published, without ever stepping out of character, a "Mission 1 alert": the can had vanished, "the authorities" had ended up recovering it, the site was declared compromised and abandoned. The cache was archived without being replaced, following the rule of the operation: a lost A.P.E. container is never replaced. Of the fourteen missions, only two are still in play, in Brazil and in Washington State.