As the producers are in hiding, The Times went to the original source to get some clues into early notions of the island's origins. Lloyd Braun, the former president of entertainment of ABC who hired J.J. Abrams in 2004 to develop a drama about plane crash survivors on an island. Braun, who also hired Lindelof, was not at ABC when the show launched in September 2004.
"The island was going to be a character in the series and present an ever-present threat to the people on the island," he said. "Everything was going to be rooted in science fact so that, as crazy as things might seem, there might be plausible explanations for them. And my assumption back then was that the island was some sort of experimental facility, maybe related to the military in some form. But we never, quite honestly, got into the details of what the island was. Nor did I worry about it too much because, over time when you've done this long enough, you recognize that whatever you may lay out as the mythology, it almost always changes once the show is up and running and succeeding."