Valve have always been masters of secrets, as we all know Gabe has been playing Half-Life 3 for a few years now and just wants to master it completely in every way possible before releasing it. Until, that is, the Spike Video Game Awards over the weekend.

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The VGA's saw quite the number of teases, and announcements and this nugget of info is no different. Steam's message boards have been going absolutely crazy trying to figure out if Valve actually teased the upcoming game, with theories heavily relying on a half-speed YouTube video of Portal 2's AI "Wheatley" giving a speech.

The center of attention lies on a line of text at the top of the video, which is written in Greek. The translation for this text, according to the Steam message boards, is "OBSERVATION SATELLITE "LANTHANUM.""

Lanthanum (again, according to the Steam forums) comes from a Greek word that translates to "to lie hidden." The word is also significant, as it begins with a lambda symbol in Green. That symbol? Well, it's iconic to the Half-Life franchise.

But, you know these pesky Internet Detectives... there's more. Lanthanum has an atomic number of 57, and as a commenter pointed out, this year's E3 falls between June 5 and June 7. So there's your 5 and 7. There's also the element, which is in group three of the periodic table. Also, the number there is significant when Wheatley reads off his coordinates at the end of the clip: "one, one, one". One plus one plus one is... three.

Valve have replied to GameSpot on this story, when they asked whether people were reading too much into the video, with a Valve representative responding with just, "Yep."

What do you think? Could we see Half-Life 3 announced, or teased, or something at E3, 2012?