“Dear Editor This is the Zodiac Speaking …”

The evening of Friday, December 20, 1968, was the first date of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday of Benicia, California. The couple planned to attend a Christmas concert at a nearby high school two or three blocks from Jensen’s home. Instead, they visited a friend and stopped at a local restaurant, then drove out Lake Herman Road. At about 10:15 p.m. Faraday parked his mother’s Rambler in a gravel turnout, which was a well-known lovers’ lane.

Shortly after 11 p.m., another car pulled into the turnout and parked beside them. The driver apparently got out with a pistol and ordered them out of the Rambler. Jensen exited first. When Faraday was halfway out, the man shot Faraday in the head. Fleeing, Jensen was gunned down twenty-eight feet from the car with five shots through her back. The man then drove off. Their bodies were found minutes later by Stella Borges, who lived nearby. The sheriff’s department investigated but found no leads.

On July 4, 1969, sometime around midnight, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau were shot multiple times while parked at a golf course in Vallejo, four miles from where Jensen and Faraday were murdered. At 12:40 am, a man phoned the police department from a phone booth only a few blocks away from the police station and claimed responsibility for the attack as well as for the murders of Jensen and Farady.

On August 1, 1969, nearly identical letters were received by the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner in which the author took credit for the shootings. Each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper’s front page or he would “cruse [sic] around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.” The threatened murders did not happen, and all three parts were eventually published.

On August 7, 1969, another letter was received at the San Francisco Examiner with the salutation “Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking”. It was the first time the killer had referred to himself with this name. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not been released to the public as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code “they will have me”. On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California, cracked the 408-symbol cryptogram. No name appears in the decoded text.

From September 27 to October 11, 1969, the Zodiac murdered three more people. On November 8, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a card with another cryptogram consisting of 340 characters. The 340-character cipher has never been decoded.

“A cleverly crafted puzzle is a work of intellectual art when the simplicity of its solution is beautifully hidden by the complexity of its design. Such art requires imagination and creativity on the part of the creator and requires the solver to walk the fine line between inspiration and insanity.”

Brian Smith, Author/Creator of the Cerebral Codex

Part novel, part puzzle, part quest … it is difficult to find a single description that adequately describes the Cerebral Codex.

The Novel

The story begins with the protagonists Bret and Jon fighting for their very survival swimming through a rough sea in a raging storm. Sighting an island in the distance, they manage to avoid drowning and swim to the safety of the shore. After recovering on the island, they discover hidden deep within an old stone library the Cerebral Codex, which told a unique and intriguing tale.

In this mysterious environment, the two friends find themselves in a strange place with only the Cerebral Codex to help guide them. They find that the Codex is riddled with mind bending and mysterious mental challenges, which when solved lead them on an adventure like no other.

The Puzzle

As the characters in the novel encounter puzzles, you are given similar challenges to solve. Work to solve the puzzles and uncover hidden information in the codex and begin your own adventure.  This is a multi-stage challenge which has several levels each consisting of a mental challenge (puzzle) followed by a physical challenge.  Can you unlock the mysteries encoded deep within the Cerebral Codex?

The Quest

There are two ways to claim credit for solving the Cerebral Codex. As a cache finder or as a distance solver.

If you choose to find the cache in person, you’ve got quite a trek ahead of you. The Cerebral Codex geocache is set in the heart of the Wharton State Forest in New Jersey, USA. With over 100,000 acres, Wharton is the largest New Jersey State Forest and provides a great backdrop for this challenge.  While the cache itself is located in Wharton State Forest, this adventure will take you well beyond it’s boundaries in search of the puzzle pieces that you need to access the final cache container, the logbook, and the Codex Bonus Cache Travel Bug.

If you decide to tackle this as a distance solver, you’ve got a different sort of trek ahead of you. Download the novel, and read the entire thing. Solve the first ten puzzles to unlock the twenty Meshulash pieces. Use the Meshulash pieces to solve the final puzzle.  When you solve the final puzzle, you’ll be given the tracking code for the Codex Distance Solver Travel Bug.

The Cerebral Codex  was not designed to be tackled in a weekend – it will take thought, time and (if you attempt to find the cache) several trips.

Getting Started

If you are ready to tackle the challenge of the Cerebral Codex, click on one of the following links:

Geocache Hunters: Visit the cache page for GCVJXQ
Distance Solvers: Download the novel and begin solving from home

Sir Edward Elgar was an English composer who lived from 1857 to 1934. If you have ever attended a graduation ceremony in the United States, you have heard his music – his composition March No. 1 in D from Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches, Op. 39, is the de facto standard for processional music.

After a tiring day of teaching in 1898, Elgar was daydreaming at the piano. A melody he played caught the attention of his wife, who liked it and asked him to repeat it for her. So, to entertain his wife, he began to improvise variations on this melody, each one either a musical portrait of one of their friends, or in the musical style they might have used. Elgar eventually expanded these improvisations into his Enigma Variations, Op. 36.

The “Enigma” of the title refers to two puzzles contained within the work. The first puzzle is to determine which of Elgar’s friends each variation represents. Here is what Elgar had to say about the second puzzle:

The enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played … So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas … the chief character is never on stage.

Variation 10 called “Dorabella” refers to Miss Dora Penny, a friend whose stutter or laughter is depicted by the woodwinds section. Elgar wrote a letter to Penny dated July 14, 1897, that enclosed another letter, enciphered by Elgar, which has become known as the Dorabella Cipher. She was never able to decipher it, and its meaning remains unknown to this day.

The true meaning of Elgar’s ‘dark saying’ in his Enigma Variations has never been determined. Years later, when Dora Penny questioned Elgar about the secret of the Enigma Variations, his only comment to her on the subject was this: “I thought that you, of all people, would guess it”.

Google demonstrated its support of puzzleheads everywhere by changing the logo on its splash page today.

It’ll probably be back to normal tomorrow, but you should be able to find it in their holiday logo archive.

Stuck on a puzzle that requires you to become a codebreaker? The Secret Code Breaker can help. The site provides a number of free codebreaking tools that I’ve found far more useful in some circumstances than many other online tools.

One of the most useful ones is the Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher Solver – while there are many cryptogram solvers available on the web already, this one has the ability to solve cryptograms when the spaces are removed.

There is a wonderful library of tools useful in cracking classical ciphers available at rumkin.com. This is typically the first place I go when trying to solve a puzzle that involves cracking a cipher.