DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST

Fellow Puzzlehead Child of Atom sent this note to me the other day …

One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century (and now the 21st century) is Kryptos. This sculpture – in the courtyard of CIA headquarters – contains a cipher, 3/4ths of which has been cracked. The story of its

On November 20, 2010, the artist released a clue to the remaining unsolved section – that six letters in the ciphertext translate to the word “BERLIN”. For a far better write-up than I can provide, check out the New York Times article.

“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.

In 1912, the Collegio Romano (now known as the Pontifical Gregorian University) faced a financial crisis. Short on cash, the school decided to raise funds through a discreet sale of a portion of the holdings in its library. Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich acquired 30 of the texts, which included what has become one of the most studied and least understood books in history – a book now known as the Voynich Manuscript.

This 272-page hand-written book (of which only 240 pages remain) is filled with writing in an unknown language as well as beautiful illustrations. So far, no one has managed to decipher the text or ascertain its meaning.

The language in which the text is written is perhaps the most mysterious part of the entire book. There are over 170,000 unique glyphs (or “letters”) in the text, and an alphabet of approximately 20-30 glyphs would account for nearly the entire text. The glyphs are arranged into approximately 35,000 words of varying length that seem to follow some basic rules of spelling similar to other known languages – certain glyphs must appear in each word (as vowels do in English), some glyphs can never follow others, and some symbols may be doubled while others may not. Some words are quite common, while others appear sporadically or only once. But the letter frequency, word frequency, and word relationships are unlike those in any other known language – it is far more complicated than a simple substitution cipher.

The book is organized into 17 groups of 16 pages each, divided into six major sections of different style and subjects (as indicated by the illustrations) on matters that appear to be herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and instructive. The relationship between the illustrations and the text is uncertain.

The book’s history is also somewhat uncertain. By the style of dress of people depicted in the illustrations, most historians believe the book was written between 1450 and 1520. The earliest reference to the book was in a letter written in 1639 by Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist living in Prague, to Jesuit scholar Anathasius Kircher at Collegio Romano asking for assistance in deciphering “this Sphynx that had been taking up space uselessly in [his] library for many years.” Kircher acquired the book in 1666 after Baresch’s death.

There is no mention of the book for the next 200 years, although it was likely kept at the library of Collegio Romano. When the forces of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured Rome in 1870, the college moved much of its library collection to the Italian countryside for protection.

After Voynich’s death in 1930, the book made its way through the hands of various book collectors and dealers who were unable to find a buyer for it. In 1969, the book was donated to Yale University.

Fortunately, Yale has made high-res scans of the entire Voynich Manuscript avaialble online. Click here to take your own tour of the book’s secrets.

Many theories abound about the book’s authorship, content, purpose, and language. My favorite one was postulated by the folks over at XKCD.

The concept behind GoogleEarthing.com is very simple: imagine a scavenger hunt akin to Where’s Waldo whose search space consists of the entire visible surface of the Earth. Seriously.

The rules of the game are very simple:

1. Download and install Google Earth.
2. Identify the location of the image by name, longitude and latitude, or very specific description. Enter your guess using the comments feature for the image in question.
3. Send an email to info@googleearthing.com so we know how to contact you.
4. Tell all your friends about GoogleEarthing.

The first person with the correct coordinates, name, or otherwise completely specific description of the location will will a valueless prize chosen by the site operator.

Just for grins, here’s an idea of the sort of image you are tasked to find:

The above image is actually puzzle #92, posted November 12, 2006. As of this blog entry, this puzzle has not been solved … will you be the first to crack it?

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”.