Zodiac Ciphers found on Facebook
Clicking the above logo will bring you to a Swedish thrash metal band, rather than mysterious cryptograms. Nevertheless, you may find yourself puzzling over their indecipherable lyrics.
Word pairs
Here is another quick (and pointless) diversion. As explored in the previous post, you can find words in the cryptograms without performing any substitutions. For example, in the 408-character cryptogram, the word “OUT” appears: And the word “RIDE” can be…
Hidden in plain sight
Many people have noticed that words can be found among the symbols in the Zodiac killer’s cryptograms without performing any substitutions. Here are some examples from the 340: HER TOM Looks a lot like “ZODIAC” FBI TOO GOD BOO is…
Gardner and Penn, Jekyll and Hyde
Between 1956 and 1981, math and science writer Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column, a series of popular recreational math diversions in Scientific American. Gardner’s gift to the world was to rescue us from the school-borne tedium and fear…
How to crack Kryptos
(photo credit: Elonka Dunin) Thanks to Doc for informing me about this story. Above is CIA analyst David Stein, the first person to crack encrypted messages in the Kryptos sculpture at the CIA, leaving only one message unsolved. Twenty-three years…
New Zodiac Killer forum
Mike Morford recently relaunched his Zodiac Killer discussion forum: His forum was formerly available by invitation only, but is now open to everyone. It is filled with lively conversations on a wide variety of topics, including news, suspects, the killer’s…
Cipher message to Zodiac
On October 23, 1969, the San Francisco Examiner published an article about the ongoing hunt for the Zodiac killer. This enciphered “message to Zodiac” appeared in the article: The article was published after the 408-character cryptogram was solved, and before…
Ricin lone bomber code solved
Updated April 17, 2013: In light of recent events, I’ve decided to remove the ricin recipe plaintext from this post. The FBI, however, continues to display the encrypted ricin recipe on their website. Cryptographer Klaus Schmeh recently posted about a…
Are the ciphers prime-phobic?
Dan Johnson recently posted a really curious discovery about the 340-character cipher on his blog. First, number each of the positions of the cipher from 1 to 340. Then, mark each of the positions occupied by a symbol, the most…
Klaus Schmeh’s book of famous unsolved codes
German computer scientist and cryptology writer Klaus Schmeh recently published a German-language book about famous unsolved secret messages, including the Zodiac Killer cryptograms. (The cover depicts what we all probably want to do with Zodiac’s cryptograms.) Nicht Zu Knacken (which…
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