We know you like a good mystery.
Who, when confronted with a puzzle, can’t help but try to figure it out?
The process can be frustrating, but we usually get there in the end, especially when given
some clues.
But what if we told you there’s a puzzle that exists in this world that just can’t
be solved, and we mean by anyone.
That the answer to the riddle has kept some of the brightest minds on planet Earth up
nights on end.
It’s a puzzle that will drive you around the bend.
That will draw you in and boggle your brain to the extent of you ending up in a padded
cell wishing you would have never looked at the thing.
It’s the can of worms that has brought men to their knees, and we think it’s time you
had a look inside.
The story of this puzzle goes back to the early 1990s when the Central Intelligence
Agency had a new building at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The CIA had this new place, and they wanted it to look nice.
That’s why the agency’s Fine Arts Commission got to work on decorating the place.
A local artist by the name of James Sanborn was commissioned to build a sculpture, but
this was going to be no ordinary sculpture.
In the spirit of the secrecy of the CIA, the thing was going to be both an artwork and
an unfathomable mystery.
The sculpture was to be named “Kryptos”, which is the Greek word for "hidden".
That’s why these days we have lots of words with “crypto” in them, and those words
usually refer to something secret or hidden.
Anyone today can go and have a look at Kryptos, well, if they’re allowed in the CIA headquarters
of course.
It sits between the courtyard and a cafeteria.
It might be a mysterious puzzle, but it’s certainly not shrouded in mystery.
The artist that was chosen to build the sculpture was known for creating things that made people
think about the strange forces of nature, and being a man of high intelligence, he read
up on cryptography before starting his design.
He also worked with a CIA cryptographer.
The sculpture itself is quite beautiful to look at.
The materials used were petrified wood, quartz, polished red granite, copperplate and lodestone.
Sure, it’s pleasant on the eye, but to most people the code written on it would mean absolutely
nothing to them.
To some of the world’s best cryptanalysts, amateur or professional, it was a huge challenge.
Quite literally for some, a challenge of a lifetime.
The part of the sculpture that the messages are written on is the S-shaped copper screen.
There are four encrypted messages in all and at first glance they obviously have no meaning.
All the symbols are from the Latin alphabet, you know, the one we use to write English.
Here’s an example of part of one of the messages:
EMUFPHZLRFAXYU, You get the point, we're not going to read the whole thing out.
Yep, it looks a bit harder than your regular puzzle, and that’s why ordinary folks likely
don’t have a chance of cracking it.
But it didn’t look quite as meaningless to some big brains and so for years they studied
the sculpture and its different messages.
One particular man was determined to crack the code, and lucky for him he worked in the
building.
This was the CIA analyst named David Stein.
Many others tried, but none were as successful as Stein.
He didn’t use any fancy machinery to solve the puzzle, and just took a paper and pencil
with him to the sculpture.
He spent in total about 400 hours over eight years and he actually managed to solve three
of the four puzzles.
One puzzle is said to be totally unsolvable, but we’ll come back to that later.
So, what did Stein find out?
Well, for a while the CIA kept it a secret.
They told him well done, you are correct, but keep a lid on it.
A year later they said ok, you can publish your results in an internal newsletter, but
to people like you and I it remained classified for years to come.
It didn’t really matter that the CIA kept it secret, because a computer scientist cracked
the three puzzles sometime later.
Still, this didn’t become public knowledge, or at least the solution didn’t.
He also kind of cheated, because he used a computer.
Stein did it with his old-school pad and pencil.
After the CIA declassified what Stein had found out, the world could read what he said
about his seven years with the puzzle.
It’s quite beautiful how he described the feeling of finally seeing how it all fit together.
This is part of what he said: “I was hit by that sweetly ecstatic, rare
experience that I have heard described as a ‘moment of clarity.’
All the doubts and speculations about the thousands of possible alternate paths simply
melted away, and I clearly saw the one correct course laid out in front of me.”
To solve the first message he had to use something called a Vigenère cipher.
Just explaining how this works is not easy, but we’ll give it a shot.
We should say that these days you can enter a bunch of jumbled letters into a computer
and then try out a bunch of ciphers, but with Stein he had to know the cipher and then work
it out on his pad.
Ok, as an example let’s show you this: Vyc fnqkm spdpv nqo hjfxa qmcg 13 eiha umvl
What does that mean?
Not much to you we expect.
But using the Vigenère cipher it reads: “The quick brown fox jumps over 13 lazy
dogs.”
Hey presto.
Aren’t we clever…No, we just found that example on the Internet.
Not in a million years would we have seen those jumbled words and seen foxes jumping
over dogs if we had to work it out for ourselves.
It works like this.
A simple hidden code might just mean substituting one letter for another.
Such as As are actually Bs, and Ds are actually Ms. This level of decoding is pretty simple
and even we could crack a message like that.
Once you know the substation it’s easy to read the full message.
Prisoners serving time might write coded messages like this and prison guards can crack them
with ease.
Those guys aren’t qualified to work at the CIA, though.
The difference with a Vigenère cipher is that there are lots of substitution alphabets.
One letter isn’t always substituted for another.
Now it gets hard.
There are many different alphabets that are used and they can shift depending on where
a keyword is placed.
Basically, you have to know how each letter is substituted given that keyword and which
alphabet you are using.
If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry, it is to everyone.
This is what the Vigenère cipher looks like and all those different alphabets.
The solution to the first message on the sculpture actually spelled this sentence: BETWEEN SUBTLE
SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.
To solve the second puzzle he couldn’t use the same Vigenère cipher.
Instead, another kind of formula was used and that was a coordinate system called an
abscissa.
It’s like a graph with an axis, so Stein could look at the scrambled message and using
this picked out the right letters.
He also had to know a keyword.
Part of the solution read: “It was totally invisible”.
Hows that possible?
They used the Earths magnetic field for X.
The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location X.
Does Langley know about this?”
When you read the full text you get the coordinate “38°57′6.5″N 77°8′44”W” and
that is somewhere in the headquarters at Langley.
The third part of the puzzle was solved using something called a transposition cipher.
This kind of cipher doesn’t substitute one letter for another in an alphabet but the
letters are arranged so that if you use a key you can spell a word.
You have to find the right key.
An example would be you see a bunch of letters that are scrambled but you know if you move
three places to the left, four places down, two more right, up and down and back again,
you’ll get the next letter.
The problem is, there are lots of different transposition ciphers.
Stein figured it out and he read the message: “SLOWLY DESPERATELY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF
PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING
HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE
I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME
TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE
ANYTHING Q ?” What’s all that about you might ask?
The answer is, it relates to a question that was asked by a British archeologist when the
tomb of Tutankhamun was opened in 1922.
The reply to the answer was, “It is wonderful.”
Ok, so well done to Mr. Stein who worked all that out with simple tools and his amazing
brain.
We imagine if 99.9 percent of the planet were asked to solve those puzzles with nothing
but a pencil and a notepad and given ten years to do it they would fail.
If given no timeframe we imagine that they’d all complete it in the same time it would
take an infinite number of monkeys to write word for word the complete works of Shakespeare.
That said, now we have software and you can run such word puzzles through it and it will
do the job in no time at all.
You just have to figure out what cipher is being used.
So, the question is, how come no one has solved puzzle four?
You’d think someone like Elon Musk when armed with a team of crack engineers and the
best cypher software known to man could do it.
But he hasn’t, and neither has anyone else.
This is part of the last part of the puzzle.
OBKR UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
Six years ago a clue was given and that clue was “clock.”
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall was happening at the time the sculpture was being built
some people think this clock might relate to the famous Berlin Clock.
It’s no normal clock, though, and instead of using numbers it uses sequences of colors.
Each color denotes a time, so you have to read the time by looking at a sequence of
colors.
It all sounds very CIA.
Still, the Berlin Clock theory hasn’t led to the solution of puzzle four.
Clock might also relate to a method used by a Polish cryptographer to decrypt German Enigma
ciphers.
The famous British cryptologist Alan Turing used this kind of method to break codes.
Years have passed since the clock clue was given and still no one has figured out the
hidden message.
And we assure you, many people have tried.
There are threads on the Internet that discuss this last unsolved puzzle and people think
that the reason no one can crack the code is because the cypher used is something no
one has ever seen before.
The CIA, the NSA, the best codebreakers on the planet, cannot seem to unravel this mystery.
It’s widely believed that to crack the complete puzzle every message needs to be solved, because
each message has a clue.
If puzzle four is not solved then the entire puzzle cannot be solved.
It’s exciting to think about what it all could mean.
The creator of the sculpture, Sanborn, is now in his 70s and is probably bored of waiting
for someone to solve the puzzle.
He has been interviewed and said even if he dies and no one has solved it he has written
in his will that the solution be passed on to someone else.
That of course doesn’t mean that this person will give anyone else the answer, but he or
she will at least be able to confirm if anyone cracks the problem.
Maybe you should have a go at cracking this last code because if you do we have no doubt
that your name will go down in history and you’ll likely be given a job at the CIA.
This show might have been a bit of a strain on the brain so we want to put you in total
relaxation mode now.
Have a look at these mind relaxing videos and then take another shot at the code.
(ANIMATION NOTE - USE “How To Lucid Dream in Your Sleep In 3 Minutes” and “How To
Hypnotize Yourself in 2 Minutes.”)