Thinking Sideways: Kryptos

something he never dreamed possible. But how did he get there? What happened to his old life? Jason searched for answers, leads him on a strange journey and puts him in the crosshairs of an seemingly unbeatable foe. So pick up a copy of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, now in

paperback and available everywhere books are sold. And by Crime Con Indianapolis, Indiana, June Night to the eleven, Pet Dogs Meet Us, Get tickets, don't forget It's crime Con dot com and uh promo codis Sideways twenty off your tickets. Thinking Sideways. I don't know stories of things. We simply don't know the answer too. Hi there, welcome to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm Joe, joined this week as always by Devon and Steve, and we're here to solve

another cool mystery. Uh. This is one that's been doubled the world for almost three decades now. It's made me look like an idiot. Yeah. No, I've tried to break this mystery. That no, luck, not me. I try to admit my ignorance and things like better. Yeah I didn't even try. Yeah no, no, that's so that's okay. By the end of the episode, we will have solved it,

so don't worry about that. Uh. This has been around for twenty six and a half years right now, and it holds supposedly that maybe possibly a secret to a hidden treasure. Well, we really don't know, or maybe something or something or maybe nothing. Yeah, maybe maybe just a note or something like that. I don't know. We'll find out at the end. Uh. Yeah. So first of all, let me say what we're talking about here. We're talking about none other than cryptos. And you probably heard about that.

That's a sculpture at the CIA in Langley, Virginia. Yeah, cryptos. And you think if you haven't heard about it, what you've heard about it now? And also a little shout out to a few of our listeners. Actually several us suggested this, I think Rhona and Sean, Linda, Alex And that's how far we got before we started saying and then everybody. Yeah yeah, so thanks guys, we really appreciate

the suggestion. Um And I, for my part, I've been doing a little too much murder in Mayhem lately, so I thought I'd take a break and do something different, and next time I'll go back to some grizzly murders. But yeah, let's do cryptography. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, let's go back to the beginning. In the late nineteen eighties, the brass of the CIA decided the agency was missing something like, you know, operational security or maybe better better intel,

or employees who weren't rushing moles. Oh no, no, that wasn't it. Now. They didn't have any publicly funded art installations, and so they commissioned one, and they hired a sculptor named Jim Sandboard to create this sculpture. And and actually we actually I think the government in this case got pretty good Bangford's buck. Oh yeah, desolutely, yeah, better than d I A for sure. Yeah, definitely. That's just a rock. Yeah yeah, that's that one downtown outside Pioneer Place, which

is several rocks in a row. It's like, well, well, how do I get that job? Yeah, you'll give music Monday is the Huns, I will give us sculpture. He just did an accent. That wasn't German, no is the French was a German French anyway, soologies to our French

listeners and German listeners. Yeah. Well, at the time this was commissioned, this is towards the end of the Cold War, though we didn't really know it at the time, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and as far as any of us knew, because I was alive back then, we all thought it was going to stay standing for a lot long. We all figured it would come down sooner or later. But when it came down, it was kind of it was kind of a surprise for all of us,

It really was. It was all of a sudden. Uh So, something commissioned today by the CIA might be a little more cynical. If it were me, I would create a giant, shifty looking bronze mole with a file folder in his mouth that Yeah, and they probably would like show me the door. Yeah, they'd look at your concept and you'd go into a deep dark room and bottom it never come out. Yeah, go to our waiting room. Yeah, stay there for about five years. But Jim Simbord created something

more serious. Uh. And like I said, he the public got good bank for its buck with this one. And it's kept a lot of cryptography nerds busy, and a lot of people were still racking their brains over it. And I mean a lot of people, some very smart people, and of course journalists have managed to get lots of good news stories out of it over the years. So it's been a win all the way around, I think. Uh. And it's still unsolved, or at least part of it is.

So can you I mean, I know what cryptos looks like. You know, we all in this room, but I think a lot of people probably don't. So Yeah, if you're not near a browser and you can't do you know, bring yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're driving, just close your eyes and try to bring this. Don't and left to Joe, but don't close your eyes, Okay, all right? Yeah. If if there's no rest area nearby, I keep your

eyes open. Uh so let me describe it here. If you're standing on most of the pictures that are are taken from one side of it, and that's a side where you can look at the writing and it's correct. It's a bunch of yeah, it's a bunch of ye, and so that and that. When you're looking at it from that side. There is a large petrified log standing upright on the sand on one end, on the right side, tall something like that. It's pretty good size. Yeah, nice, nice,

nice log. I wouldn't mind having that log. Yeah. And then there's a tall copper plate that sort of scrolls out like a sheet of paper as if it were like like a scroll. And I want to point out it's real copper. So it's actually green now exactly. Yeah, yeah, so everybody knows. Yeah, so yeah, I don't don't. Don't go to Google and look at the picture say no,

it is really copper. But and it scrolls out like so if you're standing to this side, it scrolls away from you, and then it goes in a semicircle back towards you, and then it curves the way around the other way, so it scrolls around and away from you again. On the one side facing towards you, it's just marble like, it's just like a marble marble ground there. And on the other side of it, of the semi circle loop whatever, there's a little round pool in the arc of the

S shape that the comprehend. Yeah, the tail in the bottom. Yeah, so that's that actually is kind of like the other end of the scroll that that it's wrapping around. If

you can't imagine that. And uh, and it was obvious to me the first time I looked at it that the symbol the symbolism it symbolizes, I think, the division of our world into smoking and non smoking areas because and really, when you think about it, it it makes sense because when you're standing on the right side, which is a part that doesn't have the pool in it, you can actually stand inside the sculpture. But if you go on the other side, the smoking side, you can't stand inside.

You have to stand outside, just like smokers do. Yeah. And and the little the little pool in the center makes a great place to show your butts. Yeah, it's not what it's intended for. I like it. Um, yeah, let's let's get back to our more description. Um, there are letters cut into this copper sheet about seventeen hunters or sold letters. Yeah, and they're they're actually, like some

people said, stamped out. I don't know if they were cut out with a torch or stamped or what, but they go all the way through, so they're not just they were probably knowing the time that it was made, it was probably done with like a water jet or something like that, where some kind of computer controlled device to be able to cut them with the precision that they're done. Yeah, and today would probably be a laser yeah, leasure. Yeah, Yeah,

you're mispronouncing that word, Joe, I'm sorry. Okay, of course you can find drawings of the text part of the sculpture online, and i'll describe that real briefly. It's shaped like a rectangle, which is divided into four smaller rectangles.

The two right rectangles show the English alphabet that's repeated over and over again with the word cryptos inserted into the text, which is a big hint because actually it turns out to be one of the keys for the encryption cipher of the first two messages, and because this

whole thing is one giant cipher. We haven't said that, you know, the whole, the whole sculpture is well, yeah, the left half is the message and the right half is the key, Okay, so that Yeah, the two rectangles on the left hand side the top Okay, So the top half or either the upper left hand rectangle isn't cut it with what's called the visionary at cipher, which is named after a French cryptographer called Blows the vision are. He was a sixteenth century dude, and actually he apparently

did not invent this this method. It was invented by some guy named what was his name was giovam Batista Beloso, who invented also the sixteenth century and then and then vision are modified at several decades later and then sooner or centuries after that. It was misattributed to him, but actually he didn't really invent the concept. Yeah, I kind of like that. Yeah, but we don't care. It's it's called there. Yeah uh. And here's a quick give me

a real quick down rundown of how it works. And now everybody knows what a Caesar cipher is, right, you don't know what the season sisor shift okay, Okay, Yeah, Caesar shift is one where it's the the easiest and dumbest cipher out there, one where you basically pick a key. The key might be safe. Let's say your keys one if you're if I were to say, and you're gonna shift everything over one, and of course if you can't, so you shift everything over three and the alphabet. But

let's say it's one. So I'm a cryptane say devon, So devin d e V I am becomes e f W j oh right, okay, that's it. Well see, and so but those are ridiculously easy to break. And so the vision Air cipher is in the simplest form, like a like a Caesar shift. But you pick a key, pick up, let's pick a word like say bacon, and then we make that our key. And so we shift the first character by two because you know b s two and the next one is A, so we shift

the next one by by one. The next one is cee, so we shift the next one after that by by three, which is first ce and on and on, and then we started over again, shifting from to one three blah blah, and then shift over two one three, and but of course again that leaves a big pattern and then but that's in the simplest form that's a vision air cipher and that what they did here is there's a little craftier one. This is one where to do this one.

Here's what you do. You sit down and right down the whole alphabet A through Z. And in this one you used the word cryptos for the for the first key for the top key. So write the word cryptos to the left of your alphabet, and then go through your alphabet and take out every letter that's in the word cryptos, so starting with K. So you'll notice that if you go through the alphabet, those letters are missing. And then so that's it cryptos a trough zy missing

those letters. What you do is you're going to repeat this alphabet underneath that as many times is the length of your key. So the first key, the first part of the message used the key palump cest which is ten characters, so ten rows. But what you do is the first row starts at P, so that's how they're all shifted around, so palump sest P. So it starts with the P and cryptos and goes all the way through and at the end k r y from cryptos

is adented to the end of it. The next one is A, so it just starts right A day and then cryptos. Next one is L, so it starts L through Z and then it says cryptos and then A through J. I'm going to ask a question that I think I know the answer to, but I want to make sure. So you said the key to this is cryptos, but Palin pal obsessed is the second key. Oh so it's a two key cipher. Yeah, okay, that's the part

you didn't say. And I was making sure that I wasn't missing, okay, And so essentially what you do is is let's say I want to encrypt. Uh, we don't want to crypt Devin. That's too many letters crypt Joe. I like that one. So yeah, So just so the first the first line, and this one Jay is in and then you get you cat. You go, you go to the top line, You pick out your letters, and

then go down. So the first one it is the first line, j U. Second letter OH is the second line, So I go to OH, and that goes down to the second row, which is F. And then and this is going to be incomprehensible to you people who are just listening. And then I go over to the E and I go down to the third line and that is why. So that is how. So that is how

my name is encrypted. And then yeah, and then what I do is when I when I want to decrypt the message, I come back through and this since this is a and I know that since I'm decrypting it and I'm not a cryptographer, I'm actually the intended recipient. I know the two keys. That's the beauty of the system is that, since you know, it's easy to remember two words. And so the guy that's that gets this message,

he doesn't have to carry a codebook around him. He can just he can just sit down and write the whole thing out because he knows those keys. And then when he's done deciphering the message, he can just burn He could just burn his key that he has created. So for everybody listening, I know that this can be kind of tough to to understand. There's a great book out there, and Joe help me with this book. Yes,

is that the Is that the actual title of it. Yeah, it's called the Codebook, and I can't remember who wrote it. We've talked about it about three years ago when we did the last Cipher episode. It is The Codebook is a great book to at least go through. He does a much better job of making this kind of stuff palatable to the layment. And that would be a book i'd recommend to to look through. Yeah, that's it. Really is kind of hard to make this totally understandable when

you because it's a very visual thing. I mean, I've got I've got this table right in front of me, and it's very easy for me. You guys would have it too, iron I was gonna say, I have it in front of me, and I do not understand it at all. But the good news is I don't try to decide from just like yeah, now and and but

here's the here's the beauty part of it. So now with my name as encrypted, here is is n f Y, righte n f Y. So I go back and I do my name, do my name, and I go to the first line, and I go over to the N, and then I go to the and then that's not the first line, but the first line. The top line is to the decryption line, so would actually be the second line, but it's the first keyed line. So and I have a confused yet, you bet I have that.

I go over to the N and then I go up to the top line and there's a J. Then I go down for the second letter. I go down to the second line down here, and I go to the F and I go up to the top line. Who says oh? And then I go down to the third line and I go over to why and go up to the first line, and there it is an E. And so I know my message says Joe. So that's how.

I don't know. I don't know why he bothers to put things in code to us when he writes emails, because I know that if I spend the time to decode it, it just says Joe is awesome, over and over and over. That's all different kinds of ciphers. Yeah, so that's how the first the first that ciphers, the first cipher that and there were how how do we know that? How do we know that that's what it is? Actually because people some people broke the cipher the first one. Yeah,

they did. And I said there were two there were two, Um, there were two messages and so two different ciphers. I mean they were both visionaire ciphers but with different keys, and so that whole part of it. And then uh, and then it gets a little trickier when you get to as the second rectangled down the lower left and but the top part of the message as two matches, And I said, the first one that says between subtletiating and the absence of light led us a nuance of inclusion.

And there were intentional, apparently misspellings in the text. So if I questioned how intentional that agrees, it's always it's always entirely based on things that we discovered later on. I think in the third one, or maybe it's the

second one, but I really feel like maybe that wasn't intentional. Well, there was there was at least one intentional boob or unintentional boo boo that was in there that caused the second part of the text to be misinterpreted, which is why I questioned his statement of all I did that on purpose. Yeah, I know you would hope that you wouldn't have typos and something that a very expensive thing carving, so you would hope you wouldn't screw up. I think

it's possibly did. He said that he intentionally misspelled a couple of words, and also that he left a letter or two. See, uh, this is too soon to talk about this yea, let's keep talking about the cipher. Yeah, okay, Well the second one, which the key for that one was, by the way, abscissa, which is one of those obscure little words, the first element of an ordered pair, now, you know, like for example, palamp sess. The palap cessed is supposedly hinted at by the shape of the of

the sculpture itself. It's shaped like a scroll. And a palap cessed is that which has been recorded over or written over. And so the earliest scrolls, because writing materials were kind of scarce back in the day, often the scroll that was no longer used for much of anything would be scraped off without the characters would be scraped off of it, and then people could write over it again. And that's what a palamp cessed is. So, so the palap cessed, you know, in its earliest form, was a scroll.

And so apparently so that's the whole thing is like, well, don't you see the hint there, the big hint, you know, it's a scroll. Therefore palap cessed. You know, for me, it was like yeah, right, I mean I can see it now in retrospective course, But how somebody was expected to guess set you know before decoding it? Well, you know, for Christ's sakes, give me a break. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of little hints like this at least and supposedly people say that the word epsissa

the second key was hinted at in the first message. Well, I'm not seeing that, and I've read that. He go to the first message and I'm not seeing it in there. But whatever, I mean. These people must be a lot smarter than me. I guess let's look at this second message. Here's what it is. Uh says it was totally invisible. How is that possible? They use the Earth's magnetic field. The information was gathered and transmitted underground, underground misspelled to

an unload the land on location. Does Langley know about this? They should, It's buried out there somewhere. Who knows the exact location only WW. By the way, this w W is William Webster. He was at the time director of the CIA at the time. This was his last message, and hear the message gives some coordinates. Uh. What's turned out to map to a spot about a hundred and

fifty feet southeast of the sculpture. And then then it's followed at that point by two more words, which are layer two and nobody knows what the significance of layer two is yet maybe it'll all become clear someday. And so yeah, it's it's unfortunately we need decode the messages. They're they're really they're really not all that helpful. A little leg yeah, a little yeah. Uh. And then we go to the lower rectangle and there's uh, I think

eight hundred sixty six characters. No, and they're something like that. No, actually eight hundred sixty six is the entire left hand sculpture, so about half of that, about four thirty three right in there. Yeah, these, at least the first part, about the first maybe three quarters of them was encrypted with a totally different system. It was something called Calindar transposition. This is mind boggling, Yeah, especially how somebody could figure it out and decrypt it. Well, yeah, it really is.

It took me a little while to actually understand this, and I actually it was eventually able to figure it out. But it's tricky, and so imagine this. So if you if you want to ENCRYPTO message, you take your text, take all the punch of interests and spaces out, put it in a word documents, so it's at least three or four lines, and you want to use a font like Courier exactly nothing that with proportional spacing, you want every character to occupy the same amount of space, right, uh.

And then you print it onto a sheet of paper, and then you cut the text. You cut the text out into columns, so you've got like say four lines. So you've got all these little snip sets of paper that have four vertical letters on them, right, and all of the columns are the same with yeah, four four letters wide. No, no, there are one letter wide, one letter wide, and four letters high. Oh okay, I thought it was into group. The columns were grouped, Okay, got it? Yeah,

And you don't that. So you cut out a single all these columns. And then, in this particular case, what you do is you step through backwards. In this particular case, they chose to have a six character lines. They step

through backwards seven characters at a time. So starting at the beginning with the first character, they stepped backwards seven, which took them to uh, which took them to column eighty one and then and then so you pulled out pull that snippet of paper out and set it next to the first one, and then go back seven more,

which is column seventy four. You pull that one out, set it next to the first one, and just keep doing that over and keep going around and round and round through the message until you but essentially rearranged all the columns in this pattern. Right, then take all your little snippets of paper and rotate them ninety degrees clockwise and glue them all together in the end. And then at the end of all that, then cut it somewhere

in the middle. And in this particular case, this text actually ended with a question mark, and when it was done rearranging everything, the question mark was about halfway through a little more than halfway, so that's where they cut it. So this question mark wound up at the end of the encrypted text. Again. Uh so they cut it right after the question mark, and they swap the front and the back house and there you have it. That's your that's your encrypted texts. So I see the look on

Devon's face. Simpler terms, you take a can of alphabet soup, you pour it on the ground, and you read it. That's that's that's about it out. Yeah, yeah, So the contrast between the two systems is in the first half, the letters are all in the right place, but they don't mean the same thing. It's the wrong letter, right, you gotta and whereas in this case none of the letters have actually been encrypted, they've just been rearranged and so and so the letters are all in clear text.

But good luck figuring it out technically. And yeah, technically, well can I I This might be a dumb question, but here we are. Who made these cliphers? Did the artists make the clipher? No? Actually, he got, he got. There was a guy who's the chief of the cryptography department at the at the time. He made them. Yeah, well,

essentially he and the artist sat down. I think that Jim sandboord to create these riddles because and then and then encrypt them, and so there was a collaborative project between the two of them, is how do we how do we encrypt these things? I was thinking, this is a kind of big undertaking for somebody who's an artist. I mean, not that artists can be smart, but yeah, well, you know, you never know. Sometimes people have hobbies to There are people out there who do one thing and

cryptography as their hobby. So you know, but but he had a little help with this. Um. So what did that that cipher end up being did? Was it broken? Yeah? This one was broken? Um. And and again this is up to characters number up characters seven out of a sixty six. So, and this is what's called K one two K three. So the first two messages are in the top left rectangle, and then about three quarters at the bottom left are K three. That's and then below

that is what's called K four. That's what hasn't been broken yet. Okay, but what did K three say? Yeah, this last one, and nobody knows why quite yet, But it was taken from the diary of Howard Carter, who is an archaeologist who opened King Tut's tomb in and so he had this thing where he described, you know, the opening of the tomb. So here it is as deciphered by various people slowly, desperately, slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway

he was removed with trembling hands. I made a tiny breech in the upper left hand corner, and then widening the whole little inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber cousts the flame to flickr, but presently details of the room within emerged from the midst X can you see anything? Q, question mark, some little random characters thrown in there for some strange reason. Well he doesn't he You will see in the translations of this text in random places there are x is

in the text, and those appeared to be used as periods. Uh, sort of they sort of breaks the sort of mark breaks between sentences, but they're not consistently used. You're right, And I was wondering what the heck was going on with that one. Yeah, well a lot of people have wondered about that too. I mean, I mean again, as

we rely on Sandborn to tell us the truth. And you know, if he if, like you said, he's screwed up and he doesn't want to admit it, well, you know, hopefully he'd be truthful enough and honest enough, because he actually did make one air that he's admitted to, and he claims the rest were deliberate. I guess part of me thinks that maybe he doesn't actually know, if he's not the one who actually I mean, you know, he worked in conjunction with somebody to create the cipher, but

he did. It's totally possible that that person was like, all right, this says what you wanted it to say, and he doesn't know. Well, yeah, I think what happened is he was required Sandber was required to actually give them the contents of the messages along with the encryption techniques that he use. So I think what happened is

he got trained up. They picked out a few really good cipher techniques, and then he got trained up in it, and then he up to the messages himself, and then he had to handles over the CIA because essentially what they wanted to do is they wanted to know that he wasn't putting something in there, kind of like you knows, a bunch of jerks. Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, and so you know, they wanted to know what the contents were so they wouldn't be embarrassed like he did.

He did all of this as far as I know, He did the encryption himself. So um, And so what I'm wondering what other people have wanted this too, is that given these strange little glitches, weird the weird things with the X is moving characters around and stuff. If perhaps there isn't another cipher within that. So I was going to say, yeah, the cycerd message might itself contain

some other cipher and ciphered message. And I presume that people, since you know, Kate four isn't solved yet, I presume that people have tried to get some kind of cipher code from the other three that decode the fourth. Yeah, that hasn't worked, obviously because obviously no. Supposedly there are hints to the to the solution of K four in the previous three, but these as said, what exactly these hints are. The problem, if I understand correctly, with K

four is that it is so short. Yeah, exactly. One of the problems. Well, so, I mean K four is what it's character. It's less than a hundred characters long, which the longer a cipher is, the more clues you can gather by. Because when it's such a short thing without the key, you're pretty host Yeah, you kind of are. It does lend yourself a little bit better tonight. What they call brute force attacks, you know, but where you

just basically you throw everything at it. And and if you and this this only really works well if you have a computer to do it with do it by yourself, you'll go insane. But the computer or the computer you can you can actually do a brute force attack pretty easily, which people have now done. Oh yeah, share as computers get faster, you know, our brute force attacks get faster. Watson has a taking this on yet, or that's a good question. Why not? It just does seem like a

good jeoper an AI doesn't. Yeah, because it's the rise of the machines. They don't want him to know the answer. Good point. Yeah, we don't want him to know how to like code stuff and you do stuff in secret, and I'm sure Watson doesn't know how to do that already. Yeah, he hasn't figured that out. Definitely not dumb. Yeah, geez, I sure hope you know with all the AIS that weird that we're creating, I sure if they've just got some guys standing switch. Yeah, no, not. You don't want

to kill switch. You just want to power. You want to like an outlet in the wall, and you want to want together just jerk the corse, that's what I mean, just like flip the fuse. Yeah, exactly. Supercomputers, ultra intelligent artificial intelligence runs the entire world plugged into a hundred and ten volt plug in the Yeah, some dude could accidentally trip over it and just destroy the infrastructure. Would that be hilarious? Yeah, it sounds like that's what's going

to happen. Okay, So k Ford totally totally it is unsolved. Yeah. Yeah. Let me go back for a second to the solution of the first three. Yeah, the first the first three were cracked in ninety nine by computer scientists named Jim Jim Galogley who used a computer. He was a California computer scientists I know. And uh, but then the CIA reigned all over his parade by announcing that one of their employees had solved the first three pieces in nine

the year before. His name was Dave Stein. And also they made they they made clear that even though they had employees that have been working on this, they weren't using company times. They just did it on their own time. So he said, he just did it over like the course of about four hundred lunch hours working on this sculpture. And uh, and then the the n s A and I was is that, Hey, you know, three of their guys had like totally solved the whole first three messages

in nineteen that's what they said. Yeah, yeah, that was like, oh, by the way, actually I solved it in eight Yeah I did too. Now I saw it in nineteen nine, the day after they put it up. Well, and the funny thing is is that if you read some of the stuff from the CIA and the n s A, they're they're really kind of poking at Jim Glogly. Is that how you say it? Because oh, well, we did it all by hand, and you just don't get the

same joy and blah blah blah. It was really funny the writing that just took a total dig this guy using a computer to do it. I think the computer is a smart way to go myself. You know, it didn't take four lunch hours, no, exactly. The thing about

doing it by hand is cryptography. There's a lot of bean counting going on, you know, all that all that stuff that just wrote stuff like say, if you're just doing a Caesar cipher, the simplest thing possible and you just have to add say three to every alpha letter in your in your clear text to encrypt it, well you gotta go hump, don don't, don't, don't through the entire message and isn't it better for that kind of grunt work to have a computer do that? That's mindless.

I mean, yeah, there's a lot of that in cryptography in both directions and so and so I'm not unless you have a little Annie, a little orphan Annie decryptor ring or yeah help ye I had a Johnny quest and decrypton was it Johnny Quest or g I Joe or I don't remember what it was. But I had a pretty cool decoder room when I was a kid. Yeah it was handy. Yeah, yeah, just remember to drink your oval team. Yeah. I don't know where I got that cracker jack box or what, but yeah, that's cool stuff.

I'm sure it's illegal now because you know, if if any kid had that today, he would immediately shove it down a stroke and choke on. Yeah. We were different, We were different breed of kids in my day. You know, we didn't choke on stuff because everything it's I mean, it's hard when like they're dinosaurs threatening your life, you tend to not like shove things in your mouth. YEA, thank you? Okay, So yeah, okay, So SO and N

s A kept their discoveries secret. Maybe they didn't want to like let people know how just how smart they are and how brilliant they are decrypting or you know, it could actually be that, and it does seem to be documented. They actually in fourteen that the n s A did declassify some documents because apparently their employees, there were three of them, wrote up reports on how they did the whole thing, and uh, but they were classified up until and uh but now they're available online so

you can read it. So apparently it is documented that their employees did indeed break those first three ciphers. But why were they classified? Yeah? Why do they keep it? Because they work for a certain certain organization where almost everything is classified. There is a tendency to over classify things. And it might have been just share sportsmanship. They might have just felt like, you know, hey, you know, we're going to rain out a lot of people's parades if

we say, hey, we cracked it. Here it is, you know, Yeah, that doesn't stop them before, especially as weird as this one is, there's more cracking to be done. It is a weird one. I mean, yeah, you think they could have said something like, hey, we cracked it, but we're not gonna We're still not gonna tell you what it is. You're gonna have to figure that out yourself, bitches. But all right, so we're gonna start with there. We're gonna

talk about our first little mystery here. But first let's take a break, because I think I see a man in dark sunglasses and a suit at the door. The town of Beaumont had a problem. The city council had barred dancing and rock and roll. You couldn't do it. It just wasn't allowed. Supposedly, the rules put in place after the Reverend Sun died in a car accident on the way home from a dance. But that wasn't the

real reason. The real reason was that the Reverend was wearing conventional socks that didn't fit right and gave him blisters, and dancing only made it worse, and he didn't want to be the only one not dancing. Being the pillar of the community, he decided that it had to be that way for everyone, so the band was put in place. Luckily, a spirited teenager named Wren McCormick came to town and

showed everyone in the error of their ways. Socks a vital article of clothing that often gets overlooked Thankfully, four years ago, two guys set out to rethink it. Neither of them was written, and after spending two years fixing all the things they didn't like about conventional socks, Bombas was born. Bombas offers premium socks equipped with seven substantial improvements to the ordinary sock, which you can find online.

In fact, Bomba socks are such game changers that customers overwhelmingly claimed that they are the most comfortable socks they've ever worn. But best of all, every pair of socks Bomba cells, they donate a pair to those in need. They've already donated over two million pairs so far. Go to Bombas dot com slash sideways to get off your first order. You'll love Bombas socks or your money back guaranteed.

That's Bombas dot com slash sideways. Now that I think about it, maybe Randy Goldberg and David Heath are like Brand McCormick. They did buck the sock system and we're back. That guy was just h Yeah, that's that's dangerous. I got a good serial killer story for you guys. About that one for another time. Time. Yeah, mystery number one, let's talk about our first mystery, which what is exactly the true purpose of cryptos. Was it just art or

is it something else? Do you do? You know, I sort of wondered if maybe it's not kind of a recruiting device to try to, like, you know, find some really talented cryptographers to hire. Yes, no, I mean I I don't. There's not a question in my mind that this is similar to you know, the idea behind the Cicada three three oh one, where it's like, obviously a lot of these puzzles get put out there simply because they're recruiting tools, you know, and obviously back in the forties. Yeah,

I mean, Google does the same thing. They hire people who hack into their system. They say, if you can get into our system, we will hire you. I know, when I heard about that, I got my car and drove through the front wall, and that doesn't count. You were like, well, it's all right, I had an accident into But I mean there's for me, there's no question. But I know I'm more prone to believe stuff like

that than you guys are. So yeah, well, you know, and think about it is it's actually a kind of a nice looking piece of sculpture too, so it could be a dual purpose. Kind of thing, you know, purposes pretty nicely, not that any old smoke can just wander up to it, but well that is the thing. Yeah, it is on CIA grounds, so you it's not not everybody gets to look at but there's lots of pictures of information about it. There's just tons of information out there,

and we'll have some good links for you all. By the way, there's one person that at Lanka Done and who's who's like, you know, considered one of the foremost experts on the whole thing, and she has a page which will give you a link to that has in itself, I don't know what a hundred two hundred links and articles and and and all kinds of stuff, and so yeah, pretty much almost everything you need to know about cryptos you'll find in her page. Well, anyway, let's go back

to our story for just a little bit. As you know, nobody is yet deciphered k for so if the last time it was deciphered and seen, that's all almost twenty years and people are still hammering their head and brains out over that one. Yeah, and I said earlier, because it's so short. That's one of the things that's made it kind of tough to break, although it turns out, you know, K one was actually kind of short too,

and people managed to break that. And it turns out there it's actually shorter than ninety seven letters because in tween Jim sim would reveal that actually that last characters is two messages, not just one, and they're encrypted with different systems, making it even harder. Yeah, he does make it harder. And he also said that you need to solve K four in order to solve K five. So and in uh it again, it have been eleven years since the last time there had been any progress in this,

so he decided it was time to dropping officially. Yeah, officially, Yeah, that's a good point. Uh And so he said, the six characters in K four translate to the word Berlin as in as in the city in Germany. The characters are the sixty four through sixty nine. The letters are N, Y, P V T T. Write that down. And again I remember, of course, at this time in ten, nobody with sandboard knew that there was actually two messages in there. So my question, of course when I first heard that as well,

is Berlin in K four or is Berlin in K five? I? Oh, I guess there is. I just have a hard time. I'm so green with ciphers, I like, don't I don't understand cipher's like at all. So for me, it's so hard to imagine a cipher where Berlin would translate to something that has two t s at the end of it. You know, yeah, I pause, that's really hard for me.

But also, you know, knowing that there's this other kind of cipher where actually all of the letters are crack, you know, like it's but yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, obviously it's not a substitution cipher, right, and it's not. It's not a substitution cipher. Can't be right, obviously it can Obviously it can't be simple, it can't be a Caesar shift. Obviously the colindar transposition technique is not being used here because all six letters are side by side,

they're not and I scattered all throughout the text. So it could be uh as we're back to the old vision air cipher. Maybe I don't know, but presumably a lot of people have already tried to decrypt it using the vision are cipher. Yeah, if you know that it's used once, you might as well give it a shot and see if you use more than once. Uh, yeah,

I suppose. I mean, but if they, if they, if they've gone back to the vision are cipher, it appears that they probably took out the keyword crypto, so they're probably using a different there's probably two different keys this time. It was not yeah, so uh and that's about all we know about it so far. There were only twenty three characters after after the word burl, after the word Berlin. Well,

and that's not actually true. That's twenty eight. But in in nine Jim sand Words said that because still nobody had broken any broken the cipher. He said, Okay, the word after berlin clock so brilliant clock. And so those words that word would be spelled mz F p K spell clock exactly. So after clock there are only twenty three characters after that. I'm assuming that brilliant clock is

in K four and not K five. Makes sense if you have to have K four to fix yeah, otherwise otherwise Sandberg Sandborn is a real jerk j J. Yeah, I guess I just keep thinking characters. That's a small enough set that you could have if you have two different encryption and you're really smart about it, right, it could literally be the same letters with two different encryption codes, with two separate messages that are all ninety seven letters.

I think that's possible. It's not easy, it would be really tricky, but I'm saying that it could just be two different cipher sets, right, And that would also for me. I'm sorry, this may be like jumping ahead a little bit, but for me, when I look at all of the errors that are included in all of the other ones, that's kind of what it looks like to me is that the shift would be different, and so a different message with different sets of errors would appear in like

K one for instance. Right, that like, if there were a separate message included in there, those xs would go away and suddenly they become a's and it's a totally different set of you know whatever. Um. And So I guess for me, I don't think it's likely that that is the case, but it's a possibility that I come I keep coming back to. It would the genius level encryption to me, So you're saying essentially that, but there are a lot of errors in this. So he could

have done it wrong. He could have thought he did it perfectly great and it turned out no, they're both incipher decipherable. Now yeah, but yeah, I mean, but but I saw if when I from reading it correctly, you're saying essentially the same the same piece, the same message can be two entirely different things. I'm saying that the same set of letters, given two different encryption code could

be two separate, could be two different things. Yeah, and that's some time, and that would explain a lot of things, like you say that the stray weird characters and the spellings and stuff where they had to sort of shoot horn these things together. And so that's entirely possible. A lot of people have pondered that exact question. That's just that's just a little too fiendish. On the other hand, so well, yeah, I'll stand okay. So oh yeah, we're at Berlin clock. Okay, and uh, and again we've got

two messages. Presumably there's at least twenty three characters in K five And by the way, brilliant clock. Do google on that. And if you haven't heard of it as a famous clock, it's kind of cool. Uh. It's one of those clocks that you know, you have to sit down and figure out how to use it and how to tell time by it, and then you never use

it again because it's a painting. But you've got to kind of do some math in order to tell what the time is, because can you give me like a high level colored shapes so that I think it's a there's a red circle, then there's a bar below that that is divided into three pieces, and each p slights

up in yellow. It's basically this weird semi binary clock. Yeah, um, it's I mean, you would have to be really really versed in that kind of stuff and use it all the time in order to understand that the combination of lights this means six thirty, but this means sixty two. Yeah, it's yeah, it is. And so so it's like they're I think there's like three red ones up near the top, three red rectangles, and those denote fifteen minutes each. Yeah, and then so so if like three of them are

lit up, its four four at the top. And then so those are four increments of like fifteen minutes stations. So if those those little guys three of them lit up there, it's okay forty five minutes after the hour. And then you go down further to find out what the hour is and stuff, and you gotta be super complex. It's a little you know, it's not concepolutely difficult, but it's kind of a kind of a nuisance if you want to know what the time is real fast. But

you know, people dig that stuff. I mean, you watches like that all the time. There's i mean the binary watches. We already said binder, but there's a couple of different ones. I don't know if you never saw this, Devan, but Joe, I don't know, you remember that that watch that I had that had the hollows center in the light like that thing was cool, but a giant painted the buck to use again. It's just kind of a cool factor

kind of thing. Absolutely, Okay. I want to advent a time piece that's just whenever you want to know the time, you know, you press a button and it just drops out gold bars and a certain you know, at a certain number of gold bars for the hour, and then then yeah, it wouldn't it be nice? Yeah? I think you're gonna have to go into alchemy for that, yeah, probably. Yeah, So one gold bar for each hour and then a bunch of career answer for the minutes that work. Okay,

like that. Yeah, So the big question is is will K four and K five b the code? And well, probably sooner or later they will, but it doesn't solve everything when and not quiet because sand Words said this in and I'm quoting him here, once the play is deciphered, I'm not convinced that true meaning will be clear even then there's another deeper mystery. Yeah, okay, so let's let's stop here because I know we're about to go into

mystery number two. I have a so my my concern with this whole thing is when I mean, we talked about it before the mistakes and him saying they were intentional. You know, I work in a in an area where you take artistic license to things, and I have I worked with some people who will seriously manipulate things to make them look right. And the problem is that that then very dramatically changes them and changes their meeting, whether it be in text or imagery or illustrations or whatever.

We're in this case a series of letters. Well that's kind of That's why I really worried that this thing is is completely screwed up, because he's he's quote unquote massage to the letters around and blown the whole thing apart. Honestly, I feel like him that quote from him of like, once it's deciphered, O Nacha is totally him just covering his But because he like realized ten years later he was like, oh crap, I totally mess that up. It's not going to mean anything. I, on the other hand,

maybe not. I tend to think he probably probably did improof reading before he put the whole thing up, but he didn't because it was ten years later that he was rereading the plain text and they found that one era that dramatically changed it. Well, it didn't dramatically change, it changed two words at the end. Are we going to talk about that? Yeah. Originally at the end of the end of the second message, it said it looked like it said by by the by the code everything

it desired. And this is just entirely coincidental, serendipitous. I guess it decrypted to a lot three words. I d by Rose. Yeah, so I d by Rose. But it turns out that what he had intended to do is he had he had intended to put another X in there as as a delimita to the previous sentence, and then had the two words layer to appear after that, and so when he left that out, he removed the X to make it look proportionate. Yeah, exactly. So when he left that out and it went from saying layer

two to just saying I d by rows. And that's just a peer coincidence that it actually translated to something coherent, that's likely that it could have translated to something just gibberish. That's why that's why you're wondering if maybe the same message with two different keys could translate to different because it totally could totally explain there's no spaces, there's no nothing right, So it would explain some of the things like the x is and the misspellings. I know exactly,

you know, I imagine imagine this. Imagine that you're reading left to right, uh, the line after line. What if it's you know, you're reading calumn well or I mean the other thing even is like maybe you're reading right to left because you can go all the way around these things, right, I mean they are intentionally punched all the way through. You can step around on the other side of it, and then it's a different methods should

read it backward? Yeah, you read left to right from the other side and suddenly it's a you know, so I don't know. I think there's a lot of stuff here that. Yeah. One of the reasons I have wondered about the top to bottom think the columnar thing is that some of the words said, the misspellings and stuff, like the last word in the first message was illusion, but with the que instead of an L, so it's

it's i q l U so inclusion. And I seriously wondered because he said he's left letters out to deliberately, and I wondered if actually the word he's the word he's actually misspelled, wasn't illusion after all? The inclusion occlusion. Inclusion is the word I'm thinking occlusion because it makes sense. I mean, he's talking about about shadow and darkness and

all that stuff. So he says between subtlet shading and the absence of light less and nuance of exclusion illusion, But occlusions pits out a lot better when you think about it, because the inclusion is like, you know, you know, the the absence of light. Essentially, when you include thing, you know, you've blocked the light and you shade it and stuff. So to me, yeah, or that kind of thing to you. But inclusions, so I wanted a conclusion. So, in other words, he put a que in there because

he needed to. He needed to. Otherwise he would have had to put two season there and oh a CNFC and so he needed to he needed to toss out one of those seas, and so he put the queue in there instead to do the same job. So I Q instead of see, which would explain you know, And again this is all tendentious. It's like, I am not actually going to spend a huge amount of time trying to crack this one because I've just got too much

to do. I don't know a lot of people with bigger brains who have not managed to do with it than Yeah. Probably it's not worth the die. It's one of those delia. So I just thought, okay, I'll give it. I'll give it like half an hour, just because it would be so cool if all these people have been beating their brains out over it, and if I was able to sit down and just you know, crack it

the text editor and figured it out. Yeah, you know, as anybody ever thought to, like, you know, put this into Microsoft word and then switch over to wing dings. I mean really though, Yeah, yeah, I'm going to try that. Actually, actually I'm not going to try that, or just do detect language on like Google Translate. Yeah, try that too, Yeah, try to let it, you know, see if there's another language in there, because Google is pretty good at like

trying to decipher. Google's like your sober friend, you know, like you can type some like really messed up words in there and it's like, oh did you mean this, because it understands somehow. I gotta feel like if you, if you type this, Google probably knows this very well and they'd probably if you type it in there, Google say you're give us, say like nice tried, dude, Yeah

we solve this twenty years ago. Yeah. Yeah, so you have it back to her, I think he uh so there's there Apparently according to him, there are riddles to be solved and that will that will leave you as you know, as I said, he made reference to something being hidden somewhere, probably in the grounds of the CIA and Langley. He actually gave he actually gave the level

too whatever that means layer to actually layer too. That's another one right where it's like he's obviously telling us like there's another layer to this code and maybe it is, and maybe he's just playing this mind game right where every time somebody says, hey, is it this, he's like, no, like, I D Rose, I D by Rose. Like that could be I'm sure everybody, like I'm sure that people have experienced this or explored this already, right, but I D by Rose could be another part of the cipher that

exposes the second layer. Yeah, I mean it could be right, Yeah, Rose could be the other work. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, there is that there is a discussion for him. For for these cryptos nerds out there, if you really want to get intensely involved in this, I will definitely put the link out there too. You have to act, think, send them an email and ask for membership. You know, they have to be admitted to the group and have to prove that you're not like a spot here or

a Russian. Actually you probably get extra poement points for being a Russian. But the but but yeah, they's so, they've been discussing it. They still are as far as I know, So that mystery, okay. Yeah, And then of course you know there's there's other elements to the sculpture. Also, there's some pieces of marble that are that are setting.

They're sort of set around it, and you don't know if those had significance or they're just they're flat paced places for people to sit down and eat their lunch. You don't really know. Did I read somewhere somebody thought that maybe they were brail or something from the well, there is a there's a Morse code there. Yeah, there's

a there's actually in the whole thing. There's there's not just a sculpture, but there's other various rocks and things around, and there's a message in Morse code that's what conceivably be brail. You know, maybe the Morse totally wrong. Yeah, but it's more well, if it's Morrise code, though it doesn't really translate that well because there's a lot of dots in there, which translates to just ease. So maybe

it's something else. I don't know the Yeah, that's what it is, but where did the where did that come from? Was that part of the same Yeah, but it doesn't make you wonder if maybe people are too fixated on the central piece and that image the other stuff. Oh yeah, there's aerial images available out there, and people have like you know, tried to like make any sense about it from out of it from there, and of course somebody has has actually marked the spot that's marked by those

coordinates that are in K two. So you can find an aerial where that's marked. And is it on Langley property? Yeah, it is, it's actually yeah, it's actually quite Yeah. They have a they have a Brilliant Wall memorial there where they actually brought over several chunks of the Brilliant Wall after it got torn down and they stilly created a monument to that, and it's right about very close to that. Well, maybe there's some significance with Berlin. Uh yeah, well Berlin

clock and all that stuff. And of course when it when this was commissioned and he was doing it, doing his work, it was committed and I think before the fall of the wall, but then I believe it was completed after the fall of the wall. So I could totally picture him going back with this momentous thing happening and inserting some reference to you know, obviously they're brilliant clock, but maybe something about the wall, you know, the fall

of Communist been, Soviet Union and all that stuff. I mean, but we don't know. And uh, and so there's there's riddles he said, he's he's hinted that the solutions to the riddles will lead you essentially to another riddle, and that's the riddle apparently solved these last riddles. You have to actually have access to the CIA, you actually have to solve them on on the ground, and so good luck with that. Yeah, yeah, and so that's where it's at.

And so any of our listeners out there, if you know, if you if you go out there and you saw this, then just tell them we said, you know, we'd appreciate that, and all of you with coke y. Yeah, so let's get into our mysteries here. These are more mysteries and theories, which yeah, we've been on mystery one for a good little bit here. Yeah, mystery too. Are the c in the n s A telling the truths? Which is to say, they say they haven't cracked Kate in four in k

five yet that seems suspicious. It kind of does you know these guys just you know, actually it kind of kind of makes me mad because we're paying them a lot of money to be able to do this kind of crap and they can't and I kind of, uh, well, they have they literally do have the trick I mean, they may have other things that they consider higher priority than solving the installation. That sounds wrong. Yeah, I could be.

I mean it really could be. But I I don't know you would think that with all those supercomputers and everything, and I know, I know they have said at least for public consumption, they have said that they're not debuilding any public resources to this at all. Yeah, people would freak out if they heard that, Well I would. I

don't know. I don't know, man. I think if the N s A employees have a little bit have a spare minute or two be decrypting between decrypting ISIS communications and everything, if they've they've got a few minutes of downtime and they want to play with this on their supercomputers, I wouldn't. Yeah, you know, I don't see a problem. I don't have a problem with that, really, I mean whatever, you know, it's like it actually for them it would be kind of cool to have a nice little break

from your day to day routine. They are to be able to do something a little different, keep the mind sharp. But yeah, I think they're probably lying. I kind of think that probably they've at least N s A has broken it. Well, they're supposed to. I mean, the the answer was given to the c I A. Yeah, so they you imagine that what's the head guy, William Webster, thank you. He probably put it in the safe and it's probably something that is transferred from director to director,

so they know the Freagan answer. Yeah, they have to have the answer, So it's not as if they, well somebody, yeah, I mean, yeah, somebody. I mean maybe those guys are such honorable fellows that they've actually left it sealed in the envelope in the safe for all these years and they haven't actually pulled it out and looked at it. But if I would watch, if I've watched X files enough, the answer to that, you know, it would be kind of tough to not pull that envelope out and have

a look at it. And almost impossible. Yeah, it really kind of would be. Yeah, So how many more mysteries do we have? Here? Got a few more mystery? Number three? What are the encryption algorithms for K four K five? And we've already kind of talked about that, so I don't you know again I could Yeah, tough, I've already told you what it can't be. It's it's not rearrangement. It's not just a simple substitution cipher or seas shift or anything like that. But there's a lot of other

ciphers out there. So anyway, why does it on here say pig Latin. Oh yeah, pig. I tried pig Latin. That doesn't work, and so no pig Latin. Our next messages, well and order the messages say well, hell if I know. I mean, I've seen the stuff that's been decrypted. I don't. I don't even know if don't totally understand that. Yeah, not really, No, I don't. I don't get it at all. But again, it's a this is gonna be kind of one of those Da Vinci Code kind of things where

to the ordinary person, you know, it's ghibberation. But then you know, Tom Hanks comes along and said, well you have we said Tom Hanks to Langley. He would figure this out in like two days. Oh no, you figured out in like thirty Secon just glanced at it and be like, oh, but I always loved that in the Da Vinci Code. That's the only one of the series that I've read is and I haven't seen the movie, but I just love it. He goes into the lube and there's a dead body. But before he died, he

arranged himself. So he's pointing towards this, this fading but this so obviously Tom Hanks is the guy to figure this one out. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And by the way, and Dan Brown is apparently a fan of cryptos, I'm sure, yeah he is. And he actually mentions it apparently in the Da Vinci Code, and he wrote some other book that also mentions it quite heavily too. So

Angels and Demons problem, it wasn't that one. I can't remember the name of it, but you know, but yeah, I just go out to Dan Brown dot com or something like that or I don't know, Google. Yeah, you'll find something about that. So our next. And here's the thing. I mean, obviously there's something hidden theoretic, I don't know if they're okay. Yeah, So if there is something hidden,

well what is it? And I can see some different possibilities, one of which is treasure, you know, a little word or something kind of humorous, like maybe a secret decode or ring Hitler's body. Yeah yeah. Another may be another encrypted message. It's like, you know, so you get all the way down there, and there's got another message. So you got to figure out I mean it could be

I mean why not. You know there there is talk about the because of the coordinates and the memorial for the Berlin Wall or the monument, there is talk that initially it was supposed to go in a place that lined up with those coordinates. This is supposition, of course, but that after he made Cryptos, they just they changed their mind and moved it to a different location and screwed the whole thing up. It's how it possible. You know, some peon said, oh, no, it's gonna go over here

because the contractor will charge just more over there. I don't know why they didn't put it there, But I don't know why you would have a cipher that directed you to the exact coordinates that you're already standing at. No, it's this According to what I read, the coordinates were not exactly where Cryptos was, but it's near it, and that that near location, that's where the Berlin Wall remnants

were supposed to be put. Because then that would give you the idea of oh wait, the word bill Berlin Wall. Oh look, I found the word Berlin and the tacks that must mean something like I don't know if that's real or not, but I've seen that out there. Yeah, no, there's there's other other suppositions or a series are that he actually screwed up and he actually was using the wrong map and that was off by a little bit, you know, and in his coordinates. So there's always that possibility.

But then I I would say that the cordinates are the Berlin wal Wantument. What I would be doing is I would looking for I'd be looking for a little piece of foe all other ways. Go out there to the little monument and it's like find that, find the one, you know, the one piece of it that looks a little newer, and maybe the graffiti's in English instead of German, and yeah, okay, that's what it is. Pull it out of there and take a sledge to and see what's

inside there. But they will so let that. Yeah. Well, also, you know the other thing is is that like maybe the treasure is employment at the CIA. It could be it could be as an employment application. Yeah, and it could and it really could be. You know to me that um, you know, K four and five have been solved, and it literally just says like hey, contact this person if you can read this and the block, Yeah, that could be it. Yeah, and they get a job, you know,

and they're sworn to secrecy. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. That's that's a good one. I like that one. My favorite, this is my personal favorite is that it's a tampon. They've got a box with a tampon in it, And that's just that's just my sense of humor. But I don't yeah, I would. I would just love that there's a big ceremony to they have on Earth that hermetically

sealed box and the TV news cruiser there they Yeah. Well, here's the thing is that it actually kind of makes sense and anything from an in a metaphorical kind of way, because cryptography is about keeping meaning hidden. And if you look at tampons, when you buy a tampon in the store, it's hidden. It's in the box, and when you take it out of the box, well it's hidden somewhere else. Uh. And so you've done a lot of philosophizing in this episode. Day know that. Oh no, that might just might usual

the philosopher king. But anyway, that's why I kind of like the tampon idea. But aside from the Philosopher's Stone, Yeah, are there. It could just be an uplifting message like peace on Earth or something like that. I hope it's not, but you know, it's always possible. If there's something like that, it would be pretty anti climatic, though, Yeah, it really would be. I'd be kind of a I'd be kind of a jerk thing to do, so I'm kind of thinking not. But yeah, I like actually I like your

theory to having about an employment application. I think that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, contact us. We have one more mystery. Well yeah, mystery number six. Uh, well, is a mysterious hidden the object even still there? Because we've talked about like the Berlin Wall monument and everything being moved to a different place, and what if they did a little re landscaping they accidentally dug up the box that's got the tampon in it or whatever it's got

the piece lilies. Yeah yeah, uh yeah exactly, or they're putting in a new sprinkler system. You know, I mean obviously this is classified where this thing is hidden, so if the guy out there just doing the work doesn't know about it, clink, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's always a possibility to that it's actually not even buried. I mean, it might actually be one of those hidden in plain sight kind of things. So you know, maybe some CIA employees stole it, you know, and then has it perceived.

Or maybe Audre Chames actually because he was still working there of cryptos one up, James, the famous mole, maybe stole it and gave it to the Russians whatever it was. Currently, it's in Putin's office, yeah, desk, yeah, yea, and though or maybe you know, maybe the cleaning staff just accidentally threw it out. That'd be kind of funny, but it wouldn't be the first time. Yeah, I'm assuming it's something kind of secure, so that can't happen. You would help.

So anyway, do you think who was it? Was it Einstein that stayed up for a day and a night and had everything on the chalkboard and passed out from exhaustion, and the cleaning lady cleaned the chalkboard for him. I took it all the way. That may not be a real story, but it's It may not have been Einstein, but I swear I've heard that before. I can imagine that that's why they put police don't erase or on

those things. But yeah, I could. You would think that somebody would ask before they would erase all those equations. You would think, you would think. But yeah, so it appears our mystery is at an end. It does. So I lied at the beginning. I said we were going to solve it. Now I totally lied, always lying. Yeah, no, I I can. I can tell you what the answer is. What's that exactly? When you read it, that's what it

says if you don't unscrample it. Yeah. I did that phonetically though, so please don't try and make that perfect. And hopefully by the time this goes to you know, goes to press, somebody won't have solved it in the thing. If they did, won't damn it. But if you have any thoughts on this, you can contact us, as always via email. We are at Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com because we'd like to get an email fanmail,

especially because you know we have so many fans out there. Uh. We also have a website believe it or not, Thinking sideways podcast dot com, where you can found our episodes. We've got an episode list out there so you can see the entire list. In turn, catalog, it's always Yeah, you know, you can download and listen to our our or can you download from there just listen straight up? Yeah, but also let's take you into the post and in the post player you can do the downloading if you

want to do it directly from the website. And of course we have merchs there also, so you can are cool things like mugs and t shirts and all kinds of nifty stuff. Daggers. Do we have any daggers yet one of these days. Well. Yeah. Other places you can find us iTunes where you can subscribe. You can give us a rating and reviews, but we're preferably a five star rating and a really glowing review. We like those. And you can stream us from everywhere including what Stitcher,

Google Play, and a lot of other places. The places you can stream we are there pretty much. Yeah. We're on social media. So there's the Facebook where we have a group in the page, so you like the page, join the group. Be sure to like the page and join the group. Lots of fun stuff happening in our group. Actually, good, good bunch of people out there. We're also on Twitter, where we are thinking the sideways without the g and we have a sub reddit thinking sideways, we have any

action on that lately? Devint? Yeah, okay uh and that's about it until next week. Would bye gay? He said in CRYPTI said in code in pig Latin. I know that code. Wow, bye everybody, Bye guys,