More funny thing would be if he hid his name in the descripted text, requiring another layer of cracking without people knowing as it seemed fully done. ;)
Samuel Blake stated, in his Vice interview that, "..there’s relatively similar schemes from a 1950s US Army cryptography manual that wasn't declassified until like 2014. " Kevin Fagan, for the SF Chronicle, also commented that the "scheme for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s." I'd love for Mr. Oranchak to elaborate upon this in an upcoming video. If this is true, then the implications are enormous for the Zodiac case. It would narrow the field of suspects exponentially, for perhaps the first time in the history of the case.
@@kathykline7202 Well, I don't know about any of that, but I know about the Justice League of America. And it definitely didn't exist until the 60's, started up by Gardner Fox for DC. So nobody was using Justice League products in the 40's and 50's.
@@kathykline7202 I didn't realize you were serious about your theories, I thought you were messing around. Maybe there's something to your ideas. The Justice League wasn't around in the 40's and 50's though, so I thought you were maybe pulling people's chains or something. Sorry bro, I see now that the Justice League comment was an honest mistake on your part.
Personally I think there is still more to find. I personally have a gut feeling that there is more than one message inside the code that was cracked. Almost as if we have only have half of the message so far
The cop that saw the zodiac after the murder of Pau Stine estimated him to be between 35 and 45. That was 52 years ago so he’d be between 87 and 97 so I doubt he’s still alive.
@@4gegtyreeyuyeddffvyt if he's be around 87 i feel like he'd still have a decent chance of being alive though. 97 not so much though. I suppose the real question would be more so if he's alive would he even keep up with any of this stuff or know how to use the internet.
@@ShabazzTBL let’s say he was only 20 at the time then that would put him at 72 today so yea he could definitely still be alive. I kinda hope he is alive as I’d love to see him get caught and go to prison.
@@doranchak and advice on decrypting numerical values like GPS coordinates embedded in a larger cipher? I was able to solve the vast majority but the numbers.... there really isn't much to go on
And maybe do the same thing as in the movie Se7en. Look in public libraries the names of the people borrowing these cipher books. If the name match to one of the pontential suspects. Than you have it!
@@rafaeldettogniguariento8247 Never gonna work. You're talking about literally hundreds of libraries in the SF area. Several years worth of records to sift through. Libraries kept minimal records at that time, and nothing electronic. At best, you're gonna get a list of names like G. Wilson, S. Fernandez. How is that going to help? Even if a name matches a potential suspect, it's only very, very, very circumstantial evidence.
I think books about these kinda ciphers are numerous even in that era. Likely any library would have books about ciphers, and codes so i doubt it would narrow down the suspects. There were lot of hobbyists as well even the people who cracked one of the letters were just amateurs
@@lalli8152 I wasn't thinking in terms of finding a suspect, but rather for finding clues as to his knowledge of coding. Use that to approach decoding his ciphers.
Did anyone notice that the amount of different symbols he used for each letter seemed to be related to the frequency that letter is used. For example the letter "y" isn't used often so it had two symbols to represent it, but the letter "e" is used frequently, it had five symbols to prevent it from being easily guessed. The zodiac was able to make such difficult cyphers because he understood language.
Seems like a lot of awkwardness lies around the "life is" and "death" at the end that doesn't get flipped for some reason. This specific message outside of the normal cypher could be cause for the mistakes he made in encoding the msg.
I think it is at least safe to say he seems to have taken frequency into account when choosing symbols, with common letters assigned more symbols then uncommonly used letters. Hardly a surprise I think, but he seems to have actively tried to make frequency analysis impossible, which means he at least must have been familiar with the concept.
The Zodiac Killer was our childhood boogeyman in California, among many famous boogeymen. It’s so strange to see international coverage of this. In the 70s, 80s, there was so much speculation about when he would appear again.
Found this. The zodiacs ciphers all have 17 items in a row. I think he may have used a Heptadecagon in some way in his code creation. If you look into how you create a Heptadecagon, there is lots of math with polar coordinates and circles. Notice the relation to his symbol and messages and the polar coordinate system. His symbol is a circle on a polar coordinate system. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptadecagon.
Cryptography and ciphers like this are really interesting me right now, and I love how you explain the whole process of solving it and how it could have been made by Zodiac. Thank you thank you for your amazing solving and videos!
The zodiac killer was a monster but a very smart monster. I love how he definitely knew what he was doing to stay a mystery and one of his letter over 50 years later
@@Rando_Shyte if you don’t think he knew what he was doing you might need to look more into him. You aren’t going to murder people and taunt the government and cross your fingers that you don’t get caught. He absolutely knew what he was doojf
@@DakotahMiskus I've said it before and I'll say it again. It doesn't take a genius to randomly shoot people in a remote place and get away with it in the 1960's. No modern forensics or DNA. Plus he could barely spell and he encoded all his ciphers incorrectly. He was a numbskull maniac who got lucky.
@@DakotahMiskus he didn't. His first cipher was cracked somewhat easily. Then, as the coward he was, he started trying mumbo jumbo to hide his messages, but even then he didn't give anything remotely useful. Was too afraid for it.
This code was not particularly sophisticated. It's similar to codes I was messing around with when I was 12. It's just that cracking codes is way more difficult than making them up. That's kind of the point of codes...
I loved doing puzzles with as a kid and watching your teams hard work has reignited that passion. Your ability to break down a puzzle that has baffled the world this far into the information age into something which is easily digestible is rivaled only by the humility and good nature I've seen from all your efforts.
He suddenly used more techniques in his ciphers in 69. I wonder what library books were around about this topic in his area. He may have had a favorite book where he found inspiration.
I Don't know if this is even possible as it is just an idea looking at the Zodiac's writings but he mentions the word dice. Now I may be completely off the map with this theory, but i have a small and very wacky idea. To me when I read that I thought if he has purposely made spelling errors on something he knows a great deal about, is it possible that he has tied other things to these codes than just movies. as he already referenced "The Most dangerous game" is it possible he may have tied board games to these puzzles. I had a very strange feeling that the board game Risk may be linked to not only the writings but the map of the Zodiac's crimes, as I said it is only just a theory but I thought it was worth putting it out there just incase the odd chance it had but it probably hasn't haha. Really well done videos and hope there is more to come!! keep up the good work guys!!!
I can't wait for your video discussing which clues in the 340 turned out to be meaningful. Been waiting to get the definitive features vs phantoms break down for over three years, haha :)
Don and Bettye Harden, the schoolteachers that solved the first Zodiac cypher, were also amateur cryptographers. That doesn't diminish their accomplishment, it just means they weren't professional codebreakers, and instead did cryptography as a hobby.
What a great video. Fascinating seeing your thought process, even if I am waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of my depth when it comes to code breaking. I too would love to know where the zodiac killer learned what was needed to make this cypher. Seems like that might be an important clue as to who this individual is. Great work, all of you who were involved.
I'd suspected that some sort of symmetry would be key here, but never in a million years could I have figured this out About how he chose the specific ciphers for the letters, I'd guess that he only transposed to the substitution-cipher after he made a plaintext of the encrypted letter, and adapted it based on how he wanted it to look. Like, signing off with what almost looks like "zodiac", "zo>aik", with the zodiac sign in front of it. Down the vertical middle, you have P, and further down D(cirkel)I(cirkel)C(cirkel)
I suspect he used some physical tool (e.g. involving cutting/folding/rolling paper) because that would explain why the message is split awkwardly into chunks. his encryption method may have had a physical limit to how much text could fit. also i wonder if the spelling errors were made before or after the substitution cypher e.g. did he accidentally translate letters into the incorrect symbols to begin with, or just copied over the wrong symbol at some point while transferring the message?
Comment on encipherment errors: The errors can be broken down into several types. These errors may inform how the encipherment was performed. First there's the C in "paradice". This was some sort of intentional choice so I'm disregarding it. Other errors are likely to be products of consistent error: U into A in "fun" and "because" in the first section. S into O in "brings" in the first section. I into L in "paradice" the first section. N into H in "sooner" in the second section. I into E in "I" in the second section. In these cases, the character that is incorrectly not used exists in other parts of the text. This indicates "genuine" error, which may say something about how the encipherment was performed that would make an error likely. The U, N and I errors are plausibly a result of misreading letters (telling us the plaintext being worked from was in lower case), but the others make less sense. I am particularly interested that the A error occurs in the first section of text, but not the second section; it may say something about the likely order of actions in the full encoding process. One other error exists: K into V in "work" and "know" in the second section. The letter K does not occur elsewhere in the text. This may indicate that the letter-symbol substitution was already "set" when the plaintext was composed, not including the letter V, or may indicate that some equipment used to perform the encipherment (like a typewriter) caused the K to be read as a V.
Great stuff. Coming up with the splitting of the text in 3 parts Seems the hardest. Although once you decide on that diagonal reading method it makes sense. And what lead to the diagonal reading method was those bigrams 19 periods apart which seem like they want to be read in that diagonal manner. Solving it back then really was a lot more difficult. Perhaps there might be substitution patterns before the transpotition. Maybe he wrote his text to 17 letter rows substituted the letters with that key and then transposed it reading it diagonally crossing out a symbol once it's transposed on to the final paper. I guess you need to write the life is part before the transpotition and skip it when doing so otherwise the placement doesn't work. That life is part and the h definitely a slight mystery. I wasted some of my time as well on that webtoy !!! 😂 The s's on that Halloween card match up with the - on the cipher I think ? Anyways definitely hints around the stuff he sent. Interested in the next parts of the series! Edit I guess it seems like it was transposed first and then substituted if you take those zodaik parts and some of its symmetric aspects like the + and the - - into account.
If you have a tool or device for reading the message or key that has holes in it or something you can wrap around a device that is the key with diagonal holes. If the holes are diagonal, they will meet at the corners and the device will be weak where the corners meet. If you go down and over two spaces, there is plenty of material left between the holes at the corners and so the device can be solid
10:05 Imagine the rows in the Scytale cyphertext loop around horizontally. Numbering lines from 0 to 8, The 0-th line is already correct, and to correct the n-th line displace all letters in the row 2n positions to the right. That fixes all the rows in the Scytale and gets you the actual cyphertext! maybe there's some transposition that does this naturally? what i can see is that it corrects the Scytale exactly. EDIT I see the transposition now: Start on the first letter I. Do a knights move 2 spaces to the left and 1 down. The characters you land on are the ones that begin each row (I, E, E, D, B, so on...), and the order of the characters relative to each other is preserved. Dont know if it works for the second block of cyphertext, but it seems equivalent to the triangles method.
This is more than 100% just my brain screwing with me, but for some reason from F to O of the 340's key is reading as a sentence to me "It is my cipher told to nobody alive." I figure it might be nice to comment this useless bit in case I soon suffer an aneurism or something as divine punishment for obtaining information. I'm most likely fine though and have wasted whoever is reading this's time. :)
Thank you, David, for everything you and your collaborators have done. Interesting that Z would put so much effort into making the 340 virtually impossible to "crack." The decoded text further explains his reason for killing - collecting slaves for life in "paradice" - building on his previous 408 message. Does the degree of complexity/difficulty here suggest that was Z's genuine motivation rather than a mere terror tactic designed to further frighten the public? If he wanted to simply scare people, would he have not made the code easier to solve? Or was he pissed that the Hardins so easily breaking the 408? Perhaps being "crack proof" was more important than the actual message. Plenty of mystery remains...
Description of Zodiac: Reddish Brown Curly Hair, Crew-cut, possibly greasy 5'8"- 6 ft. Tall Beefy build, Barrel-chested, Stocky Build Possible slumbering gait Normal looking Wore glasses during killings, uncertainty if he always wore them or if a disguise Brown Old, Pleated Suit Pants Military Boots, Possible short shoes Car had two different front tires Possible Brown Car
David, have you tried transcribing his original plaintext (without misspellings) on a typewriter? Note the movement of your fingers in x,y keyboard coordinates when you duplicate the misspellings. You should do this on a mechanical typewriter, a telegraphers’ mill, and a radio mill, as all have slightly different keyboard layouts.
The 'misspellings' are what CARRY the metatext. The entire UNADULTERATED Oranchak Blake Eycke solution is reconfigurable in other formats including the 17x20 original tall rectangle, horizontal 20 x17 & other 'columnars' plus spiral solves. There is even a (1960s) 7 digit binary to ASCII solve achievable with the TIMES 17 Cardano Grille type mask.
On the topic of symbol assignments - do you have any opinion on the choices that were made with regards to how many symbols to map to each letter for the homophonic part of the cipher. I was thinking about how I would go about writing a cipher like this. I would have started with deciding my plaintext before working out how many symbols to assign to each letter to 'flatten' the frequency curve as best I could by assigning by proportion. Doing this I worked out that 'H' for example should have had 5 symbols assigned to it instead of the 1 that it ended up with. Do you think this was a deliberate choice (to create a frequency spike) or was the author of the cipher using a frequency chart in an book which gave a vastly lower significance to 'H' and that the author didn't notice. It just seems odd that no attempt was made to mask such a common character. Another anomaly in this regard is the letter 'U' which only occurs 6 times in the plaintext but is assigned 3 symbols to represent it. What system do you think the author used just to decide how many symbols to use for each letter? Does it also imply that the key was generated before the author had any idea what he was going to write?
Good questions. I've wondered these things and don't really have an answer. My hunch is that he purposefully deviated from the expected distribution of symbol-to-letter assignments to try to confuse people trying to break his ciphers.
So we had lots of variations of the cipher text, basically rearrangements that follow simple rules. We fed each one into the powerful azdecrypt software, which is designed to find the correct substitutions for a substitution cipher, as long as it's a real cipher with a real message. Eventually, azdecrypt was able to recover a lot of the correct substitutions for one of the variations, which was very close to the correct rearrangement the the cipher. Azdecrypt figures out the correct substitutions through trial and error, which it does very quickly. It guesses a key, which is usually wrong at first. Then it makes random changes to the key and measures the quality of the plaintext (how closely it resembles the English language). Eventually it will find the key that produces English text, if the cipher is correctly arranged and is a real substitution cipher. Let me know if you still have questions.
@@doranchak Wow, thanks for personally responding. So you basically ran a massive brute force program that simultaneously tried different permutations of order and different substitution keys? So you had it set up to flag any combination of both above a certain percentage of words or legibility? So you got a flagged combination with "hope u are"/"gas chamber", thought it was promising and had the computer run combinations with a similar rule set? You said Jarl had come really close to solving the transposition but didn't mention the substitution key, so was it trying both at the same time or not actually putting in a key and only evaluating the probability of a transposition to contain English? Sorry for all the questions and if I'm using the wrong terminology. I really appreciate the response and understand if you're busy.
Hi David, amazing job, congrats! I'm very excited for the upcoming videos! When I saw the movie, back in 2010 (I think), this case brings me some light because I am not a north american and this case was not familiar in my country. I was very upset at that time, because it was so hard to me to realize that this guy was never caught by the police since 70's. Unfortunately I never read the Graysmith books because here in my country it's very difficult to find and by some reasearch on the internet back then I think that the 340 was solved by him. Some years later, here I am now, watching your videos and amazed by the great job that you've done with these guys. I am a programmer too and it's so good to see how technology and good efforts can bring dead cases to a proper solution. Greetings from Brazil!
I think he used a piece of paper with holes on it with the message wrapped around something. The over 2 and down is necessary because if you go one over and one down, the corners of the holes meet and the cipher implement becomes weak and can break or tear. I think the two over and then one down was just due to necessity.
I’m wondering if you ever tried decoding using the same method but starting the diagonal from right to left instead of left to right. Also, has anyone tried from bottom upwards in the diagonal also in left and right movements? We could be leaving 3/4 of the message still hidden.
Reminds me of a book I had as a kid "The know-how book of spycraft"-- where you'd use what the book called a a "pigpen" method for creating the cipher characters. I'll look forward to hearing Oranchek's ideas on how the cipher characters were assigned.
I couldnt crack the cipher but the same writer from san francisco was a writer in tidbits in palm springs the exact same layout as the news paper of the ti Es of the zodiac killer are replicated in palm springs tidbits. Allen was a master at crosswords, cartoons, definitions, and writing. He can do crosswords so well its crazy. Imagine the symbols as black spots like a crossword. I came across this by accident when i was first introduced into the zodiac killer. Realized later its 3 people allen, darren beach-nielson or nelson and cameron. BNS RAD ( lived in san francisco and palm springs. Newspaper and tidpits match i style.
Okay, I may just be noticing something that wasn't intended, but seeing the symbols written out for A, it struck me that you could create a word, if you consider a backwards L is a J, O is o, the K is k, crosshairs is a vertically dissected e and the half triangle is the right way round to fit as, R or r. Ergo Joker. It's just one letter and could be a coincidence, but it strikes me that if Zodiac started off by creating the symbols with a word in mind for the letter, then just randomly chose which symbol of that word each time he used the letter, it could maybe be a plausible explanation for why he chose those specific symbols and assigned them the way he did. He was working off a preconcieved word. Edited to add, if that is the case then A Joker, might also be him making use of the twentysix letters to describe himself.
Such a great follow up to your episode 5 video, I couldn't help but feel genuinely happy for you guys thanks in part to all the news/media coverage from all over the world that you shared. I could feel the hype from the cryptographers and zodiak buffs through the screen. I was blown away when I saw all those news stories and articles from different countries, some that I never would've thought gave a damn whatsoever about some psychopath's murder spree over 50 years ago, surreal! I can't imagine how incredible it must be for you three haha. Congratulations!
The cipher is actually really clever, because it uses more different symbols for more common letters - so it messes with the letter-frequency analysis - but not an exactly proportionate amount to the frequency, so that it still *looks like* the symbol frequency is different enough. (Plus, obviously, the sheer amount of different symbols indicate even to newbies in decryption that it's not a simple substitution code.) It's curious to see such an elaborate and clever code to be used by a person who can't spell right. Did the FBI ever look at the "is dyslexic" marker in their investigations? Because it's a non-too-uncommon feature of dyslexic people to be above average with numbers and logic...
In the 408, I encodes T In the 340, *I and I* encode T So those are almost another preserved encoding Also, in the 340, which was the Zodiac's revenge for his 408 being so easy to solve, the greater than sign < encodes I "I'm greater"?
In the 408, y encodes U In the 340, / encodes U Similar symbols except for the extra stroke of the y In the 340, < encodes I In the 340, backwards y encodes I Similar symbols except for the extra stroke of the backwards y If he was saying, "I'm greater than..." then you might expect the whole phrase to be "I'm greater than you U" So if we look at U... In the 408, you encodes U In the 340, / encodes U Similar symbols except for the missing extra stroke of the / "U lose a stripe"??? "lose your stripes"?? \ gains a stripe to become backwards y Encoding R in the 408 becomes I in the 340 "R. Gains a stripe to become I" Further associations seem even more contrived However, the "I'm greater than" seems plausible
I would love to see the map Zodiac refers to on the right (26:57) - could it be a place (town, street perhaps?) or a map reference? He obviously wanted the police to have some kind of chance to decrypt it as he said they have until next fall to dig it up! The left letter starts by asking if they cracked the last cypher then says my name is .... so could the cypher on the left be related to the other one he was referring to? Has anyone compared them? Just curious. So on the left we have the last code linked to the cypher on that page and on the right, he says that the map *coupled with this code" so those could be linked too?! What do you think David? Or was Zodiac just trying to mislead everyone? I'm just astounded that in those days 60s/70s) he was able to devise such a cypher, considering he wouldn't have access to a computer (?) that nobody could decipher for over 50 years! That must have taken him some time. So, I wonder, how many of the suspects had sufficient knowledge of code writing to be able to do it? Was that ever looked at? Your comments right at the end were very interesting indeed.
The diagonal writing being a potential hint in decrypting the cypher is stunning! Thank you for sharing a helpful overview of what the community’s reaction was to the 340 solution.
Great work. 51 years. Might be more hidden within one cipher or some of his letters/ciphers combined. Maybe the misspelled letters can somehow form a message or a name.
Do you think the disruptions in the transposition were deliberate? I could imagine the words written backwards in the last paragraph being deliberate (though it might also just have come from the method he used to make the cipher with), but the missing and repositioned "h" and the added "life is" seem like him badly patching up errors. Maybe he was just too lazy to redo all of the work when he noticed the slip ups and went with them, not realizing how much harder the cipher would become to solve that way. I can't think of anything right now, but those two peculiarities might help identifying the way he made the cipher. It would need to be a technique that leads to him only discovering his slip ups at the very end or at least only at the end of the second paragraph. Edit: Also the visible "ZODAIK" signature at the bottom of the cipher might have to do with these alterations. Maybe he just coincidentally realized he could spell Zodiac with his symbols but had to make some changes for it to work (and it still doesn't work out perfectly, as the A and I are interchanged). Note that he could have done this more easily by just changing some of the symbols in his key ex post. I really lean towards the idea that he was either too lazy or rushing to get it done in the end.
Of course they are deliberate. The Oranchak solution reconfigures to rectangular and spiral metatext fields for adjacent space steganography with more content.
The life is part seems like he was filling the gaps. The same with possibly the word death. The h seems more like a mistake to me. But then again it could be deliberate. That's just what I feel like it is of course. Needs looking into.
@@nicktrousers Not really. He/they(?) likely used an early IBM computer to configure multiple solution, multi layered messages from what we see here now as the initial Oranchak solve. This can further can be read off as adjacent space steganography when reconfigured (unadulterated in other respect) of which some MAY be the actual intended content. Possibly a discrimination key or mask is required for some. The strange arrangement is to allow for the other configurable transpositions. Spiral arrangement and by simply placing the text back INTO the 17 x20 rectangle amongst others. The spatial understanding required by Z/ them? to composite this is immense.
Yeah that zodaik part seems deliberate. Substituting letters with a key for those letters so that zodaik come up. Possible. That would mean that it was transposed first and then substituted the letters. There are some things that seem like they would happen if transpose first then substitute. I mean if you transpose and you have the transposed text in front of you it seems easier to do this.
@@nicktrousers Not sure, I didn’t even consider the possibility of the transposition being applied first. Possible. The thing is, if he had transposed it first and then substituted the letters, I don‘t think the A and I would be mixed up in „ZODAIK“. Could of course be a simple orthographic error too, but it seems more likely to me that he just couldn‘t get the transposition to work out to spell ZODIAK with the substitution being done beforehand. I don‘t think Zodiac was a very bright person. I could totally see him simply overlooking the possibility to change the substitution in order to spell ZODIAK with the symbols. And instead he kept changing up the transposition.
From the way it's written it seems like the key to the 13 character cypher to the last message would be hidden in the 340, maybe the random nature in which you cracked it caused you to miss something, just speculating though.
FIrst plain word of the first section HER, First line of second section LIFE IS. Could the cipher have been designed to leave these in the plain to indicate that the cipher is divided into two section, it would be interesting to see if HER or LIFE IS was used to make the key
david you are a legend after decoding this code and ur name will be in history books forever, i love u bro, such a smart person u r, i am also a computer professional, ur channel is one my fav utube channels.
At 20:35 in the video you highlight a couple of the pivots in the cipher, can you explain (either in text or video!) how they come about given the encryption schema? Also, someone on the forum pointed out that the letters for "e" kinda spell Cabbie, which is spooky. And it's Jarlve? I have been reading it as Jarvie (jar-vee) all this damn time!
Great work just shows you using all of zodiacs workings in it's entirety gives clues. Rush to editor written diagnoally no way a coincedence. Still beleive because of this all codes of his can be broken. There must still be many clues available as he has put things in a certain way for a reason. While 340 is more complex than first cipher. Was he disappointed it got broken so quickly or did he just want people to have to work harder to break this code? After all if the diagonal is a clue plus the content, means he would have wanted it to be broken within months of sending it or what's the point. Enigma codes were meant not to be broken that is the point of their cipher. Zodiac on the other hand wants his to be broken to reveal his message so he leaves clues but he never imagined that he made it so difficult that it would take 51 years. I would have thought zodiac had mixed feelings. There is the satisfaction and smugness that his cipher was not decoded but also an underlying annoyance that his message was not revealed at the same time. Did this put him off sending more ciphers?
My first reaction to the presentation of the decoded 340 was recalling the FBI's documentation on the cipher. Decades ago, one of the Bureau's analysts had stated: "There will be an unmistakable sense of rightness about the [correct] solution". And there it was, the sense of rightness, seen for the very first time, and indeed unmistakable. :-) By the way, I suspect that in the penultimate sentence, he actually intended to say, effectively: "I am not afraid, because I already know what my new [after]life is going to be", and that the one-letter difference was just another example of his numerous misspellings or mistakes which he had made during the encryption. (The 408 contained multiple misspellings and encoding errors as well). (Of course, it is little more than speculation to debate Zodiac's intent as far as those more nebulous parts of his correspondence are concerned, and it will most likely remain speculation even when he is identified. With the shift and reversal of "life is" to the very end, the possible intended messages become coherent as well: "I am not afraid, because I know that my new life will be an easy one. Death is life" - i.e. "My victims' death is my eternal life", "Death will be the beginning of afterlife" or "In 'paradice', death is life"... etc. With Zodiac's lack of punctuation, one can hardly be certain about those). Incidentally, the solution does allow for a number of additional interesting speculations, not directly related to the encryption itself. For instance, is there a hint of a resigned acceptance of death in there, or is it just reading too much into the context? If it's really there, then could Zodiac have been terminally ill, and could learning of the illness have become this particular serial killer's final stressor? And another one: considering that Zodiac was extremely recreative and incapable of much originality, where did he lift the encryption techniques that he (re)used for the 340 - was it Laffin, was it Kahn, or still another source?
@@drogadepc It's a multiple solution metatext. New transpositions obtainable from the reconfiguring of the unadulterated Oranchak solution into various formats including 17x20 , 20 x17 , Spiral algorithm with the initiating word 'kernel' being - I hope you are... S O F U N T O U A R O Y I H E L E P O H G N I V A Etc, etc. This one has '****. I see P.Stine about mess' achievable in adjacent character writing steganography. Along with " At Mensa ____has IBM software he can use" Plus he/they may be trying to claim the Manson crimes with "Noose Sebring. Hang, that was fun in Tates" (Punctuation being added for effect). Vids up.
I've seen one comment talking about the Golden Bug by Edgar Alan Poe. Apart from being a horror writer, he also had interest in cryptography and cyphers himself. Take a look at this story, it indeed has some interesting concepts, along with a poem called Valentine, if I'm not mistaken, and his article "A Few Words on Secret Writing".
For the person who posted this. Looks like you are into cryptology. The Ciphers were created with L programming. L ++ to be exact. So, the codes are not numeric substitution or polymorphic, L programming allows you to customize commands within the arrays, and it allows you to compile also, and it allows you to work on individual values even within an array. In English. The CWO/CW was able to code the ciphers without destroying the language. (Think about what I am saying). This may be what he did to achieve his goal **(if 1, null, if 2 (2 becomes 1), If 3 (1=2, 2=3 etc.) , then reduce anything over 6 to 4, under 5 to 3 and on and on. The result was (anagrams) of English words & acronyms. If you ran a frequency test, you still could not figure it out, unless you had the correct database to compare it to. The alphabet would not be able to do the trick and lead you to the common answers. You would have had to guess that the base language was United States Military language, and you would have had to have a database of all the United States anagrams & acronyms for positions, jobs, paygrades, locations, actions etc. especially for the Navy. If you had that and ran a frequency test, you would then have printed a lot of military anagrams and been well on your way to solving the ciphers. I got lucky and guessed right and had google to index the information. That is how I solved it. But I did it by hand. Took a while. But still, they are amazing documents. Because you would have had to write all the sentences down, then transformed each into anagram code, then laid them out in the proper order to tell the story as a narrative in tape form, (Turin Machine), and then place them in a box. Even if you started left bottom up, across on top, down right and left bottom and then added a diagonal cross -section as the base, how in the hell do you get all the lines to work together without a lot of null space. How he did that is the genius!! and I have not figured it out yet. Some names and places that were anagrams could have been set as "print Only' like special characters, so they would repeat as is. But you still have to have single letters, with multiple meanings working in multiple directions like a train crossing, within a Matrix of boxes that all work together in all directions. Incredible!! He could have created a 'test' for a custom conflict based on how he constructed his anagrams, but because of the wonderful flexibility of L ++, the individual input could conflict while the custom arrays complied without error. It would have to be a custom test, comparing individual letters, or groups of letters conflicting within the correctly compiled arrays. You could then take the results and (by hand) start to resolve each conflict by subtracting, changing or adding a letter or symbol for direction or phonetic meaning to move the story along, that would become your punctuation. But by Hand, that would just be pure hell!! But Also, Pure Genius!!**
Hi. Odd question I am not a US citizen but running his name in code would not be lacking true ID. What about running his name as a social security number. Not even sure if the digit count matches but could that not be a accurate avenue?
at playtime 13,46 you have to look from the fourth line from the bottom right there it says in mirror writing from far right to left 4 letters S,V,R,S Ross sullivan
This really looks like he checked a book on encoding out of the library and tried to put in a whole bunch to make it hard. I think the H that's out of alignment was a copy error and he just didn't know enough about what he was doing to realize that, "Eh, I'll just stick it over here," would screw stuff up. Or he did it deliberately to screw Everything up, but didn't make nearly as much of a hurdle as he intended. I wonder if the five symbols that decode the same will decode the same in the short messages. Or could be presumed to decode the same as a starting place.
At minute 10:27 considering the correct letters that zodiac should be used we have "usuisniksks" that form the sentence " n kiss u kiss u " sounds like a goodby letter...
The secret pal snowman card Zodiac seems to have sent has a set of TWO keys seems to be very important to figuring out his name and using two ciphers together to solve it. Please keep working to find his name!
Looking at the commonalities between the 2 symbols charts at 26:35. Wondering how intentional that could be. Whether those letters, combined, could spell something meaningful. You have D, inverted K, inverted L, N and P, and on the right-hand columns, A, E, I and again N. Not one graphic symbol here. Just letters. What struck me is you could phonetically write A.LEE ALLEN (yeah, I know, wrong spelling) and the words KILLED and PEEPLE. So, not rigorous (why use some inverted letters and not others), full of liberties and approximations. But maybe a better brain than mine could do something with the basic idea? Anyway, congrats David for all the brilliant work and thanks for continuing the series.
Fantastic video as usual David. I was just wondering is the circle and the curved line on the envelope and the cipher are of any significance? The curved line in the cipher cuts through, backward P, filled circle, G,
There was talk about those circles being put there by investigators, maybe to point out places they found or tested for fingerprints? But I'm not sure.
I feel like the message is fairly rambling and just off the top of his head though the cipher probably took some time. So I came up some ideas on how he might have created the transpose without much work and allowed for the mistake and the insert. This is just conjecture So don't take it too seriously. I think he took something like a thick wooden cylinder and wrapped 9 BLANK strips of paper around pining them together and onto the wood. The pins would start in a vertical column. 17 Characters +1 pin = 18. 360' / 18 = 20 degrees. It's pretty easy to make 20 degree markings or have a tool like a rotating vise or lathe rotate the cylinder accurately. He can then just ramble on writing from top to bottom, turning the cylinder 20 degrees when he reached the bottom. After finishing a section he just pulls the pins from the wood and shifts them over to create the diagonal pattern with the pins. The top pin gives him the position to start transcribing the code to paper which he does writing left to right. On the second section to add the "Life Is" he just writes backwards on the top line and skips it as he writes normally. I think the mistake is a real mistake and shows us his final step. He skipped a character while transcribing and didn't notice it until he came to the end of the row. Where he noticed the mistake and 'fixed' it is what made me think of loops around a cylinder. It seems plausible to me that it was some method like this.
The suspect name Edward Edwards has been proposed and has the correct number of characters for the short cryptogram..Did I miss info on this...?.. Does it work at all...unicity would be an issue too..no?
Ignoring the splitting and corrections, can't this just be thought of as coming up with the message, then translating the nth row 2(n-1) positions to the right? Or am I missing something?
I noticed that the letters that occur more frequently in English language (a, e, t) seemed to have more possible code substitutions.. Must have been on purpose, so as to resist frequency analysis?
Yes, that is a feature of "homophonic substitution". When used properly, they do indeed increase the difficulty of frequency analysis by hiding the appearances of high frequency English letters. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher#Homophonic_substitution
On the note to Belli, Zodiac wrote 'Mery X Mass" -- there are also multiple "X"s in his writing - he could be a member of the Tenth Brigade [ X Brigade ] .. a Catholic [ Mass ].. or/and a PARA Trooper [ Paradise three times in 340 ] ..
You can try flipping the "inverted letter" rows in the cypher or so. I guess he might have wrote a message in columns, inverted a few row so he got those "inverted letters" and used it as a cipher. Symbols may be "spaces". commas, and so on.
![Lethal Company Music Video 🎵 "Follow The Orders" [VERSION A]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QeooZB4Z7RA/mqdefault.jpg)
You know what would be funny? If somehow, the key to Zodiac's identity was in his spelling errors.
You might be on to something 🤭
More funny thing would be if he hid his name in the descripted text, requiring another layer of cracking without people knowing as it seemed fully done. ;)
@@soroganath2069 freaky stuff ahah
I was thinking the same damn thing
Maybe it is coordinates that are error places?
Samuel Blake stated, in his Vice interview that, "..there’s relatively similar schemes from a 1950s US Army cryptography manual that wasn't declassified until like 2014. " Kevin Fagan, for the SF Chronicle, also commented that the "scheme for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s." I'd love for Mr. Oranchak to elaborate upon this in an upcoming video. If this is true, then the implications are enormous for the Zodiac case. It would narrow the field of suspects exponentially, for perhaps the first time in the history of the case.
I was thinking about the Diana cryptosystem.
@@kathykline7202 Hey man, the Justice League didn't even exist in the 40's and 50's. They weren't created until the 60's! Busted!
@@kathykline7202 Well, I don't know about any of that, but I know about the Justice League of America. And it definitely didn't exist until the 60's, started up by Gardner Fox for DC. So nobody was using Justice League products in the 40's and 50's.
@@kathykline7202 I didn't realize you were serious about your theories, I thought you were messing around. Maybe there's something to your ideas. The Justice League wasn't around in the 40's and 50's though, so I thought you were maybe pulling people's chains or something. Sorry bro, I see now that the Justice League comment was an honest mistake on your part.
In fact... JB is a good candidate...
I have to say, just the content by itself is enough, but the editing and animations really takes it to a whole other level. It’s incredibly well made!
I was wondering if you're going to continue the series after finding the holy grail. Well, this part is an answer. An excellent answer.
Personally I think there is still more to find. I personally have a gut feeling that there is more than one message inside the code that was cracked. Almost as if we have only have half of the message so far
@@unnamedchannel1237 A double message with only one encrypting code ? This is Einstein...
@@unnamedchannel1237 There's still Z13 and Z32
Bro imagine the zodiac sends another letter saying he’s alive and watching
The cop that saw the zodiac after the murder of Pau Stine estimated him to be between 35 and 45. That was 52 years ago so he’d be between 87 and 97 so I doubt he’s still alive.
@@4gegtyreeyuyeddffvyt if he's be around 87 i feel like he'd still have a decent chance of being alive though. 97 not so much though. I suppose the real question would be more so if he's alive would he even keep up with any of this stuff or know how to use the internet.
@@4gegtyreeyuyeddffvyt what if he was actually young though?
@@4gegtyreeyuyeddffvyt after all it is just an estimate and something in the profile could have made him seem older than he actually was.
@@ShabazzTBL let’s say he was only 20 at the time then that would put him at 72 today so yea he could definitely still be alive. I kinda hope he is alive as I’d love to see him get caught and go to prison.
the animations in this series are sooo satisfying. i love it
Thank you!!
@@doranchak can you tell me your email i would like to discuss something with you if its alright?
@@playtime5051 that very link outlines how it is a hoax
@@doranchak and advice on decrypting numerical values like GPS coordinates embedded in a larger cipher? I was able to solve the vast majority but the numbers.... there really isn't much to go on
28:00 It would be interesting to look into what cipher books were available in the Zodiac's time period.
And maybe do the same thing as in the movie Se7en. Look in public libraries the names of the people borrowing these cipher books. If the name match to one of the pontential suspects. Than you have it!
@@rafaeldettogniguariento8247 Never gonna work. You're talking about literally hundreds of libraries in the SF area. Several years worth of records to sift through. Libraries kept minimal records at that time, and nothing electronic. At best, you're gonna get a list of names like G. Wilson, S. Fernandez. How is that going to help? Even if a name matches a potential suspect, it's only very, very, very circumstantial evidence.
donno if he can access thesis or not tho...
I think books about these kinda ciphers are numerous even in that era. Likely any library would have books about ciphers, and codes so i doubt it would narrow down the suspects. There were lot of hobbyists as well even the people who cracked one of the letters were just amateurs
@@lalli8152 I wasn't thinking in terms of finding a suspect, but rather for finding clues as to his knowledge of coding. Use that to approach decoding his ciphers.
In the news snipplets, i love how they vary from 3 more or less random citizens to 3 code experts and intellectuals...
They did not break the code in fact backdated this channel
Hi Victoria Fuchsia in fact that is the truth
Now that the 340's been solved... Wow just wow... I never thought it would have been done in my lifetime.
Did anyone notice that the amount of different symbols he used for each letter seemed to be related to the frequency that letter is used. For example the letter "y" isn't used often so it had two symbols to represent it, but the letter "e" is used frequently, it had five symbols to prevent it from being easily guessed. The zodiac was able to make such difficult cyphers because he understood language.
“LIFE IS DEATH” makes more sense as
the message title or theme,
rather then inserted awkwardly into one of the sentences.
Or part of a bigger message? Maybe theyre a part of a message split across several codes.
Seems like a lot of awkwardness lies around the "life is" and "death" at the end that doesn't get flipped for some reason. This specific message outside of the normal cypher could be cause for the mistakes he made in encoding the msg.
I think "death is life" is better
its "death is life"
I think it is at least safe to say he seems to have taken frequency into account when choosing symbols, with common letters assigned more symbols then uncommonly used letters. Hardly a surprise I think, but he seems to have actively tried to make frequency analysis impossible, which means he at least must have been familiar with the concept.
The Zodiac Killer was our childhood boogeyman in California, among many famous boogeymen. It’s so strange to see international coverage of this. In the 70s, 80s, there was so much speculation about when he would appear again.
I remember like yesterday. I believe he died.
Zodiac was so obsessed in his name and intended to cipher the message with the keys leaving the name at the end precisely wow
Why is David Oranchak my favorite intellectual now?
+1
+2
2:28 Oh hey, even the Zodiac himself was talking about this!
I was thinking the same 😂
Glad the videos are continuing. Was worried that would of been it when it was solved.
Found this. The zodiacs ciphers all have 17 items in a row. I think he may have used a Heptadecagon in some way in his code creation. If you look into how you create a Heptadecagon, there is lots of math with polar coordinates and circles. Notice the relation to his symbol and messages and the polar coordinate system. His symbol is a circle on a polar coordinate system.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptadecagon.
you guys are geniuses. Well done. The Knight possibility is a legit educated guess.
3:25 is Ukraine, not Russia. Wonderful video anyway though.
It literally says "Ukraine" but in Cyrillic, he couldn't decypher it.
WHO CARES??? who?
@@megapro1725 me
@@megapro1725 Everyone who doesn't think that USA is the only country on Earth.
@@soroganath2069 hohol, calm down
Cryptography and ciphers like this are really interesting me right now, and I love how you explain the whole process of solving it and how it could have been made by Zodiac. Thank you thank you for your amazing solving and videos!
Proud of you David! You made an unbearable 2020 something special. One step closer to closure for the families victimized by the Zodiac killer.
The zodiac killer was a monster but a very smart monster. I love how he definitely knew what he was doing to stay a mystery and one of his letter over 50 years later
He wasn't smart. Just lucky. His ciphers were bs
@@Rando_Shyte if you don’t think he knew what he was doing you might need to look more into him. You aren’t going to murder people and taunt the government and cross your fingers that you don’t get caught. He absolutely knew what he was doojf
@@DakotahMiskus I've said it before and I'll say it again. It doesn't take a genius to randomly shoot people in a remote place and get away with it in the 1960's. No modern forensics or DNA. Plus he could barely spell and he encoded all his ciphers incorrectly. He was a numbskull maniac who got lucky.
@@DakotahMiskus he didn't. His first cipher was cracked somewhat easily. Then, as the coward he was, he started trying mumbo jumbo to hide his messages, but even then he didn't give anything remotely useful. Was too afraid for it.
This code was not particularly sophisticated. It's similar to codes I was messing around with when I was 12.
It's just that cracking codes is way more difficult than making them up. That's kind of the point of codes...
I loved doing puzzles with as a kid and watching your teams hard work has reignited that passion. Your ability to break down a puzzle that has baffled the world this far into the information age into something which is easily digestible is rivaled only by the humility and good nature I've seen from all your efforts.
He suddenly used more techniques in his ciphers in 69. I wonder what library books were around about this topic in his area. He may have had a favorite book where he found inspiration.
I Don't know if this is even possible as it is just an idea looking at the Zodiac's writings but he mentions the word dice. Now I may be completely off the map with this theory, but i have a small and very wacky idea. To me when I read that I thought if he has purposely made spelling errors on something he knows a great deal about, is it possible that he has tied other things to these codes than just movies. as he already referenced "The Most dangerous game" is it possible he may have tied board games to these puzzles. I had a very strange feeling that the board game Risk may be linked to not only the writings but the map of the Zodiac's crimes, as I said it is only just a theory but I thought it was worth putting it out there just incase the odd chance it had but it probably hasn't haha. Really well done videos and hope there is more to come!! keep up the good work guys!!!
I can't wait for your video discussing which clues in the 340 turned out to be meaningful. Been waiting to get the definitive features vs phantoms break down for over three years, haha :)
The amazing thing that rarely seems to come up about is WW2 codebreakers is they were cracking a foreign language along with its cultural idioms.
Well I wouldn’t call any of you amateur code breakers! 🤣Great work. I think most people didn’t really ever think this would be solved.
'Amature' doesn't refer to skill level. It just means it isn't their job; they're not professionals.
Most people have never heard of Zodiac.
@@guitarslim56 Considering it had a hollywood film made about it, I'd imagine it's not *that* obscure...
Don and Bettye Harden, the schoolteachers that solved the first Zodiac cypher, were also amateur cryptographers. That doesn't diminish their accomplishment, it just means they weren't professional codebreakers, and instead did cryptography as a hobby.
@@RockandrollNegro And one of them was the killer himself. Don.
What a great video. Fascinating seeing your thought process, even if I am waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of my depth when it comes to code breaking. I too would love to know where the zodiac killer learned what was needed to make this cypher. Seems like that might be an important clue as to who this individual is. Great work, all of you who were involved.
Plot twist> David Oranchak is the Zodiack killer who got frustrated that nobody could decript it for this long.
nah he was not alive then this plot twist doesn't make sense
@Bot número 4 you're stupid
@@kathykline7202 "iTs a DoUblE cIpHer" prove it
@@kathykline7202 please explain your method
@@swastikchakraborty295
Party pooper
Obviously the Zodiac Killer was an intelligent man. Just to create the code is an effort in its self
I'd suspected that some sort of symmetry would be key here, but never in a million years could I have figured this out
About how he chose the specific ciphers for the letters, I'd guess that he only transposed to the substitution-cipher after he made a plaintext of the encrypted letter, and adapted it based on how he wanted it to look. Like, signing off with what almost looks like "zodiac", "zo>aik", with the zodiac sign in front of it. Down the vertical middle, you have P, and further down D(cirkel)I(cirkel)C(cirkel)
I suspect he used some physical tool (e.g. involving cutting/folding/rolling paper) because that would explain why the message is split awkwardly into chunks.
his encryption method may have had a physical limit to how much text could fit.
also i wonder if the spelling errors were made before or after the substitution cypher
e.g. did he accidentally translate letters into the incorrect symbols to begin with, or just copied over the wrong symbol at some point while transferring the message?
Comment on encipherment errors:
The errors can be broken down into several types. These errors may inform how the encipherment was performed.
First there's the C in "paradice". This was some sort of intentional choice so I'm disregarding it.
Other errors are likely to be products of consistent error:
U into A in "fun" and "because" in the first section.
S into O in "brings" in the first section.
I into L in "paradice" the first section.
N into H in "sooner" in the second section.
I into E in "I" in the second section.
In these cases, the character that is incorrectly not used exists in other parts of the text. This indicates "genuine" error, which may say something about how the encipherment was performed that would make an error likely. The U, N and I errors are plausibly a result of misreading letters (telling us the plaintext being worked from was in lower case), but the others make less sense. I am particularly interested that the A error occurs in the first section of text, but not the second section; it may say something about the likely order of actions in the full encoding process.
One other error exists:
K into V in "work" and "know" in the second section.
The letter K does not occur elsewhere in the text. This may indicate that the letter-symbol substitution was already "set" when the plaintext was composed, not including the letter V, or may indicate that some equipment used to perform the encipherment (like a typewriter) caused the K to be read as a V.
Great stuff. Coming up with the splitting of the text in 3 parts
Seems the hardest. Although once you decide on that diagonal reading method it makes sense. And what lead to the diagonal reading method was those bigrams 19 periods apart which seem like they want to be read in that diagonal manner. Solving it back then really was a lot more difficult. Perhaps there might be substitution patterns before the transpotition. Maybe he wrote his text to 17 letter rows substituted the letters with that key and then transposed it reading it diagonally crossing out a symbol once it's transposed on to the final paper. I guess you need to write the life is part before the transpotition and skip it when doing so otherwise the placement doesn't work. That life is part and the h definitely a slight mystery. I wasted some of my time as well on that webtoy !!! 😂 The s's on that Halloween card match up with the - on the cipher I think ? Anyways definitely hints around the stuff he sent. Interested in the next parts of the series!
Edit
I guess it seems like it was transposed first and then substituted if you take those zodaik parts and some of its symmetric aspects like the + and the - - into account.
If you have a tool or device for reading the message or key that has holes in it or something you can wrap around a device that is the key with diagonal holes. If the holes are diagonal, they will meet at the corners and the device will be weak where the corners meet. If you go down and over two spaces, there is plenty of material left between the holes at the corners and so the device can be solid
That seems very plausible. It'd be interesting to try to reproduce theorized construction methods such as that.
where was this type of code used or taught prior to the zodiac killings?
10:05 Imagine the rows in the Scytale cyphertext loop around horizontally. Numbering lines from 0 to 8, The 0-th line is already correct, and to correct the n-th line displace all letters in the row 2n positions to the right. That fixes all the rows in the Scytale and gets you the actual cyphertext!
maybe there's some transposition that does this naturally? what i can see is that it corrects the Scytale exactly.
EDIT I see the transposition now: Start on the first letter I. Do a knights move 2 spaces to the left and 1 down. The characters you land on are the ones that begin each row (I, E, E, D, B, so on...), and the order of the characters relative to each other is preserved. Dont know if it works for the second block of cyphertext, but it seems equivalent to the triangles method.
Uh that's how they solved it. I mean the knight's move thing.
This is more than 100% just my brain screwing with me, but for some reason from F to O of the 340's key is reading as a sentence to me "It is my cipher told to nobody alive." I figure it might be nice to comment this useless bit in case I soon suffer an aneurism or something as divine punishment for obtaining information. I'm most likely fine though and have wasted whoever is reading this's time. :)
hmm 🤔
More info is better, dont be ashamed of providing it. It still seems slightly off but the base is correct. I dont know
DONT get up....
This is just a hunch but I think there will be a second/first half still hidden in this somewhere. I think they only got half the message de coded
@@unnamedchannel1237 why do you think so?
Thank you, David, for everything you and your collaborators have done. Interesting that Z would put so much effort into making the 340 virtually impossible to "crack." The decoded text further explains his reason for killing - collecting slaves for life in "paradice" - building on his previous 408 message. Does the degree of complexity/difficulty here suggest that was Z's genuine motivation rather than a mere terror tactic designed to further frighten the public? If he wanted to simply scare people, would he have not made the code easier to solve? Or was he pissed that the Hardins so easily breaking the 408? Perhaps being "crack proof" was more important than the actual message. Plenty of mystery remains...
Description of Zodiac:
Reddish Brown Curly Hair, Crew-cut, possibly greasy
5'8"- 6 ft. Tall
Beefy build, Barrel-chested, Stocky Build
Possible slumbering gait
Normal looking
Wore glasses during killings, uncertainty if he always wore them or if a disguise
Brown Old, Pleated Suit Pants
Military Boots, Possible short shoes
Car had two different front tires
Possible Brown Car
David, have you tried transcribing his original plaintext (without misspellings) on a typewriter? Note the movement of your fingers in x,y keyboard coordinates when you duplicate the misspellings. You should do this on a mechanical typewriter, a telegraphers’ mill, and a radio mill, as all have slightly different keyboard layouts.
The 'misspellings' are what CARRY the metatext. The entire UNADULTERATED Oranchak Blake Eycke solution is reconfigurable in other formats including the 17x20 original tall rectangle, horizontal 20 x17 & other 'columnars' plus spiral solves. There is even a (1960s) 7 digit binary to ASCII solve achievable with the TIMES 17 Cardano Grille type mask.
Can't wait until the other messages are solved. I feel it's only a matter of time
On the topic of symbol assignments - do you have any opinion on the choices that were made with regards to how many symbols to map to each letter for the homophonic part of the cipher. I was thinking about how I would go about writing a cipher like this. I would have started with deciding my plaintext before working out how many symbols to assign to each letter to 'flatten' the frequency curve as best I could by assigning by proportion. Doing this I worked out that 'H' for example should have had 5 symbols assigned to it instead of the 1 that it ended up with. Do you think this was a deliberate choice (to create a frequency spike) or was the author of the cipher using a frequency chart in an book which gave a vastly lower significance to 'H' and that the author didn't notice. It just seems odd that no attempt was made to mask such a common character.
Another anomaly in this regard is the letter 'U' which only occurs 6 times in the plaintext but is assigned 3 symbols to represent it.
What system do you think the author used just to decide how many symbols to use for each letter? Does it also imply that the key was generated before the author had any idea what he was going to write?
Good questions. I've wondered these things and don't really have an answer. My hunch is that he purposefully deviated from the expected distribution of symbol-to-letter assignments to try to confuse people trying to break his ciphers.
Seeing the video the day it was released (through recommended) makes me feel good for some reason even though i haven’t done jack
It's ( the code key to the 340 and other Z ciphers ) just the 408 code key with the added decoding of the MY NAME IS cipher added to it
I don't get how you figured out the first substitutions.
So we had lots of variations of the cipher text, basically rearrangements that follow simple rules. We fed each one into the powerful azdecrypt software, which is designed to find the correct substitutions for a substitution cipher, as long as it's a real cipher with a real message. Eventually, azdecrypt was able to recover a lot of the correct substitutions for one of the variations, which was very close to the correct rearrangement the the cipher.
Azdecrypt figures out the correct substitutions through trial and error, which it does very quickly. It guesses a key, which is usually wrong at first. Then it makes random changes to the key and measures the quality of the plaintext (how closely it resembles the English language). Eventually it will find the key that produces English text, if the cipher is correctly arranged and is a real substitution cipher.
Let me know if you still have questions.
@@doranchak Wow, thanks for personally responding. So you basically ran a massive brute force program that simultaneously tried different permutations of order and different substitution keys? So you had it set up to flag any combination of both above a certain percentage of words or legibility? So you got a flagged combination with "hope u are"/"gas chamber", thought it was promising and had the computer run combinations with a similar rule set? You said Jarl had come really close to solving the transposition but didn't mention the substitution key, so was it trying both at the same time or not actually putting in a key and only evaluating the probability of a transposition to contain English? Sorry for all the questions and if I'm using the wrong terminology. I really appreciate the response and understand if you're busy.
Hi David, amazing job, congrats! I'm very excited for the upcoming videos! When I saw the movie, back in 2010 (I think), this case brings me some light because I am not a north american and this case was not familiar in my country. I was very upset at that time, because it was so hard to me to realize that this guy was never caught by the police since 70's. Unfortunately I never read the Graysmith books because here in my country it's very difficult to find and by some reasearch on the internet back then I think that the 340 was solved by him. Some years later, here I am now, watching your videos and amazed by the great job that you've done with these guys. I am a programmer too and it's so good to see how technology and good efforts can bring dead cases to a proper solution. Greetings from Brazil!
I think he used a piece of paper with holes on it with the message wrapped around something. The over 2 and down is necessary because if you go one over and one down, the corners of the holes meet and the cipher implement becomes weak and can break or tear. I think the two over and then one down was just due to necessity.
I’m wondering if you ever tried decoding using the same method but starting the diagonal from right to left instead of left to right. Also, has anyone tried from bottom upwards in the diagonal also in left and right movements? We could be leaving 3/4 of the message still hidden.
Reminds me of a book I had as a kid "The know-how book of spycraft"-- where you'd use what the book called a a "pigpen" method for creating the cipher characters. I'll look forward to hearing Oranchek's ideas on how the cipher characters were assigned.
I couldnt crack the cipher but the same writer from san francisco was a writer in tidbits in palm springs the exact same layout as the news paper of the ti
Es of the zodiac killer are replicated in palm springs tidbits. Allen was a master at crosswords, cartoons, definitions, and writing. He can do crosswords so well its crazy. Imagine the symbols as black spots like a crossword. I came across this by accident when i was first introduced into the zodiac killer. Realized later its 3 people allen, darren beach-nielson or nelson and cameron. BNS RAD ( lived in san francisco and palm springs. Newspaper and tidpits match i style.
If Lester Holt said ANYTHING about me I would die. Congrats on the accomplishment and the acknowledgement!
Okay, I may just be noticing something that wasn't intended, but seeing the symbols written out for A, it struck me that you could create a word, if you consider a backwards L is a J, O is o, the K is k, crosshairs is a vertically dissected e and the half triangle is the right way round to fit as, R or r. Ergo Joker. It's just one letter and could be a coincidence, but it strikes me that if Zodiac started off by creating the symbols with a word in mind for the letter, then just randomly chose which symbol of that word each time he used the letter, it could maybe be a plausible explanation for why he chose those specific symbols and assigned them the way he did. He was working off a preconcieved word. Edited to add, if that is the case then A Joker, might also be him making use of the twentysix letters to describe himself.
Good idea
zodiac comic. 1964 tim holten
Congratulations to jarl for also breaking 400 year old Langren code.
Such a great follow up to your episode 5 video, I couldn't help but feel genuinely happy for you guys thanks in part to all the news/media coverage from all over the world that you shared. I could feel the hype from the cryptographers and zodiak buffs through the screen. I was blown away when I saw all those news stories and articles from different countries, some that I never would've thought gave a damn whatsoever about some psychopath's murder spree over 50 years ago, surreal! I can't imagine how incredible it must be for you three haha.
Congratulations!
The cipher is actually really clever, because it uses more different symbols for more common letters - so it messes with the letter-frequency analysis - but not an exactly proportionate amount to the frequency, so that it still *looks like* the symbol frequency is different enough. (Plus, obviously, the sheer amount of different symbols indicate even to newbies in decryption that it's not a simple substitution code.) It's curious to see such an elaborate and clever code to be used by a person who can't spell right. Did the FBI ever look at the "is dyslexic" marker in their investigations? Because it's a non-too-uncommon feature of dyslexic people to be above average with numbers and logic...
In the 408, I encodes T
In the 340, *I and I* encode T
So those are almost another preserved encoding
Also, in the 340, which was the Zodiac's revenge for his 408 being so easy to solve, the greater than sign < encodes I
"I'm greater"?
In the 408, y encodes U
In the 340, / encodes U
Similar symbols except for the extra stroke of the y
In the 340, < encodes I
In the 340, backwards y encodes I
Similar symbols except for the extra stroke of the backwards y
If he was saying, "I'm greater than..." then you might expect the whole phrase to be "I'm greater than you U"
So if we look at U...
In the 408, you encodes U
In the 340, / encodes U
Similar symbols except for the missing extra stroke of the /
"U lose a stripe"???
"lose your stripes"??
\ gains a stripe to become backwards y
Encoding
R in the 408 becomes I in the 340
"R. Gains a stripe to become I"
Further associations seem even more contrived
However, the "I'm greater than" seems plausible
I would love to see the map Zodiac refers to on the right (26:57) - could it be a place (town, street perhaps?) or a map reference? He obviously wanted the police to have some kind of chance to decrypt it as he said they have until next fall to dig it up! The left letter starts by asking if they cracked the last cypher then says my name is .... so could the cypher on the left be related to the other one he was referring to? Has anyone compared them? Just curious. So on the left we have the last code linked to the cypher on that page and on the right, he says that the map *coupled with this code" so those could be linked too?! What do you think David? Or was Zodiac just trying to mislead everyone? I'm just astounded that in those days 60s/70s) he was able to devise such a cypher, considering he wouldn't have access to a computer (?) that nobody could decipher for over 50 years! That must have taken him some time. So, I wonder, how many of the suspects had sufficient knowledge of code writing to be able to do it? Was that ever looked at? Your comments right at the end were very interesting indeed.
I still feel like the 'life is' in the 2nd to last line should match up with 'death' in the last line. So then the last line would be 'life is death'
wow i just watched the whole series yesterday what a coincidence.
The diagonal writing being a potential hint in decrypting the cypher is stunning! Thank you for sharing a helpful overview of what the community’s reaction was to the 340 solution.
Great work. 51 years. Might be more hidden within one cipher or some of his letters/ciphers combined. Maybe the misspelled letters can somehow form a message or a name.
I'm really glad you are continuing the series! this is really cool and I am excited to see where it goes
Wow!! Bravo. Never thought I'd live to see this
Franklin had two symbols from the 340 as tattoos which I believe most likely translated to the key from the 340.
I am fascinated by your guys’ work on the zodiac cipher. Impressive, wonderful, amazing. Looking forward to more of your videos. Knock on wood.
Do you think the disruptions in the transposition were deliberate? I could imagine the words written backwards in the last paragraph being deliberate (though it might also just have come from the method he used to make the cipher with), but the missing and repositioned "h" and the added "life is" seem like him badly patching up errors. Maybe he was just too lazy to redo all of the work when he noticed the slip ups and went with them, not realizing how much harder the cipher would become to solve that way.
I can't think of anything right now, but those two peculiarities might help identifying the way he made the cipher. It would need to be a technique that leads to him only discovering his slip ups at the very end or at least only at the end of the second paragraph.
Edit: Also the visible "ZODAIK" signature at the bottom of the cipher might have to do with these alterations. Maybe he just coincidentally realized he could spell Zodiac with his symbols but had to make some changes for it to work (and it still doesn't work out perfectly, as the A and I are interchanged). Note that he could have done this more easily by just changing some of the symbols in his key ex post. I really lean towards the idea that he was either too lazy or rushing to get it done in the end.
Of course they are deliberate. The Oranchak solution reconfigures to rectangular and spiral metatext fields for adjacent space steganography with more content.
The life is part seems like he was filling the gaps. The same with possibly the word death. The h seems more like a mistake to me. But then again it could be deliberate. That's just what I feel like it is of course. Needs looking into.
@@nicktrousers
Not really. He/they(?) likely used an early IBM computer to configure multiple solution, multi layered messages from what we see here now as the initial Oranchak solve.
This can further can be read off as adjacent space steganography when reconfigured (unadulterated in other respect) of which some MAY be the actual intended content. Possibly a discrimination key or mask is required for some.
The strange arrangement is to allow for the other configurable transpositions. Spiral arrangement and by simply placing the text back INTO the 17 x20 rectangle amongst others.
The spatial understanding required by Z/ them? to composite this is immense.
Yeah that zodaik part seems deliberate. Substituting letters with a key for those letters so that zodaik come up. Possible. That would mean that it was transposed first and then substituted the letters. There are some things that seem like they would happen if transpose first then substitute. I mean if you transpose and you have the transposed text in front of you it seems easier to do this.
@@nicktrousers Not sure, I didn’t even consider the possibility of the transposition being applied first. Possible. The thing is, if he had transposed it first and then substituted the letters, I don‘t think the A and I would be mixed up in „ZODAIK“. Could of course be a simple orthographic error too, but it seems more likely to me that he just couldn‘t get the transposition to work out to spell ZODIAK with the substitution being done beforehand.
I don‘t think Zodiac was a very bright person. I could totally see him simply overlooking the possibility to change the substitution in order to spell ZODIAK with the symbols. And instead he kept changing up the transposition.
From the way it's written it seems like the key to the 13 character cypher to the last message
would be hidden in the 340, maybe the random nature in which you cracked
it caused you to miss something, just speculating though.
FIrst plain word of the first section HER, First line of second section LIFE IS. Could the cipher have been designed to leave these in the plain to indicate that the cipher is divided into two section, it would be interesting to see if HER or LIFE IS was used to make the key
Congrats on breaking the code!!! I can't wait to see what happens next.
Awesome video! Thank you so much for making these and sharing your knowledge with us David.
david you are a legend after decoding this code and ur name will be in history books forever, i love u bro, such a smart person u r, i am also a computer professional, ur channel is one my fav utube channels.
At 20:35 in the video you highlight a couple of the pivots in the cipher, can you explain (either in text or video!) how they come about given the encryption schema? Also, someone on the forum pointed out that the letters for "e" kinda spell Cabbie, which is spooky.
And it's Jarlve? I have been reading it as Jarvie (jar-vee) all this damn time!
The "ve" is short for Jarl's last name.
Great work just shows you using all of zodiacs workings in it's entirety gives clues. Rush to editor written diagnoally no way a coincedence.
Still beleive because of this all codes of his can be broken. There must still be many clues available as he has put things in a certain way for a reason.
While 340 is more complex than first cipher. Was he disappointed it got broken so quickly or did he just want people to have to work harder to break this code?
After all if the diagonal is a clue plus the content, means he would have wanted it to be broken within months of sending it or what's the point.
Enigma codes were meant not to be broken that is the point of their cipher. Zodiac on the other hand wants his to be broken to reveal his message so he leaves clues but he never imagined that he made it so difficult that it would take 51 years.
I would have thought zodiac had mixed feelings. There is the satisfaction and smugness that his cipher was not decoded but also an underlying annoyance that his message was not revealed at the same time. Did this put him off sending more ciphers?
My first reaction to the presentation of the decoded 340 was recalling the FBI's documentation on the cipher. Decades ago, one of the Bureau's analysts had stated: "There will be an unmistakable sense of rightness about the [correct] solution". And there it was, the sense of rightness, seen for the very first time, and indeed unmistakable. :-)
By the way, I suspect that in the penultimate sentence, he actually intended to say, effectively: "I am not afraid, because I already know what my new [after]life is going to be", and that the one-letter difference was just another example of his numerous misspellings or mistakes which he had made during the encryption. (The 408 contained multiple misspellings and encoding errors as well).
(Of course, it is little more than speculation to debate Zodiac's intent as far as those more nebulous parts of his correspondence are concerned, and it will most likely remain speculation even when he is identified. With the shift and reversal of "life is" to the very end, the possible intended messages become coherent as well: "I am not afraid, because I know that my new life will be an easy one. Death is life" - i.e. "My victims' death is my eternal life", "Death will be the beginning of afterlife" or "In 'paradice', death is life"... etc. With Zodiac's lack of punctuation, one can hardly be certain about those).
Incidentally, the solution does allow for a number of additional interesting speculations, not directly related to the encryption itself. For instance, is there a hint of a resigned acceptance of death in there, or is it just reading too much into the context? If it's really there, then could Zodiac have been terminally ill, and could learning of the illness have become this particular serial killer's final stressor? And another one: considering that Zodiac was extremely recreative and incapable of much originality, where did he lift the encryption techniques that he (re)used for the 340 - was it Laffin, was it Kahn, or still another source?
I think the mistakes could be intentional, either for misleading people or as result of the killer's obsession with symmetry
@@drogadepc
It's a multiple solution metatext. New transpositions obtainable from the reconfiguring of the unadulterated Oranchak solution into various formats including 17x20 , 20 x17 , Spiral algorithm with the initiating word 'kernel' being - I hope you are...
S O F U N
T O U A R
O Y I H E
L E P O H
G N I V A
Etc, etc. This one has
'****. I see P.Stine about mess' achievable in adjacent character writing steganography.
Along with
" At Mensa ____has IBM software he can use"
Plus he/they may be trying to claim the Manson crimes with
"Noose Sebring. Hang, that was fun in Tates"
(Punctuation being added for effect). Vids up.
I've seen one comment talking about the Golden Bug by Edgar Alan Poe. Apart from being a horror writer, he also had interest in cryptography and cyphers himself. Take a look at this story, it indeed has some interesting concepts, along with a poem called Valentine, if I'm not mistaken, and his article "A Few Words on Secret Writing".
For the person who posted this. Looks like you are into cryptology. The Ciphers were created with L programming. L ++ to be exact. So, the codes are not numeric substitution or polymorphic, L programming allows you to customize commands within the arrays, and it allows you to compile also, and it allows you to work on individual values even within an array. In English. The CWO/CW was able to code the ciphers without destroying the language. (Think about what I am saying). This may be what he did to achieve his goal
**(if 1, null, if 2 (2 becomes 1), If 3 (1=2, 2=3 etc.) , then reduce anything over 6 to 4, under 5 to 3 and on and on. The result was (anagrams) of English words & acronyms. If you ran a frequency test, you still could not figure it out, unless you had the correct database to compare it to. The alphabet would not be able to do the trick and lead you to the common answers. You would have had to guess that the base language was United States Military language, and you would have had to have a database of all the United States anagrams & acronyms for positions, jobs, paygrades, locations, actions etc. especially for the Navy. If you had that and ran a frequency test, you would then have printed a lot of military anagrams and been well on your way to solving the ciphers. I got lucky and guessed right and had google to index the information. That is how I solved it. But I did it by hand. Took a while. But still, they are amazing documents. Because you would have had to write all the sentences down, then transformed each into anagram code, then laid them out in the proper order to tell the story as a narrative in tape form, (Turin Machine), and then place them in a box. Even if you started left bottom up, across on top, down right and left bottom and then added a diagonal cross -section as the base, how in the hell do you get all the lines to work together without a lot of null space. How he did that is the genius!! and I have not figured it out yet. Some names and places that were anagrams could have been set as "print Only' like special characters, so they would repeat as is. But you still have to have single letters, with multiple meanings working in multiple directions like a train crossing, within a Matrix of boxes that all work together in all directions.
Incredible!!
He could have created a 'test' for a custom conflict based on how he constructed his anagrams, but because of the wonderful flexibility of L ++, the individual input could conflict while the custom arrays complied without error. It would have to be a custom test, comparing individual letters, or groups of letters conflicting within the correctly compiled arrays. You could then take the results and (by hand) start to resolve each conflict by subtracting, changing or adding a letter or symbol for direction or phonetic meaning to move the story along, that would become your punctuation. But by Hand, that would just be pure hell!! But Also, Pure Genius!!**
Hi. Odd question I am not a US citizen but running his name in code would not be lacking true ID. What about running his name as a social security number. Not even sure if the digit count matches but could that not be a accurate avenue?
at playtime 13,46 you have to look from the fourth line from the bottom right there it says in mirror writing from far right to left
4 letters S,V,R,S
Ross sullivan
The Belli part is interesting since WILL is not backwards but the words around it are.
Another awesome video, David. You're a machine! Thank you
Has anyone tried doing the transposition with the original symbols?
Maybe they will mean something, he does have normal letters in it
This really looks like he checked a book on encoding out of the library and tried to put in a whole bunch to make it hard. I think the H that's out of alignment was a copy error and he just didn't know enough about what he was doing to realize that, "Eh, I'll just stick it over here," would screw stuff up. Or he did it deliberately to screw Everything up, but didn't make nearly as much of a hurdle as he intended.
I wonder if the five symbols that decode the same will decode the same in the short messages. Or could be presumed to decode the same as a starting place.
"nearly as much of a hurdle?" It went unsolved for 50 years!
Immediately recognized Marvin Belli from the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, he helped put on the festival
At minute 10:27 considering the correct letters that zodiac should be used we have "usuisniksks" that form the sentence " n kiss u kiss u " sounds like a goodby letter...
Interesting idea!
We can also rearrange it to say: "ISIS skunks u". Maybe Zodiac was predicting terrorist groups. 😀
as I am a polyglot i absoltuely loved hearing all the foreign reporting!
The secret pal snowman card Zodiac seems to have sent has a set of TWO keys seems to be very important to figuring out his name and using two ciphers together to solve it. Please keep working to find his name!
Looking at the commonalities between the 2 symbols charts at 26:35. Wondering how intentional that could be. Whether those letters, combined, could spell something meaningful.
You have D, inverted K, inverted L, N and P, and on the right-hand columns, A, E, I and again N.
Not one graphic symbol here. Just letters.
What struck me is you could phonetically write A.LEE ALLEN (yeah, I know, wrong spelling) and the words KILLED and PEEPLE.
So, not rigorous (why use some inverted letters and not others), full of liberties and approximations. But maybe a better brain than mine could do something with the basic idea?
Anyway, congrats David for all the brilliant work and thanks for continuing the series.
Hi, just wanted to correct something: the clip shown at 3:26 is not from Russia, but from Ukraine :)
Fantastic video as usual David. I was just wondering is the circle and the curved line on the envelope and the cipher are of any significance? The curved line in the cipher cuts through, backward P, filled circle, G,
There was talk about those circles being put there by investigators, maybe to point out places they found or tested for fingerprints? But I'm not sure.
I feel like the message is fairly rambling and just off the top of his head though the cipher probably took some time. So I came up some ideas on how he might have created the transpose without much work and allowed for the mistake and the insert. This is just conjecture So don't take it too seriously.
I think he took something like a thick wooden cylinder and wrapped 9 BLANK strips of paper around pining them together and onto the wood. The pins would start in a vertical column. 17 Characters +1 pin = 18. 360' / 18 = 20 degrees. It's pretty easy to make 20 degree markings or have a tool like a rotating vise or lathe rotate the cylinder accurately.
He can then just ramble on writing from top to bottom, turning the cylinder 20 degrees when he reached the bottom. After finishing a section he just pulls the pins from the wood and shifts them over to create the diagonal pattern with the pins. The top pin gives him the position to start transcribing the code to paper which he does writing left to right.
On the second section to add the "Life Is" he just writes backwards on the top line and skips it as he writes normally.
I think the mistake is a real mistake and shows us his final step. He skipped a character while transcribing and didn't notice it until he came to the end of the row. Where he noticed the mistake and 'fixed' it is what made me think of loops around a cylinder. It seems plausible to me that it was some method like this.
That's a great thought.
The suspect name Edward Edwards has been proposed and has the correct number of characters for the short cryptogram..Did I miss info on this...?.. Does it work at all...unicity would be an issue too..no?
19:00 Is it possible he is signing the letter "- Death"?
No. He called himself "Zodiac," not "Death." Rule number one for a serial killer is BE CONSISTENT.
@@guitarslim56 Rules 1-10 dnt get caught...
13:45 I think this is probably a clue to how it was constructed, unless it was an intentional mistake.
Ignoring the splitting and corrections, can't this just be thought of as coming up with the message, then translating the nth row 2(n-1) positions to the right? Or am I missing something?
I noticed that the letters that occur more frequently in English language (a, e, t) seemed to have more possible code substitutions.. Must have been on purpose, so as to resist frequency analysis?
Yes, that is a feature of "homophonic substitution". When used properly, they do indeed increase the difficulty of frequency analysis by hiding the appearances of high frequency English letters. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher#Homophonic_substitution
On the note to Belli, Zodiac wrote 'Mery X Mass" -- there are also multiple "X"s in his writing - he could be a member of the Tenth Brigade [ X Brigade ] .. a Catholic [ Mass ].. or/and a PARA Trooper [ Paradise three times in 340 ] ..
Its Donald Harden. His full name and profession are in 408 cypher.
You can try flipping the "inverted letter" rows in the cypher or so. I guess he might have wrote a message in columns, inverted a few row so he got those "inverted letters" and used it as a cipher. Symbols may be "spaces". commas, and so on.