The White Dot

There has been another finding that I can’t believe I didn’t notice until now, and it supports my assertions from two posts ago (The Obelisk).  Thanks to Jew-Lee Lann for bringing this to my attention.  Look at this picture, which I obtained from her website…

Jew-Lee points out that not only does this dot appear in overhead images, but it also exists in Jim’s studio model, which suggests importance.  Note that even from this non-nadir perspective, one can tell that the dot is more-or-less in alignment with the pool, outcropping, and sculpture.  But how good is the alignment?  Well, here is your answer, using the nearly-nadir image I had already posted to make my observation in “The Obelisk”…

The line that I had previously drawn (which precisely connects the Kryptos sculpture with the Washington Monument) passed directly over the white dot.  Allow me to clarify:  the image I am showing above was created about a year ago, when I didn’t even notice the white dot!  Here is what the line looks like when extended over the Washington DC area…

And here is the other end of the line segment…

That’s right.  If you use Google Earth to draw a line segment that connects the Kryptos sculpture to the Washington Monument, that line passes not only through the aligned courtyard elements (pool and outcroppings) but also directly through the white dot which appears on Jim’s studio model.  It is also easy to verify using Google Earth that the strata in front of the building are nearly parallel to this line as well.  (And Jim has expressed disappointment that they weren’t perfectly parallel.)  Why go to the trouble to indicate this direction if it is not important?  If it’s important, how can the perfect alignment with the Washington Monument not be the best candidate for a reason?  Who still believes that this is a coincidence?

Here’s the Tompkins connection:

I think that there is a VERY good chance that this white dot is the clue that Jim has said was right in front of us (but that we hadn’t noticed). And even though it went unnoticed, I luckily made the connection to the Washington Monument anyway, due to the approximate alignment of the other structures and the association with Tompkins’ other books.
Yes, I know Tompkins was pretty much a kook.  But I have already given other associations between elements of Kryptos and his other work.  It’s pretty clear to me that his work is relevant.  The only question is how.

Regards,

Randy Thompson

Berlin

Together we cooked up a scheme for me to parachute from France into northern Italy and then fall back into Hitler’s redoubt. A fascinating scheme; it might have been my last. As it was, Hitler failed to carry out his part of the plan and I found myself instead with the advance guard of the OSS in Berlin, where, well inside the Soviet Zone, with a Russian major and a bottle of vodka, I realized, sadly, that our enemies had changed.

The only constant in this crazy world would appear to be one’s friends.

– Peter Tompkins, last two paragraphs of A Spy in Rome

One of the biggest challenges with APEX Theory has always been the fact that somewhere around Step 8, the 97 characters of K4 get reduced to only 48 characters.  As I wrote in Step 10, this fact presents a dilemma because during a talk at the Hirshhorn Museum, on September 23, 2005, Jim Sanborn stated, “The final section that hasn’t been decoded yet is approximately one hundred characters.”  So in subsequent steps APEX Theory somehow needs to increase the character count back up from 48 characters to “approximately 100″. Considering that the theory also needed to explain how the “APEX” easter egg was injected into this intermediate stage, things seemed dire indeed.  The only way that I could envision satisfying these requirements was through the use of a book code, whereby Jim Sanborn, knowing that he needed to choose 24 words (indexed by 2 characters each) while also leaving this histogram in place, simply contrived the message and chose his words judiciously so that he could weight those letters more heavily.  At least, that was the theory.

Along with the recent plaintext clue (i.e. “BERLIN” at character positions 64-69) came the information that the plaintext solution contains exactly 97 characters.  While that doesn’t damage the logic that a book code could have been used, it significantly increases the likelihood that something else was (i.e. custom mixtures of transposition/substitution methods that leave the character count unmodified).  So, on a relative likelihood basis anyway, this may be perceived as a blow to APEX Theory.  I appreciate that, and I’m likely to continue my current mode of attack only for some fixed length of time.  After that, I will probably retrace back to Step 5 of APEX Theory.  This step occurs prior to character count reduction of K4, and it is also the step at which I have the most confidence.  Steps prior to 5 are all elegantly and simply motivated, and their easter eggs are more artistic and obvious.  (Pundits that have claimed I purposely manipulated my steps to arrive at those easter eggs are incorrect.  They need to go back and read Steps 1-5, including the motivation and observations, and give me the benefit of the doubt that I have been sincere in the description.)

Before I retrace back to Step 5, there is something that I am very excited about, and it must be checked out.  But first here is some background and speculation regarding Jim Sanborn’s actions and motivations…

The Book that Wasn’t and the Clue that Was

In September of 2009, I met Jim Sanborn and Ed Scheidt at a dinner in McLean, VA (not far from CIA HQ) along with a host of other Kryptos fans.  (We were given a banquet room to ourselves for the occasion.)  The food was excellent, the company fantastic, and the atmosphere was electric.   This was an event that I won’t soon forget.  After dinner, we mingled and shared our progress with Jim, Ed, and each other.

Notably, when I first started talking with Jim, he told me that he intended to write a book on Kryptos that contained facts, history, hints, guidance, encouragement, etc.  I thought “Really?  A whole book?”.  Then I proceeded to tell him about my work, and later I got a chance to do so with Ed too.  Other Kryptos researchers in attendance did the same.  But Jim and Ed had their poker faces on that night, so I didn’t really expect any feedback (positive or negative) to come from those exchanges.

So all this year, I’ve been waiting for news about this book.  Through the Kryptos grapevine (perhaps the Yahoo Kryptos Group page) I heard that Jim might still produce the book if he could find a publisher.  Again, I thought “Really?”  I find that hard to believe.  Jim Sanborn is already a published author, and I also believe that a book on Kryptos would sell at least a hundred thousand copies worldwide within a month.  While that might not land the book on the bestseller lists, it certainly puts it in the realm of economically  sound.  In my opinion, if Jim decided to write a Kryptos book, he would be able to find a publisher.  Something else is causing his reluctance.

Now comes this clue via the New York Times, as opposed to a book.  ”BERLIN” at positions 64-69.  Quite the clue… or is it?   I find the nature of this clue quite interesting, almost more so than its content.  This is a crib, and cryptographers worldwide must be salivating in their sleep over it.  Cribs are extremely useful for cracking codes, especially if you’ve got some powerful computers at your disposal and know how to use them.  But here’s the rub:  cribs are useless without a candidate method to test them with.  If the K4 method is truly a custom code (as both Sanborn and Scheidt have indicated) then you need to be at least in the vicinity of the method before the crib will help.

So I am left with some questions:

(1) What really happened with regard to Jim’s intentions to write a book?

(2) Why did he provide a crib?

I think the answer to these two questions is the same:  somebody is relatively close to the right method, and Jim Sanborn knows it.  He found out about it sometime between the beginning of that dinner and now.

So I have proposed that Jim’s provision of a crib is interesting unto itself.  Now what about the content?  I find that interesting too.  While any 6 characters in the set of 97 would provide a significant boost for an attack (given the method) why did Jim choose to provide those 6?  He could have given us something less unique, like “andthe”, or perhaps even 6 characters that fell across word boundaries.  (Some have suggested that that may have happened here, and that this is not really the word “Berlin” but instead something like “rememBER LINcoln”.  Although that’s possible, I’ll be investigating a different premise for a while.)

So, my premise is that this is indeed the word “Berlin”, and I am wondering why Jim gave us that particular crib.  One possible answer is that such a unique crib can be more helpful than something more innocuous, like “ANDTHE”.  At a minimum, it sets some context about which we can extend the crib.  At the Kryptos Yahoo Group, folks have talked about guessing what may precede these characters, e.g. the words “West” or “East” may be likely.  But if one can say that a unique crib word provides a small boost (as compared to 6 common characters) when trying to crack a substitution cipher, then one could also say that it provides a tremendous boost for a book cipher.  After all, a unique word can help narrow the set of candidate books as well as help determine the method of indexing into them. (“ANDTHE” would do neither.) Since this is currently my preferred area of study for APEX Theory, using the word “Berlin”, I have studied some books and considered the methods.  And I am very excited about something I found…

The Peter Tompkins Connection

As I posted before on this blog, I have found numerous parallels between Kryptos elements and the literary works of Peter Tompkins.  I am convinced that Kryptos references his books, and regardless of whether the relationship is pertinent to solving K4 or the alleged mystery that lies beyond, I am certain that this is important.  The amazing thing is that the only reason I discovered this connection is because of APEX Theory’s insistence that only a book code fits the requirements.  Wouldn’t it be a wonder if APEX Theory is a big pile of steaming bunk, and yet it pointed me towards something important by pure serendipity?  Well, I guess that stranger things have happened, so I can’t prove otherwise.  But I decided to look a little more, and I found some more relevance to Peter Tompkins.

In my supplemental report, I listed a whole bunch of parallels between Kryptos elements (e.g. limestone chunk, red granite, whirlpool, green blob, “SOS”, and alignment of sculpture/pond/strata with Washington Monument) and Tompkins’ books (Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Secrets of the Soil, and The Magic of Obelisks).  Well, there are two more parallels that I didn’t introduce in that report, and so I’ll bring them into play now:

(1) One of Tompkins’ biggest bestsellers was The Secret Life of Plants, a far out treatise that raises the question of whether plants have consciousness and can remember events.  That sure does resonate well with the morse code “LUCID MEMORY” followed by “RQ” (which is essentially a way of placing a question mark at the end of a morse code statement).  The focus of the book is on answering the questions:  Are plants lucid? Do they have memory?  (I had already related the subsequent “SOS” to the book Secrets of the Soil, and I provided a very interesting dust jacket picture to support the relationship.)

(2)  Amongst the various Tompkins’ books that I identified, one of my favorite candidates for book code source was A Spy in Rome, which was essentially Tompkins’ autobiography of the time he spent as an OSS agent in Rome near the end of WWII.  I liked this book because the other Tompkins’ books were strangely hinted at, and we may have been expected to put two and two together and then make the final leap to this one.

Here’s what I find so exciting in light of the new Sanborn clue: after Peter Tompkins (admirably) performed his espionage duties in Rome, his next assignment was in Berlin.  Now, one might think that a book about WWII and living amongst the Gestapo in Germany-occupied Rome would be filled with instances of the word “Berlin”. Well, I checked, and that is not the case.  This book is written entirely from Tompkins’ perspective, and it is quite focused on giving you the description of his local events and observations rather than a dissertation on the general WWII situation.  As such, there are only two occurrences of the word “Berlin” in the entire book.  One of them is in the middle, on page 110, when Tompkins references a German officer coming to Rome with orders directly from Berlin.  But the other occurrence is the most interesting.  The second occurrence happens on the very last page, just a few lines up from the end, and in perfect position for indexing by alphabet characters if you work from the end. The quote at the top of this post contains the relevant passage, and it marks a transitional moment in history: WWII is ending, our enemies change from the Germans to the Russians, and the fledgling OSS gives way to the CIA. I find this very fascinating. (Perhaps “IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE.  HOWS THAT POSSIBLE?” is a clue that is supposed to make us think about referencing words by alphabet characters in the reverse direction?  I = INVISIBLE; T=TOTALLY.  Of course, I’m not suggesting that it be as simple as pulling off the first letter of each word. The indexing scheme would most likely be numeric, but with letters as substitutes.)

In the next few days, I am going to work on creating an ASCII file that is delimited such that one can distinguish individual words, lines, paragraphs, and pages.  I’ll be making that file available at the Yahoo Kryptos Group so that computer-savvy people can ingest the text and investigate modes of indexing either my APEX sequence or any other sequence their own theories indicate are significant.  I am asking for help because I have very little time to work on Kryptos.

Regards,

Randy Thompson

The Obelisk

Here’s a point that I’m bringing forward from the comments section, because it seems to be a common point of contention:

There’s no doubt that Tompkins was certainly “out there”.  But believing in his theories (which I don’t) is not a prerequisite for believing that Sanborn referenced his books (which I do).  Now, back to the previously scheduled program…

It is a well known fact that the strata and the pond placed in the courtyard by Sanborn form a nearly perfect line with the Kryptos sculpture itself.  Furthermore, according to notes taken by Elonka Dunin, Sanborn has confirmed that “the front-entrance pieces were supposed to parallel something in the courtyard, but [he] was surprised and a bit disappointed when it appeared that they did not.”  From overhead imagery, it is easily confirmed that the front-entrance pieces are nearly parallel with the line formed by the courtyard pieces and the Kryptos sculpture.  So one might wonder why Sanborn went to the trouble of forming these lines.  We are clearly supposed to take notice, else why form the parallels?  What do the lines indicate?  Where are they pointing?

I used the linear mensuration feature of Google Earth to find out.  I started by drawing a line from the center of the Kryptos sculpture, through the (approximate) center of the two courtyard strata and along the straight edge of the courtyard pool.  Then I extended the line out across the Washington DC area.  To see the surprising result, as well as its relevance to the works of Peter Tompkins, check out my supplemental report or my APEX Theory website.

The number of correspondences between peripheral elements of Kryptos and the works of Peter Tompkins are now overwhelming.   This simple thesis explains numerous peripheral elements of Kryptos (e.g. limestone rock, polished red granite strata, whirlpool, green blob, “APEX”, “RQ”, “SOS”, alignment of sculpture with courtyard strata and pool).

It simply defies belief that these are all mere coincidences.

Peter Tompkins is the Man!

Following the trail of the previous breakthrough, I’ve found a great number of significant connections between Peter Tompkins and Kryptos.  I believe that Kryptos is related to the literary works of this ex-OSS spy.  These findings are significant even if you don’t appreciate APEX Theory in general, so I’ve made them available via a report that you can get from the following link:  Peter Tompkins and Kryptos.

You can also visit my APEX Theory website and look at the final step there.

Regards,

Randy

Major Breakthrough

Pressing on with the book code concept that I presented at my site before, I have made what I consider to be a very significant breakthrough.  I now believe that the solution to K4 is within reach, assuming a team effort to perform trial & error book code experiments.  I believe that we can constrain the process to a small set of books from a pair of authors that I identify on my APEX Theory site.  But before you go there and look at the work, please consider the following comments and requests…

I am convinced that I am on the right path.  I have been convinced of this for several years (since about the middle of step 8).  And I do believe that if I am left to press on alone, I will eventually crack K4.  It will take quite some time – years perhaps – because I can only spare a couple of hours per month for this effort.  But I am convinced that I will solve it.  All by myself if I must.

So ask yourself this:  why is Thompson sharing his work and asking for help?  The answer is simple: I no longer care whether I am “the one” to first lay eyes on the K4 plaintext.  I care more that we hurry up and solve this puzzle.  Together.  I’m not begging for help or desperate.  I’m impatient.

Apparently most people don’t feel the same way.  Here is what I envision as the spectrum of responses to APEX theory in the community:

(1) Some people don’t care for my theory at all, so they just ignore it.

(2) Some people really like it but don’t want to be on a team, so they ignore it.

(3) Some people really like it and are actively trying to advance it, but they are doing so without telling anyone of their efforts… including me.

I have been trying really hard to get some attention, teamwork, and momentum going but there is little evidence of that having any effect.  If you are a member of set (1) above, then doubtless you feel that this is as it should be, and you can continue to ignore my efforts.  But if you belong to sets (2) or (3) then I would like to humbly ask you to do one simple thing for me:  prior to following the link to my site, please tell at least two other people (whom you know to be interested in Kryptos) about this blog.  Pass them a link to this very page.  Hopefully they will do the same, and we can drive some real team effort here.

Cheers,

Randy Thompson

APEX Theory Updated

Greetings again.

It’s been some time since my last post.  I’ve been quite busy just living my life, enjoying my family, and working for “the man”.  There hasn’t been much time for Kryptos, but I have managed to make a few good observations and potentially move the ball forward a bit.

To see the next step in APEX Theory, please just visit my site.  Come back here and tell me what you think.  Are you ready to help the cause?

Regards,

Randy Thompson

Three True Stories

Many times in life, something strange happens, and we pause and exclaim “what were the odds of that?”.  But we don’t actually stop and calculate those odds (OK, sometimes I do, just for grins) and we never give voice to the more important question: “What does it all mean?”  Read on…

Story Number One

Once upon a time, I took a girlfriend to Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas.  This is not a nightclub so much as it is a nice place to go and chill out, especially on a Saturday afternoon.  Picture wooden floors, long wooden picnic tables and benches, and a general friendly, laid-back attitude. My girlfriend and I took some playing cards with us, because we were very much into playing Cribbage at the time.

Halfway through our Cribbage game, my girlfriend was shuffling the cards, and something amazing happened.  For whatever reason, one card escaped her control during a shuffle, flew across the picnic table to where I was sitting, and almost hit me in the face.  Sitting as I was, elbows on table with head in hands, I was able to quickly move my right hand forward just a bit and snag the lower right corner of the card between my thumb and forefinger just in front of my nose.  Card aligned perfectly with the vertical, it was all so smooth and graceful, you would have sworn it was a practiced stunt.  But it wasn’t.  How often does one card “fly” from a deck, head specifically toward one individual, and get snagged so gracefully?  And get this… the card was the “Queen of Hearts”, the mythical card of love, romance, and relationships.   This was clearly a sign of things to come, for that girlfriend eventually became my wife.  Now there’s significance for you.  True story.

Story Number Two

Once upon a time, in high school, I was tossing a football around in the front yard with one of my best friends.  On one throw, I significantly overthrew him, and he had to chase the ball down in a neighbor’s yard.  For whatever reason, my friend decided to punt the ball back instead of throwing it.  It was going over my head, but it was very high with plenty of hang time.  I backpedaled slowly, keeping my eye on the trajectory.  Two steps.  Five steps.  The ball was on its way down, and I was moving across the driveway backwards.  Eight steps, and I was under the basketball goal now, with no more room to back up and unsure about how the ball would carom off of the backboard or pole.  But it didn’t carom.  The football swished straight through the hoop;  nothing but net.  What are the odds?  This, too, was clearly a sign of things to come, for my friend went on to be a two-sport athlete in college.  You guessed it:  football and basketball.  Yup.  Significant.  And true.

Story Number Three

The other day, I was straightening up the house.  I was upstairs, and I noticed that one of the tennis balls that my dogs play with was in an unsafe resting spot near the top of the staircase.  With full hands, I decided to nudge the ball with my foot in the direction of the stairs so that it could find its own way down.  The tennis ball bounced on the center of the first step, then on the center of the second, and likewise the third.  I started to pay heed.  And yes, that ball hit every single step exactly one time on its path down those stairs.  It had just the right speed and direction neither to miss a step, double bounce, or contact a wall on either side.  True story.  What are the odds?  What is the significance?

The Significance of the Stories

Now before you have me fitted for my “tinfoil hat”, let me tell you that I was only kidding about the significance of the stories above.  Yes, the stories were true, but most scientifically-minded people wouldn’t attribute any significance to them.  Even non-geeks know that there probably is no significance, so nobody bothers to ask the question or really worry about the odds.  In a mindless universe with so many variables, we should expect every now and then to observe events that seem to be out of the ordinary and/or significant.  And I would venture to say that the vast majority of the time, there is no significance whatsoever.  That is exactly what some people are saying about the observations made in APEX Theory, and you are probably thinking that I just supported their claims.  That’s because the stories above are lacking context, and I am going to rectify that right now…

Context

First of all, Kryptos is not a “mindless universe”.  There is no doubt that it has a creator, and it is widely believed that he has provided both clues and signs that are meant to serve as guidance and confirmation, respectively.  But the creator didn’t tell us which things were clues, how to interpret them, or what signs to look for.  All we know is that there are clues, and there are signs.  Here is the quote that supports this notion:

“There are lots of doors to go through to get to the meaning of the code.  Every time you enter one doorway you might, in the distance, see another door.  You go through that doorway and then you go through another doorway.  It unfolds as it’s deciphered.”

- Jim Sanborn (from November, 2005 CNN Jamie McIntyre video)

According to this quote, we won’t necessarily know in advance what the signs shall be.  Therefore, if and when we encounter potential “doorways”, we will be compelled to determine their nature (i.e. sign vs coincidence) after the fact.  We have no other choice, and while such determinations are not slam-dunk simple or conclusive, they are definitely achievable if one is both highly imaginative and strictly discriminating.  These qualities are typically antithetical, so it requires a challenging process of “blue sky” dreaming vs “devil’s advocate” thinking.

Let’s construct an analogy between Kryptos and the stories I told you above.  Suppose one day, out of the clear blue, a multitude of people heard a voice from the heavens.  The voice told us that there was a mystery to solve and that he would be creating signs.  Then he gave us a bunch of ambiguous phrases to guide us.  (This is just a hypothetical story, by the way.  It’s only a thought experiment and analogy, so don’t go asking about the “tinfoil hat” again.)

Suppose now that the reason I went to Gruene Hall was because I had interpreted one of the phrases (maybe it said “oldest dance hall”) as a clue to go there.  Suppose also that another of the phrases was “after soaring ladies, proceed to friend’s house”.  In this context, it is appropriate to ask whether there was any significance to the fact that the Queen jumped across the table at me, and to see where this interpretation might lead. So I decide to go to a friend’s house, but I am not 100% convinced that I am correct.  Perhaps I chose which friend based upon a clean interpretation of some other clue.  (I grow weary of inventing these clues.  You get the point.)  And then, 10 minutes later, the football swishes through the basketball hoop.  Then I recall another phrase provided by the voice: “pigskin three pointer”.  Again, in this context, I think it is reasonable to consider whether this was another sign.  The story might proceed with a clue to kick the tennis ball down the stairs and a separate phrase that matches the unusual result, etc, etc, etc.  If the match between the clues, steps, and signs are clean enough, and the signs themselves are unusual enough, then these things begin to confirm one another and increase your confidence.  (This is similar to the concept of preponderance of the evidence in a court case, where there is no “smoking gun”, but there are numerous unlikely coincidences that you could not have foreseen at the beginning of the investigation.)  The APEX Theory is a very good example of this.  Go read it.

As I said before, each of these events happening on its own and out of context is completely without significance.  But in the context of a creative mystery (as opposed to a mindless universe) whereby these independent events happen consecutively (rather than years apart without any connection) and with clues and signs for guidance and confirmation (instead of arbitrary actions and observations) there may very well be significance.   Part of the process of determining whether to assume significance is asking the question:  ”what are the odds that that could occur just by pure chance?”   While it is true that low odds by themselves are no guarantee of significance, they are certainly a requirement.  For instance, if I choose as a “sign” some event that happens every time I walk out the door, the power of that event as a discriminator diminishes and the problem becomes unsolvable.  (If the creator does not rely on “easter eggs” that are unusual, then how will we see them amongst all of the other possibilities?)

So, in this context when you ask the question “what are the odds of a uniformly random process having that result”, you are not just comparing the likelihood of that result to each of the other possible outcomes of the uniformly random process.  (We all know how that turns out.) You are actually just counting how many possible distinct outcomes there possibly were and confirming that you aren’t mistaking something quite commonplace for an “easter egg”.  You are playing “devil’s advocate”, as well you should.

Debunking the Debunkers

In APEX Theory, I provide a detailed methodology for approaching K4 which involves interpreting clues and observing signs.  The context of those clues, signs, and processes are extremely important details.   Without those details, the conclusions of APEX Theory seem about as far-fetched as the sarcastic significance of my three true stories above.  While I have no problem granting that the last one or two observations of APEX Theory may be pure chance, other observations support each other through the contextual relationships and preponderance of evidence.  Context is absolutely critical, so if someone were to attempt a critique of APEX Theory that leaves out a lot of that context, then they can “prove” anything they want.

Some people are masters at “proof by omission”.  Michael Moore could probably make Mother Theresa seem to be the anti-Christ just by editing film footage, sound bites, and printed quotes.  I sometimes wonder what makes certain people better at such things than others, but I digress.  Regardless of “why” or “how” someone drops important context in order to make a point, it is fairly simple for you to determine that it has happened.  In the case of APEX Theory, you can simply do this:  search the “debunking” material for instances of the words “doorway” or “world”.  Search likewise for any mention of the clues I’ve relied on.  Search for anything deeper than brief, high-level descriptions of my steps and their motivations.  Search for quotes taken out of context and then interpreted in the most extreme way possible (e.g. ” Here Thompson admits X…” when the quote provided does not say that, nor are the differences ever actually explored in depth.)

Actually, if you want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of APEX Theory, the best way to do that is simply go read it yourself.  If you happen to have an old copy of it, perhaps in Word document format, throw that thing away and go to the website where it is all much more clear. If you do that, then the most important thing to realize is this:  the strength of the theory lies in the clues and the way that the various observations fit together.  The statistics are only around to confirm that the “signs” are not things that happen all of the time.  The clues confirm the relevance.  If you don’t like the statistics, or if you don’t even think they should be in there, then by all means, go print out the document and redact all of the parts that mention them.  Then see what is left standing regarding clues, observations, and coincidences.

Can you see the forest for the trees?

Sherlock Needs to Retire

You’re Sherlock Holmes and you have a problem to solve.  Along with Watson, you’ve surveyed the crime scene and gathered numerous clues. Watson is asking you what it all means, expecting you to say something that begins something like “Elementary, my dear Watson…”

But you don’t say that.  Instead, you say “These clues are obviously relevant to some other crime.  It’s too difficult to reconcile them, one with another, so I will keep digging for more clues until I happen upon that ‘silver bullet’ that makes it all fall into place.”  And you stay at the crime scene, day after day, month after month, year after year… continually ignoring the clues in hand and searching for that one elusive clue that will make this all simple.

So you’re working on K4, now are you?

Have you sought the “original matrix”?   Have you considered “all possible shifts”?   Have you sought out the instructions in earlier text that refer to later text?  Have you observed the positions of the misspelled characters in Kryptos?  Have you looked for anything “visual” in your work?  Have you paid any heed to “Palimpsest”, “Abscissa”, or the tantalizing clues within the deciphered plaintext?

No?  You think that would be too hard, so those clues must be meant only for some other challenge, beyond K4?  You are quite sure that there is some previously unfound scrap that will make K4 unravel with ease?  Shame on you, Sherlock.  This isn’t like you.  Watson is wondering what has become of his friend and mentor.

APEX Theory

Greetings.

My name is Randy Thompson, and I am a Kryptos addict.  (Although I can really only spend a few hours per month working on it.)

I am starting this blog as a forum to share ideas regarding “APEX Theory“.  This is a fascinating methodology for approaching the solution of Kryptos part 4 (aka K4).  Please follow the above link and give the ideas there a thorough review.  If the starting premises differ from yours but are not literally impossible, please temporarily suspend disbelieve and observe the numerous independent coincidences that follow.  Many researchers have become believers in this approach.  (Admittedly, there are some stubborn holdouts.)  You are free to form your own opinion.

Return here and let me know what you think.