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MYSTERIES

10 Unsolved Coded Messages You Could

Be The First To Crack
MARK OLIVER DECEMBER 12, 2016

From the comfort of your own home, you could solve ciphers and coded messages that
have baffled even our best experts. Some of these 10 coded messages hold the key to
solving murders and mysteries. At least one reveals the path to buried treasure. But each
one offers the simple pride of knowing that you were the first to crack a puzzle that no one
else could solve.

10

Forest Fenns Buried Treasure

Photo credit: CBS News

When wealthy art dealer Forrest Fenn contracted cancer, he resolved to leave a legacy that
would remind people he had once been here. He buried more than $1 million worth of gold
and treasure in a mountain range north of Santa Fe. In 2011, Fenn released a memoir

containing nine riddles that give away the location of the buried treasure.
The treasure chest is filled with golden coins, nuggets, statues, and jewelry that have
become more valuable since Fenn buried them. People have literally risked their lives
trying to find Fenns treasure. In 2016, a man named Randy Bilyeu died while hunting for
the gold.
The treasure is not hidden in a dangerous place, Forrest Fenn announced after Bilyeus
death. Ive said many times not to look for the treasure any place where an 80-year-old
man couldnt put it.

The Somerton Man Cipher

Photo credit: adelaidenow.com.au

In 1948, the body of the Somerton Man was found on an Australian beach. No one knew
who he was. In his pocket, though, was a mysterious piece of paper with the Persian words
Tamam Shud (It is finished) printed on it.
Sixty-eight years later, you could still solve one part of this mystery from home. According
to police, the Somerton Man had torn the paper out of a book called the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam. In the back of the book, he had scribbled a coded message:
WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB
Gordon Cramer, a former UK detective, believes that micro-writing is hiding between the
letters, making 1,100 characters in all. He also believes that a code between the letters
gives away secrets of the British military.
Cramers theory isnt widely accepted, though, and the code remains unsolved.

The D-Day Pigeon

Photo credit: The Telegraph

When the Allied armies stormed the beaches of France on D-Day, the British army was
under a total radio blackout. Officers had to send carrier pigeons to England with coded
messages attached to their legs.
One lost her way. She got stuck in a chimney and stayed there for 70 years until David
Martin uncovered the birds skeleton during home renovations. Attached to the bird was a
coded message in a small red capsule:
AOAKN HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
WAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ
KLDTS FQIRW AOAKN 27 1525/6
In 2012, the experts gave up on trying to crack the code and put this message on their

website: Without access to the original code books, details of any additional encryption, or
any context around the message, it will be impossible to decode.

Tatjana J. Van Varks Haiku

Photo credit: craftsmanshipmuseum.com

Tatjana J. van Vark is something between an engineer and an artist. She develops

complex machines, often imitating or even copying the technology of bygone days.
These are more creations of art than function, but they still show an incredible technical
ability. Van Vark has a reputation as a gifted engineer, legendarily creating an oscilloscope
from scratch when she was just 14 years old.
She has also developed a cryptographic device that she describes as an improvement on
the Enigma machine. She has promised to share the details of how it works if someone
can decrypt this coded haiku:
GUK59 XBOFJ
-AFF1 SGU65 0-KME YKCL7
76PRO LIKNY /WVSZ X-JYI OS6GN 9GLYL
CTOSE -UBO6 OFD7P I+M3J
IOP59 O0/6T 10G2Q
The message is short enough that it almost looks like it should be easy, but nobody has
cracked it yet. To date, van Varks machine remains as much a mystery as her encrypted
poem.

The Devils Handwriting

Photo credit: cipherfoundation.org

This coded message was first printed in 1539, but it has never been solved. According to
legend, it was written by a man named Ludovico Spoletano. He conjured up the Devil, who
took control of his hand and forced him to write this strange, scratched message.
The story is full of the type of supernatural magic that excited the imaginations of 16thcentury people. Even the alphabet used by Spoletano looks like Amharic, which was
believed at that time to be the language spoken in the Garden of Eden.
Of course, most people dont really believe that his message was written by Satan.
Instead, it seems to be a cipher that we could read and understandas soon as someone
cracks Spoletanos code.

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 90

Photo via Wikipedia

An ancient Egyptian papyrus from AD 180 carries an encrypted message that no one has
ever solved. The paper itself is just a receipt for the purchase of corn from the public
granary. Etched at the bottom, though, are two lines written in Greek characters that are

completely incomprehensible.
As shown in the image above, those two lines seem to be a coded message.
The papyrus was first shared with the world in 1898. Nine years later, Frederic Kenyon, a
handwriting expert at the British Museum, took it upon himself to decipher the message.
But neither Kenyon nor anyone else has ever cracked the code.

The Cipher Of The Zodiac Killer

Photo credit: patch.com

In 1968 and 1969, the Zodiac Killer plagued San Francisco. While he preyed on the innocent,
he also ordered local newspapers to publish a series of coded messages. This sent the
public into a frenzy as everyone tried to decipher the serial killers code.
The first message was deciphered within a few days, but they got harder and harder. One
which is 340 characters longremains unsolved, and people around the world are still
struggling to figure out what it means.
In 2012, Corey Starliper believed that he had cracked the code. He replaced the symbols
with similar-looking letters and then replaced each letter with the letter three places down
in the alphabet.
His method came up with an eerie message from the killer that ends with these words:
Please help me stop killing people. Please. My name is Leigh Allen.

Experts have written off Starlipers theory as not valid. They think that Starliper just
created the message he wanted to see by changing his own rules whenever it was
convenient.

The YOGTZE Case

Photo credit: motherboard.vice.com

Before his death in 1984, Gunther Stoll told his wife that he was being stalked by an
unspecified they and that his life was in jeopardy. She feared he was losing his mind.
On the day he died, he cried out, Ive got it! He wrote YOGTZE on a piece of paper and
rushed out of his home.
That night, Stoll was found dead in a car that had crashed into a ditch. Naked, he was at
the wheel with only the paper that read YOGTZE on him. At first, police figured that he
had just gotten drunk and crashed.
But the autopsy revealed that he wasnt the driver. Stoll had been run over by a car and
placed naked inside of it by the person who killed him.
Nobody knows what YOGTZE means. His mysterious death, though, makes it seem
possible that someone really was stalking him. YOGTZE might just hold the key to
the identity of this person.

Kryptos

Photo credit: Jim Sanborn

In 1990, sculptor Jim Sanborn set up a sculpture, Kryptos, at CIA headquarters. On Kryptos
are 865 characters that make up four coded messages, set up as a challenge for the
nations brightest to solve.
The first three have already been deciphered. An NSA employee actually cracked it first, as
early as 1993. By 1998, a CIA analyst had solved it, and in 1999, Jim Gillogly became the first
private citizen to crack the code.
The fourth part, though, has never been solved:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

In 2010, Sanborn gave away part of the code: NYPVTT should be deciphered as Berlin.
Four years later, he revealed that MZFPK means clock.
There are several really interesting clocks in Berlin, Sanborn hinted. Youd better delve
into that.

The Blitz Cipher

Photo credit: ciphermysteries.com

During World War II, German bombs exposed a set of papers in an East London cellar. The
pages are covered in beautifully written characters that someone took great care in
writing. But the alien alphabet is indecipherable.
The first page is emblazoned with a plaque with strange coded writing underneath. The
second page is covered in diagrams, and the third gives a grid full of cipher letters.
Eight pages have been released so far. But no one knows what any of it means or who
wrote it. Some theorize that the pages could be more than 100 years old, holding a coded

message from a secret society. Others say that its just gibberish scribbled down as a hoax
to keep people entertained.
Whoever deciphers it, though, will be remembered as the first to uncover the mystery.

MARK OLIVER
Mark Oliver is a regular contributor to Listverse. His writing also appears on a number of
other sites, including The Onion's StarWipe and Cracked.com. His website is regularly
updated with everything he writes.
Read More: Personal Site

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