Let's Crack Zodiac - Episode 5 - The 340 Is Solved!

[Music] ah oh my god so this is a big one we have a solution for the 340 and it's real i've been working together with two other code breakers for a while now one is named sam blake he's an applied mathematician who lives in australia and has worked on several interesting problems the other is named jarl van icke who is a warehouse operator who lives in belgium he's also a very gifted programmer and created excellent code breaking software called az decrypt which was inspired by his desire to crack the cipher well sam became interested in ways to do transpositions or manipulations of the 340. it was assumed that zodiac did something different to the message before assigning all the symbols and that could explain why the cipher was unsolved for so long so we started doing a lot of experiments he sent me about 650 000 different manipulations of the ciphertext our thinking was if zodiac rearranged the cipher message somehow let's try to find out how i took all of sam's manipulations and ran them through yarl's a-z-decrypt code breaking program the idea was to take sam's hundreds of thousands of variations of the 340 and tried to get az decrypt to crack them maybe we'd stumble on something well on thursday december 3rd after many months of running sam's experiments in az decrypt i looked at this solution that was mostly gibberish so it looks like the thousands of others normally i'd ignore them but this one had words like hope you are trying to catch me and or the gas chamber at that time the rest of the plaintext looked like garbage and nonsense like many other thousands of solutions i've seen over the years but these phrases turned out to be our way into the real solution and we almost overlooked them so we took a closer look at sam's manipulation of the 340. what he did was split the cipher into three sections the first section is nine lines long so is the second section then there are two lines in the third and last section in sam's manipulation of the cipher he reads through all the symbols in a diagonal direction following this rule first start in the upper left corner write out that symbol move down one and then move over two write out that symbol continue until you get to an edge then jump around to the opposite edge and keep going [Music] [Music] then you'll have a rewritten cipher that looks like this so i put that first manipulated section of the cipher into az decrypt hoping it would solve it but it didn't come up with anything useful the phrases hope you are trying to catch me and gas chamber didn't even appear again but those phrases came up before so i plugged those into a z decrypt using what's called a crib feature basically you can lock in words at specific positions then the solver leaves those words alone while it searches for the rest of the key so here goes i clicked on solve with cribs and boom suddenly got a really clean message and the phrase that wasn't me on the tv show pops out at this point i jumped out of my chair and yelled holy [ __ ] it's because i knew the cipher was received on november 8 1969 which is about two weeks after someone calling themselves zodiac called into a tv talk show hosted by jim dunbar and featuring the famous lawyer melvin bellai while the show was on the air the caller said i need help i'm sick i don't want to go to the gas chamber and then we'll come back and i'll give you a specific answer to this question and you're going to the gas station [Music] so all this made the message seem real because it fits the timeline of events and sounds like what zodiac would say we had to be on the right track here's the full text az decrypt found i hope you are having lots of anne in trying to catch me that wasn't me on the tv show which bringo up a point about me i am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to pay all ce all the now the cipher has 63 different unique symbols throughout and they all appear in this first section so that means we now probably have much of the key for the entire cipher since the key seems to work pretty much fine for the first part here's what the key looks like but what about the second part of the cipher the next nine lines what's the message there applying the same key with the same reading direction gives this plain text it's not quite right but it does seem to have some real words in it because have slave where everyone he has nothing when they reach and this kind of looks like it says paradise and afraid of so that made me think a real message was still in there i'll return to this part in a moment but let's skip ahead to the last two lines this is what the last two lines look like when you apply the same substitution key first thing we noticed is it has some normal looking words in it i will easy and death very strange why would words appear normally it's inconsistent from the diagonal reading order we did for the other two parts but look at this piece it looks like it says paradise but spelled backwards he used that word several times in his letters spelled the exact same way including in the solution for the first cipher so if you look there are other reversed words first let's put some spaces between them then let's put the reversed ones back to normal now it says life will be an easy one in paradise death that seems like a pretty good interpretation and it reinforces the solution we found for the first part because the same substitution key produced two sections of plain text that makes sense okay so that leaves us with the second part the decryption didn't look quite right yet and has some recognizable words in it we thought maybe since this message seems close that there was some mistake or error in the transcription or in the inciperament that is the rule we are using to read out the message doesn't quite work perfectly because of some mistake zodiac might have made when he created the cipher so we decided to look at what corrections need to be made to fix the cipher the first thing we discovered is that many spelling mistakes happen on the same line for example these words are misspelled oow should be now e-n-s-u-g-h should be enough slaver should be slaves and fov should be four the problem letters are osvr they are all on the same line to fix the spelling you have to change those letters to nosr but notice that nosr is on the same line but has shifted one position to the left i sent this observation to url and he discovered if you shift this entire section to the right and move the h from the end to the beginning it fixes the spelling of many words we also noticed how life is appears in the clear up in the upper right corner jarl also discovered that if you ignore this section when applying the diagonal reading rule the message in this part is even more clear so now we go through the reading rule like this [Music] and remember we are going to skip the life is part [Music] and here's the resulting message and with some minor corrections we finally have this sooner because i now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradise so they are afraid of death i am not afraid because i know that my new yarl supposed that zodiac may have intended for the extra words life is to be placed at the end of the message so it reads i am not afraid because i know that my new life is so now when we combined all three parts the final message looks like this i hope you are having lots of fun and trying to catch me that wasn't me on the tv show which brings up a point about me i am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because i now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradise so they are afraid of death i am not afraid because i know that my new life is life will be an easy one in paradise death incidentally where the words paradise and death appear in the solution corresponds to where the zodiac signature appears in the original cipher text the very end doesn't flow quite right yet but maybe someone can figure out how it's supposed to read but that is the final message we settled on and we submitted it to the fbi on the morning of saturday december 5th by the time you see this video it should be officially confirmed by authorities but i invite everyone to do their own confirmation based on the information in this video and send in your comments so it's been a very exciting few days 51 years after it was sent zodiac's 340 character cipher has finally been solved the message doesn't really say a whole lot it's more of the same attention seeking junk from zodiac we were disappointed that he didn't put any personally identifying information in the message but we didn't expect him to maybe his name really is in the 13 character cipher he sent almost 6 months after the 340. unfortunately there is not much hope of confirming any solutions for such a short cipher without getting really lucky and discovering new evidence or finding zodiac still alive and asking him but the solution tells us zodiac did indeed react to how quickly his first cipher was solved back in august of 1969 and he put in a good effort to make his second cipher even more complicated this thing was a beast splitting it up into three parts and including multiple transpositions made the cipher difficult but it was made even more difficult because of the mistakes in the second part we were extremely lucky to uncover this solution because enough of the cipher was still created systematically using rules that one day someone would try to apply to the cipher so now i want to thank all the people that helped make this solution possible first to yarl and sam for their many hours of assistance with this effort this solution would not have been possible without their dedication and inspired insights thanks also to the fine folks at the cryptanalysis and racketeering records unit over at the fbi for their assistance and support also want to thank mike morford michael butterfield and tom voit for their websites and forums full of useful zodiac information az decrypt was partly inspired by another code breaking program called zk decrypto which was made almost 15 years ago and was one of the first programs that could automatically solve the 408 cypher the team that made it were brax cisco wesley hopper michael eaton and david campbell so many thanks to them for creating the spiritual predecessor to az decrypt thanks also to jeffrey le turner who contributed many fascinating cipher experiments on the forums in his investigations of the period 19 phenomenon the period 19 phenomena ended up being a legitimate clue into the transposition scheme used in the 340. also want to thank heiko kalista's many contributions on the forums and for his awesome zodiac cipher font and the code breaking software he created called peekaboo thanks also to my family for putting up with all this and believing in me and i also want to say thank you to all the supporters of the web series your kind words encouraged me to keep working on this problem i'm not sure what the future of this series holds but i'm sure there will be more things to talk about in the coming weeks so until next time see you later and stay safe [Music] you

Channel: David Oranchak

Views: 1,875,119

Rating: 4.9816442 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: -1oQLPRE21o

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SenorLuke]

The translation in case anyone doesn't have time to watch the video.

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

[u/MRosvall]

Just a thought. But the random "life is" in the top right second section. Instead of putting it at the end of the second section you can turn it around and put it in the end of the third. Making it read:

So they are afraid of death.
I am not afraid
Because I know that my new life will be an easy one
In Paradice, death is life

[u/pyabo]

Anyone interested in ciphers in general should read The Code Book by Simon Singh. He goes over the entire history of cryptography from the ancient romans to modern day, and does it in a way that the layman can understand. Very good book.

[u/sethasaurus666]

OK rethinking this.. Given the attempt at creating a harder to crack cypher, and the tendency to reverse things, he probably meant to say 'Death is life'.

[u/Brian_Gay]

For anyone that might be thinking the zodiac is some kind of insane genius for being able to develop such a difficult cypher, it's far easier to make up a cypher than to solve it, it's like playing eye spy, just because you can't guess what I'm seeing doesn't make me smarter than you, I have a huge advantage. Undoubtedly this fucking fruitcake thought he was a genius though.

[u/ABenn14]

u/doranchak is one of the people who solved it

[u/StubbornElephant85]

Drink more ovaltine

[u/Eyzaroth]

I don't know why but watching this gave me the creeps.

[u/initialslide]

He should be called the run-on sentence killer.