The Ides of March are fast approaching, and paranoia is in the air! Keep a weather eye to the horizon for signs! Be careful, the man in the Gabardine suit has a bowtie that is really a camera! Are you feeling anxious yet?
Don’t worry, Dan Brown fans, the Illuminati aren’t really out to bury the truth (probably). Still, encryption is everywhere, and in the land of the coded messages, the Cryptographer is King. In this spirit, it is fascinating to see that American code-cracking goes far back past the Navajo Windtalkers of World War II. Polymix Studios has created a gorgeously rotoscoped and collaged short film about the Thomas Beale Cipher, a bit of numerical encryption describing the location of a great hoard of gold buried by the outlaw Beale in the Antebellum Virginia mountainside. There are even clues about the characters in the story hidden within the film. Can you spot them, Highlights readers?
Perhaps more enervating are the codes that are written in plain sight. The perfect example sits outside of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos by DC-based artist James Sanborn has towered in the CIA courtyard since 1990. This 9-foot 11-inch tall sinuous copper structure is punched through with about 1,800 characters which contain four coded messages. Three of these messages have been translated, but as of this writing, the fourth remains a tremendous mystery. Sanborn, baffled by his enduring secret more than twenty years after the installation, even released a clue to help with decoding the final message: BERLIN. Could this be related to the fall of the Wall? Or the slabs of the Wall now housed at the CIA?
Would you or–more to the point–a motivated young person you know, like to take a crack at this code and others like it? Get those beautiful minds ready, because the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada is currently accepting applications for The Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students. Quantum and cryptography, you say? Be still by nerdy heart. Sadly for me, it’s being targeted at eleventh graders who will have completed eleventh grade math and maybe also Physics by this summer. I am super jealous of you kids, so get in there and uncover the secrets of our world!
‘Berlin’ is Revealed as Kryptos Clue
