Cicada 3301: A Mystery Without An Answer
Source: npr.org
"Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck."
That message, signed "3301," appeared on the underground message board known as 4chan two years ago. It was mysterious, cryptic and sparked a global Internet mystery that has yet to be answered to this day.
"It’s like a Dan Brown novel if Dan Brown could write this well," freelance writer Chris Bell tells NPR’s Arun Rath. Bell for The Telegraph. "It’s beyond the realms of my intelligence and beyond the realms of any individual’s intelligence to do this."
Thousands of people took on the challenge.
To code-breakers who dwell in this world, it was simple in the beginning. The first puzzle used a technique called steganography, concealing a message or image within another image. Hidden inside that first seemingly simple image — those black words on white text — were many more pictures, codes, clues and the reoccurring image of a cicada. That’s what gave the mystery its name: Cicada 3301.
"It’s a bit like the moth imagery in a Thomas Harris novels like Silence of the Lambs," Bell says. "So it began to symbolize the entire puzzle as it started."
If you decoded that first image, you were led to a website. That website contained more puzzles, even harder ones. And that’s why Bell says so many more people joined in, because no one person had the skills to solve all of the puzzles.
Extremely obscure knowledge was needed to crack these codes, from Medieval Welsh literature to Victorian occult numerology. Eventually the clues led to 14 different GPS coordinates, Bell says, in places like Hawaii, Moscow and Warsaw.
"When people visited these locations, they found the cicada image there again and a further clue," he says.
This was one of the most complex puzzles the Internet has ever seen.
"And this is why people slowly started to realize that maybe it wasn’t just some kind of lonely, random neckbeard sitting in his mother’s basement, this was an international game," Bell says.
Bell says that as the puzzles got more and more complex, people started to suspect that perhaps a military organization was behind it, perhaps the National Security Agency. He says many people suspect it could also be the CIA or various security services.
 A poster found in Warsaw shows a QR Code for a website related to the Cicada 3301 mystery. |
"After it got through all of these tests the first time around it led to a website on what’s know as the ’darknet’ ... and once a certain number of people had accessed it, it closed down, and left a message: ’We want the leaders not the followers.’ "
Bell says for many people trying to solve the mystery, it was a huge disappointment. No one is quite sure what happened for the select few who made it. He says there are a lot of different rumors, but none of those who were successful have talked about it.
"They reckon there’s anywhere between a dozen and two dozen people who made it to the final website," he says. "Apparently they had to build a computer server and register certain addresses. But they never revealed who was behind the tests to begin with; the path led and stopped."
But on Jan. 5, 2013, it all started over again [...]
Read the full article at: npr.org
READ: A Russian Enigma: Most Mysterious Radio Transmission in the World
Tune into Red Ice Radio:
Nick Pelling - Deciphering of the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript
Marty Leeds - Hour 1 - Gematria & The English Alphabet
Michael S. Schneider - Constructing The Universe with 1 through 12, Nature’s Numerical and Geometric Language
Wayne Herschel - The Hidden Records & Freemansonry
John Lash - Origin of Religion, Black Magic Pharmacology & The Discovery of the Eadwine Psalter
Tom Horn - Apollyon Rising 2012 & The Return of The Gods
Dennis Fetcho - The Isisian Codes
Carl Munck - Hour 1 - The Code, The Pyramid Matrix & ET
Steve Willner - Video Game Symbolism, Ciphers, Words, Movies & Mind Control
