8 Mysterious Uncracked Codes

In the early 1860s, raiders attacked the island of Rapa Nui, now known as Easter Island, and abducted hundreds of natives to be used as enslaved labor in Peru. With those raids, it was once said that the final source of knowledge regarding Rongo Rongo, the hieroglyphic language used by the Rapa Nui, disappeared. While it’s true that to this day no one has been able to make any sense of the extant Rongo Rongo texts, everything else about this seemingly lost language defies simple narratives and clear explanations. The mystery of Rongo Rongo is just the first of many uncracked codes I will be discussing today, from bewildering ciphers found on a murdered man’s body to the unsolved codex that once belonged to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.

The idea that knowledge of Rongo Rongo disappeared in those raids of 1862 and 1863 was eventually cast into serious doubt. However, it does seem that anyone schooled in Rongo Rongo died that decade, likely from diseases introduced to the island by Europeans. Many artifacts containing Rongo Rongo were destroyed in the 1860s; the pictographs were often carved into wood, and some contemporary sources said that the carved artifacts were burned by the Rapa Nui themselves to build fires. This may have been at the urging or compulsion of Catholic missionaries. Some Rapa Nui said that the evangelizing Europeans warned natives that Rongo Rongo was a connection to their so-called heathenism. Others disputed this version of events. A European priest on the island in the early 20th century believed that the Rongo Rongo artifacts hadn’t been destroyed at all but hidden in the island’s many caves and lava tubes. As Steven R. Fischer laid out in his 1997 book about the language, a couple dozen inscriptions did survive, and people have been trying to decipher the various symbols contained within them for more than a century without much luck. Some glyphs appear to represent human or animal forms, while others are abstract shapes. No one has ever put forth a convincing translation of the texts, and much of the history surrounding their origin remains contentious. Debates have raged as to whether the script predates European contact, and fantastical ideas have arisen regarding aliens and lost continents.

Some of our ideas about Rongo Rongo have been informed by more plausible scholarship, including work done by an early 20th-century ethnographer named Katherine Rutledge. Among the most intriguing pieces of information gleaned from her interviews is the fact that, according to her sources, young Rapa Nui students of the past were able to master Rongo Rongo in just a few months.

After discovering gold and silver in what is now the American West, Thomas J. Beale buried a treasure in Bedford, Virginia. All you have to do to find it is solve a simple cipher. Well, actually, that’s just the claim made in an 1885 bill published decades after Beale’s disappearance. Few can agree on much more than that—whether Beale actually even left a treasure or even the ciphers themselves is a matter of serious contention. Some historical details about his supposed exploits have been called into question. Beale’s purported discovery of silver and gold, for example, doesn’t seem to line up with known timelines about other precious metal discoveries. Of course, many Beale cipher enthusiasts have their own idiosyncratic explanations for these apparent inconsistencies. Others believe that even if the treasure itself is a hoax, the ciphers themselves might represent a real cryptographic challenge that remains to be solved. The cryptanalyst William Friedman summed up the confusion around the Beale cipher, saying, “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I think it is real; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I think it is a hoax.”

Shout out to YouTube commenter Sabi Kitsune for pointing us toward the Beale ciphers on our video about battles that changed history. We have an upcoming episode covering a hundred facts about Venus, so drop an interesting comment about the second rock from the sun for a chance to be featured in that episode.

When a book supposedly passes hands from an astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor, you’d expect a certain degree of intrigue to accompany it. The so-called Voynich manuscript, named for a Polish antiquarian who purchased it in 1912, doesn’t disappoint. It may well be the most famous item on this list, but I will never get tired of discussing it until someone deciphers the roughly 35,000 words in its text. After Wilfred Voynich acquired the manuscript in the early 20th century, he claimed he’d been sworn to secrecy regarding its origins. It likely has a connection to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who Voynich suggested got it from an astrologer in the court of Elizabeth I named John Dee. For what it’s worth, that provenance is now considered questionable. The pages are full of drawings of what look like plants and seemingly other scientific or pseudoscientific diagrams, along with a lot of ladies bathing. The text appears to be entirely invented—not just the words but the letters themselves. Radiocarbon dating done by a team led by the University of Arizona’s Greg Hodgkins pegged the pages to the early 15th century, but no one knows who wrote the book or why. Some of the world’s best code breakers have been drawn to the Voynich manuscript and have been left stumped, including William and Elizabeth Friedman, a married couple and two of their generation’s leading cryptanalysts. William is the same expert we quoted in reference to the Beale ciphers. The Friedmans studied the manuscript and deemed it to be a genuine artifact and not a hoax. By the time of his death, William seems to have concluded that it was less a code per se than an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type—a language whose vocabulary isn’t based on any existing languages. In the absence of a clear explanation for the text, outlandish theories have proliferated. Voynich himself once said, “When the time comes, I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of 20th-century science.” The time apparently never came. His dramatic declaration might have just been a bit of showmanship. Still, there are countless theories as to the real meaning of the book. One popular idea actually says that there is no meaning to it at all—that, contrary to the Friedmans’ analysis, the manuscript was created as some kind of hoax, perhaps to fleece Emperor Rudolph. If you manage to decode the secret meaning of the most mysterious book of all time, do me a favor and drop an English translation in the comments below.

Another undeciphered and potentially undecipherable code comes from Edward Elgar. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Elgar wrote “Pomp and Circumstance,” the second most iconic graduation song of all time. Shout out to Vitamin C for having the bravery to star in a music video featuring wistful hacky sack. The Dorabella cipher gets its name from its original recipient, Dora Penny, a friend of Elgar’s who is almost 20 years his junior. It consists of a series of what I’m going to call “little squiggly things.” A number of people have claimed to have cracked Elgar’s code, but none of them has been widely declared correct. Tim Roberts from the University of Central Queensland in Australia felt that he had come up with a solution, which read, “PS now droop beige weeds set in it pure idiocy.” One entire bed, Luigi Cacobana, lovingly tuned to Studio Two. The first half could maybe refer to a gardening project, as Roberts said, but then you get into “Luigi Cuckoo Bunned” and have to buy that Elgar was referencing a certain Italian composer and poking fun at Dora’s stutter while discussing gardening. Other would-be solutions require arbitrary rules or result in complete gibberish, leaving Elgar’s message a secret.

In 1987, a man named Chris Cole posted three ciphers onto a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to cryptography. According to the post, Dr. Richard Feynman had showed him the ciphers when Cole was a graduate student at Caltech. The first cipher was actually solved in just one day by a Usenet user, but the other two remain uncracked today. You’d think that displaying a code on the grounds of CIA headquarters would lead to a quick solution, but even though many United States intelligence officers pass by the crypto sculpture on their way to the cafeteria in Langley, Virginia, one section of code remains unsolved. Even though the code maker has provided several clues to cryptologists over the years, Kryptos was created by artist Jim Sanborn and installed on Langley’s grounds in 1990. In subsequent years, three of the piece’s four sections of code were cracked. The first section decoded revealed a poetic sentence written by Sanborn: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of occlusion.” Sanborn said he included an intentional misspelling of “illusion” to mix it up, which is how I’m going to explain any typos or mental flaws from now on. The second section is a rather opaque paragraph that references Langley’s coordinates and former CIA head William Webster, who ran the agency when the sculpture was first installed. Section 3 is my personal favorite; it paraphrases Howard Carter’s account of discovering King Tut’s tomb in 1922. Sanborn has said that the first three sections provide a clue to solving the fourth and has also decoded a few specific words from its text, including “Berlin,” “clock,” and “northeast.”

Side note: a Season 2 episode of the Kevin James show “King of Queens” featured a poster of Kryptos as set decoration. If you happen to have a solution to section 4 of Kryptos and also starred in the Paul Blart movie franchise, please let us know in the comments.

In 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Australia. He was wearing a suit and had a half-smoked cigarette resting on his collar. The more authorities looked into the case, the stranger it got. We’ve linked to a great piece in Smithsonian Magazine down below that gets into a lot of the story’s twists and turns, but I’ll try to give you a cliff’s notes version. Police never figured out who the dead man was or even how he died. Some people suspected a rare poison could have done him in and then been metabolized by his body without leaving a trace. The deceased’s unusually well-defined calf muscles and a label on some clothing that said “Keen” might have been clues or just red herrings. No “Keen” was ever identified as a match for the man, and theories that he was a professional dancer or wore high heels remain unsubstantiated. Months into the investigation, an expert named John Cleland discovered a slip of paper in a small pocket in the dead man’s pants. The paper had the Persian phrase “Tamam Shud” or “It is ended” printed on it, the final words in many translations of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It took months for someone to come forward with a version of the book that matched the scrap, and that just created more questions. On the rear cover of the book, which has a provenance shrouded in its own layers of fog, authorities found a phone number and a faint string of characters. The phone number led to a woman who admitted to giving a man named Alfred Boxall a copy of the Rubaiyat, but it turned out Boxall was still alive and still had his copy of the book. Police went back to that mystery string of characters and placed it under ultraviolet light, revealing more letters that appeared to form some kind of cipher. If it is a code, it’s never been cracked, and given how limited the letters are, it may never be. Weirdly, no one has ever found another copy of the Rubaiyat that matches the edition found on the dead man’s body. Perhaps even weirder, another man was apparently found dead in Australia near a copy of the same poem. There are those who believe the Somerton man died by suicide and others who think he was murdered for his involvement in some kind of high-stakes espionage. While we may never know the truth, in 2021, the man was exhumed for DNA testing. As of the recording of this video, the results of those tests haven’t been released.

When the body of Ricky McCormick, a possible homicide victim, was discovered in June 1999, officials found two handwritten notes in his pants pockets consisting of an indecipherable string of letters. McCormick was allegedly functionally illiterate; his mother, Frankie Sparks, said the only thing he could write was his name. He didn’t write in any code, but authorities don’t believe the notes are meaningless scribblings. They actually released the possible ciphers to the public in 2011 in the hopes that someone might help solve them. McCormick’s girlfriend believed he could have been involved in trafficking marijuana. He also had a number of health problems, perhaps brought about by his smoking habit, allegedly begun at the age of 10, and his penchant for drinking upwards of 20 caffeinated beverages per day. A natural cause of death can’t be ruled out, but McCormick’s purported connection to illegal activity and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to conclude that something nefarious happened. Detective Michael Yarbrough summed up the frustrating confusion of the case to St. Louis’s Riverfront Times: “It’s kind of like Humpty Dumpty; all the pieces are there, but how do you put them back together?”

Drop your favorite riddle in the comments below. I realize that’s only sort of related to the topic of this video, but in my defense, riddles are fun. Thanks for watching!