1. The Buried Treasure of Forrest Fenn
When a rich art dealer, Forrest Fenn found out that he had cancer, he decided to leave something behind that would remind people of his time here. That's why he ventured to a mountain range north of Santa Fe and buried more than $1 million worth of treasure and gold there.
In 2011, he released a memoir containing nine complex riddles that supposedly give away the treasure's location, and in 2016 a man called Randy Bilyeu actually lost his life in the hunt for the buried treasure. After this tragedy, Fenn said that “the treasure is not hidden in a dangerous place,” and that nobody should go to "any place where an 80-year-old man couldn’t put it.”
2. The Somerton Man Cipher
In 1948, the Somerton Man's body was discovered on a beach in Australia. Nobody had any idea who he was, and in his pocket, they found a strange piece of paper with the words 'Taman Shud' written on it, which is Persian for 'it is finished.' According to police reports, the paper had been torn from a book called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and when they recovered the book they found the following coded message hidden in the back:
WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB
A former UK detective, Gordon Cramer, believes that there is a hidden message written in micro-writing hidden between the letters and that it reveals many of the British military's secrets. However, this theory is far from widely accepted, and so this enigma lives on...
3. The D-Day Pigeon
Photo credit: The Telegraph
When the Allies stormed the French beaches on D-Day, the British army suffered a complete radio blackout. That's why the army officers decided to send carrier pigeons back to the UK with coded messages stuck to their legs. However, one of the pigeons ended up getting lost, and 70 years later, a man called David Martin discovered its skeleton in his chimney while he was renovating his home. Attached to the pigeon's leg, in a small red capsule, was the following message:
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 finally gave up on trying to decipher the message, and updated their website with the following notice:
“Without access to the original codebooks, details of any additional encryption, or any context around the message, it will be impossible to decode.”
4. The Haiku of Tatjana J. van Vark
Photo credit: craftsmanshipmuseum
Tatjana J. van Vark is an extremely gifted Dutch engineer and artist, who legendarily crafted an oscilloscope from scratch when she was merely 14 years of age. She has also managed to engineer a cryptographic instrument that she claims is an improvement on the Enigma machine. What's more, she's promised to explain precisely how it works if someone manages to decrypt the following encoded haiku:
GUK59 XBOFJ
-AFF1 SGU65 0-KME YKCL7
76PRO LIKNY /WVSZ X-JYI OS6GN 9GLYL
CTOSE -UBO6 OFD7P I+M3J
IOP59 O0/6T 10G2Q
To date, not a single person has managed to crack the code, and as a result, van Vark’s machine remains as much a mystery as the poem itself.
5. The Devil's Handwriting
First printed in 1539, this coded message was written by a man called Ludovico Spoletano, who apparently summoned the Devil who forced Ludovico to write this peculiar message. Curiously, the alphabet used closely resembles Amharic, which was believed to be the language used in the Garden of Eden. Almost 500 years later, and we still have no idea what the Devil's message is all about...
6. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 90
The 2 lines seen above come from an ancient Egyptian papyrus, dating back to 180 AD. The rest of the papyrus is simply a receipt for the purchase of some corn from the public granary. What's strange though, is that the 2 lines at the bottom are written in Greek characters, and are entirely incomprehensible. This message was revealed to the world in 1898, and more than a hundred years later no experts or amateurs have ever managed to decipher it.
7. The Zodiac Killer's Cipher
Between 1968 and 1969, the Zodiac Killer not only went on a devastating killing spree but also ordered local newspapers to publish a number of encrypted messages for the public to see. The first one was deciphered in a matter of days, but none of the others have ever been definitively deciphered. The most mysterious one is 340 characters long and is still entirely unsolved today.
In 2012, Corey Starliper claimed that he'd managed to crack the code by initially exchanging the symbols for letters that look similar, and then replacing each one with the letter that'd come 3 places down in the alphabet. The message that he ended up with was: “Please help me stop killing people. Please. My name is Leigh Allen." Despite how eerie this message seems, professional cryptographers have written off this theory as invalid and said that he conveniently bent the rules to suit his own ends.
8. The YOG'TZE Case
In 1984, Gunther Stoll told his wife that he was being stalked and that he believed that his life was in jeopardy. Then, he one day shouted, "I've got it!" He then wrote "YOG'TZE" on a piece of paper, and ran out of his home. That night, he was found naked in a car that had crashed into a ditch. All he had on him was that mysterious piece of paper.
Eerily, his autopsy found that he wasn't the one who had been driving the car. They believe that he had been fatally struck by the vehicle, before being stripped naked, and placed inside. His mysterious death has never been solved, and nobody has ever managed to work out what "YOG'TZE" means either.
9. Kryptos
Photo credit: Jim Sanborn
In 1990, Jim Sanborn erected a sculpture outside of the CIA headquarters, called Kryptos. This sculpture included 865 characters which make up 4 coded messages and was meant to serve as a type of CIA recruitment tool. The first 3 have already been deciphered, yet the 4th has never been solved by anyone so far:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBB
WFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWAT
JKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJC
DIGKUHUAUEKCAR
Tired of waiting, in 2010 Sandborn gave the world a hint, when he said that 'NYPVTT' should be deciphered as 'Berlin.' In 2014, he also said that 'MZFPK' means 'clock.' “There are several really interesting clocks in Berlin,” Sanborn hinted. “You’d better delve into that.”
10. The Blitz Cipher
During the Second World War, a barrage of German bombs exposed a hidden set of papers in a cellar in East London. These pages are full of beautifully written characters that are unfortunately written in an entirely alien language. On the first page, there's a plague that has a strange code written underneath it. On the second page, there are quite a number of weird diagrams. The third page contains a grid that's full of cipher letters.
So far, eight pages have been released, but not a single person has a clue what it might all possibly mean. Some claim that it's a message from an ancient secret society, while others are confident that it's nothing more than a hoax. Perhaps we'll never find out...
