Counterforce

As I’ve said before, I love the weird shit (and the weird shit, well, I don’t want to brag, but it tends to love me right back), but I know it’s best to be skeptical about it as well (the best wizard is just a scientist who knows that what we call magic is really the prestige of filling in all the gaps of human perception). As much as I enjoy all the cool magical nuggets of the bizarre that the universe can offer us, I love them because they’re real. I love the truth that emerges on the crested wave of the fantastic.

So, starting today and over the course of the next few days, I’m going to share three of my favorite little mysterious oddities with you. Not the usual stuff, not the Bermuda Triangle or Stonehenge (or Avebury) or the Cerne Abbas giant (see above), though those are all fascinating, but they’re incredibly well known. And for a reason! But no, today is things that are interesting and that maybe, just maybe, you’ve not yet heard of…

First up is: Kryptos!

Kryptos is a giant sculpture, built by James Sanborn, that resides on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It derives it’s name from the Greek word for “hidden” and is one of many pieces on the location, all of which conform to the same theme: “intelligence gathering.”

The most prominent part of the sculpture is an S-shaped piece of copper, meant to resemble a scroll, with 869 characters cut out of the copper in four encrypted messages. The first three have been figured out, despite a typo in the creation of the sculpture, but the fourth has yet to be solved, though a great many mystery lovers and codebreakers have been working to figure out what it means since it’s 1990 dedication, including the NSA.

from here.

A secret code with a visible cipher, created by a man and so far unsolved by mankind, at the home of our dark masters of intelligence. Does it get any cooler than that? I would suggest that it does not. I imagine you’ll heard about it more since I believe it’s to be a part of the new Dan Brown novel, The Lost Symbol, set to come out in September.

This is the translation of the third message of Kryptos:

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)

…which is a paraphrased (and obviously misspelled) quotation from Howard Carter’s 1923 book, The Tomb of Tutankhamun, about the opening of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The question above is posed by Lord Carnarvon, and Carter’s infamous answer (in the book) is, “wonderful things,” even though his field notes from that moment on November 26, 1922 state that he actually replied, “Yes, it is wonderful.”

But I’d definitely recommend you go read more about Kryptos, since I’m obviously just paraphrasing everything here. It’s really very interesting. And tomorrow’s mystery… Well, there’s no new Lost tonight, so there’ll be no quick thoughts on tonight’s episode obviously, but tomorrow’s mystery will involve an island with some weird goings ons and some weird speculation involving the Knight’s Templar, Captain Kidd, and even the Holy Grail attached to it. See you then?