Delayed indefinitely · 5 services
Still delayed.
Every cipher on the main board was broken in the end. These were not, or only after decades. Some may be hoaxes, some may be too short to break, and one of them finally pulled in in 2020. No puzzles here: just the board, and what we know.
Delayed service 01 · 1400s
The Voynich manuscript DELAYED
About 240 pages of vellum, written in a fluent script that matches no known alphabet and illustrated with plants nobody can identify, star charts and small figures bathing in green pools. It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who bought it in 1912, and is now at Yale's Beinecke Library. Radiocarbon tests in 2009 dated the vellum to the early fifteenth century.
Nobody even knows whether it is a cipher, an unknown language, a code, or an elaborate hoax; dozens of announced solutions have come and gone. It deserves far more than a paragraph, so we are saving it: Whyarium plans a separate encyclopedia of unsolved mysteries, and the manuscript will be on its first page.
Delayed service 02 · 1885
The Beale papers DELAYED
In 1885 a pamphlet printed in Lynchburg, Virginia, told a story set sixty years earlier: a man called Thomas J. Beale had buried a wagonload of gold, silver and jewels in Bedford County, and left a locked box with an innkeeper. Inside were three pages of numbers. The pamphlet's anonymous author said he had spent years on them and cracked one.
That one, the second, is a book cipher keyed to the Declaration of Independence: each number points to a word of the Declaration, and you take its first letter. It describes the treasure and says the other two pages give its exact place and the names of the people owed a share. Those two have never been read. No record of a Thomas Beale matching the story has turned up, and studies of the unsolved pages point the same way. The best known, by Jim Gillogly in 1980, showed that reading the first page with the same Declaration gives long runs of the alphabet in order, which looks more like someone picking numbers by hand than enciphering a text. Most cryptanalysts now suspect a hoax, though treasure hunters still dig.
Delayed service 03 · 1897
The Dorabella cipher DELAYED
In July 1897 the composer Edward Elgar wrote a short note to his young friend Dora Penny, made of 87 little squiggles in three lines. Each sign is one, two or three small arcs, turned to face one of eight directions. Elgar loved puzzles and wordplay, and two years later he gave her a variation of her own, "Dorabella", in his Enigma Variations.
Dora said she never managed to read it. She printed it in her memoir of Elgar in 1937, and it has resisted everyone since: with so few signs there is not much to count, and nobody knows whether it is plain English in a simple substitution, a private joke, or something in between. Many solutions have been proposed; none has convinced the others.
Delayed service 04 · 1990
Kryptos DELAYED
A curling wall of copper, cut through with letters, standing in a courtyard of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sculptor Jim Sanborn made it with help on the cryptography from a retired CIA cryptographer, and it was dedicated in November 1990. It holds four enciphered sections.
The first three fell in the 1990s: Jim Gillogly, a computer scientist, published solutions in 1999, and it then emerged that a CIA analyst, David Stein, had worked them out by hand in 1998; NSA documents released later show that a small team there had solved them in 1992–93. They use Vigenere-style and transposition ciphers, and the third paraphrases the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. The fourth, 97 characters long and known as K4, is still unbroken by cryptanalysis. Sanborn has released a few words of its plaintext as clues over the years, among them BERLIN and CLOCK. In 2025 two writers found the K4 plaintext on scraps among Sanborn's papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and the files were then sealed. In November 2025 the solution was sold at auction with Sanborn's Kryptos archive; the buyer came forward in 2026, but as of autumn 2026 the plaintext has not been published.
Delayed service 05 · 1969
The Zodiac's 340 ARRIVED 2020
The Zodiac killer murdered at least five people in Northern California in 1968 and 1969 and taunted the police and newspapers with letters and ciphers. His first, 408 symbols long, was solved within days in 1969 by Donald and Bettye Harden, a schoolteacher and his wife, working at their kitchen table. The second, 340 symbols mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, held out for 51 years.
It finally arrived in December 2020, solved by three amateurs on three continents: David Oranchak, a software developer in the United States, Sam Blake, an applied mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer in Belgium. It turned out to be a homophonic substitution (several symbols for each common letter), with the text first rearranged by reading the grid diagonally in sections, plus a few slips by the writer. Blake ran hundreds of thousands of possible rearrangements and Van Eycke's solver tried substitutions on each. The FBI confirmed the solution. The message is boasting, and it does not name the killer, who was never caught. Two of his shorter ciphers are still unsolved.
Sources
Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 408 catalogue entry; The Beale Papers (1885) and J. Gillogly, The Beale Cipher: A Dissenting Opinion, Cryptologia, 1980; Mrs Richard Powell (Dora Penny), Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation (1937); Elonka Dunin's Kryptos pages and the CIA's own account of the sculpture; D. Oranchak, S. Blake and J. Van Eycke, The Solution of the Zodiac Killer's 340-Character Cipher, arXiv:2403.17350, 2024. Simon Singh, The Code Book (1999).