Zodiackillersite.com

Quagmire wrote:Well, we all know that Zodiac is Welsh so that's what everyone should be looking for...

Diolch yn fawr a Nos Da.

This is true, we have solid evidence that is as good to ID someone as DNA itself. We have, what is without doubt, hard evidence of Zodiac's Welsh roots from Trained Observer and SFPD Patrolman Mr Donald Fouke MBE.

"The man was a bit stocky and this automatically means he is most obviously A Welsh Minor who probably lost his sanity from being underground more than he's on land.

I mean I don't know, but if you push mr Fouke for an answer he will confirm that yes, as Zodiac walked past the patrol can he was heard singing Land of my Fathers.

doranchak wrote:

entropy wrote:- The and symbols in the 408 are accompanied by and in the 340 (is the symbol a letter or are all of these variations of the same symbol?)

It's curious to me that the is involved not only with one of the "pivots" (intersecting trigrams), but also those weird "box corner" things:



I can't help but look at the symbols and see them as little arrows, especially since the left and right "arrows" are new in the 340. The and are also new to the 340. And the is involved with the "fold in the middle" quality of the 10th line. How much of this is pareidolia???

Thanks for interpreting for me, Dave. I've saved that amazingly cool typewriterification tool for future lame cipher posts. I honestly don't think it's pareidolia. There seem to be a lot of recognizable patterns in the 340 cipher, which I think begs the question of whether they represent some indication of a specific method of construction or whether Zodiac just presented us with a bunch of garbage and purposely threw in patterns and teaser words (HER, GOD, ZODAIK) to make the cipher seem meaningful and solveable. I'm kind of worried that the latter fits his psychology better but who the hell knows?

Yeah, I've thought of those symbols as cues to rotate symbols as the cipher is being read. I still imagine him having a catalogue of each symbol used in four different positions (N, E, S, W) (0, 3 ,6 ,9) (^, >, v, <) and cherry-picking the conversion of each symbol to create meaningful patterns. Does that make sense? Symbols could be rotated after each arrow symbol... or every 4th line or however he chose to do it. FWIW, I'm convinced that his chosen name and chosen symbol are reflected on the construction of the 340 cipher somehow.

entropy wrote:Yeah, I've thought of those symbols as cues to rotate symbols as the cipher is being read.

Do you mean physically rotating the symbols themselves, or rotating the plaintext assignments (making the cipher polyalphabetic)? Or are you referring to re-routing the direction the plaintext is read?

doranchak wrote:

entropy wrote:Yeah, I've thought of those symbols as cues to rotate symbols as the cipher is being read.

Do you mean physically rotating the symbols themselves, or rotating the plaintext assignments (making the cipher polyalphabetic)? Or are you referring to re-routing the direction the plaintext is read?

I suppose it could be any (or none...) of the above. My first intuiton was rotating the symbols themselves a quarter turn every line. I've always been curious about the apparent similarity between lines 5, 9 and 13, for instance, and why those recognizable patterns happen to show up on every fourth line.

Interesting ideas and observations. I was curious about if the trigram fragments (repeating trigrams with gaps) also repeat every 4 lines (or multiple of 4 lines). Here's an updated image with the patterns highlighted:



The repeating patterns I highlighted are:

? ?
? ?
? ?
? ? ?
? ? ?
? ? ?
? ? ?
? ? ? ?
? ? ? ?
? ? ? ?

The pattern ? ? ? repeats with four lines in between, if you count from the end of the first occurrence. The others don't seem to fit a pattern.

? ? is interesting because it happens right at the box corners. Also, measuring from the symbols of the box corners, they are 5 columns apart, just like the two intersecting trigrams or pivots.

I also think it's interesting that ? ? ? ? involves the in . Perhaps even the apparent "signature" hides some plain text.

I think I need to go back and see how many of these kinds of patterns happen in other directions, to confirm they occur more frequently when the cipher text is read left to right, up to down. And how often do they occur in completely randomly shuffled cipher texts?

Keep digging Guys, maybe this is the week you guys crack the 340!

By the way, have you guys ever thought about, or tried holding the 340 to a mirror and rotating it to see if anything jumps out at you?

Here's what it would look like in the different orientations:

Normal:

Rotate 90 deg:

Rotate 180 deg:

Rotate 270 deg:

Flip horizontally:

Flip + Rotate 90 deg:

Flip + Rotate 180 deg:

Flip + Rotate 270 deg:

Good stuff, d. Unfortunately, the pattern I mentioned doesn't seem to fit the other trigram fragments. The hypothesis was obviously that they might if Z was rotating symbols a quarter turn each line. The glaring repetitions in lines 5, 9 & 13 made me wonder. If you include the trigram, line 13's actually combines two different trigrams that appeared 4 and 8 lines prior. Just seemed like a huge coincidence...

morf13 wrote:Keep digging Guys, maybe this is the week you guys crack the 340!

By the way, have you guys ever thought about, or tried holding the 340 to a mirror and rotating it to see if anything jumps out at you?

yes I tried that too imagine it was tried along time ago as well.
I find the ZO _ AIK ( a triangle for the _ symbol )odd , it seems to be a substitute for Zodiac . I f there is a code key for this cipher similar to the 408 cipher then tria. =d , O=O ,Z=Z,A=I ,I=A, K=C ? I find it very farfeched to think it spells a different word that just happens to be that close to zodiac ,and next to a zodiac symbol. maybe it is just jiberish

Ace - filler (I think) from HN9 onward on the last line, pulled down from the start of lines 1 and 2, for a start. Maybe.
Thanks for the rotated/reflected images, D., they made me feel queasy! Ha!