Hmm, I tried ROT13 on a fragment from that last PDF. No joy.
For what it’s worth, the spiral looks like a Fibonacci spiral. Whether that’s a clue or just a stylistic choice, I don’t know. I’m going to guess the code is going to be more of the type of start at the first letter, skip through letters in a sequence (like, simplistically, every other letter), and find the message. Getting the other two fragments would obviously be necessay. Just run a frequency analysis on the letters (our dataset looks to be big enough) and if there’s a lot of variation in the frequency of certain letters, then we might just have a simple Caesar or letter substitution cipher. If the distribution of letters is fairly constant, it’s most likely not one of these ciphers.
Another thought is possibly a Vigenere cipher. I tried decoding the fragments and thought I hit something when the keyword “spiral” turned up “old dirt” in the decoded text, but it was just coincidence, as the rest of the input text was jibberish and trying that keyword on other text fragments didn’t yield anything of interest. If the final code text is big enough, you could use something called the “index of coincidence” to test whether it’s likely a Vigenere cipher or not.
Is this link still available somewhere?
I tweeted 3outof4 yesterday that there didn’t seem to be a clue in San Francisco and she sent back, “Message received. No Reply.” I’ve no idea what that means.
Anyone know someone in Miami who can look for the clue there?
Sorry, it’s back there now.
For reference, the letters so far are arranged in a spiral and run:
IYM (missing) GALUICLDOXNYIP (missing) HVJTLDCWXTPNCHYRWDPTBEITMPAXLO XEWTPRGUWULJDNMZEKOLMYFND ZIZAPETOGRIBVCYRNHUBTW
Where the breaks in the long string are arbitrary so as not to stretch the screen
After saying, “Maybe I’ve overreached, but it doesn’t get easier,” on Friday, 3outof4 posted the other two pieces this morning: www.itsanenigma.com
Here’s the whole thing:
IYMHACQGALUICLDOXNYIFJVOLBEIJMJAGHTCRNADAMQIHHKUMYRHVJTLDCWXTPNCHYRWDPTBEITMPAXLOXEWTPRGUVULJDNMZEKOLMYFNDZIZAPETOGRIBVCYRNHUBTWFIOUWXUTPWZEPAJXTXOWWBKGFWPVAVPVAJKWHNQWHPBXRMALJNJGETCWTRTIOMXS
The text had a wide variety of letter frequency, but I can’t seem to get anything out of it using simple letter substitution. It would be a lot easier if it had spaces in it.