There is the sort of solver that prefers building things with the words and letters of Kryptos.
I will try to emulate the spirit and methodology of their proposals.
Take the Copperplate plaintext and K4.
K3 is obviously a literal “roadmap” or “building plan” to uncovering the hidden truth of Kryptos. Just as the archaeologists unearthed the ancient pyramids so too shall we explore the secret treasure “buried” within Kryptos itself. By following the directions and the clues hidden in Kryptos, you will soon see that this is the de facto solution to the mystery of the Kryptos.
Slowly? Alright…
Remove the DEBRIS…
I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner
Widened the hole a little…
I inserted the candle…
and “peered in”…
We’ve got some air escaping from “the chamber”…
The flame flickered, see the how the chamber helps build the candle and the hot air escaping is now the smoke of the candle? I think of the pink as symbolizing the draft that blew the candle out. The other yellow “slowly” is where Howard Carter peed himself a little because he was so excited.
Details emerge…
…from “themist”…
I took “Can you see anything?” to be a rhetorical question that implied there was much work to be done still. I mean, look at this awesome pictogram I built, it’s gotta mean something. Well it’s gotta mean something else because so far we’ve accomplished a whole lot of nothing.
I reused some of the solution methods of the previous sections, i.e. Morse code, palindromes, anagrams, 2 Vigenere ciphers, a route transposition, a keyed columnar transposition, a scytale and two rotational transpositions but I won’t include those here because we’ll run out of time/attention span.
You can read it all here though: Pharaoh/Sphinx/Voynich/Chaocipher/Titannic/Seabass Cipher System. It’s very straightforward and I’m sure you’ll agree it follows very obvious keywords and clues left for us by William Webster.
Here’s what I found:
One of the things I noticed was that there appears to be a message hidden in Kryptos’ plaintext. I indicated the nulls to make the reading easier and on an interesting note I found quite a few conjunctional nodalities between the hidden message and the original plaintext that generated it (these are highlighted in red). I guess “palimpsest” wasn’t just a keyword after all.
It is indeed philosophical. It evokes love and loss, pain and frustration and in fact sums up the human experience in only a few short lines. Truly this is the message Sanborn wanted us to see and I for one am glad to have finally solved the challenge. I know we will all ponder this wisdom for years to come and it will continue to inspire fresh insight and direction especially in an increasingly troubled world.
So Kryptos proves the existence of God after all!
Genius. Absolutely Genius.
I was wondering something else related to a literal interpretation. Believe me, I too cringe at the idea, because of all the “k4 proposals” out there, the worst come from literalists, right?
So let’s just imagine for a moment that we aren’t biased — that a literal interpretation has as much potential as any other. Why not?!
So with our literal interpretation and a hand-written document with the ciphertext and plain text someone copied from the sculpture, we go over to that coy pond and reflect on the past twenty years.
“Okay, why haven’t we solved this? Maybe those last 97 characters are something else. After all, what rule says it must be a cipher?”
Slowly, out of desparation, we regard “k4″ as rubbish. Garbage. Passage DEBRIS to be thrown out. It’s an illusion, right? It’s not a cipher. Since it’s at the bottom, let’s metaphorically refer to everything in “layer two” here as a doorway. Why? We’re trying to be literalists.
Such a bold move instantiates a trembling hand. What do we do? Make a tiny discovery — or breach of secrecy? A breach in the upper left-hand corner. What’s up there?
Raised letters. YA and R… Widening the whole a little, I inserted the candle, literally through the characters. We see the flicker of the candle RAY. And immediately details of the space within the whole of the doorway is revealed. A “Eureka! moment.”
Can YOU see anything?
***
That’s a literalist’s interpretation. Everyone has been trying metaphoric interpretations. That won’t ever work, because one source can metaphorically refer to an infinite number of methods. It’s trickery. Has anyone considered this before or was the illusion totally invisible?!
Just throwing out an alternate, not that I swear by it.
And I don’t mean to detract from your brilliant sense of humor. I still can’t stop laughing.
Why thats George Michael, Careless Whisper. Funny, I’ve been singing some of those words wrong the entire time
Me too!
LOL
LOL