A glimpse of Kryptos: The greatest mystery of all the time

Puzzles always demand brainstorming from the solver. Kryptos is just a synonymous term for the father of all the puzzles which appears to be too easy to solve but when it comes to solving, it's way more difficult than anybody might have ever thought. 

This unsolved mystery lies in the heart of CIA headquarters (Central Intelligence Agency) ,still catching the special attention from many mystery solvers apart from the other mysteries within this building. Elonka Dunine, the lady who solved one-third of this puzzles, describes kryptos as follows:

It is about 12 feet tall and 20 feet long.

It has thousands of characters carved into it.

Kryptos has four codes in it.

Three of the four have been solved.

The fourth has not been solved and it is considered to be one of the most famous unsolved codes of the world.

Here we are going on 30 years,

and it still hasn't been cracked. 

Elonka and cryptanalysts around the globe have tried every technique given in the book and many methods such as polyalphabetic substitution, transposition, Playfair, binary, Morse, but still the 97 characters long fourth code is yet to be revealed.


How Kryptos Came Into Existence?

It was in the late 1980s when Jim Sanborn, the artist who had never created a code before in his entire life, have designed something that has stumped the entire code breaking world. He was appointed to build a structure in the CIA  to beautify the environment around. So he decided to work on a piece using encoded text. Through the copper screen he cut with jigsaws, by hands, almost 2,000 letters. And that's how Jim gave life to Kryptos.

Unveiling the Kryptos Group Meetings

 Kryptos group, meets Jim every year or so, to do everything humanly possible get some clue for the Fourth code. This meetup is full of  people all around the world, professional code breakers, students to do the required brainstorming. But the most advantageous person in this meeting is none other than Jim since he receives a variety of gifts and treats and all the other possible attempts so that he could simply pour out some clues unintentionally. 


Jim :