David Oranchak, the man who cracked the Zodiac Killer's 340 Cipher, decodes a UFO message and weighs in on alien symbols and hidden codes.

A

Hi everybody, this is Michael Ryan. We are on summer hiatus, but for the rest of the summer we are going to play the Best of UFO Talker Podcast. So enjoy today's episode and as always, if you have a question or comment or something you would like to say to us, send your email to ufotalkerell.net.

B

You are listening to the UFO Talker podcast. Come with us as we explore UFOs from the past and the present.

A

With insightful discussions, interviews and reviews, we

B

will add our voice to the mysteries that have been seen in our skies and oceans for all of human history. Now, here is our host, Michael Ryan.

A

Welcome everybody to the podcast. This is season three, episode 27 from Studio 7H, overlooking the beautiful Trent river here in Ontario, Canada.

C

And I'm Christine Scott, coming to you from the beautiful warehouse district in Regina, Saskatchewan, Studio 9B.

A

And on today's episode we have an interview with David Orincheck, who is part of a three man team that cracked the Zodiac 340 cipher, which hadn't been broken in over 51 years. And he is also going to talk about the Bernie Official UFO Cipher, which he also broke that code as well. I just want to mention that there is another UFO festival and this one takes place in Cardiff, Queensland, Australia, which is a great place, which is warm, I think, all year round and has all that crystal blue water in the ocean. And this takes place, as I mentioned, in Cardwell, and it takes place from August 8th through August 10th. Now on their site, they haven't actually mentioned who the speakers are going to be yet, but they have a lot of events set up already and I will put a link to that festival in the show notes. And one thing I can tell you for almost for sure, because I have lots of relatives in Australia and everyone thinks in North America that the beer of Australia is Fosters, but, well, according to my relatives, it's twoies. That is the beer of choice and I think their motto, or it used to be have a twoies or two. There you go.

C

Oh, I like that. I will, thank you.

A

There you go. And of course in Australia too, that's just getting started.

C

Yeah, that's waking up.

A

That's for breakfast. No, no, no, of course we're joking. Not really, but we're joking about that. So I want to mention something that everyone should look at. It's a zine and it's called the Observer. And our good friend Bernie o' Connor also writes for this, this scene and he has two interviews that you should go check out. And I'LL put links in our show notes for it. He has an interview in there with Joel and Paul Hynek, which is very interesting. I read it. So that's very good. And also he has, his most recent article is on Veronica's Books, which is a bookstore that carries all things about UFOs and cryptids and high strangeness and all those things. And the observer, it was actually a post by William Murphy in On the Anomalous Page that tipped me off to this publication. And I think it's worth checking out. It's pretty, I've, I've been reading it for a few weeks now. And, you know, I think in the States it says it's a free physical zine and you can get that for free. And I'm pretty sure it's the States. It doesn't mention that. But I don't think they're paying for that to go around the world for free. And the, the zine covers UFOs, conspiracy theories, cryptozoology and high strangeness. So that is right up my alley. And yeah, a lot of good stuff in that, for sure. So, Christine, I just want to mention that Dr. Richard F. Haynes, he has actually written a new fiction book. And I'm always amazed at the number of people who've investigated UFOs or researched UFOs and have written nonfiction books about UFOs, and then they write fiction books. There's a, there's a big list of them. So he has come out with a new book. It's called Spiral All Behavior Has Consequences. And you can buy this book on Amazon. But he says you must, if you do a search, you must use his full name, Richard F. Haynes, because that's the one that will take you to the right place. So that has just come out. It would be interesting to read it and see what it's about. And maybe if we have listeners that have read it or about to read it, maybe they can send us an email and tell us what they, what they think of it. So now we're going to do some news and I think, Christine, you have something for us?

C

I do. The US Hearings have, of course, dominated the news cycle for a long time. But Canada, the federal government report on UFOs is expected to be made public by June. I'm reporting via the Ottawa Citizen. Then it also goes on to say an internal briefing says the initiative is not meant to prove or deny the existence of extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial visitors. Okay, so what does that mean for you? A final report on unidentified flying objects should be released by June, confirmed by the office of the federal government's Chief Science Advisor. It's the Sky Canada Project, led by the aforementioned Chief Science Advisor of Canada, was launched in the fall of 2022 to review current practices surrounding public reporting of unidentified aerial phenomena in Canada. Public sources estimate Canadians report somewhere between 600 and 1,000 UAPs annually. One in four Canadian surveys said that they have personally witnessed the UAP and the full report will come out, but only, by the way, only 10% reported what they saw.

A

Well, the weird part is because I've read about. Obviously I've read about this before.

D

Yeah.

A

Is. So they're not investigating anything.

C

No.

A

And they don't want people to phone them up with their reports. So I'm trying to think. So what is the point of this again?

C

Well, they claim it's spurred by increased public interest and recent developments in other countries, particularly the US where formal procedures for addressing UAP sightings are in development. They say what they're doing. The study will explore current reporting methods, identify gaps, and provide recommendations to enhance transparency and scientific inquiry into UAP issues in Canada, according to the Office of the Chief Science Advisor.

B

So what?

A

Yeah, that could mean a lot of things. Yeah, that could mean that. There goes another thousand dollars a week in lunches.

D

Yeah.

A

For the taxpayers.

C

Well, here, Canada, they go on to say the Sky Canada project briefing for the Department of National Defense pointed out that among the reasons behind the initiative were support for national security through surveillance activities.

A

Well, I'll be. I'll be interested in reading the report, but I'm setting the bar low.

B

Yeah.

C

And someone also told me, because I will just. There is a UFO club developing in Regina which I will report about after I go to the first. The first meeting I can attend. But someone did remind me that there's. Isn't there another round of US congressional hearings on May 12th?

A

I believe so. I don't know the date, but.

C

Yeah, coming up soon.

A

Yeah, I think there's more of them. But you're going to have to keep us definitely posted on that new UFO club in Regina because there are not a lot of new UFO clubs, at least in Canada. So it'll be interesting to hear what that's all about. And you know, our very own Christine Scott will be at this club, so

C

live on the scene, I know. Yes, I unfortunately missed. It was started by a lovely chap I know named John Vaughan who does programming for the Regina Public Library film theater. And. And it was his idea. He's a Big fan. We had talked a lot in the store and I had to miss the first one because I had a family thing, but they had. He showed communion and then everybody went out afterwards for drinks and had a discussion. And the second meeting is set for the end of this month and it looks like I can go to this one. I don't know what movie we'll be watching. And then we'll adjourn for drinks and discussion and I will let everyone know.

A

That sounds good. Very interesting. Yes. Definitely. Want to hear what it was like?

C

Yeah, I think it'll be fun.

A

So my news, it comes from a very good source in ufology and that is John Greenwald's Black Vault. And I haven't seen much of him lately, at least for a while. I was wondering what was happening. But he has announced a few days ago that in 2020, because he is the king of Freedom of Information act requests, he had put in a FOIA request in 2020 with the Department of Navy and he was seeking information on the newly formed Pentagon effort to study UAPs. So the package, this FOIA package, it was finally released on April 22 and it did a lot of interesting things. So first of all, and I'll put a link to his documents, a lot of the documents were heavily redacted, but his FOIA request does confirm the existence of a highly classified UAP task force and their chartered document that was from the Naval Intelligence activity and it was signed in September 2020. And this task force, the mission includes to detect, analyze, catalog, consolidate and exploit advanced non traditional aerospace vehicles posing an operational threat to U. S. National security and avoid strategic surprise. Boy, that's.

C

I like the strategic surprise part.

A

That is a mouthful. Especially when you're just talking about, oh, you're talking about ufo' and it's good that John Greenwald did this because there had, in the interim five years, there had been a lot of people saying that this, there was nothing to it. It wasn't, you know, people didn't care about, wasn't doing anything important. It was really totally dismissed. And here it is, John Greenwald backing it up with his documents again. No, it's very serious and they are taking it very seriously. So we will watch that in the future for sure to see if anything takes place with this. And I'm glad to see John Greenwald is back. He. I. Unless I miss something, I think he's not been very active in the last month or so. So, Christine, it's that time again to do our shout out to a small Town or city where we have listeners. And this week, we have a place that I have never been to, but I'm bumping it up to near the top of my list. It is Charlottetown, Prince Edward island, and it has a population of 38,809 people. And Prince Edward island, for those of you around the world who are thinking, where is that? It's Canada's smallest province, and it is off the coast a little bit north of Nova Scotia, and it's a little bit east of New Brunswick and the US State of Maine. And of course, they grow a lot of potatoes on Prince Edward Island. And of course, like always, I watch videos and boy, charming does not really do this place justice. It looks unbelievably great. And all the passenger ships, they dock there. A lot of them dock there. Very quaint Victorian architecture everywhere. Everything is well kept up. One of the main streets is closed to traffic, and it's just a pedestrian walkway. And they are restaurants and stores lining both sides of the street. Everything looks fantastic. And there is a great Catholic church there, one of those big spires and big cathedral inside. Just amazing. Now, I watched two videos of this cathedral, and it was funny because one of them said it was built in 1907. And then the other guy said, and it was built in 1913. I can't exactly tell you when that was built, but one of them is wrong for sure. Or both of them were wrong. But yeah, the play, and it's right by the water of the whole place looks really fantastic. Now, Christine set me straight before the show because in the videos, I noticed there were many shops that said, like the Anne of Green Gables chocolate shop. The Anne of Green Gables ice cream store. The Anne of Green Gables. We want to take all your tourist money shop.

C

Shut up and take my money store

A

and all those things.

B

Yeah.

A

And Christina's told me that no, Charlottetown really has no, no great tie to Lucy Maude Montgomery. I thought she was born there, but

B

no, no, she was born in New.

C

New London. Pei.

A

Yeah.

C

And earlier, earlier in the season, we picked Summerside P.E.I. as the shout out. And it is rumored that Summerside is the model, actual model for the town in Anne of Green Gables. So Summerside. I mean, pei. Hey, everybody in pei. You be proud of Anne.

A

Yes.

C

You lay claim to her. But Summerside was apparently specifically chosen as the model for the town in Anne of Green Gables.

D

I know.

A

And I, I. The. The one thing is that I read a little bit about Lucy Mod Montgomery's life. And so from the very first book with Ann in the and of Green Gables. It was successful right off the bat and did well her whole life. Now, the only problem is she didn't have a personally, a very good life. It was.

B

No, she didn't.

A

Boy, a lot of hardships and depression and boy, I thought for someone who sold so many books and delivered so much happiness around the globe, she had a rough go of it.

C

Yeah. And there was a lot of controversy about her later years and dueling biographies, dueling relatives. I know librarians and book dealers who are in the middle of it. I won't really say anything, but it's. It's. There is really a lot of, like I said, a lot of debate about her final years and her mental health. Very interesting if you want to look into it, because like you say, she meant so much to so many, and it's kind of sad to see she. She did not get to enjoy a lot of that happiness.

A

Now, normally, as everybody knows that listens to the UFO talker, we cover a bakery and a coffee shop, but, boy, we are throwing caution to the wind today. We're just throwing it right out the window. We are doing something totally different today. And mainly because when I watched these videos, I thought I could not pass. I could not pass this up. So in Charlottetown, they have a place. And when I'm going to Charlottetown, I will 100% be going to this place. It's called Doll's Potato Bar. And of course, like we mentioned, they grow some mighty fine potatoes in Prince Edward Island. And Dolls has a few different baked potatoes that they offer. But you know what? I'm gonna go with their original baked potato. And they show it being made. And so they get the baked potato, they cut it in half, they put butter in it. And I'm gonna say it's like half a stick of butter goes in and then mozzarella pile on that. Salt, green onion, sour cream and corn.

C

Oh, yeah, yeah.

A

And then the person has a big spoon and they kind of stir it all together inside the potato skin. And I thought, oh, boy. Yeah, I'm going there. And then for dessert, they have cow's ice cream. And many people on the sites I was looking at, many people said cow's ice cream is hands down the best ice cream in all of Canada. And they have three flavors that I'm going to probably try every time I go there. Now, one thing I should warn everybody about, it's supposed to. It's supposed to be the best ice cream in Canada. And also from what I've seen it's the most expensive ice cream in Canada and perhaps the world because a little cup was, I think, $10. But, you know, it's supposed to be great. So I think once in a while you can try it. But they had three flavors, I have to mention. One is chocolate orange ice cream. The next one is Nanaimo bar ice cream, and that looked very good. And last, P.E.I. blueberry ice cream. Oh.

C

Oh, yum.

A

Yeah. All looked good. And they had many, many more flavors. That's just the three that caught my fancy for sure. But Charlottetown, P.I. high on the list of places to go. We have a sad bit of news to express to all of our listeners, and that is that Earl Gray Anderson has passed away. And I read it on his site. His daughter, Earl Gray's daughter, I think everyone knew him as Earl Gray. His daughter posted on his Facebook page that Earl had passed away early Sunday morning from his battle with cancer that he unfortunately did not beat. You know, he was many things, including the MUFON state director of Southern California. I had never met. I had never had the privilege of meeting him, but he was high on my list of people to interview. You know, there's so many people I want to want to interview. He was way up there on the list. I had seen him many times, you know, and he must have been an incredible force in ufology because every. You used to see his picture and his name everywhere, all over every ufology meeting, all kinds of Facebook pages. He was forever connected with so many things, and I have never seen such an outpouring of love and condolences on all these pages. There was just, just. It was really amazing to see so many people talk about him, and his friends and family would know this better than I, but he must have been a very, very special person. We want to give our love and condolences to all of his family members and all of his friends, which are numerous. And to Earl Gray Anderson, may you rest in eternal peace.

D

What is it to look for the truth when others find it easier to look away? When all is said and done, who will we thank for writing the history of unidentified flying objects? It hasn't been governments or institutions. It has mainly been individuals that have done the heavy lifting of ufology. Names like Dr. James McDonald, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Ann Druffle, John E. Mack, Stephen Stanton Friedman, and Dr. Richard F. Haynes and thousands and thousands of others whose names have been lost to time. For many, there was no fame, no adulation, and little or no monetary reward. And yet they kept on giving their time and large parts of their lives to help find the answer. Are we alone in the universe? So here's to all of those for their hard work over many decades, collecting pieces of the puzzle of one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Your investigations will not have been in vain. Sometimes the reward is in and of itself.

A

My next guest is Bernie o'. Connor. Bernie was just on the podcast a few short weeks ago on episode 23. Today, Bernie is back to talk about the Bernie Official UFO Cipher. Bernie, welcome back to the podcast.

E

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate you having me. Having me here and kind of excited about the cipher we're talking about. I've had it for. In my files. Next year it'll be 50 years.

A

I know it's amazing to think because when you sent me the scans, I literally went, wow. Because I had an interest in the Zodiac letters and it was very similar. They're not exactly the same, but very similar. Oh. I was very excited, and almost immediately I wanted to know what it said. But I have a couple of questions for you because we want to set the stage, if you can. If you can take us back to your. The offices of Official UFO Magazine in 1976 in New York City. What were those days like? Just a brief description of what a day was like. Then.

E

Well, come to the office of my cup of coffee, and I was. I would usually start coming. I had worked overnight a lot of times. I would bring home manuscripts and read them and edit them and see what issue they were going to come into and so on. And depending on the time I would come in, there would be a mail bag of mail sitting there. We got an awful lot of correspondence from the magazine. At the time, we had 375,000 circulation, which for 1976 was, for any time, would be impressive.

A

Very good. Very impressive.

E

And what.

A

What was the typical kinds of letters that you would get back then?

E

Well, like we talked about in the other podcast, there would be. I saw. I saw a light in the sky. I don't know what to do. Sometimes the letters would be much more in detail. There'd be corrections to articles. There would be comments from the readers, which we always entertained. And at the time, my. My girlfriend would help, and now she's my wife, she would help answer some of the letters, and we would go through them. A lot of the letters were just really crazy. We got. My favorite letters was the one that started out that if you give me a million dollars, I will. I will introduce you to the alien. My life was in danger. It was like the Nigerian prince of the year, you know, of that time. Yeah, we got a lot of, a lot type of stuff, and a lot of people queried, you know, can I write an article? Can I submit it? So it was, it was a very lively community. I mean, it was before the Internet, before email, before, you know, podcasts, before YouTube. So people were looking for information, and they were looking for valid sources of information they could go to. And I would refer them out to mufon, Apro or other authors I know who were active investigators as well.

A

When this letter arrived, the. Bernie, official UFO cipher. When this letter arrived, what was your first thought when you, when you saw it?

E

Well, it was, it was really different. And I had not received anything like it. And I, I looking at the cipher and it's all symbols and, and, and I'm gonna say almost like graphic designs in it. And I looked at, and I thought, okay, well, this is, you know, let's see where this leads. And it was from Canada. That's why I, I, when, when we started talking, I dug it out of the files and sent it to you because I, I said my, my note to you was, I, I don't understand Canadian. Could you translate it for me? And I still thought it was like, you know, a hoax or a joke or, you know, someone would want me maybe to publish it in the magazine and then say, haha, you know, I got you. So I just folded up, put it away, and I kept it. I just kept it. I kept a good envelope full of letters from Send it to ufo, and for some reason I just kept, kept that one. And when we started talking, I dug it out.

A

Is this, was this the only cipher that you ever received?

E

I, I think I would have saved the other ones if I, if I had gotten more.

A

So thank you, Bernie, for being on this podcast and setting up the interview with cryptologist David Orincheck, which will follow right after this, after this. And boy, oh, boy, it will be revealed. What?

E

I hope so, yes. I mean, after, like I said, almost 50 years, if something comes out of this, I might kick myself for not doing something years ago.

A

Well, my only hope is that it's, you know, it's, it's something of substance because I'm hoping that it's just not what the guy had for lunch.

E

Yeah, yeah, that's why I didn't print it either, you know,

A

so we will find out. All right, right after this. My next guest is David Orenscheck. David has been a software developer and cryptologist with over 25 years of industry and government experience. In December of 2020, David was part of a three man team that included Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eka that cracked the Zodiac 340 cipher which had remained unsolved for 51 years. David, welcome to the podcast.

B

Hey, thanks for having me.

A

Now, before we get started, I just want to mention that David has cracked our Bernie official UFO cipher. And we will get to that a little later in the show. Also, to give my listeners some perspective, the Zodiac 340 cipher was considered for many years to be in the top two most difficult ciphers in the world. The Zodiac 340 Cipher had every major cryptologist in the world trying to decode it, including military organizations around the world, the FBI, the CIA. So it's a very stunning achievement, to be sure. David, my first question is, what got you interested in cryptology?

B

Well, I think I really developed an interest in cryptology because. Because of that cipher, because of the Zodiac's 340 cipher. I think it was around 2007 when the David Fincher movie about the Zodiac case came out. It was based on a book written by Robert Graysmith back in the 80s that had like kind of re energized interest in the case after it had been cold for a little while. You know, these crimes took place. Zodiac's crimes took place in the late 60s and early 70s and had gone on for so long without, without being solved. And then in the 80s Graysmith wrote his book and eventually that got developed into the movie Zodiac by Fincher. So that was making a splash online and in the world. And at some point I saw a picture of that letter which had the mysterious symbols on it, the 340 cipher. And it was included with a greeting card that he had sent. And I had always been kind of fascinated by that. And you know, I have a background in computer programming and I enjoy puzzles. And you know, the combination of those two things I felt were really good for exploring different ways to attack that cipher to try to get at what its underlying know hidden message might be. So that kind of fueled my interest in cryptography and cryptology and so forth.

A

The. I can't imagine anyone wouldn't know who the Zodiac killer was, but just basically he was a serial killer. And we're. I'm assuming he was a male, but in the late 60s and early 70s like David mentioned, and he sent these ciphers to several newspapers, kind of taunting the police. And I think most of the ciphers were sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, but he did send them to other newspapers as well. It's amazing. It's an amazing story, to be sure. It's full of twists and turns. And a question I have, and I don't know if you can answer this, but did you ever read or think about a person like the Zodiac Killer when they send these ciphers? Like, in an odd way? I think so. They want to be. They want them to be deciphered, because why would someone do this if they didn't want it? So it's a weird thing that they want it to be secret, but they're kind of baiting people to. To figure it out. Do you ever try and. Did you ever try and get into the mind of the killer? Like, is that part of deciphering the code?

B

Yeah, like, you kind of get a sense of some aspects of his personality, I guess, or at least what he was trying to accomplish with his, you know, campaign of correspondences after his initial murders that he committed. He is, I think, widely regarded as a kind of a domestic terrorist type of killer because he's trying to make a, you know, a strong impact with the Bay Area in particular and probably the entire United States in general by getting his name plastered all over the headlines in the newspapers. And so he was. He was very interested in kind of causing the newspapers to publish stories about him. And one of his ways of doing that was, like, in his initial letters, he would threaten to kill more people unless the newspapers put his letters or his ciphers on the front page. So he's basically telling the newspapers, you know, it's going to be your fault if I kill more people if you don't do what I say. So it became an extortion case, and on top of a, you know, a murder investigation, a series of murder investigations. So that was an interesting aspect to it, where he was kind of leveraging his crimes to create even more damage, you know, through this campaign of fear, which was widely reported on. You know, there were people that were really afraid living in that area because the crimes were fairly random. At least they seemed very random. He was targeting young couples that were in isolated locations like Lovers Lanes. And so it seemed like he was a boogeyman that would come and kill you, you know, and there wouldn't be any reason for it. He would just pick you at random. And that kind of progressed into him threatening school children, and, you know, he was going to blow up a school bus full of children. And so they had, you know, police. Police detachments that were following school buses to keep them safe, you know, during some part of this crime spree. So he definitely had an impact. And, you know, he could just send a new letter and get his name in the papers again. And I think the ciphers were a part of that in the way that, you know, he was trying to keep people busy and keep them afraid and mess with the authorities. You know, he definitely didn't like cops and he wanted to make them look silly. So he would say, hey, I've got my identity in this cipher. All you have to do is solve this cipher and you'll know who I am. And the first cipher where he said that he would include his identity, that one's known as the 408. That one was solved after it was published in the papers in, I think it was early August 1969. Within a few days, a high school teacher and his wife solved that one by hand. So that one didn't take years and years to solve. They solved that one pretty quickly because it was fairly simple. And of course it says, you know, I'm not going to give you my name because you will interfere with my, you know, killing efforts, basically. So he was kind of stringing people along with promises in his letters, like, oh, yeah, I'm not. I'm. I'm gonna give you my name, so you better solve this. So, you know, people have been wasting their time, including me, on these ciphers for so many years to, you know, maybe try to get some information out of them. And, you know, even the 340 cipher doesn't include his name either. So he has a history of making these false promises. And there's letters where he's got designs for, you know, these explosive contraptions and bombs that people were afraid he'd bury somewhere, but those never turned up. And so as far as I know, there's no, you know, nobody's discovered any bombs that he's created, but he definitely created a lot of fear with his letter writing campaign.

A

The one thing that, the one element I find very interesting is his last, or they say his last cipher was sent, I think in 1974. And I don't know, again, I don't know if you know much about this aspect of it, but they always say that people like this, they don't normally stop unless something happens. So in 74, there's speculation that he may have gotten to prison for some other unrelated crime, passed away or something. I've heard psychologists say people like that usually don't stop. And are you aware of any letters that came much later, perhaps? There are credit to the Zodiac killer.

B

I think the 74 letter is probably the last official one. And by official, that means, you know, there was a document examiner at the time who would sign off on it and say, yes, this is definitely his handwriting, or there's some other aspect of it that made them conclude that it was official. In some of the letters, he made it pretty clear that it was actually him writing those letters because he would include. He would include things from the crime scenes. Like when he killed the cab driver, Paul Stein, he tore up his bloody shirt and sent pieces of it with. With letters to the newspapers and to Melvin Belli, the famous lawyer, celebrity lawyer back then. And, you know, so that made it pretty indisputable that he was the same guy, the letter writer was the same guy who actually committed the crimes. But as the years went on, there wasn't as much, you know, like, forensic connection besides maybe things that they haven't told the public yet. But also, you know, there's no. There's nothing in the letters themselves that would have, like, you know, insider knowledge about the crimes like his earlier letters had. But there have been speculations about other letters that seem to be from Zodiac. Like there's, I think, one that was sent to a TV station in Los Angeles in 1978, and it has the Zodiac symbol on it. It says. It starts out, this is the Zodiac speaking. So it's very. It's worded very similarly to Zodiac's authentic letters. Handwriting is a bit different, but, you know, people debate over him possibly changing his handwriting to create a different effect. But there have been a lot of copycats over the years, so it's. It's difficult to distinguish between the authentic letters and the copycats if the. If the copycats are paying attention to the details of the letters. But, yeah, the 74 letter, I believe, is the last official one when.

A

When the. Bernie O', Connor, who is the editor of official UFO magazine during the 70s, when he sent me the scan of the cipher he received, you know, me being a layperson with regards to ciphers. So when I first looked at it, so immediately I saw a similarity between that and the Zodiac ciphers. Not saying that it's the same person, but generally I went, wow, this looks very familiar. So that's why I looked you up to be the person to. To try and crack this. When you. When I sent you the scans and you looked at them, what were your first thoughts before you actually got to decoding it?

B

I did see some of. Some of the similarities. It's fairly common for, you know, handwritten ciphers, especially substitution ciphers, to use a mix of symbols. You know, not necessarily just replacing a letter with another letter, but taking the original letter and like part of a word and replacing it with shapes and symbols and mysterious looking looking symbols. And that's what I noticed in the letter was it's a lot of mysterious looking symbols. But they seem to be. They seem to have the qualities that a lot of substitution ciphers that I've seen over the years have, where you can see word patterns, you can see, you know, two letter words, three letter words. Because the author of this, of this cryptogram was nice enough to put spaces in between the words. Even though they're an advanced alien intelligence, they at least helped us out by putting the spaces in there. You know, there's some specific similarities to Zodiac ciphers, like the, the triangle shapes, because Zodiac used triangle shapes and the less than sign and a mix of other symbols. But there are enough differences to make me think that it's clearly not the same. It's not. Yes, but, yeah, but I did notice right away that it did seem to be a pretty simple substitution cipher from the outset.

A

So for me, like, having no real knowledge of cryptology, a question I have is, so this person, whoever it was in 1976, why would he have picked a similar kind of. I don't know what you call the symbols. Are they called symbols or glyphs or.

B

Yeah, yeah, both of those words are accurate.

A

And this. So the symbols were similar kind of to what the Zodiac serial killer used. But I'm trying to think, were there books out in 1976 or prior to that that would have given the person who put this together an idea of what they were doing? Or like, I'm thinking, why would someone who had. If this person had no knowledge of cryptology, it's odd that they would have picked similar symbols. So I'm trying to think, could there have been a book like something he was copying or trying to imitate? Do you know of any. Is there any famous books that were out prior to 1976 where someone could have read it and had a general knowledge of how to make a cipher?

B

Yeah, there were quite a few of those kinds of books out there around that time. I think in closer to, you know, the post war era or even During World War II, there was a strong interest in code making and code breaking. You know, if you look at pop culture back then, there were a lot of stories about, you know, like, adventure stories or dramatic tales of people Using ciphers to hide information, like during wartime. And especially in crime fiction, detective stories, they would contain a lot of stories about, oh, the criminal has left a secret message somewhere, and we. We have to decode it before his next crime. It'll have information that'll help us solve the next crime. And in a lot of those examples, they would just do a simple symbol substitution where they would replace letters with symbols. And there were other general knowledge books out there at the time. Like there was one called Secret and urgent by Fletcher Pratt, which had a lot of examples of different ways of encrypting messages using simple methods that involve only, like, pen and paper or pencil and paper. And you can basically create any kind of substitution cipher with any set of symbols. So it's only limited by your imagination. You can, you know, use a collection of Greek letters. There was a. There were examples of that in superhero comics back in the olden days where there was, like, a decoder wheel that used letters from the Greek Alphabet. And so a lot of those letters have shapes that resemble zodiacs, ciphers. And you'll get this resemblance just by, you know, just trying out different shapes like circles and squares and triangles and so forth. So it's fun. Fairly easy to come up with these substitution schemes in a way that they all start looking like each other.

A

I have to say, it is a bit eerie for me when you look at the cipher that I sent you, Even though there could be absolutely nothing sinister about it or anything like that, but you can't help but think, oh, the person never sent a return address and they put this message in there. It just.

E

It.

A

I don't know if it's just me, but it gives you a little bit of a. It's kind of slightly chilling, right, because even though this could have been a prank or, you know, something someone just did as a joke or something like that, it is kind of weird. Do you ever get that impression, like, why would someone do this? And that was the only one he ever sent. So they never published this in the UFO magazine. So he never. Never got what he wanted. Them. Trying to figure it out and keep going. But you just think to yourself, it is kind of a weird occupation, right, to go to that level to try and deceive someone, I think.

B

Yeah, I mean, there's. It's pretty easy to create a message like this, but it does have that kind of. It gives you the impression of, oh, this is secret information, or they don't want us to discover the message. So there's. There's kind of this illicit kind of, kind of error that you get from it. You know, people, people encrypt messages for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they really do want to conceal the information, especially if it's involving crime or they're writing personal details in a journal or a diary. It was also common years ago for people to send encrypted messages in postcards because you would want to send a message in a cheap way to a loved one, but you didn't want the postman to be your romantic messages or, you know, you didn't want people to know your plans or whatever it was. And so there's a lot of examples of that where people just have these substitution schemes and some of them look similar, where they had these weird shapes or weird glyphs and they almost look like different languages. And also in newspaper classifieds, so you'd see some of these kind of encrypted messages that look like gibberish, but the recipient can, knows the scheme and can decrypt a message. So seeing a letter like this to the UFO magazine, it kind of has that same flavor, like there's some secret information there. It makes the message automatically more interesting.

A

Yes.

B

So I think that's what, that's the vibe that I'm getting from it, is that somebody wanted him to pay attention to the, the message. And that's a good way to do it, is to make it more mysterious and make it look alien and make it, you know.

A

Can you, can you walk us through the basic steps that you took to decipher this cipher?

B

So the standard way of approaching a simple substitution cipher like this is to do what's known as frequency analysis. And that's basically where you look at all the symbols and you figure out which ones are written the most number of times. Like, in the English language, the letter E occurs more than any other letter. So if you count up all the symbols in the mysterious message and there's one that happens to occur more than all the others, then it's more likely to be E than say, Q or something like that. And so that's the way you get into these messages is even though the symbols are hiding the identities of the letters, they don't hide their frequencies. So that aspect of the underlying message is peeking through even with these mysterious symbols in place. And then the other thing with this kind of message is, you know, you, it has all these spaces between words and you can, you can spot common words like these two letter words like, like is, and you can see that, you know, the word Is I think it might be repeating in this message. And the same symbols will be used for both occurrences of that word. And you know, the word the is very common so that you can see that happening in this message more than once. And it uses the same three symbols each time. Kind of infer from that, oh, this is. This might be the word, the song. Then you write down those, you know, you replace all those with the letters in the word the and it and is, and you build from there. And then you see pieces of other words kind of peeking through. And then you can think of common words that fit those patterns. And then, you know, you use trial and error and you can come up with the underlying message that way. The other way that, which is what I actually did was I used a computer. I cheated and used a computer. I was too lazy to do the frequency, so I basically typed it up in a format that the computer would understand, fed it into a code breaking program and just had it do the work for me. Like using a calculator to do long arithmetically.

A

Yes. So now I'm going to actually read the decoded message and I just want to mention to our listeners that I will also print out on my blog an email that David sent me, which is very, very interesting for anyone interested in this kind of thing. But I'm going to read this and then I have a couple of questions for David that really interest me. So he deciphered it as let it be known that on the 12th day of seven month, mankind will have his first public contact with we, the inhabitants of the moon. Please do not panic. We will land at coordinates 43 degrees, 12 minutes latitude, 79 degrees, 30 minutes longitude. This is man's last chance. The materials used for this communication came from Earth. So that is interesting. And I have a few questions that sprung to my mind. Is, and I've not only seen you mention it and not just here, but in the zodiac letters, and I've seen other cryptologists mention it is you talk about an interpretation. And so some of the things I read are in brackets. And I'm not totally clear, not just from our decoding, but other ones I've seen. So what is the interpretation part? Like, are there parts of this? Like, for example, in the second line you have day in brackets. And then mankind will have, so will is in brackets. Like is when you call it an interpretation. Not just in our cipher, but in all ciphers, is there a part of is. Are you saying that a part of it is your interpretation of the code or.

B

Yeah, so most of the message is it came out of the decryption process matching, I believe, what the author originally intended. There are a few places where when you apply the substitution key, and to make that more clear, the substitution key is the thing that tells you which symbols stand for which letter. For example, the upside down triangle in this cipher stands for the letter E. And so you go through and you, once you think you've figured out the key, you apply it through the whole message and you'll get, in this case, a completely legible message, except for a few places you pointed out the word day. If you look at the way that the author of the cipher encrypted that it decodes to daie, so it's not quite the word day, but you infer from the fact that he mentions the number 12 and then the seventh month. So it's clearly indicating, you know, a day in a month. So, and when you say daie, when you try to pronounce it out, it sounds like the word day. It's just like a phonetic way of spelling it, I guess the make it look more alien, I guess. And so I interpret that as the word day. There's a chance that there's a different meaning that was intended for that. But that's my best guess for what he meant by that. And they're little things like, you know, putting three O's in the word moon. Obviously that's still the word moon. And let's see, the other example was the word will. So mankind will have his first public contact. But the symbol that he used actually stands for, I think T originally, if I look at that, yeah, it looked like it was encoding the letter T. So but that didn't make sense to say mankind till have his first public contact. And it seems, seemed like a reasonable conclusion to say that he really meant to say will. And it was either, you know, a misinterpretation of the symbol that he used for W or a misspelling on his part. And there's other, there's a few other ones too, like the. When he says this is man's last chance, it has actually decrypt it to a weird spelling like C A, N, C, D, or something like that. But the only other word that made sense there that is similarly spelled is chance. So that's also an interpretation, I think a reasonable one. So you have to be careful with decoding ciphers because I've seen so many examples of if you take interpretations too far, you can make the message say whatever you want.

A

Yes.

B

But in this case, I tried to limit the interpretations to what's reasonable and what can be supported by good argumentation.

A

And then the coordinates, I found this kind of interesting is the coordinates could either be southeastern Kazakhstan or somewhere in Lake Ontario.

B

That's right, yeah. Because he didn't give the. Whether it was degrees east or degrees west for the second number. I think it's obvious that the first number is degrees north, because if you put in degrees south, it doesn't point to anywhere of note. It's just the middle of the Southern hemisphere, the oceans of the Southern hemisphere. But if you put east, you get either a remote area in southeastern Kazakhstan, but if you put in west, you get a spot like in Lake Ontario. And that. That might be more interesting because the letter originated from. From Canada.

A

Yes. Alberta. It is. You can see. And it's, you know, really clear how. You can see how someone can take this little bit of information and create a whole conspiracy around it. Because it is interesting that, you know, Kazakhstan, so that's where the. The Baikonur aerial drone was, where they launched the Russian or Soviet Union rockets. And then also in Lake Ontario, which is, you know, where the letter came from, Canada. So you're thinking that there's a Canadian angle. So, you know, just by those two weird coincidences, which could totally be a weird coincidence. It's one of those things that start to make you think. Right. When you're trying to think of all the. All this stuff. So you can see how your imagination can kind of run away with your thoughts. Yeah.

B

Especially if you look at anything that happened on that day that was from what, 1976.

A

Yes.

B

That would be July 7th month would be July, and the 12th day would be July 12th. So look into the news.

A

I know, I know.

B

Well, and see if you find something interesting that happened in southeast Kazakhstan or if you found something interesting that happened in Lake Ontario, you know, outside of. To Toronto.

E

Right.

B

So there may. If there's something interesting, then you can weave a story around that that's connected to this thing. Because maybe this. If this is just some guy trying to create a UFO story, then it would make sense for him to have done something in one of these locations to what he was. What he was doing, like to generate interest. So there might be, you know, like maybe some articles out there saying, oh, we found this weird thing in one of these locations.

A

The one part of the decoded cipher that really ruins it for me, because up until that point, you can kind of. It could go a few ways, but at the end, where it says the materials used for this communication came from Earth. So if you're. If you're thinking, wow, this could be from an alien. But then at the end, I'm going to point out why I had to use a letter and stamps to send it. So that kind of. That kind of ruined it a little bit.

B

It would have included some alien material that would have just been.

A

Yes. And so this got me to thinking, you know, of a lot of things a little bit outside the box. And for my listeners, I sent David some suggestions of a case, the Rendlesham Forest incident. And in that case, David knows a little bit about it. That where Sergeant Jim Peniston, he wrote down symbols that he saw on the UFO at close range. And it made me start thinking about this in kind of a larger perspective and in cryptology. And I have no idea if this is possible or I'm really getting out there, but let's say there was a real alien message, like from a species that was not from Earth and they. They had symbols or a cipher. Is that even possible for us to try and decode it? Or it would just be, because it's a totally alien language. It's not in the realm of possibilities that we could decode it.

B

Right. You would need something like. What do they call it, the Rosetta Stone. Like, even in a human language, we had trouble decrypting it, despite having numerous examples of the language, things written in that language in hieroglyphics. And we needed that, basically, that cheat sheet, the Rosetta Stone, that told us how to translate it, something like that. For the limited group of symbols that we see from the Rendlesham Forest incident, it's an even harder problem because we only have, what is it, five symbols.

A

Yeah.

B

And so I've seen some of the speculations around that. Like, that second symbol looks kind of like a tool. You know, it's like a pick of some kind or some kind of instrument. But, you know, that's like an imaginative speculation based on how it looks. And you can extend that type of reasoning to all the symbols like that. The fourth one looks like a figure standing two. To me, it looks like a rock guitar. You would have to have a lot more examples of these symbols being used in order to make a conclusion using statistics based on does it appear to have language characteristics? And there's linguists that study that kind of stuff. The. The Voynich manuscript, for instance, looks like an alien language. We've got a whole book that was written, you know, 600 years ago with some strange Script with strange symbols. And it looks like it has some language characteristics, but we still can't translate it. And there are other examples that are interesting, like the Codex Seraphanus. I can't. I don't know if pronouncing that right, but there was this strange book that came out in the 70s. It's filled with this, like, bizarre artwork. And the whole book is packed with this undeciphered language. And it was written by an artist. And it turned out, years later, the artist admitted that the language was just invented to look like a language. So it has some language characteristics, but it doesn't actually translate to anything. It was just meant to convey that this thing was a, you know, like an alien guide or book of knowledge or something like that.

A

So we would need. Like on. When NASA sent the Voyager one off in, I believe it was 1976, they had a. I guess it's a cipher where they showed what a male and a female looked like in the solar system. And I think there was, like, you're saying like there was some information. Information there that would be like a Rosetta Stone so aliens could figure out what. What we were saying. So kind of what I was trying to think of is what we sent out that could be hopefully decoded. I wonder if. If it would be. That was my original thought was could. If it was reversed, would we be able to figure it out? But you're saying we would need some kind of Rosetta Stone to help us?

B

Yeah, we would need at least that or, you know, an entire book or larger piece of writing that uses these symbols in an extensive way. Because then you would at least have something you could test and look for patterns that appear in the sequence of symbols and see if there's any language characteristics. Because in written languages, there tends to be certain patterns that appear over and over again because of words that are common or concepts that are common and reused frequently. And you can create all kinds of statistical models based on that and compare them to other languages and try to come up with a way to decrypt them. But we only have the five symbols, so there's not a whole lot you can do with that. Maybe you can find some other public that uses, you know, one or more of these symbols in some other context. Then you would have, like, an interesting lead into. Maybe there's a connection to wherever it appears elsewhere.

A

Now in cryptology are. You know, I. So me being a layperson, I tend to think of it as symbols like that was in the Zodiac letter. And then the cipher that we got. But can cryptology encompass things like, you know, patterns in sound or lights or different colors? Is, can anything be discerned from that or is that like my thinking has gone way, way out on a limb?

B

Well, certainly you can use things like light to convey messages. I mean, you can think of the, the ways that naval ships used to send messages to each other. As long as you could see the other ship, you know, far away but still in sight. You can flash lights and interpret the sequence of flashes as Morse code and decrypt it. That's more of an encoding rather than an encipherment. But technically you're translating the information in a way that, you know, can be determined visually. And there's, you can do that with sounds too. There's ways of hiding messages using sounds. There's a, I believe there was a famous case of that in World War II, I believe, where they were using vinyl records where you would have some kind of like random noise that would be added by, by using a vinyl record as the key to the message. And so it would turn your audio recording into just static, but then you could play, you could play it against this same record that serves as the key in order to turn it back into its original state and understand the audio. So there were different, like physical ways of, of encoding messages because people are pretty clever about coming up with ways of hiding information.

A

My last question of trying to confound you is a lot of UFO sightings at nights and the, and this is the one that I'm talking about, ones that are more credible where pilots and people like that have seen these UFOs lighting up. And several or many of the cases talk about the light pattern changes. So it'll be, you know, blue, red, orange, they'll see the different colors. And you know, thinking about what you're doing, it made me think, I wonder if that's actually a message like in a lot of these, when people see these, a lot of their descriptions, they're just saying, oh wow, it changed different colors. But I wonder if anyone has thought about, or if it's possible that the changing or the sequence of colors, could that be a message?

B

Yeah, I think I've seen situations where there are standard ways of, of that aircraft are required to, to be lit up. And you know, there's different lights for landing, there's lights that indicate position and there are different colors. There's like inspection related lights, there's anti collision lights and that kind of thing. And there's kind of a, there's recipes for how you're supposed to sequence those lights. And so when you see that kind of pattern happening on on something you're seeing in the sky, I think it's helpful to cross reference that against the known kind of recipes for these aircraft to sequence their lights. If there is a message, then the question becomes like if it is truly a UFO of unknown origin, I would think that it'd be important to know what the encryption method is because you would need to find a way to decipher the sequence or interpret the sequence and have it not produce, you know, conflicting messages or interpretations. So that's quite a challenging task.

A

Before we wrap this up, I just want to mention that I'm going to put a link in my show notes for David's YouTube series called let's Crack Zodiac. And I have watched some of the episodes and it is very interesting. It doesn't take much to want to watch all of them if you're interested in this topic at all. And David, I just want to thank you very much for being on the podcast today. It has been very enlightening.

B

Well, thanks a lot for having me on and I had a ball talking about this stuff and it's all been very interesting.

D

Here are the Canadian Civil aviation anomalies for the week of April 21 through April 25, 2025. On April 22, a WRC Enterprises Limited Cirrus aircraft flying from Boundary Bay Airport, British Columbia to Vernon Regional Airport, British Columbia, entered Class 7 airspace without contact or permission at Alder Grove, 2,400ft, and exited the zone by the Mission Bridge at 4,000ft through the active skydiving area. On April 23, a WestJet B789 was operating flight WJA 81 from Tokyo Narita International Airport, Japan, to Calgary International Airport in Alberta. Approximately 15 minutes into the flight, unanticipated turbulence was encountered. Two cabin crew members were injured and were considered incapacitated for the remainder of the flight. Duties were reassigned among crew members. Also on April 23, a Jazz Aviation CRJ900 departed Yellowknife Airport, Northwest Territories on Flight JZA479 under the Instrument flight rules. When a flight attendant became ill, a doctor and nurse on board as passengers were able to attend the ill flight attendant. The flight crew requested through their company dispatch that emergency services meet the aircraft at Vancouver International Airport. Airport the crew requested priority but did not declare an emergency with air traffic control. After landing, the flight attendant was taken to the hospital for assessment. There was no impact on operations and all flights proceeded to their destinations without further incident.

A

Well, that's our podcast for this week. Please share, subscribe and do all those great things to help spread the word about UFO Talker. And until next time, this is Michael Ryan. Keep watching the skies.

D

You have been listening to the UFO Talker. If you have any questions or comments on this episode, you can email us@ufotalkerl.net or visit our website at UFO Ufotalker CA. You can support UFO Talker by using the Buy me a Coffee app with links on our website and in the show notes. We appreciate every listener. Thank you for your support. This has been a Michael Ryan production.

E

30 that's a wrap.