User:Vorlath:Theory
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[edit] Principle
The Vorlath Theory is based primarily on a simple concept. That K1 is the instruction manual for the rest of the sculpture. Specifically, that misspellings are clues and that these misspellings enable the formation of Morse Code palindromes. These palindromes are often shorter than the English word that contains them. By extracting these, and correcting the misspelling, we can obtain new words and clues.
K1:
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
The two things mentioned here are SUBTLE SHADING and THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT.
S U B T L E S H A D I N G ... ..- -... - .-.. . ... .... .- -.. .. -. --.
These are the two largest Morse Code segments in color. The first one now spells DESHA. If we anagram this, we get DASH with an extra E. The other Morse Code segment spells DIT directly. DASH and DIT is an obvious reference to Morse Code.
ABSCENCE OF LIGHT is a play on words. Let's look at the Morse code.
A B S C E N C E O F L I G H T
.- -... ... -.-. . -. -.-. . --- ..-. .-.. .. --. .... -
There are a few palindromes here, but nothing to really go on. What we look at here is LIGHT as the entire word is nearly a perfect palindrome. By swapping the first dit and dash of the L, we get this:
N I I G H T -. .. .. --. .... -
The double letters would have seemed strange at first. But having seen K2's misspelling, this should no longer be unexpected. The difference here is that there is an extra letter whereas UNDERGRUUND is simply misspelled. However, I believe it is difficult enough to form different Morse code words from the containing English words that I can overlook the extra letter. In fact, we will see more of this in the finer details of the Vorlath theory. Besides, the overriding principle is obtaining Morse Code palindromes and NIIGHT is a perfect Morse Code palindrome.
We can now translate K1.
BETWEEN MORSE CODE AND THE ENCODING OF PALINDROMES LIES THE NUANCE OF CLUES.
I changed QLUS to clues and discarded the rest. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that QLUS jumps out at us. One other clue is that the Morse code segment INTERPRETATION has ON chopped off. Is there a link? Possibly later on. But it's moot. QLUS is quite obvious.
If one does not understand the above principle that my theory is based upon, everything will seem like random thoughts. In fact, most people believe my thoughts are all over the place. The truth is that I don't really want anyone else to find out what I've discovered. So if I reveal anything, it's because I'm much much further ahead in figuring out Kryptos.
[edit] K1 Keyword
For this part, we again use Morse code palindromes. But at this point, we would not know any plaintext at all except for the 12 Morse code segments. For now, we will only deal with the primary 10 segments since they are all the same distance apart (RQ SOS are further apart). We now recreate the layout found at the site in the exact order.
(North strata)
MEMORY FORCES INVISIBLE
LUCID SHADOW VIRTUALLY
Compass Rose
POSITION INTERPRETATION
T IS YOUR DIGETAL
(South strata w/ compass rose)
The Morse code segments can only be read when facing South. This is why they are in reverse order. The words themselves should be written backwards, but that would be too confusing.
At this point, all we have is the Morse code, the Compass Rose and the lodestone found over the word POSITION. I decided to try a rotation scheme based upon the DIGETAL INTERPRETATION clue. NTERPRETA is a perfect Morse code palindrome. But it doesn't mean anything. Some kind of transformation must be applied. It was revealed that DIGETAL could also spell out DIG TALE by using the extra E's surrounding the Morse code. If we remove the E, then perhaps we should remove a letter in the associated palindrome as well. The center letter is the P.
DIG TALE INTER RETATION
From this, we see that INTER could be converted to ENTER by simply taking a single dit instead of two at the beginning. And the E in RETATION is actually what is misspelled, not the E in DIGETAL. Again, we see our principle that misspellings in conjunction with Morse code palindromes gives us more clues in action.
DIG TALE ENTER ROTATION
Earlier, I believed this to be a clue for K3. Perhaps it still is, especially with DIG TALE. However, I now believe that the entire theme of Kryptos is that of BURIED TREASURE. In essence, DIG TALE is the very definition of Kryptos.
Because the Morse code segments are in pairs, I decided to seriate them. Starting at POSITION, I rotate the needle of the compass rose and write down the closest item first. So rotating clockwise, I will end up on LUCID before writing down MEMORY. And going down on the other side, INTERPRETATION will be written down before DIGETAL. We start with the first five.
- POSITION
- -
- LUCID
- -
- MEMORY
- -
- SHADOW
- -
- FORCES
- -
Now we continue going around clockwise, but we write at the vacant spot at the top.
- POSITION
- VIRTUALLY
- LUCID
- INVISIBLE
- MEMORY
- INTERPRETATION
- SHADOW
- DIGETAL
- FORCES
- TISYOUR
There is one last step. The palindromes, INTERPRETATION and INVISIBLE (and their associated pair items) need to be shifted. There aren't very many clues indicating that we're supposed to do this. However, we are given an obvious choice when we found out that we had to remove the E and P from DIGETAL INTERPRETATION to form DIG TALE ENTER ROTATION. If we align DIGETAL INTERPRETATION on the E and P, we would be shifting to the 6th and 4th characters according to the order listed. 64 is an important number. For now, we will also shift the other palindrome pair by 6 and 4 characters in the order they appear.
POSITION VIRTUALLY (Shift by 6) LUCID INVISIBLE (Shift by 4) MEMORY INTERPRETATION (Shift by 6) SHADOW DIGETAL (Shift by 4) FORCES TISYOUR
This gives PALIMPSEFT. There is a misspelled letter F in the 9th position. For the longest time, I thought this theory on the K1 keyword was bogus because of that misspelling. Then it dawned on me that misspellings are signatures, not mistakes. In fact, this misspelling is necessary for decoding some clues from the K4 ciphertext.
There are other clues as well. There are 31 dits and 33 dashes to make 64 symbols in all the Morse Code. This is without the extra E's. Also, K2 begins on the 64th character.
[edit] DESPARATLY
We now come to the mysterious word DESPARATLY with two misspellings. Actually, one letter is misspelled and the other is missing.
D E S P A R A T L Y
-.. . ... .--. .- .-. .- - .-.. -.--
We see the largest palindrome is PARATE. If we included the missing E, the last dit does not need to be taken from the L. PARATE is obviously PIRATE misspelled. Normally, this would seem ridiculous, but with a theme of BURIED TREASURE or DIG TALE, this would be 100% in sync with the overall story that Kryptos is telling. And if we're talking about pirates and buried treasure, then X marks the spot is clear as day as a clue.
Before continuing, it should be noted that even after K3 is decoded, LAYERTWO would not be known to us. It should have been gibberish all along. But instead, IDBYROWS came out and no one thought that perhaps there are clues leading up to its correct decoding. This has thwarted a great deal many attempts to decode K4. More than anything, K3 is there to decode LAYERTWO and the mysteries within. This is a wrongfully rejected theory by all in the cryptography community because it seems to run contrary to logical order. But Sanborn doesn't have any assumed restrictions. He can go in any order he wishes. If the last 8 letters of K2 were still gibberish, we all know that it would be quite logical to believe that perhaps K3 had clues to its decoding.
[edit] X Marks the Spot
The X's in K2 all lead to ciphertext letters ASTTO-R. We added the R from the misspelled letter in UNDERGRUUND (along with the O from SIX). Anagramming this, we get STRATO. This is old news. Others have come up with STATS and other combinations. However, I only use the extra X's and the misspelled letter. If one wishes to use the A from EXACT, A STRATO works just as well.
To substantiate the buried treasure theme, we can find out the name of the pirate in question. K2 has a few double letters with UNDERGRUUND and ONLY WW KNOWS. LAYERTWO's ciphertext is WJLLAETG. WJLL is misspelled. It's actually WILL. William "Captain" Kidd is the pirate in question. KIDD is again showing the double letter theme. And he is also the only known pirate to have buried a treasure. There is more supportive evidence of this later on.
[edit] Straddling Alphabet and DYAHR
With K4, we note there are 31 character wide rows. In the tableau, we note that the rows are also 31 characters wide. The end of K2 used to encrypt the coordinates are likewise 31 characters wide. This is a link to all three sections. The tableau has a straddling alphabet that hasn't been used yet. Since straddling checkerboards use straddling digits and use 30 grid locations, it's a fair bet to conclude that this is what the top 30 letter alphabet is indicating.
If we do use a straddling checkerboard, how do we build it? Russians had a specific way. You needed several items.
- 8 commonly used letters.
- Keyphrase
- Location of two empty spots on top row.
First thing we do is figure out our keyphrase. I just tried KRYPTOS. For the 8 common letters, I used the clue DYAHR. The offset letters are a clear indication of Linotype machines. Offset letters are used in ALL typographic packages for this very reason. Linotype machines had two sets of common letters.
Each group has only six letters. I need two more. This is easy. DH is not found in ETAOIN and EN (the first two letters of K3's ciphertext) are not found in SHRDLU. So yes, we will have two straddling checkerboards. However, the T in ETAOIN did not give good results, so I changed it to an L based on the extra L at the same line in the tableau.
SHRDLUEN ELAOINDH
Those are our two 8 letter groups.
Now to build the checkerboard. We start off by writing our keyphrase and then writing the rest of the alphabet underneath. In other words, we simply use the keyed alphabet from the tableau.
K R Y P T O S A B C D E F G H I J L M N Q U V W X Z . ?
Note that I use a period and question mark because these are found in the sculpture. Next, we take our 8 letter group and scan vertically starting at the leftmost column and mark them off sequentially as they are found. We start at 0.
K R Y P T O S
2 7
A B C D E F G
3 5
H I J L M N Q
0 4 6
U V W X Z . ?
1
Next, we mark off the rest of the letters vertically starting at 10.
K R Y P T O S 10 2 15 19 21 24 7 A B C D E F G 11 12 16 3 5 25 27 H I J L M N Q 0 13 17 4 22 6 28 U V W X Z . ? 1 14 18 20 23 26 29
Finally, we extract all the letters according to their number. 0-7 goes on the first row, 10's on the second row and 20's on the third row.
HURDLENS KABIVYCJWP XTMZOF.GQ?
I thought this was amazing, but most people just scoff at it. Probably because they don't understand the implications. HURD LENS is misspelled. HARD LENS is a type of contact lens and it relates directly with X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q?. In fact, look at the last line. It starts with an X and ends with a Q and question mark.
TMZ OF means Transponder Mandatory Zone OF. TMZ is a system where ships (usually planes) must identify themselves. Keep this in mind later. We also see TMZ in K4.
What's left in building our straddling checkerboard is finding out the two blank spots for the first row. For this, we are reminded of K2 where it speaks of using the Earth's magnetic field. This is a force. A SHADOW FORCE.
S H A D O W F O R C E S
... .... .- -.. --- .-- ..-. --- .-. -.-. . ...
The only Morse code palindrome is RC. This isn't much to go on. But I noticed that if you split up the C's Morse code (-.-.) into TR (- .-.), you could form the word FORTRESS by using the extra E's surrounding the Morse code to form the missing S. RTR would then be a palindrome in English as well as in Morse code.
S H A D O W F O R T R E S S
... .... .- -.. --- .-- ..-. --- .-. - .-. . ... ...
SHADOW FORTRESS should be enough of a clue. But just in case, put our anagram from the X's together with FORTRESS and we get:
STRATOFORTRESS
What is a Stratofortress? It's a B-52 Bomber. And this is the TMZ clue. I thought the blanks went in positions 5 and 2, but they actually go in position 2 (B) and 7 (5+2).
0123456789 HU RDLE NS 2KABIVYCJWP 7XTMZOF.GQ?
The other checkerboard is:
0123456789 AH IDLE ON 2KURBVYCJWP 7XTMZF.SGQ?
The first row of each grid says HURD LENS and A HID LEON. Each is misspelled. HARD LENS and I HID LEON are the correct spellings. In the center of the top rows, you can see RIDDLE with a missing letter (aside from the other D). RDLE = RiDDLE. IDLE = rIDDLE. This should be a clear cut clue that we're on the right track. But there is much much more.
[edit] LAYERTWO
There are a few clues that I have not revealed yet and am not prepared to do so yet. But I'm willing to reveal what it says. One clue says to test chi fib along with the letter H. This could be interpreted in many ways, but matching a plain alphabet to the kryptos keyed alphabet, we get a shift of 7. Letters that match the Fibonacci sequence are A,B,C,E and H (if we stop at H).
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZ
Shift by 7
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOS
So we apply this shift of 7 to LAYERTWO getting KAVEUXQY
KAVE is keeping in the theme of things buried or underground. It is misspelled on the first character.
If we go back and look at X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q?, the Q in the ciphertext makes the word QHEEN. There is another QUEEN in K2's ciphertext in the form of XUEEN. We see the double letter theme. And the first letters are indeed X and Q. Between those two words are the K2 coordinates.
First, we take a closer look at XUEEN and QHEEN. Remember how LAYERTWO was missing a letter in front. I believe this was intentional. Not only because making it gibberish would cause us to look for clues, but also because taking another letter in front of both QUEENs reveals a new clue.
UXUEEN YQHEEN
Look at the first two letters of each word. UXYQ. It's almost the same as UXQY found from KAVEUXQY. One of them would have to be swapped for it to match. In fact, another of my undisclosed clues say to swap last letters. We'll swap the ones from KAVE. We get KAEV-UXYQ. KAEV is misspelled. It's actually KIEV, the capital of Ukraine. In layer two of the HU grid (specified by the second letter of XUEEN and QHEEN), we have KABIV. KABIVTSY is another town in Ukraine. This is confirmation that we're on the right track. Sanborn leaves clues like this all over the place. Not just as confirmation, but also as clues depending in what order you make discoveries.
[edit] Coordinates
Now we can continue with the coordinates. We note that the digits of the coordinates add up to 64. This number shows up everywhere. K2 starts at character 64. There are 64 dits and dashes in the Morse Code. And now the coordinates add up to 64. We could try and use the digits of either the North or West with our straddling checkerboards.
Update Oct 7, 2009: New clue. X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q? If we take XUEEN and QHEEN as the two words represented by X and Q as currently mentioned, then it looks like the riddle is asking if we can see anything between the two queens.
XUEENJTBJLBQCRTBJDFHRRYIZETKZEMVDUFKSJHKFWHKUWQLSZFTIHHDDDUVHDWKBFUFPWNTDFIYCUQZEREEVLDKFEZMOQQJLTTU GSYQPFEUNLAVIDXFLGGTEZFKZBSFDQVGOGIPUFXHHDRKFFHQNTGPUAECNUVPDJMQCLQUMUNEDFQELZZVRRGKFFVOEEXBDMVPNFQX EZLGREDNQ FMPNZGLFL PMRJQYALMGNUVPDXVKPDQUMEBEDMHDAFMJGZNUPLGESWJLLAETGENDYAHROHNLSRHEOCPTEOIBIDYSHNAIACHTNREYULDSLLSLLN OHSNOSMRWXMNETPRNGATIHNRARPESLNNELEBLPIIACAEWMTWNDITEENRAHCTENEUDRETNHAEOETFOLSEDTIWENHAEIOYTEYQHEEN
The above grid has split all the letters (including the missing S before LAYERTWO or rather WJLLAETG, but excluding the question marks) exactly in half. Each of the top two and bottom two lines have 100 letters each while the two center lines have 9 letters each. IOW, the top and bottom halves have 209 letters each. FMPNZGL is the ciphertext for SEVENTY exactly on the character at the beginning of the WEST coordinates. After the discovery of what is found within those coordinates, you will notice that 17 letters will come out exactly like CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING has 17 letters (without the X and Q).
/END UPDATE
The North coordinates give gibberish while the West coordinates gives something readable.
0123456789 HU RDLE NS 2KABIVYCJWP 7XTMZOF.GQ? 77844 G NDD 0123456789 AH IDLE ON 2KURBVYCJWP 7XTMZF.SGQ? 77844 G ODD
They both use the double letter theme of K2 which is consistent. GNDD is an acronym for GROUND. We see that LAYERTWO and the KING TUT text are literally under ground.
The other word looks odd. Adding the digits, we see that they add up to 30. That's too close to 31 for comfort. Looking at the extra L in the tableau, I noticed that I could form the word GOLD by changing one of those letters to an L. In fact, L is encoded with the digit 5. Only one off. 77854 actually does add up to 31. More than that, it shows that misspellings happen in digits just as they do in English and in Morse code.
Another undisclosed clue says that we need three add-on. If we use chained modular addition, we get the following.
77854-45398-98277-70944 G OLD DLINO NOJ G ANDD
Indeed the rest is gibberish if we go further. But here, we get the phrase:
GOLDD LINO NO J, G AND D.
GOLDD keeps the double letter theme. LINO confirms that we were right to believe that the offset letters led to Linotype machines. And then we get a new clue. NO J, G AND D.
[edit] Arrowhead Transformation
Since the K2 coordinates are 31 characters long in the textual rows, we know there is some kind of link with K4.
So we remove the debris (J, G and D).
OBKR UOXOHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNKSSO TWTQSQSSEKZZWATKLUIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWKZXTCIKUHUAUEKCAR
What most people do is leave OBKR at the end of the line when displaying K4. Why? I don't know. Let's move it into the mist. The words THEMIST would normally be located at the very beginning of the OBKR line. THEMIST is also a perfect Morse code palindrome.
OBKR UOXOHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNKSSO TWTQSQSSEKZZWATKLUIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWKZXTCIKUHUAUEKCAR
Now we can see ROQM vertically. This is misspelled. ROQM = ROOM. This is the proverbial room that the sculpture is talking about. Next, we make a hole in the upper left corner and insert the CANDLE.
CANDLEOBKR UOXOHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNKSSO TWTQSQSSEKZZWATKLUIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWKZXTCIKUHUAUEKCAR
There are a lot of words here. We see LEO on the first line. At the first and last column on the first row, we see CUT ROKK. Again, the third letter is misspelled. The correct spelling is CUT ROCK. We can see a hint of this in K1 if we use the K1 misspelled keyword. If we extract the correct letters where the misspellings would have appeared, we get UNSHULU. This includes the correct letter from the misspelled Q (from IQLUSION). Decoding UNSHULU with a Ceasar shift (BTW, the original Ceasar shift used a shift of three as we do here) gives SQDLSOS. We can clearly see SOS. In order to make RQ at the beginning, we would need to shift the letter back by one. We do the same for the other two letters afterwards. RQCKSOS. We see a misspelled Q in the second location. ROCK SOS.
Going back to the above K4 layout, we see SQS (or SOS) directly below LEO. We also see TMZ directly below TQS (or TOS). This will become obvious later on.
We then apply CUT ROCK by chopping off the end and putting it below the rest.
CANDLEOBKR UOXOHULBSO TWTQSQSSEK VTTMZFPKWK LIFBBWFLRVQQPRNKSSO ZZWATKLUIAWINFBNYP ZXTCIKUHUAUEKCAR
We do the same thing again.
CANDLEOBKR UOXOHULBSO TWTQSQSSEK VTTMZFPKWK LIFBBWFLRV ZZWATKLUIA ZXTCIKUHUA QQPRNKSSO WINFBNYP UEKCAR
Extracting by diagonals and rotating, we get this:
U
EIW
KNPQQ
CFRCTXZ
ABNITAWZZ
RNKKKWBBFIL
YSULFPFZMTTV
PSHULKSSQSQTWT
OUIRWESBLEHOXOU
AAVKKORKBOELDNAC
We can see a few words here. Cryptographers don't like doing this and for good reason. But clues have to be hidden somewhere. We see SULF. Directly below is HULK. HULK makes us think of INCREDIBLE, but only BLE appears. This is below SQS (SOS). That's for K4 and won't get into that here. Anyhow, we see the word KUURK vertically in the second column of those horizontal words.
KUURK is simply confirmation of the WILLIAM "CAPTAIN" KIDD clue. The UU in KUURK is a link to K2. So the double letter theme in WILLIAM and KIDD is confirmed. KIRK was definitely a captain. And the ID (or TMZ) of his ship was NCC-1701. Kidd died in 1701. Remember how TMZ was directly below TQS (or TOS) in the original K4 ciphertext? TOS = The Original Series. Not only did we need to use a series, but the link to Star Trek is unmistakable.
Some other oddities are that the digits of 1701 adds up to 9, a square. And that 1645 (year of birth of Kidd), those digits add up to 16, another square. Sulfur is element 16. Another curious fact is that the arrowhead arrangement has a square number of letters on any row up to the sixth row where it has a total of 36 letters. Element 36 is Krypton, or Kryptos in Greek. About the 9, the element is F and indeed the misspelled 9th letter of PALIMPSEFT is an F. The F in K1's keyword is confirmed even more when decoding K4.
As to the other clues here, we'd be getting ahead of ourselves.
[edit] Conclusion
Other clues available are finding the K2 and K3 keys amongst other things. These are available at my site. In the future, I may reveal more, including my decoding of parts of K4.
