It just wouldn’t doo to move in on someone else’s teritory. But there is more glory in killing a cop than a cid because a cop can shoot back. I have killed ten people to date. It would have been a lot more except that my bus bomb was a dud. I was swamped out by the rain we had a while back.’
WELL IT WAS WORTH A TRY

Anything is worth a try! I do think the code needs to be solved in order to truly figure it out though.

Interesting thing. The OMEGA symbol = 800. An "O" = 70. …after researching how the Greek letters tranfer to numbers, I find these two side by side on a few occasions–which led me to go back and look at Z’s code to see that these too were side by side. 870.

Anyway–latitude in Vallejo…the last digits = 865—strictly as an example..close to 870.

"ZPoem…translates to 71755875" – 875 Omega symbol (800) – O (70) – E (5)

****

The Omega symbol lower case (w) also has an association with "03C9"…"0369??"…probably just a similarity.

https://codepoints.net/U+03C9

(I’ve posted some of this stuff in various older threads)

I think it’s quite possible that if Z wasn’t simply messing with the cops*, his "puzzle" was indeed a pretty simple one.

Let’s say that you take his "clock face", superimpose it on the map (Mt Diablo thus becoming the center of the circle) and make one crucial adjustment, namely setting "0" to magnetic north – and then you’re good to go once you’ve solved the cipher:

The latter will reveal a simple instruction. X inches, 4.5 radians, say – and you’ll be able to draw a line from the center (Mt Diablo on the map), X inches long, culminating at a particular location on the map.

Now, for "radians" you can possibly substitute something else (because Z may not have been all that sophisticated – perhaps he didn’t know precisely what a radian was: glurk had a good suggestion in the 4pi thread regarding this, basically that Z may have split the circle in twelve equal parts, clock style – or indeed zodiac/astrology style – figuring that thirty degrees constituted a "radian").

* And he may have been more than just messing: If he was genuinely worried about them breathing down his neck, this bomb business of his would have been a plausible smokescreen (it did indeed work as such, one could argue, since much attention was given to his threats, etc.)

I have read time and time again where people take the radian stuff and show how it points to murder sites. Ok, maybe it does, but where is the revelation in that? We already know about these murders and where they occurred.

An important point, IMO.

Penn’s old theory (which seems to resurface from time to time in new guises) makes no sense. If there are radians in play, so to speak, they have to do with something yet undiscovered, not with already known crime scenes.

My take on the "Mt Diablo code" is simple: Either Z was just messing with/misleading the cops (i.e. the whole thing is just BS, there is no "puzzle" to be solved). Or we have to work with what he actually says: Use the actual map (not any map but the map he enclosed with his letter), use the actual hints (his "clock face", magnetic north, radians and inches along the radians), see where that can possibly lead.

I think Zodiac knew exactly what he was doing.

I think since radians and degrees go together it makes sense, but without that code solved, it is anyone’s guess as to the specific location he was referring to.

We must remember, Mt. Diablo was used for surveying and then ask ourselves how a location was pinpointed back before the days of GPS.

Now watch this movie clip from "12 Rounds"….an OK movie, but this jumped out at me right away as some have mentioned the pinpoint Zodiac drew on the map as more watch-like.

Click on the picture the video will start:

Funny–the guy at the end of the clip says "8th grade geometry". One guy says "we have degrees and we have clocks" (0, 3, 6, 9??) and the other guy says "they aren’t real clocks though….no hours. This translates to longitude and latitude."

Here’s the Youtube version of the clip since I was having trouble viewing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KeXZoS9728

Thanks doranchak!

Something else to consider…

The top line is 17 characters. Latitude & Longitude coordinates are 17 numbers. At least in the Bay Area.

For example Mt. Diablo:

37.877292 – 121.913052

C=3……etc.

Very interesting. Though of course the 340 cipher has 17 columns too.

So I think that gives more credence to the fact he used the same method to create both.

Maybe with a code book or telex paper. Trying to remember the name of the code book with 17 columns…spectra something "talking tables" in german.

Thanks doranchak!
Something else to consider…
The top line is 17 characters. Latitude & Longitude coordinates are 17 numbers. At least in the Bay Area.
For example Mt. Diablo:
37.877292 – 121.913052
C=3……etc.

That’s an interesting idea. If we assume each symbol is a number, then we’re screwed unless someone can find a nice key somewhere. If Zodiac made his own key, then it’d be nearly impossible to learn it without finding it somewhere (among undiscovered letters? hidden in some other message or cipher?). If he used some existing symbol-to-number lookup somewhere (similar to that National Tattler "message to zodiac" cipher), then there might be some hope.

Scanning all possible coordinates with brute force would require trying out all possible assignments for 16 different symbols. There are 10^16 = 10,000,000,000,000,000 different possible coordinates to examine. Could probably exclude a lot of ones that would obviously fall outside the area covered by the map. But there would still be very many left to rule out. So, we’re gonna need to find the key some other way!

"Is this code more basic than we thought"?

In my reading, I understood using radians was easier than other methods, at least in some circumstances. I got this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian , but read in other places, too. Maybe I can find those again for a better explanation.

In calculus and most other branches of mathematics beyond practical geometry, angles are universally measured in radians. This is because radians have a mathematical "naturalness" that leads to a more elegant formulation of a number of important results.

Yes Doranchak, looking at that "code" in and of itself, I don’t think there would ever be a way to solve it. Especially if one considers the "capital" Omega equaling "100". There is certainly another way….somehow!

Radians are used in longitude/latitude. "…When longitude spans 2π radians and latitude spans π radians, the solid angle is that of a sphere." (gah…used wiki)