Very interesting your observations.
For my part, I imagine that it is due to the cipher of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story(The gold bug), which is 204 characters long, divisible by 17 and is half of the cipher z408, however, as you noted, there may be other reasons.

53‡‡†305))6*;4826
)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†
8¶60))85;;]8*;:‡*
8†83(88)5*†;46(;8
8*96*?;8)*‡(;485)
;5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(
5*—4)8¶8*;4069285
);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;4
8081;8:8‡1;48†85;
4)485†528806*81(‡
9;48;(88;4(‡?34;4
8)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

Anyway, that’s it. Take care and stay at home and be you and your family in good health now !!
Marcelo

Yet another reason why I think TK is the strongest POI. By far.

Marclean – I have noticed other allusions to Poe, and other popular culture suspense / crime tales and movies, in Zodiac

Anyone who has not seen Marclean’s excellent study of Kaczynski and Zodiac handwriting should check it out. Here it is at his site:

https://zodiacode1933.blogspot.com/search?q=kaczynski

It is also here at this site, about halfway down at this page: viewtopic.php?f=102&t=938&start=310

Tomc & The Mist – Yes the fact there are 17 letters in TK’s name, an 17 occurs throughout the codes as building block, is interesting. And if you spell TK’s name with his middle initial, you get 18 letters, which matches the Unknown 18 at the end of the Zodiac 408 Code.

I’ve always been curious why Zodiac based the two big ciphers on the number 17. The 408 has 8 rows of 17 columns in 3 parts while the 340 is 20 rows of 17 columns. 17 is a prime number, the sum of the first 4 prime numbers–2,3,5,7. It’s binary number is 10001, and it’s modern Greek version is IZ’ (eye-zee).
But here’s something I noticed. Factor the two cipher’s number:
2x2x2x3x17=408
2x2x5x17=340
Now take the first three digits in each equation
2 2 2 and 2 2 5
Add the first two 2’s together, and convert the second group to a date
42 and 22 May
You end up with May 22, 1942, Ted Kaczynski’s birthday.
As Uriah Heep would say, "Interesting, in my ‘umble opinion."

Look also at the work of member MasterofthePanFlute. He also found a reference in Zodiac’s writing to 5 – 22 – 1942, Ted’s birthday:

MasterofthePanFlute: Hello, Longtime lurker, first time poster.

Building upon AK Wilks, Mark Hewitt and others. The ‘t’ of Sept, above the ‘k’ in knife sent me down a path looking for what other information did Theodore John Kaczynski (TJK) leave on the door? Granted I am looking at the evidence with a TJK bias, and I could be seeing only what I want to see, but I believe the clues are there.

If TJK is Zodiac, I think he did almost everything by design with careful planning. The common spelling errors, alignments of words etc. These are not mistakes, but finely crafted clues. I believe the Lake Berryessa car door may provide some easily found answers.

MasterofthePanFlute: TJK’s DOB is 5-22-1942

Let’s start with the most obvious, his year of birth = 42.

Why did Zodiac write ‘Sept’ as a word instead of numbers as he had in the 2 lines above? So he could align the ‘t’ of Sept, above the ‘k’ in knife. ‘Sept’ also allows him to align the day of 27 with the year of 69, on both the top and right side. Logically you would not mix these two disparate values, years and days, unless you wanted to highlight something. TJK liked ‘corners’ in his messages, here we have one with the 69 and 27. Subtract 69-27, you get 42 in two directions, Ted’s year of birth.

MasterofthePanFlute: If you subtract the 12-7 in the lines above ‘Sept’ you get 12-7=5, if you add 12+7=19. Now we have 5 = May, and 19, the century of his birth.

MasterofthePanFlute: ‘Vallejo’? Why write this one location, and leave out Benicia and Lake Berryessa? V is the 22nd letter in the alphabet, that gives you the day of his birth.

TJK was a Gemini, and seemed to like double letters, double murders, double meanings and ‘mirrored pairs’ as I like to call them. For example, ‘by’ is the first word in the confession letter, and ‘by’ shows up repeatedly across many communications. ‘b’ and ‘y’ are both the 2nd letter from their end of the alphabet (‘mirrored pairs’), from this you can get 22. My birthdate is the 11th. 11th has always been my favorite number, and holds special meaning too me. Maybe 22 means something special to Ted also?

Putting this all together, and with a little imagination, we have Ted’s birthday of 5-22-1942 mixed in with the dates and words written on the door.

Why 6:30? It is debatable if this was even the correct time of the crime? If we read backwards horizontally, we get 0,3,6,9 (9 from the ‘Sept’ year of 69). Where do we see 0,3,6,9 again regarding Zodiac?

The Mt. Diablo map. Follow the numbers around the compass and we see 9 points west, directly at Berkeley, CA where Ted had lived and taught at UC Berkeley.

AK Wilks: As mentioned by MasterofthePanFlute. On the map, Z does not use N, E,S, W, or 90, 180, 270, 360. Instead he uses 0, 3, 6 and 9, the numbers that appear on the car door. That is twice that 0, 3, 6, 9 appear, numbers that if used as Caesar shift values in a Caesar Code interpretation of the Unknown 18 from the Zodiac 408 renders that last 18 as THEODORE J KACZYNSKI, and the third and fourth line in the Raw Graysmith Proposed Solve as:

CAK NYZ THEO IKS
SEE A NAME.

And the west line from the Zodiac symbol centered on Mt. Diablo points directly and exactly to the then home of TJK, the University of California at Berkeley.

Marclean – I have noticed other allusions to Poe, and other popular culture suspense / crime tales and movies, in Zodiac

Mr Ak Wilks Could you please link these observations, I was very curious.

Thanks 4 remembering my work on TK

Forgive me the author of the topic(Mr Tomc) , because that is different from what he presented to us ,causing a digression of the subject.

Marcelo Leandro

An addendum,as I’ve already noticed and posted on another topic, I don’t know where it is.
considering only the NUMBERS written on the door, we have 17 numbers.

12-20-68
7-4-69
27-69-6:30

All together, without spaces:

12206874682769630