OK, so it hasn’t yet got to the Close Encounters degree where I’m building dinner time replicas out of mashed potato, but there is definitely something about San Francisco’s Twin Peaks that has me keep coming back to it as the absolute ideal location for the Zodiac’s “Buss Bomb,” according to his Mark II design.
Topographically we have the sloping hillside with adjacent road, surely frequented by school buses for both day outings as well as regular school runs, all combining to meet the logistics of the detailed mechanism we had drawn for us. Yet, more than just this, there is something oddly compelling about the existence of precisely these features at such an elevated and visible landmark—there for all the inhabitants of San Francisco to see and notice daily.
Were there to have actually been an explosion here, people would have been able to stand and point towards it from wherever they found themselves, with only the minimal of effort. With a telescope or an excellent pair of binoculars, it could even be scoped from the very peak of Mount Diablo itself. Even a search here for an ultimately absent device would have been enough to draw the daily attention of tens of thousands at a time.
The North-East face of the twin-peaked hill—precisely that face where the bomb would have to be placed to catch the early morning Summer sun—is just the very face which looms in the distance from many a vantage point along the majority of Market Street, heading west.
And maybe—just maybe—it is a schematic for these very Peaks that we have encoded in the otherwise mysterious symbol added to the Halloween card.
In any event, if there is any new potential solution I see offered to the Z32 cipher, my first thought is always to check whether it will reach from Mount Diablo along the “eighth radian” to somewhere around the middle of the San Francisco Peninsula, and I am all the less excited whenever it doesn’t.
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
Several years ago I had made some attempts at trying to set limits for a minimal set of plausible candidates for solution of the Z32, and for a while I was likewise drawn into favouring the eighth radian around four inches from Diablo (for which, see here and here).
The Zodiac had only just advanced from the rural side-roads of Benicia and Vallejo to the heart of San Francisco and, for the life of me, I could not imagine him letting his confidence slip. His bomb, if he was actually going to set one, was going to be right there in the very heart of everything, for everyone to shudder at.
Although my previous work had led me to an interesting proposal, there was always something about it that felt too complicated, whatever else of logical frameworking I imagined I found in it. Today, however, I find myself tilting at simpler things and so, when I stumbled upon a rather straightforward potential solution that was again directing my sight-line over from Diablo along the 8th radian, my obsession was once again awakened, if only for this while.
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
By the “8th radian,” I mean that radial line drawn out from Mount Diablo along the 8th “hour” (or spoke) of the added compass rose, once the orientation of the latter has been adjusted for magnetic North. On the following annotated version of the Diablo Map, it is reached by starting from the radial line that is just off 12 o’clock to the right and counting around to 8.
From the grid reproduced on the map, we can see that the eighth radian cuts through or just below the location of Twin Peaks (not marked itself on the map) at somewhere around 4⅓ inches. (Twin Peaks is situated right in the curve just below, and to the right of, the 66 marker; right around the point where Market Street ends and transitions into Portola Drive.)
In answer to The Zodiac’s challenge to us to use the Map and code to find “where the bomb is set,” it might then be that we would be inclined to reply:
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
As to form, “at four and a third inches, radian eight” is largely free of any troubling awkwardness with the implied comma, being as we might say it in regular speech, although I might have been more enthusiastic has it said “at four and a third inches, eighth radian,” or even “four and a third inches on radian eight.” For me, the “at” at the beginning can have some of the feel of being an arbitrary insertion solely for the purpose of permitting a match on the second and final characters.
This much said, what “at” does introduce here is the production of a form that reads easily in completion of what we find at the end of the associated letter:
“You have untill next Fall to dig it up [at four and a third inches, radian eight].”
or, simply:
“…the bomb is set [at four and a third inches, radian eight].”
and it is in this manner of reading that the qualms that I otherwise would have are somewhat eased.
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
Crucially, as a candidate solution, it does as a minimum “concern radians”—specifically, radian eight—as also “# inches along the radian,” namely “four and a third inches.”
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
However that might be, and whatever it is precisely that the Z32 deciphers to, I can’t help returning to the question in my mind: “How can it not be here?”
(Image: Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle)
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)
For context, here’s a photo from 1971 giving the view looking south-west along Market Street at the intersection with 3rd and Geary, a mere two blocks away from the Chronicle Building at 901 Mission Street.
(Source: https://www.vintag.es/2020/08/san-francisco-1970s.html )
“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)