Hi all,

In a post a few weeks ago, I’ve tried to find out what solutions could be compatible with the Z32 cipher, assuming the answer contained an angle and a distance to locate the alleged bomb. I must confess that, while some solutions could theoretically work, I wasn’t very satisfied with the result (too many possible solutions and these solutions depend too much imo on the arbitrary assumptions made about the content of the cipher).
So I started to think about alternative and more satisfactory methods.

I came to the conclusion that, if the Z32 cipher does contain a message (it’s not some gibberish code) and if it was designed to be decodable, then the cipher key cannot be totally arbitrary.

Indeed, if the Z32 is a cipher based on homophonic substitution with a completely new key, then the solution is out of reach because there are too few constraints: the cipher is obviously too short and only three characters are repeated (unlike the Z408 and Z340, which were much longer and with many characters repeated several times ; and even with that the Z340 proved to be very difficult to decode). So, I made the hypothesis that the key to the Z32 must already exist somewhere… (if not, there’s no hope to crack it and there’s no need to think about it anymore: maybe it’s the case, but it’s not the hypothesis I will follow here).

If the Z32 key is not arbitrary, I only see a limited number of possibilities:

the signs using the latin alphabet stands for themselves (and we forgot the non-alphabetical signs), and we can go on with well-known methods like Caesar or Vigenere ciphers etc.

we can reuse the two keys already available, those of the Z408 and Z340 or a combination of these.

While following this idea, I think I have found some interesting things with the use of the Z340 key (and nothing with the use of the Z408 key): not a definitive solution but some interesting things !

Only two signs from the Z32 code (Ω and the anchor like sign, or call it as you want !) are missing from the Z340, so there’s no key to decipher them but this is not an insurmountable difficulty.

The idea here is very simple : 1/ Apply the Z340 key to the 1st line of the Z32 and 2/ Apply the Z340 key twice to the 2nd line. The results are shown bellow :

Note the 4 “?” in the resulting text : those in the first line correspond to the two symbols Ω and the “anchor sign” ; the ? in the second line correspond to the “I’s” that don’t appear in the Z340 (I assume that the usual I of the alphabet are written by the Zodiac with crossbars, like in the Z408, and are different from the straight lines of the Z340). Note also that the 4 “?” are aligned, which is interesting because we are now going to modify the order of the columns to get a readable text).

The next step is to simply rearrange the columns in an arbitrary way: I didn’t find a logical sequence to sort the columns, but this point probably remains to be explored. However, changing the order of the columns as follows gives a rather interesting result:

And by adding some spaces, reversing “YAB” into “BAY” and adjusting “ROAD”, we get something like "SET IN BAY TOP ROAD / FEAR NOW TO DIE N" : this solution would not be totally incompatible with the content of the message we expected !

I find this solution disturbing, but I must agree that it raises some problems :

The name of the road "bay top road" is not very precise, and I could not find a road with such a name in the SF area.

How to deal with not deciphered signs “?”: perhaps they must be deciphered to complete the text, in particular to give a full road name ? This is one possibility, but there is another one : these special characters could very well give an indication of the angle and of the distance that we are looking for. For example, remember that the Z32 is 32 signs long, which is exactly the number of dots on a compass rose : one might imagine that the position of one of these signs in the text simply indicates an angle. They could also indicate à length in inches on a clock dial : many possibilities are opened !

What does the final N mean? a signature (a rotated Z)? an error? or simply the proof that this solution doesn’t work at all?

Of course, there may be alternative re-ordering of the columns to find a more satisfactory solution and probably it’s worth pursuing this idea.

In short, there are still a lot of questions, but I thought that these little thoughts were not necessarily uninteresting and could help move towards a totally convincing solution.