I am 27 posts away from the epic 1337 post count, a badge of honor.

I had planned to step back but being so close to both version 3 and 1337 post count, AND seeing people still talk about the city of Hercules, as if it has anything to do with the Z32 cipher, I will continue to bump as needed to ensure the truth is easily accessible at the top of the heap.

Version 3 took forever because the research expanded more than I expected.  Almost none of which will be included, but some of it will be because it is factual and relevant.  The rest was dead ends, or paths that required even more research.  The dead ends were time consuming, but were necessary and part of the process.

While people bickered about natural origin and watering holes on the forums, I was continuing the research while awaiting the scan on the triangle landmark David Stampher discovered in December 2025 using modern computational techniques.

Version 2 is “ok” but rushed.  There are some tiny corrections to be made, but it is a pre-print (like a draft).  No corrections regarding quantitative data, but rather referring to the 13th hole card as a “cartographic communication”.  It was just a communication, and one that is only suspected, not confirmed, to be from Zodiac (yes I think it was).  Version 2 was never the final version.  Even 3 might not be the final version. 

That would be 4, if they scan the triangle and find something, I will need to include that in my work.

Have a nice day,

-David Stampher, the solver of the Mount Diablo code, after 55 years.  (Cracked using the Python programming language in December 2025.)

May my glorious Python code help move this case forward.

-David Stampher, the solver of the Mount Diablo code.

Bump so my thread goes back to the top I already passed 1337.

Will add that the amount of research that went into my solve was pretty ridiculous but highly concentrated over around 6-7 months.  It was pretty much around the clock 7 days a week.  A lot of work.

Happy to have cracked it back in December.

Also the case itself is very upsetting, and I highly doubt LHR was his first, and that Stine was his last.  

Hope they figure out who this guy was some day because he is one of the worst of all time.

As a reward for my time/effort investment, I found the triangle by LHR after 55 years.  It paid off, basically.

On the topic of my code, it will be perfect in version 3 in that z32.py is cluttered.  It works fine but I would like cleaner code.  The human readable tokenizer shouldn’t be in z32.py, and the helper methods should also be moved elsewhere.

These are minor things to make the codebase perfectly nice.  I will do that but for now it works as intended, which is more important than perfect separation of concerns.  What I care more about is the output and where it lands.

And so I will say that I recognize that the codebase could use some slight improvement, although it functions correctly.  The same is true for the whitepaper.  Both of these were evolving works in progress.

Posted by: @coder1987

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The pattern I’ve observed in this discussion — and I say this respectfully — is that objections tend to be interpretive rather than structural. “I think the Zodiac meant X” or “this feels like cherry-picking” are not falsifications. They are impressions. The paper makes specific, reproducible, quantitative claims. If it is wrong, it should be demonstrably wrong. So let me lay out, explicitly, what would constitute a genuine falsification:

3. Show the map parameters are wrong. The projection uses a scale of 6.4 miles/inch (measured from the Phillips 66 legend) and a magnetic declination of 17°E for 1970 (from NOAA). If either value is materially incorrect, the coordinates shift. Demonstrate the error with a source.

None of the objections I’ve seen in this thread attempt any of these. Until one does, the paper’s claims stand unrefuted — not because they are necessarily correct, but because no one has engaged with them on the level at which they were made.

Analysis of the Phillips 66 maps shows two errors in relation to the map parameters given above. Firstly, careful measurement and comparison with actual distances on the ground will show that the map scale in not, as it states, 6.4 miles/inch, but actually somewhere close to 7.04 miles/inch. What is more, the direction straight up the page on the Phillips map (map north) is not along the direction of true north but rather 5° off from this, counterclockwise.

We can, and must, allow for these coarse errors when attempting to deduce lat./long. equivalents of any location corresponding to a given point on the map.

The simplest adjustment to your code to correct for these errors is achieved by setting:

MAG_DEC_1970_DEG_EAST = 17.0 - 5.0

MAP_SCALE_MI_PER_IN = 7.04

And, on making these corrections and the running your code, we get (for what it’s worth):

PRIMARY SOLUTION: IN THREE AND THREEEIGHTHS RADIANS TEN
  3.375 in x 7.04 mi/in = 23.8 mi at 10:00
  (38.111282, -122.239175)
  Nearest: blue_rock_springs (2.80 mi)

with the deduced lat./long. plotting on Google Maps as:

which is what @DMW had been trying to tell us since 2019.