The name of the enigmatic statue is "Kryptos."
"Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters
contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far).
There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98
characters which remains uncracked, and is considered to be one of the
most famous unsolved codes in the world...
What does Kryptos have to do with the bestseller 'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown?
Dan Brown is a big fan of cryptology, and has long been intrigued by
Kryptos. When he published his book, he hid some puzzles within the
artwork of the bookjacket. Two of those puzzles refer to Kryptos.
You can learn more about him, the book, and the puzzles by going to
http://www.danbrown.com and clicking on 'Secrets'. For example, if you
hold the backcover of the book up to a mirror and look very closely at
the part near the Crais quote, you can faintly see the coordinates 37°
57' 6.5" N 77° 8' 44" W on one side (it's light red on dark red, so is
hard to see). These are a clue to the coordinates in the deciphered
text of part 2 of Kryptos, which are 38° 57' 6.5" N 77° 8' 44" W. We
don't know why the book says 37 and Kryptos says 38, although when Dan
Brown was asked, he replied, 'This discrepancy is intentional.'
Another puzzle is on the backcover in the artwork of the brown 'tear'.
In very faint script, upside-down, it is possible to make out the
words 'only WW knows.'
In Fall 2003, Brown's webpage was also including questions about
Kryptos as part of a contest challenge, such as to refer to Kryptos
and 'the one who knows', the initials WW, a link between 'King Tut'
and the CIA, and the latitude and longitude coordinates."
Elonka: FAQ
http://elonka.com/kryptos/faq.html
More information about Kryptos may be found here:
Elonka: Kryptos
http://elonka.com/kryptos/
The New York Times: C.I.A.'s Artistic Enigma Yields All but Final Clue
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/06/biztech/articles/16code.html
Google Web Search: "dan brown" + "da vinci code" + "kryptos"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22dan+brown%22+%22da+vinci+code%22+kryptos
I hope this information is useful. If anything is unclear, or if a
link doesn't work for you, please request clarification; I'll be glad
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Best regards,
pinkfreud |
