I have an avid interest in cyphers and codes stretching back to my childhood. I guess it started when a teacher in our school read us, 8 year old second graders, a story about how Lenin tricked intelligence agents from “okhranka” (tsarist secret service). Yep, this was a story from Russian language textbooks for the 2 grade. I know it sounds insane and weird, but we had many stories in our books about Great patriotic war, communist revolution and Lenin: how he liked kids, or made a friend with illiterate bricklayer, who didn’t know whom he spoke to, etc. It was in the beginning of 80’s in the Soviet Union, and school education was a part of global brainwashing program, I believe. I have no regrets though, as we had great time at school, education was free and very good and that stories in the textbooks were interesting.Back to the cyphers. That story about Lenin and okhranka agents contained some references to the simple way of coding, by book, and the way to do so. Apparently if you use milk instead of ink for writing, nobody can see what there’s something written. To see the message you should hold the page above heat for a while, and transparent lines will become visible. So while in prison Lenin could communicate in this way: he’d shape some bread as ink-pot, pour milk in there and write with it; after he’d finish he’d eat his “inkpot” (milkpot?) and “ink” left; having a nice meal of milk and bread. Secret agents never could catch him; moreover, in such a manner he wrote a couple of books in between lines of some French novels he was allowed to read.I loved this story. Soon I started to research and develop cyphers and ways of communication with my friends, our neighbours kids myself. To omit details, I even took a course on structural linguistics/cracking cyphers at university later. It was very exciting indeed, and I was happy to learn from one of the students of prof. Yuri Knorozov, who amongst other things decyphered Mayan script and later on his life “located” mythical place of origin of Meso-American people, known as Chichomoztoc, which is slightly out of scope of this post, though a very fascinating subject. So I’ll put a picture here, but won’t tell you why at this point:
The seven caves of Chicomoztoc, from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca.
Continue reading ‘Zodiac killer code: mapping the way to Sirius’
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