Zodiackiller.com Message Board: Ciphers: Bomb Cipher

As I've said before, in the bomb cipher is the astrological symbol for "north". It looks similar to a small case "n" so reading the letters after it even seems to spell out north only nortg.....just making note.....

Hey Hurley, did you ever notice that the Z and crossed circle on the Halloween Card turn into a compass rose topped with an N for "North" when the card is rotated 90 degrees clockwise? And the Zodiac referred explicitly to magnetic north on the Mount Diablo map. My guess is that he was hinting he was from Canada.

--Jake
http://members.aol.com/Jakewark/index.html
"This is the Zodiac Speaking..."

I wonder if any of the major suspects has a Canada connection?

SFPD found several LPs by the Canadian band Rush, as well as a Kids in the Hall videotape, in Arthur Allen's basement during their 1992 search.

--Jake
http://members.aol.com/Jakewark/index.html
"Coo-roo-coo-coo-coo-roo-coo-coo!"

Is that Bob and Doug McKenzie???

I'm glad someone got that!

--Jake

Bob and Doug McKenzie's "Coo-roo-coo-coo-coo-roo-coo-coo!" call was funny for about five minutes 15 years ago, but it still makes me laugh. (Not sure what that says about me, though!).

Curt,
http://members.aol.com/Labyrinth13/X/ZFiles.htm

In looking at the bomb diagram of the April 20, 1970 letter and based on what he says about the bomb in the letter, it would have been placed facing east since he says the early morning sunlight is what triggers it to go off so the highway it was targeting runs north to south.

So the bomb was placed on the west side of the highway, facing east and his diagram shows a hill there on the west side of the highway.

How or why did he think that a school bus would be there at the exact time sunlight hit the trigger?

Oh, maybe North is a highway direction.

Or maybe it was just a general diagram showing how he would prefer to set it up...

That's true but if sunlight is what sets the trigger, its placement will have to be specific especially since the sunlight has to shine into that cardboard tube to set it off.

This is my first posting, but before proceeding I should like to thank Tom for the dedication he has given to making this such a good site to organize research on the Zodiac.

What I wanted to post is rather long and involved so instead I am posting a link to my url where I have laid everything out more or less in order and detail -- on one page.

I really want to hear from all who have an opinion or idea on this. This is the scientific/investigative process in action.

My url is: Solution To The Zodiac Bomb Cipher

Think about it and give me some feed back, either personally or, of course, here.

Thanks,

Tom F

Fife, Thank you for an interesting solution.
Would the following coordinates be within that range of error: 40.741944 ,-124.208056 ?

Zoe,

This co-ordinate that you provided is on a spur of a railroad on Humboldt Bay just south of Eureka, CA. This location is not on the map provided by the Zodiac. How did you come up with this location?

Tom Fife

Tom, due North rather than magnetic North.

Zoe,

Is this a pun?

Tom F

Fife, I should have expressed true north as a compass is said to read in the Bermuda Triangle and Devils sea. A varient grid.

Zoe,

I really am not following you. Could you be more expositive?

I do not know if this is what you are talking about but I have spoken to a hiker that has climbed Mount Diablo several times. He told me that Mount Diablo is sitting on top of an anomaly. He said that you should not take magnetic readings from the mountain itself since it is sitting on top of some extremely dense and magnetic rock that causes bogus compass readings locally.

Tom Fife

Interesting analysis. Only problem I see is that the shore of Half Moon May doesn't match the bomb site criteria. You know, like with a road and school buses? And something that could get flooded out by recent rains rather than daily tides?

Peter,

Well, what really are the criteria?

I calculated the angle above the horizon of the mountain range there and it is maybe +2 degrees at the very most. I am in the process of getting together the sunrise information for the school year right now. There are several issues with the bomb design that I am also going over to investigate necessary constraints on it. As it stands, the sun rises on the shortest day of the year there at 7:20 am. With a full bus coming back around to the school, the sun could be visible for the last twenty to thirty minutes of its drive.

I have the current bus schedule for the area schools and for the most part they start off about 7:00am and are at school by 8:00am. I have located on topographical maps several candidate locations along the current bus routes. Mountains and the roads around them turn and present all sorts of angles. Once I have all the sunrise angles through the year I will be able to verify such locations much better. In any respect, I see nothing on the surface that eliminates this as the site using his bomb design and specifications and matching them to the environs. Not yet.

An added criterion that I have is that the road should not expect to have truck traffic. Also, that the bus is only south bound and never comes north bound else it would worthlessly trigger the bomb behind it. [I have investigated having the angle such that northbound buses will not trigger it, but it seems that it would force the sun to be too high in the sky. I am not through with this investigation, however.]

Also, I would take the exact location with a little grain of salt. There is too much slop in the Zodiac’s original specifications to be as precise as I am able to calculate. I think it is properly stated as being somewhere in the northern Half Moon Bay area. I would feel comfortable right now locating the bomb as far south on the bay as El Granada. I think it is most likely between El Granada and Princeton.

It has been a devil of a time getting accurate information about the area in 1970. The real housing development there was about 10-15 years old and growing then, so it’s kind of a moving target. My laundry list includes opening dates of all the schools in the district and the 1970 bus schedules. So far it’s been like pulling teeth. For one thing: school’s out.

Thanks for the feedback. I want to hear all your ideas and thoughts. I really want to pound on this and see if it stands up to everything.

Tom Fife

Zoe,

Can you contact me?

Eduard

Fife - Please be aware that Zoe is "science-challenged" regarding the world most of us live in, and he/she will respond negatively, and bizzarly, to any post concerned with three-dimensional reality. Math is a fiction to him/her. He/she resides on astral planes that you and I cannot fathom. Should the Zodiac ever escape to another astral plane, Zoe is our only hope of catching him/her. Zoe is policing those zones fully, so that we can concentrate on the reality aspect of it all. When this board manages to zero in on the culprit, Zoe's going to be there to cover the places we can't go to.

Tom,well done on a fine effort.Your analysis is very interesting and gives plenty food for thought.I do like your thinking on the various clues as you have interpreted them.Like you I do not know what Zoe is talking about,however her co-ordinates and your analysis "clicked" with me.A theory of my own concerning the LB "car door".
Three questions I asked myself:-
Why write on the door as opposed to leaving a note on or near the bodies?
Why write SEPT.as opposed to the 9?
Why did Zodiac include the time 6:30?
I do not know whether I added 1 and 1 and came up with 5,but one of the possibilities I came up with was that there was some mathematical formula here,which could include co-ordinates!
If you look back at your own thoughts,you discuss 7 and 4 (a murder date),you also include
122 30' not the same as murder date 12/20,but....
Like I've said I may be way off base here,but I
could just see Zodiac using these dates as a pointer to some place or future event!

Lapumo wrote (regarding LB):
"Why write on the door as opposed to leaving a note on or near the bodies?"

My (admittedly simplistic) thought on this is that writing on the car door was the result of one of two possibilities:

1. Z hadn't planned to leave a note (as he'd never left any communication at the murder scene, he was always safely away from the immediate scene before communicating, as with the phone calls to police that followed BRS and LB) and saw an opportunity to leave behind a calling card to "prove" he did it (there weren't a lot of details he could provide as proof, as in brand of ammo previously and type and location of wounds).

2. He planned to write on the car door of his victim(s) (whether he knew the car of his victims would be light-colored or not, writing on a dark car wouldn't leave much of a message), and chose to do so because leaving behind an actual note would expose him to the risk of the note getting lost (blown away by the wind, etc.) or being dismissed altogether.

Just my 1 1/2 cents (the theories I offered are too simple to be worth two). I look forward to hearing your more substantive theory regarding the car door at LB.

Spencer

The theory is really interesting, Zoe's answer was also.
Zoe talked about Eureka and I found the same word in a policebatch of a town where a possible Z-victim was found. Strange....

Ooopsss,
The Fife actually talked about Eureka, but Zoe brought the coordinates up.
Fife, your work is very interesting.

Eduard
"The Zodiac-Batman Connection"

Fife:

Actually my point has to do with precision vs. accuracy. Yor calculation -- and presumably Z's -- if accurate, apparently gives you precise measurement that puts you on the beach, or slightly beyond. This implies a precision of what, a few meters? The fact that you use the Mt. Diablo benchmark implies an even finer precision than that. Yet the significance of theprecise point you have calculated would appear to be only that it identifies the community of Half Moon Bay, within which there may be any number of sites that meet the technical criteria of the bomb site. The fact that the precision of your calculation only yields the general locale of the site, not the site itself, calls into question the accuracy of your approach. Why would Z go to such lengths to require you to use any instruments or maps other than what he provided, if that degree of precision did not ultimately reveal the bomb location with any more precision than to identify the target community?

Another problem with the analysis is that it could be based to the same degree of accuracy entirely on the literary clues. How many communities are there with water in the name, located near water, a reference to the moon or half moon, and a Vallejo Beach?

BTW: The technical criteria of the bomb site would appear to be a stretch of rural road running North/South on a bus route( or NNE/SSW) with a direct view of the sun in mid-Fall at bus time from a point near the west side of the road elevated about 12 feet above the roadway. Probably with a trench or ditch near the south bound shoulder that would flood in rainy weather.

Peter,

Actually my point has to do with precision vs. accuracy. Your calculation -- and presumably Z's -- if accurate, apparently gives you precise measurement that puts you on the beach, or slightly beyond. This implies a precision of what, a few meters? The fact that you use the Mt. Diablo benchmark implies an even finer precision than that. Yet the significance of the precise point you have calculated would appear to be only that it identifies the community of Half Moon Bay, within which there may be any number of sites that meet the technical criteria of the bomb site. The fact that the precision of your calculation only yields the general locale of the site, not the site itself, calls into question the accuracy of your approach. Why would Z go to such lengths to require you to use any instruments or maps other than what he provided, if that degree of precision did not ultimately reveal the bomb location with any more precision than to identify the target community?

I think you are confusing two issues here: the precision of the Zodiac and my precision. You are also presuming to read the mind of the Zodiac and his intent. It seems you are starting with the presumption that this cipher and map somehow allows you to go to a very precise spot and reach down and pick up a bomb. I don’t. I expect no more accuracy than the original map can provide: a few miles square. Along this line I looked up the Mount Diablo lat and long. It was supplied to me to the nearest second. A lat second is about 30 yards. The Zodiac was going from a spot of ink on a piece of paper and was probably within a mile.

The Zodiac had the Phillips 66 area insert map – at least that’s what he supplied. I am told the scale on that map is approximately 6.4 miles to the inch. If you put a ruler against that map and measure along a line from point A to point B how precise to you think you could be? Could you identify 1378 Elm Street? That sounds like what you are expecting. I don’t think that Zodiac intended to do anything more than indicate a community and let the people panic. He would get a kick out of watching them searching every inch of every road in a 5 mile square. I see no more precision in him than that.

Now, I went to the topographical map because it was something I could get my hands on. I unfortunately do not have the Zodiac map in front of me with my protractor, ruler and felt-tip pen. I took the easy way out for me. I found the precise lat and long of the Mount Diablo benchmark. I came up with radians and inches. I converted the 17-degree magnetic declination to radians, added that in, and used that directly in my calculations. I have a program from the US Geological Survey that provides various projections and I can make calculations of the angles and arc lengths to come up with a very precise target lat long. I have no doubt that I used much greater precision than the Zodiac, but I used his less than accurate and less precise numbers as input. That is why I think of it as being a blurry cloud of probability around a precise pinpoint on the map. Don't try to read more precision into my calculations than the Zodiac put in.

I have done another study of the characters it takes to designate digits. I concluded that it did not make sense to presume that the cipher spelled anything out. Something that shows how little is in the cipher is the fact that he felt it necessary to come back a month later and tell us, “Oh, by the way, those numbers are radians and inches along the radians.” Then he felt he had to give another hint later. I started with a very simple premise: the cipher was decipherable, and each cipher has its own code.

Another problem with the analysis is that it could be based to the same degree of accuracy entirely on the literary clues. How many communities are there with water in the name, located near water, a reference to the moon or half moon, and a Vallejo Beach?

The important difference is one of guessing, and the other is being told. I don’t see where there is any problem with the analysis simply because someone could have guessed it. Again, I think you are reading something into the Zodiac’s intent.

BTW: The technical criteria of the bomb site would appear to be a stretch of rural road running North/South on a bus route (or NNE/SSW) with a direct view of the sun in mid-Fall at bus time from a point near the west side of the road elevated about 12 feet above the roadway. Probably with a trench or ditch near the south bound shoulder that would flood in rainy weather.

You are right about what the local placement of the bomb would have to be to follow the Zodiac’s diagram. I have located several such places in the locale. But the swamping part is not a real consideration here. When the Zodiac said that he was swamped out the police figured it was his basement where he was storing the bomb’s materials.

I already mentioned that the sunrise on the darkest day of the year allows at least 20-30 minutes of direct sunlight before the bus parks at the school. That tells me that there is no calendar constraint here. I have traced out the current bus routes on a topographical map and see the bus passing many north-south cliff/hill faces. I have looked at the bearing to the sunrise and the height of any hills in that direction and I see several places where a Zodiac could have effectively placed a bomb. So I don’t think that we can rule out this locale just because it’s on the west side of some hills.

I think all of us are coming to the table with thirty years of luggage. It’s not what you expected and it’s not what I expected, but it still works.

I am continuing to gather more precise information. I have thought of adding pages to my site showing more details of the calculations and considerations of the locale. If you see the lay of the land, you can see that there are lots of possibilities.

Tom Fife

PS
Other than the Zodiac, who said he REALLY placed a bomb? Solving the cipher is one thing and finding a bomb is another.

Lapumo,

I was thinking that he put the time there to brag that he committed the murder and it wasn't dark yet. There's nowhere to hide. No time is safe.

Anyway that was my off-hand take, but I see your point, too.

Tom Fife

This is brilliant work, Tom.

It's very refreshing.

I agree-excellent! Fife, your comment about the degree of precision Zodiac used makes sense-why lead the authorities right to the needle in the haystack when there is so much more enjoyment to be had with the 5 mile square! BTW, very nicely presented on the link!

Fife , There is no error in your solution, I think it may will stand ,as a foundation anyhow.
The errors where made by Zodiac , and he attempted to correct one of them by later adding a clue. As we know art is left to nterpretationand so I'm guessing your solution is about 75%
correct and 30% complete.
www.nrc.gov/NRC/NUREGS/BR0150/v1r4/table59.html
www.nrc.gov , also has an excellent data search
with lots of special Zodiac terms available such as radian , and more! A more complete list of Longitude and latitude tables. It's even interesting to compare z's line drawings with the site maps you can link to. If your not the sensitive type you might enjoy reviewing the daily mishaps as well.

The linkable site maps also make for a nice comparison of z's line drawings

Zoe,

Thanks for the feedback and encouraging assessment. I am a physicist and I have to admit that my write-up is not quite up to my standards; but I wanted to get the solution out there so people could beat up on it and see if it held water under scrutiny.

I have been organizing some supporting calculations and such and placing them as links from this page. This will probably be a phased in process over time.

I went out to he NRC site you supplied. Where is the daily mishap area? I didn't see it, neither the drawings you referred to in relation to Z.

Thanks,

Tom F

Maybe Z was trying to indicate an area of impact
rather than a location of the bomb. Its interesting that so many people have offered different solutions on or near the coast, maybe they are all right!

This may have been covered already but something I noticed about the first part of the bomb cipher is that it looks as if it spells out California

^ - triangle, # - black square, > - backwards K, % - anchor

C^JI#O>%AM
CALIFORNIA

Now perhaps the 2 symbols >% stands for 3 letters RNI. So then the A's line up and the M is part of the second word.
Or maybe each stands for 1 letter, so then the AM in the cipher stands for IA in CalifornIA.

Howard, you are right we need some spades here, but I think we are a little late.

Here is my solution to this cipher. I am assuming that Zodiac planned a kidnapping (Chowchilla) rather than a bomb.

First the two symbols I didn't have corresponding letters to were the Libra and Aries symbols, but if you overlap the two words you get "libraries."

I assumed Chowchilla and Livermore were in the cipher, and it came out like a crossword sharing a letter M=H. Also I found some of the symbols/letters waffled (using either the original or the cipher symbol.)

The crossword is laid out similar to the drive from Chowchilla to Manteca to Livermore. M=H (shared) I used 31 symbols for cipher including Zodiac symbol. Coordinate (3,1) on 340 cipher is a B (bomb.)
........C
LIVERMO(R)E The R wasn't in the cipher.
........O
........W
........C
........H
........I
........L
........L
........A
The remaining symbols read: X IS IN SNOW. FIND. Zodiac(symbol)
Chowchilla is supposed to line up under the M in Livermore.

Snow may be a reference to the the Pines Post Card. On it it says: "around in the snow." There is more to this. It's in the 340 Cipher also. Chowchilla has the word "chill" in it.

In the cipher G could mean buried "Gold," but in reality is a bomb. Example: coordinates (1,9)P, (2,9)D, and (3,9)G. PD G(bomb) or Police Department Bomb.

For the date of the real bombing of the Golden Gate Police Department, which is (6,12) for 2/16, there is a G(bomb)under the reverse K. K is reversed like the real date to get the coordinate. Above the K is a P, which reading down is PIG.

There are two other G's at coordinates (8,2)and (14,2) At least one has something to do with Chowchilla.

I think Zodiac it using the Poe story "The Gold Bug." It's about a treasure hunt.

Oops! Sorry, the G is in the 340 Cipher.

Hello everyone! For those more familiar with the bus bomb map than I, would "Top two inches north towards Mt Diablo" make any sense? It is consistent within itself,although obviously there is not a lot to work with with just 32 characters. Thanks in advance!