WILLIAM SHATNER: Mysterious letters
that conceal a serial killer's identity.
A sculpture outside CIA headquarters,
with a cryptic message.
And a medieval manuscript
that could hold the secrets of ancient sorcery.
There's nothing more fascinating than a code
that can't be cracked.
For centuries, mankind has devised ingenious ways to hide
valuable information, using everything
from enigmatic puzzles,
to complex ciphers and secret symbols.
If history's unbreakable codes can be deciphered,
could we unlock answers to some of the greatest
mysteries of both the past and the present?
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
♪ ♪
Since the dawn of humanity, our species has tried
to make order out of what seems like chaos.
From divining the secrets in our stars,
to deciphering lost languages,
we excel at finding patterns in the noise.
It's all part of our innate desire
to find meaning in that which we don't understand.
And perhaps the best example of this drive
is our long-held fascination with codes.
Codes and ciphers have always fascinated
humans throughout history, in part because on the one hand,
there's always knowledge that people want to hide.
And on the other hand, it's human nature to want
to read what's hidden.
To want to uncover what is disguised.
To try and be the person who has broken the unbreakable code.
SHATNER: For centuries, governments, mathematicians
and spies have used codes and ciphers to hide secrets.
In turn, this spawned a field dedicated to both
making and breaking codes.
Today, we call it cryptography.
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Any time you want to keep information secret,
the study of cryptography is involved.
It's like an arms race of trying to figure out,
what's the clever way to encode the message?
And then what's the clever way to take advantage of weaknesses
in the encryption method?
There's a mystery-solving aspect to it
that interests people because everybody likes a good mystery.
And so when you break a code, it's very satisfying,
kind of like putting the last puzzle piece in place
when you're working a jigsaw puzzle.
SHATNER: What greater mystery is there
than a supposedly unbreakable code that has yet to be solved?
Take, for example, one of the most enigmatic codes
in recent history.
A cryptic message known only as "Cicada."
On the popular image-sharing website
known as "4chan"
an anonymous user posts a mysterious image, consisting
of only a black graphic box and plain, white text.
The message states, in part: "Hello.
"We are looking for highly intelligent individuals.
"To find them we have devised a test.
"There is a message hidden in this image.
Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us."
The image was cryptically signed "3301,"
and at first, no one could
figure out the meaning of this bizarre post.
On the surface, this makes absolutely no sense,
just saying how we were seeking highly talented individuals.
And if all you do is read that text in the image,
it's a dead end.
But some people went a little bit farther trying to
figure out what's going on here, and unravel the message.
SHATNER: Using specialized decryption software,
codebreakers discovered that the black square and white text
could be translated
into a different image-- a duck, of all things.
But the mystery didn't end there,
because the duck could then be decoded further,
leading to even more pictures, puzzles and clues.
It quickly became clear that solving this strange
Internet code would require
traveling down a deep digital rabbit hole.
DAVID KUSHNER: At the most basic level, they were a series of puzzles
that set off a massive hunt and chase and
effort to figure out how to solve them
and who was behind them.
It required cryptography,
and there were all kinds of challenges.
People were starting to feel that maybe this had turned
into some goose chase.
SHATNER: Cryptographers tried hundreds
and even thousands of methods to solve the code.
The mystery eventually caught the attention of the media,
and the elaborate cypher became known as Cicada 3301.
3301 was in reference to the original signature of the code,
and the cicada insect was featured
in several of the cypher's confounding puzzles.
One of those caught in Cicada 3301's grasp
was a cryptologist who goes by the pseudonym Nox Populi.
If you were going along with it at the time,
it was just this great mystery.
And that's because, after a certain point,
uh, they started personalizing
the puzzles for each person who had got to that point.
So, this, like, thing that had expanded
to be global and just absolutely wild, suddenly was,
like, personally talking to you, the person solving it,
which was just, kind of blew people's minds at the time.
These puzzles ran for three years; 2012, 2013 and 2014.
So, I was one of the people who finished the 2013 puzzle
after it got to the point where it was individualized.
It was me and probably about five or six other people
that were kind of considered the winners of that year.
At the end, once you finally put in your last piece,
what you received was an emailed invitation
to work with them.
SHATNER: The invitation to work with the secretive creator
of Cicada 3301 was intriguing,
but there was a catch.
Whoever designed this fascinating enigma
refused to reveal their true identity.
And it begs the question, who would go to all the trouble
of designing this labyrinth of codes and puzzles?
I think part of what really drove
people's imagination with the puzzles
was the question of who 3301 actually is
because they worked very hard
to not have an answer to that question.
KUSHNER: The rumors definitely swirled around who was behind Cicada.
There was this kind of dude in the basement theory,
but that kind of got blown out of the water
when Cicada made the leap from the Internet to the real world.
POPULI: So, suddenly, Cicada 3301
starts posting GPS coordinates all over the world.
Australia, USA,
South Korea, France--
just all over the place.
Then there were posters around the globe
of these places.
The poster had a QR code on it and a cicada.
And so, it's sort of that realization that,
no, we're not just back on the Internet, and we're in-in fact,
expanding well beyond the kind of real-world impact
we thought this was gonna have.
BAUER: Whoever was behind Cicada wanted to find people
who are not only highly intelligent,
but also persistent.
Could this be somebody
from the American Intelligence Community
just finding a clever way to recruit people
to be American codebreakers?
Could it be a secret society?
Some group of, say, civil libertarians
who just wants to make the Internet
completely private and secure?
Or perhaps some third option?
SHATNER: While the identity of the creators of Cicada 3301
remains elusive, one thing is certain.
Since 2014, they've gone underground.
No new messages have appeared,
and the mysterious invitation to work with the code's creators
appears to have led nowhere.
Now, many years later,
we still don't know anything about who they are.
It's almost like they fell off the face of the Earth.
Whether they still even exist,
whether they're still working on anything,
is a big point of debate between people
who are involved in this
because there's definitely not been any indication
that they are still working.
SHATNER: Is the shadowy Cicada 3301 organization
gone for good?
We'll just have to wait and see.
But there are many other codes
that are hidden in plain sight,
like a perplexing sculpture,
built in the epicenter of cryptology,
with a cipher that is still unsolved to this day.
ORANCHAK: The Kryptos sculpture is a sculpture
commissioned by the CIA.
SAMI JARROUSH: This fourth section of Kryptos is one
of the most famous unsolved ciphers in history.
SHATNER: In a wooded expanse,
nine miles outside the nation's capital,
lies the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Standing in a sleek courtyard near the front of the building
is a rather cryptic sculpture.
It's a curved copper art piece that is called Kryptos,
which is Greek for "hidden."
This highly secure government facility
might seem like an odd spot for fine art,
but Kryptos is actually one of the greatest unsolved ciphers
of the modern era.
ORANCHAK: Kryptos is a copper sculpture
with letters cut out of it containing
four different hidden secret messages
that are encrypted using
four different encryption schemes.
The Kryptos sculpture has created a lot of interest
in cryptography because of its association
with secretive government agencies,
and it's a very compelling mystery.
SHATNER: Kryptos is a fascinating enigma,
but why was this encoded sculpture
placed outside the world's biggest spy office?
The story goes back to 1988, when the CIA
selected artist Jim Sanborn
to create the sculpture for the agency.
JIM SANBORN: At the time, the CIA was interested in polishing
their reputation,
and, uh, they figure that maybe one way we can do this
is by introducing an art program.
And so, I was awarded the commission
and then started down this long process.
I did a lot of research,
and I-I really want to understand what the CIA does.
And I finally figured out that most CIA missions
and spies involve some sort of encoding.
And if it's gonna succeed, the coding's got to be perfect.
And so, I went ahead and used encoding
as a major part of it.
I figured, in popular culture,
the CIA is what we all think of when we think about codes.
SHATNER: After Jim Sanborn labored over its conception
and construction for two years,
Kryptos was dedicated in November of 1990.
The resulting sculpture was not only visually striking,
but also a seemingly indecipherable code.
On closer inspection, codebreakers around the world
noticed that Kryptos resembles the pages of a book,
arranged side by side.
ORANCHAK: When you look at the Kryptos sculpture,
you'll see a bunch of letters.
But if you split it down the middle,
the letters on the left
contain four different secret messages.
These are referred to as K1, K2, K3 and K4.
And then, the letters on the right
form a table of letters,
which includes the word Kryptos itself,
that were used to encrypt the four messages.
My whole coding system was designed
to be slowly deconstructed
like layers of an onion,
and to say something. That's key
because there are a lot of people that believe,
"Well, this is just gibberish.
He hasn't written anything there."
But it's not. It says something,
and, um, best of luck.
SHATNER: As it turns out, codebreakers have actually had
some success cracking Jim Sanborn's cipher.
Nine years after the sculpture was put on display,
the first three messages were solved.
K1, which is located on the top left portion
of the sculpture, reads...
Below that, K2 says, in part...
And finally, on the bottom left quadrant of the sculpture,
K3 reads, in part...
All of these strange messages beg the obvious question:
what on earth is Jim Sanborn talking about?
K1 and K2, those messages are
bits of writing that Sanborn came up with.
They're a bit mysterious still because they're
kind of a poetic passage.
K3 decodes to a paraphrased version
of the account of Howard Carter
opening the tomb of King Tut.
And so, there's another puzzle to be solved even after
all the messages have been decoded.
BAUER: Kryptos is tying together
some various sort of esoteric arcana.
What this means towards the greater mystery is unknown.
You're not gonna know exactly what the artist intended.
He thought that the mystery of what he had in mind
would never be fully cracked.
SHATNER: Many cryptographers believe that the key
to unlocking the meaning of Kryptos lies in solving K4,
the final message located on the bottom left
of the sculpture.
But more than 30 years after Kryptos was created,
K4 remains indecipherable.
I think that K4 is still unsolved because we don't know
exactly what steps were taken to create it in the first place.
The other three sections,
people were able to try a lot of different methods
that are known to cryptographers.
The fourth system uses possibly something novel
or some combination of cryptographic methods
that haven't really been put together before.
The other challenge with K4 might be because it's so short.
There's not a whole lot of data to work with.
So, we can't find a lot of different
statistical clues that might point
to characteristics about the underlying text.
I personally think the fourth panel of Kryptos will be solved.
There's just too much attention,
too many people with mad computer skills going after it.
Maybe it'll take 50 years,
but I don't think it can endure forever.
SHATNER: Will K4, and with it the full meaning of Kryptos,
eventually be cracked, as some believe?
Or is Jim Sanborn's curious creation
a truly unbreakable code?
Artworks are at their strongest
when they're slightly inscrutable.
And so, I certainly prefer
that Kryptos is not deciphered.
I would rather it not be deciphered ever.
There are only two of us who know what the code says.
It's myself and my wife, Jae Ko,
and, uh, we'll see what happens.
The secret message embedded in the Kryptos sculpture
is a baffling mystery that has remained unsolved
for 30 years.
However, the most famous unbroken code
in American history was actually written two decades earlier,
by a shadowy serial killer
who called himself the Zodiac.
BAUER: Just like Jack the Ripper,
the Zodiac Killer
was never apprehended, never identified.
MICHAEL BUTTERFIELD: The murderer sent a letter
with a piece of the victim's blood-stained shirt
to prove that he was responsible for the crime.
SHATNER: The city is gripped by fear
after a number of horrific and unsolved murders
are committed by a shadowy serial killer.
The panic reaches a fever pitch when the killer
releases a series of chilling notes,
in which he refers to himself as the Zodiac.
Three virtually identical handwritten letters
arrived at the offices of three California newspapers.
And those letters took credit for the crimes
and included details from the crimes,
including the ammunition that was used,
the positions of the victims, and things like that.
And then, another letter that was sent on August 4th of 1969,
was the first to use the name the Zodiac.
The Zodiac's crime spree is often referred to
as a reign of terror.
And that's because his murders not only sent fear
throughout the community, but he eventually threatened
to murder schoolchildren on a bus.
He also said he was gonna use a bomb.
He threatened to kill dozens of people over a weekend.
So, there were a lot of threats
that sent fear through the community.
ORANCHAK: His name really got out there, and on top of that,
Zodiac's victims were selected presumably randomly.
And so, people felt like, "Well, he could be around
the corner ready to kill me or us."
So, it became kind of like a boogeyman
waiting to kill somebody out of the blue.
SHATNER: The Zodiac's reign of terror became national news,
not only because of the frightening nature
of his crimes,
but also because some of his mysterious letters
were written in code.
The Zodiac, as macabre as this sounds,
turned his killings into a game,
not just for law enforcement to try to figure out,
but for the average citizen.
These ciphers sort of served as a way for people
to play his game.
Can you figure out who I am?
So, using these codes, while it made Zodiac incredibly scary,
it also made him intriguing because
anybody could figure out who the Zodiac Killer is,
if you know how to play his game correctly.
SHATNER: The Zodiac's claim that the ciphers revealed
his true identity taunted the police and the public.
Both the authorities and amateurs alike
pored over the encrypted letters,
hoping to crack the killer's devious codes.
JARROUSH: The first cipher of the Zodiac,
it's commonly referred to as the 408 cipher.
That was actually solved in a matter of days
by a couple of citizens in the San Francisco Bay Area.
BUTTERFIELD: A local high school economics teacher and his wife,
Donald and Bettye Harden,
decided to take the killer's challenge
and spent a weekend trying to solve that cipher.
And they were able to find the solution.
Unfortunately, the Hardens' solution
did not reveal the killer's identity.
But it did begin with the phrase...
Then he talked about collecting slaves for his afterlife.
SHATNER: The shocking content of the first cipher
heightened public panic about the Zodiac.
But the killer's second cipher,
known as Z-340, would not be solved so easily.
BUTTERFIELD: The Zodiac's second cipher consisted of 340 symbols.
Unfortunately, that cipher was very difficult to solve.
And he may have made it that way deliberately
because he may have been upset that his first cipher
was solved so quickly.
SHATNER: Despite years of effort,
the Z-340 cipher eluded decryption.
By 1974, the Zodiac had released more than 20 letters,
in which he claimed to have killed 37 people.
And then, after a five-year reign of terror,
his communications abruptly ceased,
and the case went cold.
It seemed that the codes and the crimes
of this evil genius were destined to remain unsolved.
More than 30 years would pass
before software engineer David Oranchak became inspired
to take on the Z-340 cipher.
I first heard about the Zodiac ciphers when
the Zodiac movie came out in 2007.
And so there was already kind of a vibrant community
of people involved with the Zodiac cipher specifically.
So when I saw that, I thought,
"Hey, I want to take a crack at that."
Because I'm a programmer, I like puzzles,
and it would be very cool to be able to crack that.
SHATNER: To try and solve the cipher, David Oranchak teamed up
with Australian mathematician Sam Blake,
and Belgian computer programmer Jarl Van Eycke.
The team became kind of this collaboration of people
that would run experiments, try out different ideas,
come up with computer programs
and different kind of specialized tools
in order to try out these ideas
or to just run a bunch of keys and try to break the code.
SHATNER: In spite of their combined efforts, the Z-340 cipher
seemed like it might be an unbreakable code.
But then,
after 15 years of challenging work,
the team finally cracked it.
ORANCHAK: It was very satisfying to decrypt the message.
It was very exciting.
Once we had the solution,
I put together a report and sent it to my contacts
in the codebreaking unit of the FBI.
And then very quickly, they came back to us and said,
"This looks good, it looks strong,
looks like the real solution,"
and that's when the media storm hit.
SHATNER: The revelation that the Z-340 cipher
had been broken, more than 50 years
after it was released, made headlines around the world.
But, unfortunately,
the decrypted message did not reveal the killer's identity.
However, the search continues,
because there are other Zodiac ciphers
that are yet to be solved,
the most fascinating of which is called Z-13.
This cipher will literally make you pull your hair out,
because at first glance,
you would think it's got to be easy.
There's only 13 characters in the cipher.
What's worse, is that it starts with the phrase, "My name is."
He's literally telling you, "Here's who I am."
And to this day, no one's been able to figure it out as of yet.
Until cipher Z-13 can finally be solved,
it seems that the identity of the Zodiac killer
will be a mystery.
And the frustrating reality is that, sometimes,
a code can remain uncracked for centuries.
Like in the case of a series of cryptic hieroglyphs
that might explain the fate of a civilization
that disappeared from history.
The Phaistos disc comes from 1700 to 1600 BCE.
JARROUSH: What appear to be just random symbols
appear in a spiral formation.
What do these symbols mean? It's anybody's guess.
SHATNER: Phaistos, on the Greek island of Crete, 1908.
Italian archaeologists excavate the ruins
of an ancient palace
built by a mysterious lost civilization
referred to as the Minoans.
The Minoan civilization flourished from about 1900
to about 1450 BCE
in an amazingly advanced culture
that was not just based on Crete,
but it sent its influence out
to the various Greek islands as well.
The Minoans were great travelers and traders and sailors.
They were trading in things
like perfumed oils that brought them great riches.
One of the great mysteries that we have here
really is what happened at the end of the Minoan culture.
In the end, how they finally disappeared
is argued about by scholars.
SHATNER: The disappearance of the Minoan civilization
is one of the great unsolved mysteries in ancient history.
But some believe that a clue to their fate
may have been found during the Italian excavations in 1908.
On the 3rd of July, in 1908,
at approximately 7:00 p.m. in the evening...
...the foreman of the site at the archaeological dig was
doing a final check of the site,
and discovered this amazing,
enigmatic piece of ceramic wondrousness.
It has a uniqueness to it that made it very special.
So it generated a huge amount of interest very, very quickly.
SHATNER: The gold-hued, 5.9 inch in diameter
clay object that the foreman picked up was covered
in strange, indecipherable markings,
that looked like some kind of ancient hieroglyphs.
This curious artifact came to be known
as the Phaistos Disc.
The Phaistos Disc is a ceramic disc.
And it's imprinted with a series of symbols
in a spiral pattern.
It's made of high-quality clay that's been deliberately fired.
Someone had to make the symbol on a stamp
and it was imprinted on the clay when it was wet.
It's got to be one of the very first
printed artifacts that we have that survived to this point.
There are 123 symbols on one side
and 119 on the other.
So these seem to be, perhaps words,
perhaps sentences, perhaps little concepts
that we're trying to get to the bottom of.
SHATNER: For decades, the strange symbols
on the Phaistos Disc have been an unbreakable code
that historians have tried to crack.
Many have wondered, could this small disc
actually contain information
about the Minoan civilization?
The Phaistos Disc is
an incredible archaeological find to be sure.
However, the bigger mystery is
what is embedded into the clay in that disc.
You have a series
of what appear to be just random symbols.
What do these symbols mean?
As of right now, it's anybody's guess.
KERSHAW: We don't know what language the Minoans spoke,
or what they wrote.
We don't know what they called themselves.
Minoan is the name that we give them.
People have been desperately trying to unlock
the information that might be on this disc.
JARROUSH: People have posited that the Phaistos Disc
is actually a religious text.
A hymn in honor of a mother goddess,
the goddess of fertility and love.
But if it turns out that it's not,
what else could this disc possibly be?
What other mysteries could this disc potentially hold for us?
SHATNER: Unlocking the code to an ancient language
is a very unlikely proposition, but it has happened before.
When you think of mysterious ancient languages,
perhaps the most famous are Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Transcription of these ornate, pictographic writings
remained a mystery for almost 1,400 years
until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799
changed history forever.
KERSHAW: With Egyptian hieroglyphics, we had the Rosetta Stone,
where there was an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphics,
but also one in Greek that we could read.
So we knew exactly
what the Egyptian one was supposed to say.
SHATNER: So far, no Rosetta Stone has been uncovered
that would explain the Phaistos Disc's markings.
It appears that for now, the truth about both
the disc and the lost civilization that created it
remains frustratingly out of reach.
KERSHAW: The problem is that the Minoans have taken away the key
that we need to unlock their disc.
We haven't yet deciphered it because
we don't have enough information to use.
It is right now a complete mystery.
While this conundrum continues to perplex historians,
a similar air of mystery
surrounds another curious ancient text.
It's a strange, 240-page medieval manuscript,
written in an unknown language, that is often referred to
as "the world's most mysterious book."
LUKE LINDEMANN: The Voynich Manuscript is
not found anywhere else in the world.
It looks like Latin script although you can't read it.
DAVIS: It's quite possible that Voynichese represents
a lost language.
SHATNER: On the campus of Yale University stands
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The library's towering shelves preserve more than one million
literary works and the most fascinating volume housed there
is a medieval European text that, curiously,
was written in an unknown language.
This cryptic book is referred to
as the Voynich Manuscript.
The Voynich Manuscript is a book written by hand that
is reliably dated to the early part of the 15th century.
The book consists of
around 102 pages.
And there are quite a significant amount
of text and illustrations.
The manuscript was written in an entirely unique language,
which we call "Voynichese."
When you are faced with a language you can't read,
all we can do is look at the illustrations.
There are basically five sections in the manuscript.
About half of it is pictures,
drawings that take up the entire page
of a plant, an herb, or a flower.
And this looks like what we see in medieval herbals of the time
that describe the usages and the appearance of plants.
And then there is a cosmological section.
We think it's cosmological, because there are stars,
and suns and what look
like cosmological objects.
But then there are various pages that are just
entirely paragraphs and paragraphs of running text.
So we have no other examples of this script anywhere.
We don't know what it's about. We can't read any of it.
SHATNER: For centuries, the Voynich Manuscript
has intrigued and baffled people around the world.
While we are at a loss as to what information
these pages contain, we're not alone.
Because this strange writing has been a secret code
for hundreds of years.
So why would anyone choose to write
in a language that can't be understood?
The fact that the manuscript is written in a way that
nobody else could read it,
suggests that it is preserving
knowledge that someone wanted to keep secret.
It could be a known language that has been enciphered.
LINDEMANN: When you look at the pictures,
it contains drawings that make it look like an alchemical,
or magical text that include incantations,
astrological information, that sort of thing.
And so there's been some suggestion that Voynichese
represents an attempt to encipher what is considered
to be sacred and potentially dangerous knowledge,
because of the taboos of the day.
SHATNER: We've all heard tales from the Middle Ages about
secret sorcerer's texts,
filled with forbidden knowledge about alchemy and magic spells.
Is it possible that the Voynich Manuscript
is a real-life version of such legendary books?
For the moment, we obviously can't say for sure,
because its language remains indecipherable.
But perhaps further clues about encoded ancient writings
can be found by examining a much darker and more disturbing text
from the 16th century, that is known
as the Book of Soyga.
JARROUSH: The Book of Soyga in total is about 200 pages long.
Inside, you'll find instructions for magic spells,
incantations, talk of witches, talk of angels
and their genealogy, talk of demons,
how they can possess someone,
and how they might tie back to our natural world.
It's dark, twisted stuff to be sure.
SHATNER: The Book of Soyga was written in Latin,
and its contents are both fascinating and unsettling.
But the most enigmatic part of the text
is its final pages which were all written in code.
The end of the Book of Soyga is 36 pages.
Each of these pages contains
a 36-by-36 cell grid...
...with letters in each of the cells.
We don't know the significance of those letters.
You've got around what appears to be 40,000
different letters, characters, symbols
that seem to be arranged in just a random order.
But in reality, these letters all make up
encoded messages.
And so if the parts you can read
talk about some pretty dark stuff,
what's the stuff that they couldn't print
in a language that you could read?
What dark magic might potentially
be hidden in that section of the book?
SHATNER: It's intriguing to speculate about the forbidden
knowledge that may be contained within the Book of Soyga
and the Voynich Manuscript.
But of course, the more pressing question is,
will we ever actually decode
these mysterious ancient texts?
DAVIS: I believe that we will be able to read these manuscripts,
because of new technologies, new techniques
that our predecessors didn't have access to.
We have more powerful computers than they did.
And we have access to a much larger pool
of theories and linguistic analysis,
than anyone has had in the past.
And I do believe that we will get there.
Deciphering either of these cryptic books would be
fascinating from a historical perspective.
However, there have been some codes that needed to be broken,
not just for curiosity's sake,
but rather because the fate of the free world
depended on it.
SHATNER: Shortly after the outbreak of World War II,
British military intelligence establishes
a top secret base at this secluded country estate.
Referred to as "Station X,"
it is home to a handpicked team of brilliant mathematicians
who are charged with cracking an infamous
German encoding device called
the Enigma Machine.
The Enigma Machine is an electromechanical
ciphering device for encoding a plain text message
in such a way that it cannot be deciphered or decoded.
When communicating with an Enigma Machine,
an operator can key in a plain text message
that's encoded by the device,
that can then be transmitted as alphabet gobbledygook
to the other operator who receives it.
And through adjusting a series of rotors
and plug boards, the receiving end can then
turn that alphabet soup into a coherent message.
But anybody that's listening in won't be able
to make sense of the message.
Enigma was such a successful cipher
that it took a Herculean effort to break it.
SHATNER: At the peak of British decryption efforts,
nearly 9,000 personnel worked tirelessly at Bletchley Park
and its substations to try and crack German ciphers.
And then finally, a breakthrough came
when mathematician Alan Turing realized
that the Enigma Machine had a critical flaw.
The Enigma Machine had one big weakness.
And the weakness was that a letter
cannot be encoded as itself.
So if it's the letter A, no matter what,
the Enigma Machine will never make it the letter A.
So you automatically know what letter it is not.
You're able to work from that.
Alan Turing came up with the idea
of we could automate the process of running
through all the possibilities of what letter this might be.
He worked with another person by the name of Gordan Welchman
to come up with a device that they called the Bombe device.
And the Bombe device by 1941,
was cracking Enigma-encoded messages every day.
SHATNER: While the Enigma Machine was ultimately deciphered
by the more sophisticated Bombe device,
both contraptions are prime examples of the power
of the human mind to create and crack codes.
BAUER: The Enigma is the best-known cipher system in history.
Just because Enigma was broken during World War II,
doesn't mean we have decrypts of everything.
Every so often, a researcher finds Enigma messages
in archives where we just have the cipher text.
And it's an ongoing battle.
So even now we have Enigma messages that have gone unread.
SHATNER: The ongoing mystery of the Enigma messages shows
how strongly human beings are fascinated
by hidden information.
Throughout history, our curiosity and ingenuity
have been sparked by everything from military ciphers
to lost languages, because we relish the challenge
of a seemingly unbreakable code.
Codes and cyphers are utterly fascinating to so many people
because it's the allure of the unknown.
This idea of hiding information in plain sight
is, uh, so intriguing.
And if only we can get to the bottom of it,
then it can reveal wonderful truths,
and marvelous facts, and great secrets.
POPULI: There's a whole history around codes and their
kind of associations that I think really excite people.
I think probably the simplest explanation is
that if someone put all of this effort into hiding it,
that there's something interesting in there.
There's some reason that this needed to be hidden.
When secrets are locked away behind an impenetrable cypher,
it can be quite frustrating, right?
And we have to accept the possibility
that some codes will never be cracked.
But if history is any indication, humanity will keep
striving to decrypt and decipher these intriguing codes that,
for the moment, remain unbreakable and...
unexplained.
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