27: Cicada 3301 | Red Thread
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The year was 2004, and people around the world were eagerly awaiting the launch of Halo 2, the follow-up to Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the best first-person shooters, nay, one of the best video games of all time. In the lead-up to the launch, fans online came across a seemingly innocuous website reference on the developer's website, ilovebees.com.

The site was apparently dedicated to beekeeping, but people noticed the site itself was corrupted, displaying cryptic messages and mysterious countdowns instead of the bee-related content the URL had promised. What would entail was a fascinating series of puzzles and wild goose chases that would follow through into the real world through hidden GPS codes.

Not only was the Halo community immediately invested in this evolving puzzle and story, it would also catch the attention of those outside the gaming community itself, quickly becoming one of the most talked about cultural events at the time. I myself was too young when I Love Bees hit the scene, but as a Halo fan and someone who frequently used the Bungie.net forums when I was growing up, I saw people talking about it after some years had passed. It was one of the first examples of an ARG.

an alternative reality game that combined online clues and real-world puzzles to create a mystery for the audience to solve. In the I Love Bees case, it was essentially just a marketing drive to push attention to the upcoming Halo 2 launch, but some years later, in 2012, a similar event took place, beginning on a website we all know and love, 4chan.

There, users would find an image posted by an anonymous user inviting highly intelligent individuals to solve a puzzle. What would follow was a set of brain-breaking riddles, mysteries and questions that would span years. Today, we're talking about one of the greatest mysteries that has ever existed on the internet. A puzzle so elaborate that parts of it still remain unsolved to this day. A puzzle whose mysterious motivations don't revolve around marketing or advertising something, and a puzzle that very well could be an invitation into a secret society.

This is the story of Cicada 3301, and this is The Red Thread. I'm your host, Jackson, and I'm joined, as always, by Isaiah and Charlie. How are you guys doing today? I crumbled directly at the end there. I made it through that entire paragraph perfectly fine. You did so good. Just dropped out at the tail end of it. I think the tail end was the best part, actually.

I was nursing a cough that entire time, just like trying to suppress it. For those of you out there who may have noticed, I am sick. I have COVID at the moment, so this is going to be a rough one for me, but nothing's going to stop me from red threading and discussing Cicada 3301. Red threading. It's a good word. Yeah, it's a verb. Good verb, yeah.

Yeah, one of the most interesting things that I think has ever happened on the internet, that the internet has ever produced. Because it's like a grassroots moment, really. Like, you see all these things that pop up through the internet from, like, corporations and stuff, like advertising a video game or a movie. You know, like, there's advertising campaigns. And...

In the process of it being a campaign to advertise something, it loses its luster because it's just a gimmick to sell something. So it immediately becomes less interesting. There's something like this, which is born from just people being weird dudes on the internet, basically. So it's one of my favorite internet stories.

I think it's fascinating. I remember being in high school and watching YouTube videos about it. Like, oh, maybe one day I'll talk about stuff on the internet. So it has a nostalgic place for me. Have you talked about it in an actual YouTube video yet? I've mentioned it in the Conspiracy Theory Iceberg, but it hasn't got a dedicated video.

This is the first dedicated video, I suppose. But Cicada is such a... It's like you said, grassroots. It's not for money or fame or something, just for the love of the game, putting together this massive puzzle for people to partake in. I think it's cool. I actually don't remember where it ended, so that will be fun to check out and to reminisce on. But yeah, Cicada was one of my early loves about things on the internet.

So mysterious. Well, spoiler alert, it hasn't ended yet. This is still a mystery in the sense that it is. That's probably why I don't remember. Well, no, I think he meant like when the last puzzle was solved or where they got stuck, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember what the last beat was of the story. Yeah, it kind of just petered out. Yeah, I mean, in terms of like actual things happening. That's what they want you to think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to dig deeper. There's things under the surface that are still happening, definitely. Charlie, what about you? Oh, I'm very familiar with Cicada 3301. Do you love it? I mean, Lomino's got an incredible video on it. I've watched quite a bit of content on it. I remember when it first popped up, I'm quite familiar with at least some of the early puzzles, because your boy looked into it back then thinking, I could be one of those highly intelligent individuals. Oh!

Were you? How far did you get? Not far at all. I gave up after probably only like 30 minutes of looking at what was going on. It was way above me. Couldn't even figure out how to access 4chan. Yeah. How do I access this 4chan?

Okay, so that's good. For a peek behind the curtains, we don't really talk about the episodes going into it. I just kind of come up with a topic and then do the research with my team of researchers. And then we create a document. I didn't know how Charlie felt about this episode.

you know, concept, this idea. I was pretty sure Isaiah would love this because it seems like right up your alley. You know me so well. Charlie, yeah, Charlie, not so, not so sure. I thought he was going to love the manuscript last week. Why would I love the fucking manuscript, which is actual mumbo jumbo nonsense as opposed to this, which is actually really interesting. What a hater. It's still the same, it's the same concept just like 600 years before. Yeah,

Yeah. I don't know. I don't get why you're such a hater about the Voyage manuscript. It's not the same concept. This is like actual puzzle solving and mystique. That was just a fucking bundle of pages with drawings of titties and nonsense scribbles. Yeah.

It's not like a code to break. And it entirely... Well, it is. It legitimately is. It's an entirely new language to break. It's an entirely new language in the same way if I just started drawing hieroglyphics on my own. That's about the extent of that. It was a hoax. Yeah. We even concluded it was a fucking hoax. Made to look like... But yeah, but hoaxes are inherently interesting as well sometimes. Isn't everything a hoax? You know, if you think about it...

Well, regardless, this is all to say that I'm happy that you're happy, Charlie, on this one. So that's good. I succeeded in finding something that we all enjoy. I was re-watching that episode when it came out yesterday and just thinking to myself, like, man, he was so pissed off. I'm so angry. About this book. That's a stupid book. Dumb book. That's definitely a one star on the Goodreads. My gosh. Cicada 3301.

Mm-hmm. It's going to be a long episode. There's a lot to dive into here spanning multiple years. So let's just, let's just get into it. Right. Um, who wants to start? I'll take it.

This is the first invitation, so 2012. Hello, this is a quote. Hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this message. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck, 3301.

It was displayed inside a mysterious image posted to the Paranormal Board X on 4chan on January 5th, 2012. A simple message printed out in white text on a black background invited everyone to try their hand at solving the puzzle found inside the image itself.

Through doing that, the promise was made that it would begin a journey to find whoever it was that posted the image in the first place. It was signed simply from 3301. Oh, the first thought of many was running the image through a text editor, as there was very little information on the picture that would lead them to any other path. Though, through investigating the text, editors' analysis of the picture, a hidden message was found. At the bottom of the text, it read...

Tiberius Clavius Caesar says... Would that mean Tiberius Clavius Caesar? Yeah, Tiberius Clavius. But the V's were actually in the... I see, I see. Gotcha, gotcha. Says, and then just a bunch of letters and numbers. Looks like an Xbox Live arcade code.

This indicated that the message... Redeem that now. Redeem that for a copy of Halo 2. Did anyone try putting this on a Steam? There's a chance. That was our first pop culture reference. Thank you, Charlie. How long did it take? 9 minutes, 28 seconds. Well, I started it with a Halo 2 reference. I love these. That was a scripted... That doesn't count. That was a pre-ordained...

you know, that's like you putting the rule of two at the opening of the last one. It has to come naturally. Like what Charlie just did was like the muse speaking through him. He was filled with the spirit there. This indicated that the message was, was a Caesar cipher, a type of encryption named after Julius Caesar.

who apparently used it in his private letters. It's one of the oldest ciphers and is a fairly simple one. In the Caesar cipher, each letter in the plain text is shifted a certain number of places up or down in the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 3, A then becomes D, B becomes E, and so on. It's a relatively easy cipher to decode, as there are only a certain amount of shifts possible, 25 in the English alphabet. Ahem.

This brings us to the first hidden message in the invitation. Running the hidden message through the CaesarCypher tool with a shift of four provided a link to an imager. It's imager, right? That's how you say it? Imager? Yeah, that's how I say it. I'm pretty sure it's imager.

The image depicts a toy-like duck and words, Whoops, just decoys this way. Looks... Just decoys this way. Yeah, don't... What the fuck? Decoys? Like an old Frenchman? Yeah, decoys? The fedora came out for a second. Looks like you can't guess how... Yes? Looks like you can't guess how to get this message out. See? Okay, so immediately...

This is obviously a very sophisticated group of people running a puzzle. So people immediately were like, why is this worded in such a strange way? Like you can't even say it without fumbling it because it's worded in a really bizarre way. Like, whoops, just decoys this way. It looks like you can't guess how to get the message out. It just doesn't flow naturally. So that was immediately suspicious. The duck decoy is funny though. The duck picture is very cute. It is cute.

It's got a hidden purple thing behind one of its feathers. It's a fake duck on a white background with those texts in front of it for audio listeners out there.

The message doesn't particularly read well, hinting that there was something else afoot. Two words stood out to the people being out of place, at least in terms of what makes this sentence a bit weird to read. These words were guess and out. That immediately led people to a tool called OutGuess. OutGuess is actually a steganography? Yep.

I've actually never seen that word. The practice of hiding information within a message or object tool used to hide data in digital image files. Not to be confused with, what's the word for when you, like the court people that type out the transcripts? Steganographers? Is it just stenographer? Yeah, I think it's just stenographer. Yeah, so this is a different thing.

When opening the decoy duck image and outguess it revealed another message. Here is a book code. To find the book and more information, go to www.reddit.com slash R and then link to Reddit. Let's go.

See, this is what they meant by highly intelligent individuals. They went straight to Reddit. That was smart. Even back in 2012, Reddit was known as a place for high IQ people. Sophisticated, gentle sirs were the narwhal bacons at midnight, baby.

If it was a few years later, it probably would have redirected straight to the Rick and Morty. You say that just felt like someone reading the Old Testament. I know. The ancient text.

God, I love how all the messages ended in good luck and then 3301. It's like some James Bond shit. I love that stuff.

Yeah. Coded messages. Really cool. So going back to the outguess answer, those following the puzzle clues were taken to a subreddit where they would find a title and a bunch of seemingly encrypted gibberish text, two images, and a strange header image containing a bunch of symbols. The first, a picture of a welcome mat. When the image was run through outguess, another secret message was revealed. From here on out, we will cryptog... cryptog...

Cryptographically, sign all messages with this key. I know what cryptography is, but I've never seen cryptographically ever said or spelled out. Charlie's quickly getting annoyed with it. This was called the Noun Slime. As soon as longer words are introduced. You hate words, basically. Any kind of books or long word things. Well, luckily there was no words in the Voynich manuscript, so that holds no water. True, true.

There'd been many imposters claiming to be Cicada 3301, and so the real 3301 group used this PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, key on messages from here to verify their authenticity so that people could be sure that images were only provided by the authentic 3301 group. I wouldn't trust anything called Pretty Good Privacy. I would want at least Very Good Privacy. Pretty Good Privacy looks like, eh.

Yeah, it's not even like pretty great or like, you know, reliable. It's pretty good. Well, no, do you remember this, Jackson? It was on a podcast episode. We learned about that guy, like John Pretty Good or whatever, who was like the smartest man alive. Good enough. Good enough. Yeah, good enough. Yeah. John Good Enough. Wait, what? I'm not familiar with this. I think his name was John. I think it was John Good Enough. It was like John B. Good Enough or something. Yeah.

Yeah, John B. Goodenough. Yeah, John B. Goodenough. He was the... I believe... This is like way out of left field. Nothing relevant to do with what we're talking about currently. But he was basically a scientist and I'm pretty sure he created the... Maybe the lithium batteries. The lithium ion batteries, if I recall correctly. I just double checked. It was the lithium ion battery. Yeah, so he was like a very accomplished person and we just...

We basically stripped away all of his accomplishments and talked about his name for 30 minutes because it's such a good name. John B. Goodenough. The reason I brought that up is because good enough, you'd want something better than that usually, but he was fucking fantastic. So pretty good privacy is probably in the same vein where it's like, damn, this is super good. Yeah, true. Maybe he had a hand in it. Maybe this is related. Okay, now you keep reading. I'm going to look up pretty good privacy and see if he was involved.

So this is about the welcome mat, the second image that was posted. It was a stereogram, an image that creates a three-dimensional effect from a two-dimensional picture, allowing the viewer to see a hidden 3D image. The image itself was similar to the Holy Grail, and same as the last few pictures, it had hidden text which could be seen in outguess.

The key has always been right in front of your eyes. This isn't the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop making it more difficult than it is. Good luck, 3301. Yeah, so they're trolling a little bit. They're having some fun with it. It's almost like a game. Yeah, it is a game.

People at this time were very, yeah, they thought it was just a troll having fun, basically. This was still within the first day, and these puzzles were at least compared to what would eventually come fairly simple. Yeah, because you can plug and play on different website tools and stuff like that. It's not like hours and hours of research. They take a little bit of a logical leap to get to the answer that you need, but it's still pretty readily available in terms of you find the tool to use and then you input the image. There's some deduction, but nothing crazy.

The message didn't lie. The key was definitely right in front of their eyes. All they had to do was go back to the header image. The lines and circles were quickly discovered to be Mayan numerals. The Mayan numeral system was a vegesimal base system, which uses a base 20 instead of a base 10 number system.

Hmm. Interesting.

Yeah, so there was a header at the top of the subreddit basically using Maya numerals and people were able to then correlate those numerals with, you know, alphanumeric values basically to then come up with something. And then this next thing is what they came up with. Yeah, so the key to understanding and decrypting the rest of it jumped on decrypting the rest. Yeah, okay. Jumbled up text on the subreddit.

It was revealed to be translated story from mythology by Thomas Bolfink called the Mabinogion, which itself is a Welsh story from the 1300s about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and their search for the Holy Grail.

Oh, cool. Very cool. Characters in the Mabinogion were highlighted, basically. They were able to pinpoint using the Maya numbers...

they were able to pinpoint the letters within that verse to then spell out that line essentially. I always find it interesting, like a lot of, I feel, this is based on nothing, but I feel like a lot of riddles and stuff in the modern era

come from or relate around like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table I guess because the search for the Holy Grail is inherently kind of like a riddle so that's why they like play on that kind of theme yeah and it's also one of like the English classics right everyone knows it everyone has a connection to yeah hmm

But you would think high IQ individuals like this, I guess because they're starting off right now, like they want to keep it simple, I guess, to begin with. But I would have thought that they would kind of like go for more deeper fictional. Well, they're still they're still like playing on the surface. Right. They're like, aha, it's like a holy grail thing. Like this is still the introduction phase of it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think they're also just setting the groundwork for the mystique, like, oh, a secret society, potentially a Holy Grail. This could be some. I think, I think they wanted as, as many people interested from the beginning and to do that, you would need to make it some level of like, uh, you know, some level of people being able to do it. Right. Uh, if it was like way too complicated at the start, I don't think anyone would pay attention. Like they would have just ignored it.

What was the time frame like on solving these first few puzzles? I think this was within the first day. I'm pretty sure this was all within the first 24 hours of it dropping, which is really quick progress because it's relatively simple compared to the later ones.

But even still, shit like taking the subreddit title, looking at that, and comparing it to a Mayan numeral system is really not something a lot of people would think to do. Yeah. So I think it was still kind of just limited to people on 4chan talking about this at this point. It hadn't...

kind of like reached the other sites in terms of people discussing it. So it was more low-key at this point, but that would quickly change in the future. The number is now disconnected, but at the time when people called, they were greeted with a robotic voice that spoke. "Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original Final Dot JPEG image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two."

Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a .com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye. Hmm. Interesting. Okay, wait, so do you know the answer to this, Charlie? Do you remember the answer to this? I don't, actually.

Do you have any ideas? Where would your mind take you? So they're talking about the original image, the very first image that was posted, the invitation to the highly intelligent individuals. Is there any kind of lead that you would go through that would kind of draw out those two hidden numbers? Probably just the 3301. I think that's got to be the biggest one, right? And so you just take that and multiply that one. And then I guess...

Maybe let me see the first image again. I I think it's it's a very cute and simple puzzle that I think is Is kind of oh is it just the first letter of the the lines? No, I'll tell you I'll tell you right up front There's nothing in the image that will point you to to the idea. Is it the size of the image? Yeah, it's the size of the image. So no way. Are you serious?

Yeah. Let's go! I might remember that actually, so that's kind of cheating a little bit. That sounds familiar, but yeah. But let's go! That's the size of the image. Alright, so I'll take this bit. It was also at this point that the puzzle itself was beginning to hit the mainstream, with people from other sites reposting the journey and new users partaking in the games themselves. Questions began to be asked as well, though, like who was making the puzzle? What was its purpose?

What would happen to those who reached the end? There were rumours spreading quickly that this was the work of a secret society or an intelligence agency that was attempting to recruit individuals who were skilled in cryptography and steganography. These rumours would persist for a while without any confirmation one way or another, but it wasn't entirely an unwarranted rumour. There are many examples of corporations and of course military agencies using these puzzles and games to seek out and employ highly skilled and intelligent people. For example,

This is just one example. There are many examples that we could pull from. For example, Google itself had previously advertised a job position by promoting a math puzzle using a billboard that direct the person who solved it to a certain URL. But again, this has been a thing that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been using for a long time to find ambitious people who are highly capable and highly intelligent.

Do you have any examples, Isaiah? I feel like you would. Something like that. The one everyone mentions that when websites are hacked or there's data leaks or stuff like that, that the FBI will recruit off of that.

Oh, yeah. Like, what do they call it in the hacking terminology where people can send in website weaknesses to the website owners and then get prizes, not prizes, but like cash and stuff. Oh, I've got a buddy who his whole job, he has a degree in like cybersecurity. And what he does is he gets contracted by businesses to basically see if he can break into their site, steal data and stuff like that. And then he basically gives them a report of how he did it.

And then they go from there. So he's pretty much like he gets paid to hack into stuff.

It's a pretty cool setup. Yeah, that's so fucking cool. That is really cool. I also love that in the real world application as well. Like, I'm pretty sure that there are firms that are hired to, like, break into stores and stuff and then send in reports to show how they did it so that the store can fix that. How you were able to do it, yeah. Yeah, I love stuff like that. Really cool. I feel like that doesn't happen as much in the modern day. Like, nowadays, you'd find, like, a lot of the hacking events usually just lead to someone going to jail. Like, the Grand Theft Auto 6 hacker, instead of being, like...

okay, we're going to recruit this guy. It's like, all right, let's kill this guy. I think those are probably the higher profile ones that are actually caught, but I'm 100% sure there's thousands of hackers out there that do this without being caught. It's definitely possible, yeah. Yeah.

Alright, Isaiah, you can take this next part because you were the smart man who solved it. Aw, thank you. It's definitely not because I watched 800 videos of this back in high school, but sure. We can pretend otherwise. Thank you. I appreciate that. Back to the puzzle itself, though. There were no obvious prime numbers in the original image, but the answer was rather simple still. The original image, when inspected, was revealed to be 509 by 503 pixels in terms of its size.

The coolest of you would immediately know that both of those numbers are prime numbers. So by multiplying 509 by 503 by 3301, you would get 845,145,127. Those numbers, followed by a dot com, took people to a website that had a cicada and a countdown. When you ran this image of the cicada through Outguess, it revealed another message. Quote,

You have done well to come this far. Patience is a virtue. Check back at 1700 on Monday the 9th, January 2012, UTC 3301.

Alright, for real though, if I went through all this effort to break all these puzzles and solve it, I'm sure this, even if they are fairly simple, let's say, at least in comparison to what would eventually come, it still would take people multiple hours to crack through all these puzzles. And then you get to a website with a countdown timer, basically, I'd be a bit pissed, personally. Sure, but I mean, if it is something of this huge of a scale...

Well, I guess maybe you would think that it was all set up ready to go from the start, but maybe you could also view it as like there's like a second phase that they need to know who got through the first phase, if this was an intelligence agency or something like that. Well, my presumption is that they wanted as many people at this stage as possible before the next. Yeah, it just builds a pipe. When you have a countdown like this for something of this scale, it's going to get more and more people interested, like what's to come.

Yeah, it also kind of gives it an air of grandeur as well. Like something exciting is happening. Yeah, especially for the next part. This is the part I always thought was like the most interesting and leads the most credence to this being like some kind of big organization or something behind it. Those following the puzzle were forced to wait until this time when the hidden message behind the image changed. It now listed 14 sets of coordinates across the world from Australia to Japan, Russia, the United States, and more.

When these locations were visited, people discovered posters with the cicada picture and a QR code. This certainly indicated to most watching the events unfold that this was not the work of a single person or troll and was instead the work of an organization capable of having the international means to pull off something of this scale. Yeah, it's pretty crazy that this actually happened. Like, across the globe, these 14 different cities across different nations, like Russia,

you know, Japan, Australia, even down in Sydney, Australia, to have people put up posters around there without anyone seeing it happen and then have that happen at the same time definitely speaks to some level of really sophisticated organizational structure, right?

It also makes you ask a lot of questions about how it was done. Because sure, hypothetically, a single person could do this, like travel around and put everything up. But it seems unlikely just because of how spread out it is, unless the individual had money or a lot of free time, which I guess is possible. But then also, if it's several people doing it, then how has no one came forward to talk about it in all this time? So maybe it is some kind of organization. It adds a lot to the mystique of it.

Yeah. I also think it's possible that it could be a small amount of people and then they just hired people maybe to go put them up. So that was initially what I thought. But the only thing that makes me think that's probably not the case is they had the coordinates. And if you're hiring someone, like maybe they wouldn't like maybe they wouldn't do it or they wouldn't get the coordinates right if you told them where to go. So like, I don't know. It does require some level of coercion. Yeah. Cohesiveness. I mean.

I'm pretty sure in the Lemono video, there was a interesting tangent about how the locations where all the posters were put up were within like

Within like a short drive of an international airport, suggesting that someone had actually flown to each of these places and put up a poster. Yeah. Which is crazy. Which is very cool. Probably not, probably not like hiring people. And if it's, if this is some like really secret organization, I don't see them risking hiring people as well to do something like that. Yeah. I just don't see that.

Being likely. People would then travel to the locations and it was there that they would find printed sheets of paper with a picture and a cicada on it along with a QR code. There were two QR codes that led to two new book ciphers with clues to which books were needed to find.

Yeah, okay, I've screwed up that paragraph in editing. Basically, what it means is that, like, eventually, once all the posters were found, Cicada uploaded the images of the QR codes. The posters. Okay. Yeah, the posters with the QR codes. Gotcha. So that everyone could partake in the next step, basically. Okay. Which reduced the issue of, like... You have to go to the physical location. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which was a nice thing of them to do, really. Well, the guy went through so much effort of flying around the world, he wants people to see the fruits of his labor. Yeah, yeah. If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to block it, did it really happen? Yeah. Imagine if he went through all this effort and the 4chan post just ticked over into the complete void. No one gave a shit. He flew to all these different countries and stuff.

He does the whole thing, no one asks. I bet there's at least one other person that tried this and had that exact thing happen. Like they invested thousands of dollars for this elaborate fucking puzzle solving ruse only to die immediately on 4chan with no one caring. Yeah.

It's also funny to think that some guy was like walking around drunk in Warsaw, Poland and he's like, what is this cicada? And he holds his phone up. He's like, what the fuck? True. What are these numbers? Is this government? Is this some kind of saint worshiper? Like, yeah. It would have all had to happen pretty quickly because like the risk of someone like tearing down the posters or something. Yeah, or someone putting something over it or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

It was the second riddle that was discovered first, the clue being, quote, a poem of fading death named for a king meant to be read only once and vanish. Alas, it could not remain unseen, end quote.

He was referring to a book called Agrippa, a book of the dead, a collaborative project by author William Gibson and artist Dinesh Ashbaugh from 1992. Agrippa, that's the king from the New Testament who Paul testified in front of. Interesting. William Gibson's poem themed around memories and loss was featured on a floppy disk, which would encrypt itself after a single reading.

The artwork that it was accompanied with would also fade and disintegrate over time when exposed to light, matching the theming of the poem. Pretty, pretty cool. Writes a book, writes a book that destroys itself, basically. Yeah, that's pretty sick. I like that.

The book needed for the first riddle was then also found. Quote, In 29 volumes, knowledge was once contained. How many lines of the code remained when the Mabinogion paused? Go that far in from the beginning and find my first name. End quote. This led to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 11th edition.

At the bottom of these messages was also a warning about sharing information. Quote, you shared too much to this point. We want the best, not the followers. Thus, the first few there will receive the prize. Good luck. End quote.

So this was the point where they were like, no more collaboration. Shit starts to get real from this point on. We've given you all the information. Now you need to solve it on your own. And then whoever gets to the end will receive the prize, basically. Yeah, this is the first time they mentioned a prize. So as opposed to just being a worthless, time-wasting trip, they've now made it like, oh, there's a prize. And if it's this elaborate, it must be a good prize. There's gold at the end of the rainbow.

The very first image, the idea was, keep throwing these puzzles and you'll find us, basically. And it's like, who cares? I don't care who you guys are. You're just making dumb puzzles online. Now there's a prize. Now there's something cool at the end.

I mean, what prize do you think would be worth going through all this effort for? Just some money. Yeah, just money. Starbucks gift card. Yeah, you get to the end of it and it's like, here's a Dick's Sporting Good year membership. 10% off on clubs and rackets. You get my League of Legends password. I'm gold three.

If someone who's gone through all of this for like a 4chan game would be like, no way. They kind of do run the risk at this point though, because they've kind of created an element of, you know, they're needing to be something, you know, really exciting at the end of it.

and it's got the risk of disappointing a lot of people now it's got the risk of angering a lot of people and especially the people that are now solving these puzzles they probably they probably are you know highly intelligent people with hacking capabilities so to risk angering them i don't know that's kind of that's kind of ballsy in my opinion or of course the prize is you get lobotomized by the cia that's also very possible they deem you too much of a risk and they're part of the strike you have truth is game was rigged from the start

Using these books, the puzzle solvers decrypted an onion link, which would take this puzzle to the dark web using a .onion extension.

Opening this in the Tor network using a Tor browser would then show the following message. Quote, congratulations, please create a new email address with a public free web-based service. One you've never used before and enter it below. We recommend you do this while still using Tor for anonymity.

We will email you a number within the next few days in the order in which you arrived at this page. Once you received it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you received to this URL. For example, if you received a string of numbers, then you would go to a hyperlink, hyperlink, slash, and then the browser extension, the .onion extension, followed by the numbers you received.

Signed 3301 in quote. Those who provided an email address would then send an email instructing them on to the next puzzle. I'm so, by the way, I'm so glad you took that paragraph because I cannot pronounce a non-anonymity. I can't do it. Anonymity? Anonymity? Anonymity? Anonymity? No, I can't. Okay, we're going to do this together, Jackson. Anonymity? Anonymity?

Wait, can you say that again? N-I-M. Nim. Nim. Okay, so anonym. Anonym. Itty. Mittie. Anonymity. I can't do it. You made up, you added it extra. You just gave up so quick. You threw that out. Anonymity.

Anonymity. You keep adding. You're like Nemo trying to pronounce anemone. That was the one? You're adding letters. Anonymity. I can't. It's just redo the word. You just did it. You just did it. Do it again. Anonymity. There it is. You did it. That's it. You got it. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you, Jackson. This was my puzzle. After this, we're going to swallow pills together. It'll be okay. We're going to get you through this one step at a time.

I was trying to get carried away. I don't know if he's got that in him. He's going to be singing anonymity while just downing ibuprofen. Okay, so...

The following email puzzles are a bit confusing. It's an RSA encryption algorithm which is used commonly for secure data transmission. There are two keys to an RSA encryption, a private and public one. Those who received an email had a message that had been encrypted using this method and needed to find the corresponding private key to solve the puzzle.

Quote, the encrypted message is a number. Break the decryption key, then come back to this same URL and enter the decrypted message to continue. Each person who has come this far has received a unique message encrypted with a unique key. You are not to collaborate. Sharing your message or key will result in not receiving the next step. There is a second chance to get your own RSA message and key. Follow the numbers.tk hint to find it.

There are many fake messages out there. Only messages signed with public key ID 7A35090F are valid. Good luck, 3301, end quote.

Man, this is a complex puzzle. It's like there are two codes. One's public, one's private. You can't share with each other. Good luck finding it through the information. There are so many elements of these puzzles that I just really struggled to actually explain concisely. So I just kind of...

Leave it up to the experts. If you want to know more about the puzzles, there are definitely videos out there, very long videos going into each puzzle. As long as everyone understands that these are entirely written by Jackson, meaning any ridicule at getting it wrong is directed towards him. Please send it to me. If he receives all the praise, he receives all the hate too. That's how it works around here. But for the same pay. And that's why we love him.

Don't worry, I'm dying from COVID over here, so I'm already punished enough. And then Charlie and I will take all of your shares and be rich.

So at the same time, there was a second chance for whoever wasn't able to submit an email for the next part. The 845-145-127.com had changed and sent people on another string of puzzles, including going through outguess, interpreting book code from a book where there were only nine copies made, the marriage of heaven and hell, and another onion link to submit their email. Only

only not yet. There's one of nine books in the world. Got to get one to do the puzzle.

Yeah, it seems a bit mean. This was your second chance. Have one of nine available books. Nine copies. You're gonna find one of those nine. I'm sure they were like online. Yeah, there was definitely. It's clear this time that Cicada wanted those following the puzzles to work alone. Everyone received individual codes in the emails and if they were sharing messages or keys online, they received a message from Cicada basically telling them that they were out of the race. This was essentially a test.

And the quote went as followed, Hello, you have shared your information online. You are now removed from this altogether.

Even if you crack the key you've been given, it doesn't matter because we have demonstrated that you can't be trusted to follow simple instructions anyway. Thank you for your participation at this point. Goodbye 3301. End quote. Sarcastic. Hello! Hello! Just obvious to say you're fired! It's Cicada here! Salutations! You're out! Goodbye! Cicada here! They're on their way! Good

Good luck. If you can survive the kill squad, we might let you in. Lockdown event starting in five, four. The kill squad event.

If you share your code, you're immediately sent to a PVP server. I mean, I'm not going to rule out the possibility that this is, like, the government. I mean, it could be. Like, NSA and... Well, not NSA. It'd be, like, CIA or something has done weirder. I mean, do you know functionally how weird, like...

The MK ultra stuff was like, Oh yeah. I mean like the, the concept of taking homeless people and pumping them full of drugs to see what happens. And then being like, you know, we could talk to dolphins if we, if we get the dolphin high enough and then like, Oh, well let's see like an operation Stargate. We're going to hire psychics to see if we can kill people with our minds. Like if this is not beyond them at all to set up an internet puzzle on 4chan. Yeah.

As soon as I heard the story about what happened to that dolphin, it might have been in the MKUltra project, but there was a dolphin that received sexual favors, let's say, at the hands of the government in the pursuit of researching if they would be able to communicate with dolphins. We can talk to them if we get it horny enough. I love that idea. We're going to fuck it so we can speak to it.

And drugs. They gave up acid. A lot of drugs, yeah. As soon as I heard that story, I was like, okay, the government's capable of anything. There's no line they won't cross. Literally any conspiracy you've ever heard of? Sure. Why not? Sounds right. At first, those who submitted the correct answer just got an error message, but on the 17th of January, it changed to read the following. Quote, correct. We'll email you. The next step came in the form of music.

An email arrived to those who solved the previous puzzle attached with an M-I-D-I file that the recipient... Oh, a MIDI file, sorry. I'm technologically illiterate. No, I was just excited. MIDI files were such a big deal back in the day. That's how most early internet songs were downloaded, through MIDI files. It's those really simple sounding song covers, basically. Like piano song covers. It's basically beeps that replicate songs.

Gotcha. They had to, so it's in a MIDI file that the recipients had to manipulate in specific ways. The manipulations included things like the pitch or tempo. When done correctly, they would then find text embedded within the spectrogram. That's cool. Yeah, so the spectrogram is like an analysis of the... It's like a visualization of the waveforms effectively. That's cool that as they're manipulating it, sentences are coming together. It's pretty neat. Okay, so I'm

I mean, we've kind of breezed ahead through these explanations, because I've got to simplify it somehow. But this was a very lengthy process, obviously, that took people a lot of time to figure out. And also, we've jumped in terms of sophistication of the puzzles, right? Initially, it was like, oh, hello, put this image into an analyzer, and it'll say a word. That's

That's very cool. And now it's like, listen to this song and adjust the pitch to find hidden words within the metadata on the spectrogram. This is still the beginning of the puzzles. Like, it's wild how, like, complicated it got. It's fucking crazy. On both ends, right? It's crazy that someone actually came up with this shit. And it's also crazy that people solved it. It's mind-boggling. The ingenuity.

The quote read, when you correct the quote within the spectrogram read, Very good. You have proven to be most dedicated to come this far to attain enlightenment. Create a GPG key for your email address and upload it to the MIT key servers. Then, encrypt the following word list using the Cicada 3301 public key. Sign it with your key.

Send the AS2 armored ciphertext to the Gmail address from which you received your numbers. Sorry. Send the ASCII armored ciphertext to the address where you received your numbers.

ASCII armament is such a cool fucking phrase. What does that even mean? So typically ASCII is like the shit you'll see with like the Amogus penis in a Twitch chat and things like that. It's making pictures out of, you know, just text. Oh, out of like text bells, like text pieces and stuff. I see. I have an embarrassing story, a very quick tangent.

tangential story related around ASCII art when I was like I think it was like sixth grade I sent an email to my crush at the time using ASCII art to like not propose to her but you know like propose my love to her basically at the time it was like ASCII art of a love heart saying you are my crush or something like that so I ever since then I uh whenever I hear ASCII art that's that's that's what makes me think of that that's very cute um

So the words that you have to send are muzzle drop, pump, knee, bird, watch, bell, hammer, pocket, hook, house, break, feather, knot, ticket, boat, box, moon, cloud, bulb, carriage, fox, tray, square, cup, station, match, tooth, oven, horse, pencil, tray, collar, tree, scissor, brush, drawer, brick, arm, engine, sock, umbrella, sheep, apple, horn, hat, chain, fork, screw. Yes, naturally.

So I think each person got a different set of words, maybe, from their MIDI files. Yeah, I think it was specific to each person who had come there for. So it was a way of validating you are the person that solved this. Those who completed the puzzle sent their answers in and waited. On February the 6th, an email was received informing them of no more puzzles. You've offended us. No more puzzles. Puzzles are off the table now.

Who wants puzzles anyway? That's lame. Anyway, they were instead given directions to log on to a hidden tour browser with a username and password. There's a final message posted to the original subreddit titled Valet, which is Latin for goodbye. The message read, quote, Hello, we have now found the individuals we sought. Thus, our month-long journey ends. For now.

Ultimately, it seemed that the group had found their "highly intelligent individuals" and whatever happened to them would remain a mystery.

People following the puzzles were left disappointed as none of the questions that were raised by the original image were answered. Who was behind the puzzle and what was it all for? This would remain the end of the Cicada 3301 story for a year anyway. But that is disappointing, right? Like they just posted image. Yeah, we found the smart people. All you other people can fuck off now. Well, to me, that's what immortalizes it. By far the best way to do it.

it's like imagine this imagine if there was like a cult right that was like worshiping some god and like it's you witness all of them just disappear like they all walk behind a tree and then they're gone it's like oh wow okay well maybe they were right what just happened and like oh yeah no it's absolutely the coolest thing that can happen like it definitely like

puts it down in the history books as like holy shit that was that was cool but also like i want to know the answers oh yeah it's frustrating for us for sure as the quote-unquote left behind yeah as like just spectators on the bench yeah it's disappointing but i guess that's that's the you know the gambit of having a competition like this you just need to be smart enough to be on the inner circle

Join the cult using your brain. A full year and one day after the first message was posted to 4chan's X-Feed, another appeared. The image was also posted on the B-board image... On the B-board image board twice. People up until this point had remained wary of copycats that had routinely come through to try and recapture the same excitement that the initial cicada puzzles had created, but they had always failed as they were pale imitations.

This all changed with the new post, however, as it contained the one thing all others had been missing. The same valid PGP signature that the original post had contained. Oh my god. This meant that the image was undoubtedly from the same source as the original puzzle. Cicada 3301 was back and they were looking for more intelligent individuals. Let's go! Yes! Round two! Somehow Cicada returned.

I don't know how hard it is to fake a valid PGP signature. The rule of two! The rule of two! No, that's a Palpatine reference. That's not a rule of two reference. But it's still Star Wars, which means it's rule of two, baby. Is this not the second Cicada 3301 after the first one was done? Oh my god, you're right. It is the rule of two. Thank you. God damn it. Yeah, I don't know how hard it is to fake a valid PGP signature, so...

I mean, if the people who knew about this stuff said that that identified it as the real one, I'm willing to believe it. Yeah. This is them. This is them. Well, they also weeded out all the intelligent people the first time. So now all we have is the fucking bumbling morons left. So it's possible. Hey, I remember me in high school looking at this stuff like maybe I'll know something.

Well, that was my idea too. I was like, I'll take a peek. Maybe I can get a little something going. Maybe I'm the guy they're looking for. What if they ended up with a bunch of like 14 year old wannabe hackers though? And then they just have a posse of alternate reality where a bunch of YouTube like people ended up at like some CIA super program over in Cicada. That's funny.

Did you read the actual message?

Yeah, oh, no, but it's, I'll do it now. Hello again, our search for intelligent individuals now continues. The first clue is hidden within this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck, 3301. Oh, thank god you read that, that was important. So here's the quote from the outguess.

Welcome again. Here is a book code to find the book, break this riddle, a book whose study is forbidden, once dictated to a beast, to be read once and then destroyed, or you shall have no peace. That sounds like some, um, like, uh, Satanism stuff. A little bit, why? Because of the beast? The beast, yeah. And like, uh, the study is forbidden type thing. Interesting. Yeah, and you shall have no peace.

Following this was 46 lines of book code and the signature Good Luck 3301. All that was needed was to discover which book the riddle referred to. Many quickly determined that the book was The Book of Law by English occultist Alistair Crowley. Oh, I was right. I was right. Let's go. Let's go. The Book of Law was written in Cairo, Egypt in 1904 and said to have been told to Crowley by a supernatural entity named Iwas over the course of three days.

God, that must have been the most boring three days ever just being told a fucking story. Only you could find that boring. Some supernatural being named Iwas speaks to you for three days, tells you a story, and you'd be bored. Fuck yeah. Would I be like, brother, can you teach me some useful stuff? There's a good story. Maybe spend a day on that and then teach me how you traveled here. It reminds me of that...

Oh, I'm going to forget it. It's called like, it might be the Codex Giygas. There's one book. It's like the largest handwritten book that legend has it. A monk sold his soul to the devil to ride it in one night. And for seemingly no other reason at the back of the book, there's a drawing of the devil. Supposedly that the devil put his signature at the end of it. It reminds me of that. Damn, that sounds kind of hype.

Much better than fucking Voynich manuscript. Is that how the devil usually signs himself? Like when he's corresponding? Yeah, just a picture of himself. Hold on. It's like the meet the author page at the back of the book. It includes a little biography of him. Yeah. Satan born 1346. Hold on. Let me see if I can...

According to one version of legend, the scribe was a monk who broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive. To escape death, he promised to create in one night a book to glorify the monastery forever, including all human knowledge. Near midnight, he became so desperate that he prayed to Lucifer to help him finish the book in exchange for his soul. The devil completed the manuscript and the monk added the devil's picture as a tribute.

That's pretty cool. So did he win though? That goes so hard. Selling your soul for a fucking book is crazy. Well, the alternative was he was going to be... That was actually an old form of execution. I forget what the name of it was, but they would put people in walls and then seal them up inside of there and just let them die of starvation in the darkness of the walls. So this monk broke his vows, was sentenced to death that way, and said, okay, if I can write a book for the glory of the monastery...

will you let me live and then he can't get the book finished so he sells his soul to the devil for the devil to finish it was there like a word limit or something like it could have just been like 10 pages

Well, it had to be something to bring glory to the monastery forever. Oh, but that's like super subjective, right? So what, it goes to a panel of judges who are like, nope, that's not glorifying us enough. Well, I mean, if it's just like 10 pages of like, oh, God is good. I don't think that would be enough to get him off of death row. I think that's pretty good, though. I mean, what is Satan, right? What was his deal? Was he glorifying God? I believe the majority of the Codex Bible is it's...

the Bible and then there's a bunch of other stuff after the Bible's written. Like something that would be impossible to include in a single night. But you also have to realize this was back when like it's 13th century so every book had to be handwritten. So even just written copies of the Bible were super rare. So it was like

Everything written in it was a rarity in itself. Satan just showed up and plagiarized the Bible, basically, real quick. Pretty much. It contains the complete Vulgate. And then it also includes Josephus and Antiquities of the Jews. It includes a bunch of other old famous works. Two books by Constantine of Africa. If I remember correctly, it is the largest handwritten book ever, I think.

That's a big accomplishment, Satan. I mean, if it's still plagiarized, then we should still cancel him. We need some YouTube videos out cancelling Satan for plagiarization. This was a completely off-topic thing. I just got distracted about weird lore. Hey, I love off-topic stuff. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm glad someone did. Do we...

Did we talk about the book, the relevant book? I'm so sorry. So the story that was told is divided into three chapters, each attributed to a different deity. Nuit, the infinite sky goddess. Hadith, the infinitely condensed point.

And Ra-Hur-Kut, a manifestation of the Egyptian god Horus. The infinitely condensed point. Yeah, that's a really cool title. That's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Hold on. What is that? Yeah, it's like a Destiny 2 boss. Yeah, it actually is. It sounds like the Vex from Destiny 2. But also, I want to play these dudes in Smite. They sound sick.

So the following book code, chapter number, line number, and letter number, and Dropbox address was revealed. This led to a 130 megabyte ISO file that began to count from 1 to 3301. It, interestingly enough, would pause just before numbers 1033 and 3301. It then ended with a message and looped all over again. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I just realized 1033 and 3301 are the same number back to front.

Oh, you're so good. That's pretty crazy. I wonder if that was a purpose. At 123-150-705. The key is all around you. Good luck. 3301.

People began to look at two things here. Firstly, many noted that the beginning of the message looked like a Twitter handle. When they went to Twitter, they found that it contained multiple tweets of random numbers and a hexadecimal code. Secondly, they began to look more into the ISO file, which they discovered four more files. Three data files containing seemingly gibberish and an audio file. The audio file was called 761.mp3, which is a prime number.

It is also 167 seconds long, also a prime number. When the metadata of the song file was analyzed, they found the following message. The Instar Emergence, Parable 1,595,277,641. Like the Instar tunneling to the surface, we must shed our circumferences, find the divinity within and emerge.

A full day went by. People had discovered the audio and data files and a bunch of random code on a Twitter profile. What was next? Well, the Twitter profile then posted a tweet. Okay, wait, yeah, I'll take this part because I kind of wrote it in my own words. So, yeah, it posted a tweet that said offset zero, skip zero,

column 65 line 988. So basically it's saying that you can't skip any of the numbers, you can't offset them. And then it gives some data points to look at basically from what I understand. But I'm going to be honest, I wrote this down because I got really frustrated at trying to understand this. I'm going to be honest, this one was hard for me to understand and I don't think I could explain the process at all. I highly recommend watching some follow-up videos if you're interested in learning the process on solving this particular puzzle.

but I can't seem to find the words to describe it in a digestible way. But by basically by using the new information, people were able to then solve the puzzle using what is called an XOR gate to compare

bit information, so information within the file itself, like files are made up of bits, right? We all know that. They're all made up of bits. So this XOR gate is a logic gate that compares bit information and returns either a 1 or a 0 value based on if the bit has been changed or altered or is it the same or something along those lines.

So this kind of analysis using the XOR logic gate eventually resulted in an image depicting a Gematria.

I think I'm pronouncing that right. A gematria is actually a traditional Jewish system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase with the idea that they have some relation to each other. This particular one created by Cicada has three columns, the left being Anglo-Saxon runes, the middle being letters, and the third being number values. So if you're listening to this on...

on iTunes or Spotify. This is going to be a, this whole episode is probably very difficult for you guys to comprehend. So I highly recommend you going and looking at the document because there are pictures in there that, that'll show what we're talking about and it'll be on screen for the video itself. There's this chart showing the Gematria Primus showing the three columns and how they correlate to each other. It's basically just like assigning letters and values to different runes and, and,

it's basically like what was the cipher the caesar cipher before like if a equals 12 then b equals 13 basically but with with the gematra but with your own created language with your own created runes basically yeah it seems pretty easy to me i don't know what you're struggling with to be honest

Perhaps it takes a mind like mine that can comprehend shows like Rick and Morty and then make them into their themes and meaning. Yeah, maybe this all could have been avoided if you just sent through a Rick and Morty quote and then they would have immediately invited you into the group. Well, they used to do stuff like Cicada 3301 but then Rick and Morty came out and they were able to take all of their super smart individuals off of that. Yeah, you could just say it in the comment threads. Oh,

Already, this is significantly more complicated than the first one. So the first batch of intelligent people are definitely the weakest. The second batch is definitely going to be smarter. They're the strong. They're trading them. So I wonder if that's because like the cicada was disappointed by the crop of smart people from the first one. They're like, damn.

These guys weren't smart enough for us. We need to refine our tactics and really come up with some smart ideas. I want to mention, I've never heard cicada pronounced that way, but cicada sounds so cool. I'm flip-flopping at the moment. I know. Cicada sounds great. That sounds like the name of some Spanish assassin. I'm pretty sure in Australia we say cicada, but I've been ruined, so I'm saying it both ways. Sounds like sicario. That's so sick.

Alright, so the left column was basically unused at this point, so you can ignore the runes for now, but they do play a pretty prominent part in the future. But then the middle column is letters and the right column is values. And when you use the Gematria to look at the title of the song on the audio file, which was the Insta Emergence, it actually equals, using the chart, it equals 761, which is the name of the file itself, essentially confirming the cipher as valid, which is really cool.

So as with all the images in this case, many began to run it throughout guests, which turned up an empty message. But...

And this is the biggest plot twist of all. It wasn't empty. It was actually a mix of tabs and spaces. When turning the binary, it created a message. So it's like the old, you know, tabs equal one and spaces equal zero. Yeah, that's wild. It just looks like a blank page until you like highlight it. Yeah. And then you see all these spaces and stuff. Really cool. Very simple. A very simple puzzle. But getting here to this point is...

complicated enough I guess so when turned into a binary it created a message there was another onion link with the ominous we shall await you there good luck 3301 when going to the link people were greeted with a cicada created out of ASCII code telling them web browsers are useless here so then there's a picture of like a cicada made out of sevens and question marks and stuff very cool

So the answer to this was an old client slash server protocol called Telnet. Telnet was a way to remotely access or control a computer with a different computer. All that was needed was to call the onion site and type in hello and you could progress in the puzzle.

The site then recounted another string of hex code to decrypt that led to another message with another onion link. Many were left disappointed when all that was found here was the words, patience is a virtue. I mean, yeah, it would be too. You go through all this and it's like, uh-uh, being patient. There's nothing hidden here. It was simply a waiting page for when Cicada would unveil the next step. It was essentially like the countdown from the first year's puzzles.

But something pretty interesting happened here as well. A possible error on Cicada's end which leaked some information about who they might be. When someone attempted to telnet into the site, an error message came out that showed the website server was connected to a host site called Linode.

This meant that Linode had billing information to someone who would be connected to Cicada, but obviously this would be impossible for anyone to explore further unless they were connected to Linode itself. But it was essentially the first mistake or trace that Cicada 3301 had left, which was impressive in and of itself.

Cicada was obviously immediately aware of their blunder as the site was taken down as soon as people started discussing it. I feel like that might be like a red herring almost because I really don't think they would have made that mistake. Like it seems like a fairly simple mistake to make. I'm also sure people immediately dug over what Linode could be, right? What do you mean? Surely.

The moment that happened, people had to search everything related to Linode. Well, it's a host site, so they would have had to pay for it. And you could easily get that information, probably, if you could contact Linode itself and track them. Social engineer or something. But also, I feel like if they did use Linode, they probably used fake names and stuff. Fake billing information. So I don't know how to trace it. It would need to be real money coming from somewhere, though.

Yeah. Was crypto a thing at that point? This was 2013. This was right when crypto existed, but there was nothing that could take it yet. Okay. I think, right? Bitcoin was 2013. Yeah, Bitcoin was out. Yeah.

Regardless, shortly after the first people had stumbled across the website, another message appeared on the page. Quote, you already have everything you need to continue. Sometimes one must knock on the sky and listen to the sound. Good luck 3301. Alright, that quote goes pretty hard, I gotta admit. Knock on the sky and listen to the sound, I like that. I mean, a lot of their quotes are pretty cool, I'll be honest.

Thank you, Jackson.

Appreciate it. Only gamers would understand this. Take some true gamer like me, someone who understands the Call of Duty zombie storyline to know the gravity of what's going on here. Gamers rise up.

Normally the server just pings back, but the Cicada server was sending additional information back in response. When repeatedly pinging the server and collating the pings sent back, it created another hex data code, which was then turned into a compressed data file and then undone to create a message with another onion link.

Again, I barely understand how people are able to analyze this data, but that's the simplest way I can put it. I will say that is so, so cool that on a ping, the returning radar has like data in it and doing it over and over gives a message and they describe it as knocking on the sky and hearing the sound. That's so cool. Yeah. I think it's probably my favorite part of the puzzle because it's so... It's...

how do i describe it's like really simple conceptually um and you can kind of understand it without needing to know like the really technical details and it's just like a really cool but it's also something that you would never expect to be in a cipher or yeah or something like that yeah it's such a it's a it's a strange tool to include yeah it's so different to all the other puzzles that they've done

The link itself listed seven location coordinates. Dallas, Texas, Okinawa, Japan, Moscow, Russia, Little Rock, Arkansas, Annapolis, Maryland, Portland, Oregon, and Columbus, Georgia. Quickly, people began to make their way to these locations where they would, again, discover more posters. The posters had a picture of a cicada, a phone number, and access code.

The Annapolis, Maryland poster was not actually found. It had been taken down and possibly cleaned up by someone, but the number was discovered by people brute force calling every number that ended in 3301 or 1033 as each of the other numbers ended in either one of those. That's so crazy. Some lady in Annapolis was like cleaning up the streets. It's like, who keeps doing this?

Who's leaving? Are these kids trashing up the town? I can't take this no more. It's actually crazy. Yeah, but another thing is that seven of these locations... I mean, five of the seven locations were in America. So...

While it's still widespread, I mean, it's in Okinawa, Japan and Moscow, Russia, but it's predominantly these locations are in America. So people theorize that this was due to the fact that there was a lot more attention on it now because people kind of were expecting more cicada stuff.

So there's a lot more attention. And so there are a lot less surveillance cameras in America than there are like per square mile than there are in Europe. So people theorize that they've targeted America mostly so that they would be able to stay off cameras.

When calling the number, the automated voice did not respond to the access code. This was because Cicada didn't want random Joe Schmoes from the streets picking up the sheet, calling the number, and entering the access code printed on the sheet. They wanted people who were actually involved in the puzzles. Entering the Geometria again.

By using the geometria and access code, puzzle solvers were able to input a new code that the automated voice would respond to. The automated voice spilled more data than needed to be applied to the data files from the ISO file previously.

The next few steps are pretty complex again, but it led to another onion file with more data that was an SSSS format or Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme. This is a form of...

This is a form of distributing secret information to a group of people. Each person gets a section of the secret or code, and then they need the help of the others to complete the message. It's essentially a way of ensuring collaboration and preventing only one person from getting the final answer. There were around 10 splits in this code, but only five were needed to progress. It's a way of mitigating the risk of people not finding posters or posters vanishing and being destroyed, etc.

This led to yet another onion link to a time-sensitive quiz where you had to answer 20 questions in five minutes. There were no hidden puzzles. It was simply a test. So just to go back briefly, I found it very interesting that

in the first test, sorry, in the first set of puzzles, it was at this point where they were like, no more collaboration. You don't get to work with anyone. This is all you now. There's only one, you know, only you can win if you solve the puzzle, whatever. But now in this version, the second year's set of tests, they're like, they're pushing people to collaborate almost in this section. So it's a bit of a big difference. I like the questions. These are fun.

Yeah, so these are a set of quiz questions. A lot of people see these questions as an insight into what Cicada 3301 are and what their deals are.

are. In fact, it's potentially the most enlightening unveiling of the organization or individual that they themselves have released. Questions 1 to 13 all have the same answers to choose from. True, false, intermediate, meaningless, indeterminate, indeterminate, indeterminate, meaningless, self-referential,

game rule, strange loop, and none of the above. So these are like the bottom options to input on the quiz. So each of the questions from 1 to 13 have each of those things that I say I just read out as an option to enter into the quiz. So basically, I'm about to read out the first 13 questions and the answers are true, false, indeterminate, meaningless, whatever. So question one, observation changes the thing being observed.

True. True. I agree. I want you two to answer all these. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Disregarding color blindness, any arbitrary color looks the same to all people. Strange loop. Damn. I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answers, Charlie. So whatever you want. The answer to the first question, by the way, would be indeterminate, I think.

observation changes a thing because that's the Schrodinger's cat question. Yeah, it is. Well, there's also a quantum equation for it as well that does state that when you observe things, they change just from being observed. Charlie would get through it and I wouldn't on that one. That's the double slit experiment, baby. At least I think it is. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, the double slit. It demonstrates light as both a wave and particle effectively depending on observance.

That sounds cool. That sounds like my kind of hypothetical. Question three. Wait, wait, no, but question two. Disregarding colorblindness. Oh, yeah. Armature color looks the same to all people. What'd you say, Charlie? I said indeterminate. Indeterminate. This is the whole red. My red is not your red thing. You can't. There's no way to know because it's all experience. Yeah, I guess it is indeterminate, but it's also meaningless. That's also true. Question three. Grass is only green due to a relationship between the grass light and your mind.

I feel like that's true. False. Okay. Why is it false? I think you could probably look at it scientifically like the chlorophyll is the reason the grass is green. Yeah, but I feel like green itself is like... Yeah, we have to first establish what green means here. Yeah, that's true. Because going off the previous one, if it's meaningless, if everything looks the same, then what is green? Is it talking about our perception of it? Talking about the chemicals that make it? You know?

Game rule. Also, people, people, leave your responses below as well. I want to see what. Yeah, answer these. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Answer them first. All right. Question four. What you are is more important than what you do. Self-referential. Self-referential. Yeah, self-referential. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or meaningless. I mean, yeah, self-referential, whatever. Okay. Question five. You cannot step into the same river twice. Strange loop.

Strangely. Because again, you have to first determine what river means. The location or the water? I was going from the perspective of once you step in it, it changes. It's completely different water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

We get hundreds of millions of sensations. Oh, sorry. Question six. We get hundreds of millions of sensations coming into our minds at any moment. Our brain can't process them all, so it categorizes these signals according to our belief systems. This is why we find evidence to support our beliefs and rarely notice evidence to the contrary. Meaningless. Too many words. Indeterminate. Indeterminate. I was going to say indeterminate. Um...

I feel like it's kind of self-referential as well, though. Possibly. I think it's indeterminate because we can't know what the sensations and categories of everyone else's mind is, right? It's a subjective question. Yeah. But at some part, the gamification of this, to me, I feel like we've said indeterminate too many times.

And I feel like they must be using... Well, sure. But if we're being factual with this, these are indeterminate questions. This is philosophy. There's no absolute answer. This is all like, can you step in the same river twice? How is your personal sensation? These are all indeterminate things. Now, if we're talking about... Like Charlie said for the first one, oh, there's quantum rules regarding it. Then perhaps there is some agreed upon truth to...

to it, but even then it's not absolute. It's by rule or law. Yeah. Okay. Question seven. I am the voice inside my head. You undoubtedly just thought I don't have a voice in my head. This is the voice the question is referring to. I thought most people do agree that they have a voice inside their head.

Yeah, I feel like it's impossible not to. Yeah, you do have a voice inside your head. Unless you're absolute NPC. I saw this debate going on last year, I think it was, online, where people were like, I just met someone who thinks that they don't have a voice inside their head. No, no, no, I am the voice inside my head. I mean, true, yeah, I think it is. I think you are the voice, obviously. It's not some disembodied voice. Question 8. 1 equals .99 repeating.

I mean, that is true, right? That's just true. False. I think, right? Yeah, I would say false. No, if you say false, that breaks the universe, I'm pretty sure. I think it is true. I think if it's repeating... I think it's false because if we're being...

Like sure in math we would call that one but I'll say game rule. Sure. Sure. I'm sticking with false. I'm sticking with false because if we're being factual that is not one. Those are two different things. Yeah.

Because if it was not, if they were the same thing, there would be no distinction between them. They would be wholly equivalent. I mean, I get where you're coming from, but I've heard multiple times from mathematicians that have said it's functionally the same thing. But I guess that would be a different concept. Yes, it is functionally the same thing because it is such an indeterminate nano of difference. But the fact that we will recognize there is a difference means that there is a difference. Okay.

Jesus Christ. Okay, this is... I love this. This is so fun. I love these stupid, silly questions. Question nine. There is no truth. False. So the answer they may be looking for is truth. There are definitely inherent truths. Well, even then... Hold on, hold on. Even then...

They would probably be under the whole like, I think therefore I am thing, right? Of nothing can be known outside of our own experience. I would say, I would say false. There is a thing as truth, but they may be looking for a different answer, right? Honestly, they would be probably looking for like a meaningless. Oh yeah. Maybe it doesn't matter. Yeah.

Meaning is such a weird response anyway, because it completely nullifies any kind of... It could be used in any of these questions. Well, here's the thing, though. The person's saying, this doesn't matter to me. Here's the thing, though. If Cicada is looking for thinkers, like building a think tank effectively...

then it would want people who are willing to step over the meaningless, right? Yeah. Like it doesn't want people who spend their time dedicated to what is truth, philosophy, stuff like that. It wants people who recognize there's an issue and then step over it to something to accomplish something. Yeah. Hypothetically. Yeah, I agree. But yeah, for there's no truth, I would say false. Okay, question 10. If A is not true, then it must be. Then it must be as in the letter?

No. If A is not true, then it must be. Oh, it is a strange loop. I see what he's saying. He's saying that if there is no truth, then that is a true statement. Right. So it is a strange loop. Strange loop. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Question 11. All things are true.

meaningless meaningless yeah damn you guys are on the same page yeah we're we've we're locked in me and him charlie and i were almost recruited we were close to the program as a matter of fact charlie looks a lot like a kid i saw when i got thrown into a back of a van with like cia people i was moving things with my mind we were like levitating everywhere

Question 11. This sentence is false. Game rule. Game rule, meaningless, all of the above. Because like, the sentence is not stating... Okay, the sentence is stating itself to be false. And if it's true, then that means it is false, which means it's true. It's like a strange loop, effectively. Yeah, it's a strange loop. Question 13. People who only study material after a test do better than those who do not study at all. People who study after a test...

meaningless indeterminate I would say true because it's saying people who study at some point do better than people who never study but that you can't know for sure it's based on because the test has already been completed you're right so yeah it'd be indeterminate I think I think indeterminate or also like Charlie said meaningless maybe because it's like there's no test to actually relate it to okay it's all just hearsay at that point

All right. So now that was all the ones that had true, false, meaningless, whatever. Okay. This one has different answers to choose from. I'm so excited right now. This is so fun. Let's do it. All right. Question 14. Question 14. Question four. Are you locked in, Charlie? Are you ready to go? Yeah, these are easy. Let's go. All right. Question 14.

Two people are standing by a lake. One says, that's a lovely reflection in the water. The other says, I see no reflection, but it's a fascinating assortment of fish, plants, and rocks within the water. Which one is line? The options are the person who sees the reflection, the person who sees the fish, both or neither. Neither. It has to be neither. Yeah. It's a lovely reflection.

Because they're both speaking from their own perceptions. It's perspective based. Yeah. Yeah. Neither is line.

Well, maybe both because we don't, it could be both though, because we don't know if there's actually fish plants and rocks within the water. We don't know if there is a reflection in the water at all. It could be an overcast day. That's so true. They're both liars and they're both different plants from other three letter agencies against each other. They're both blind. They're both blind, like just making up stuff. They could be like, we don't know about the people. So there is no lake.

there is no like you have to bend the spoon with your mind but yeah neither all right so question the last questions 15 through 20 are open response questions okay so question 15 what does the word it refer to in the following sentence it is dark outside

That just broke my brain. What does it refer to? We use it as a placeholder in a sentence. It's kind of nebulous, right? It's just to say, oh, it's dark. Kind of like describing the environment. You're describing the environment, the outside, you know. I would say the outside because outside is referenced in the same sentence. I guess that's like the closest thing you could assign it to, right? Yeah.

Question 16. The mathematical operation known as addition is modeled after what? Combination? Yeah, combination is what I was going to say too.

It'd have to be. Combining. Unless there's some like, oh, well, the Giasoffi's principle of whatever. Yeah, I mean, some of these are probably, like, legitimately probably, like, the answers are way out of that league. But I would say combination. No, right now it's a K-3301 recruiters. Like, holy shit. These guys are good. They're blazing through these. Well, actually, we're so over time. They only have five minutes. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right.

uh name similar but hey that's 15 minutes altogether right true explain in your own words what mathematical principle is relied upon for the security of shamir secret sharing scheme i skipped one i skipped a question but i'll go back to it but for now that one what mathematical principles relied upon for the security of the sharing scheme

That was the one you used to get into this, right? Yeah, it was like you had to collaborate together to... I mean, I don't know anything about Shamir's secret sharing scheme, so I don't know what mathematical principles it used. It would be addition. I'm going to use logarithms. It was the one where everyone had a piece of it, and they had to put all the pieces together to get the full answer. That led to this quiz. So I would say addition. Yeah, so I guess it would be addition again. Yeah.

Because it's not multiplication. I mean, maybe like hypothetically, it's a multiplication of knowledge or something, but it's literal addition of the pieces of the code you have. Yeah, true. Okay. The question I skipped. Name similarities between reality and the concept of the news feed on Facebook. There are no similarities. This is like a deep cut. No similarities at all.

everything is a lie on facebook i absolutely guarantee that is that the actual answer here because it's an ideological question yeah about how how things on facebook about how news perceives reality or whatever yeah i'm sure maybe maybe you could say like very general stuff like names places but even then that's not guaranteed yeah it's probably looking for an na answer yeah

Okay, question 19. In the programming language of your choice, write a function that returns a function that returns the value 3301. Yeah, I already answered this one when I was reading it. I would simply print, I would write print and then in parentheses quote a function that returns a function that returns the value 3301 using Python. That's like the chat GPT equivalent of like writing a code. I like that though, that's cute. Write me a code.

It would work. I mean, it would work. It does exactly what they ask. How smart. Finally, question 20. In the programming language of your choice, write a function that sums digits of a number until it is one digit by calling itself.

I didn't bother doing that one. I could not spot them there. I don't know any programming languages. Copy-pasted to Python. We're good. I'd write C sharp. There you go. That's the spirit. What do they use in Jurassic Park? Unix, right? When she's opening the Velociraptor gates. Remember that scene? What? Unix? Do you not remember the...

Yeah, it was like Unix or something. The end scene where the young teenage girl is like, she's hacking into the programming language that the park uses. And it's like this really cheesy effect on a screen. Is Unix a programming language? Because Unix is also the name for circumcised servants.

no not unix like u-n-i-x i'm pretty sure it might be okay i'm like she's using unix to get into i'm like what are you talking about that was not in the movie indentured servants at jurassic park when you start yeah they've all been clipped need you to hack this asap okay let me get my unix he's so good at this okay all up

These appear to be interview style questions used by corporations to determine one's personality type. It's a mixture of demonstratable truths like one equals 0.99 repeating. Which you disagree with. Which I disagree with. I mean, if you're asking if we are like, are they the same thing mathematically? Yes. Philosophically? No. Like it depends. Again, it's perspective. Yeah. All the questions are about perspective based about understanding of reality and stuff like that. Yeah.

And more nuanced philosophy questions like I'm the voice inside my head and thought experiments. Due to the possibility of someone brute forcing the correct answers, Cicada 3301 also included the five open-ended free response questions. The enforced time limit meant that they were unable to research the topics. SoC created a test scenario designed to learn more about their testees' personalities and also their knowledge on things like programming and cryptography. It certainly speaks to the motivation of recruitment.

Apparently, those who answered the question suitably and sent in an email were asked to then build a web server that had to meet certain instructions indicated by 3301. They were basically just doing free labor at this point. Pretty much, yeah. At the end of it, they just take all the data and they're like, alright, thanks, bye. Yeah, we sell your data now.

They were so offended by what they'd seen. They were so bad. This is awful. We're going

We're going to do it all again. You suck at making salvas. They must have come across my old Pixo website from fourth grade. Cold flames. Like, what the fuck is this?

Alright, Charlie, would you like to take round three? Yeah, I got it. Round three. This is the 6th of January, 2014. Image popped up on Cicada's previous Twitter account. This one was almost immediately pretty complex and remains to this day unsolved. You had to extract hidden messages from the images using steganography, which led to a cryptic 60-page book called Liber Primus, Latin for first book.

which is an original book written in the unique runic script from 2013 Gematria created by Cicada. Only some of the pages were solved and most remained undecrypted. So they're using those runic scripts, you remember, from the left column from 2013. So that was almost like a foreshadowing of what would come in the 2014. It's like they knew there'd need to be a third round.

Yeah, they created an entire book for this, which is absolutely insane. Made out of their made up custom language, basically. The book contained numerous pages of encoded text and riddles, which required deciphering the ruins and applying various cryptographic techniques. Some clues also led to physical locations around the world where QR codes were hidden. Also worth mentioning in the 2013 one, just because they vanished without a goodbye doesn't mean they didn't recruit anyone, by the way.

We'll get into that towards the end. There's people that have spoken about their experiences from the 2013 stuff. Oh, really? Yeah, towards the end. Okay. Do you want me to read the translation? I'll go ahead and read the excerpt. So one of the translations from the book.

Believe a warning. Believe nothing from this book except what you know to be true. Test the knowledge. Find your truth. Experience your death. Do not edit or change this book or the message contained within. Either the words or their numbers for all is sacred. Yeah, they definitely immediately took this in a very like almost religious way, like sacred text kind of way, which is a pretty big shift from the first two, you know, riddles or whatever puzzle sets. Like this, this is...

kind of seeming cultish to me now yeah well the nordic the nordic runes don't help and the iconography as well like yeah the moths the cicadas and stuff like that it's like pretty pretty odd the book itself appeared to include various philosophical ideas that could be best described as a manifesto of the group itself it's filled to the brim with clues and codes there's a page asking people to find a deep website but the site still remains unfound

To this day, only 19 of the 58 pages of Liber Primus have been successfully translated. 2015 would come and pass without any correspondence from Cicada 3301, with many believing that Liber Primus would need to be solved first before anything else would happen. This theory would be proven in 2016 when Cicada posted the following image.

Hello. The path lies empty. Epiphany seeks the devoted. Liber Primus is the way. Its words are the map. Their meaning is the road. And their numbers are the direction. There is also spelled wrong, by the way. And so is road. Rayode? Oh yeah. Rayode. Seek and you will be found. Good luck 3301. Beware false paths. Verify open PGP 7A350905... 90F. Just a way to verify stuff.

Maybe they got drunk, though. That's what I'd be worried about, like, making these, like, puzzles and stuff, is if I fuck up a word somewhere and people start to think that it's an actual element of the puzzle when I just fat-fingered it, maybe. Like, I'd be so embarrassed. That'd be so embarrassing. It's, um...

the the stuff in the book saying resting like the pages we have deciphered that say stuff like an end within the deep web there exists a page that hashes to then gives a number and says it's the duty of every pilgrim to seek out this page and that along with uh the initial output on the um on the text go through what what's that the what the first thing they drop it through the good the steganography thing whatever um

It puts out the message, the work of a private man who wished to transcend. He trusted himself to produce from within. This all feels very... I don't know if religion would be right, but it feels like a... Trying to convert people to maybe a... A way of thinking. Yeah, a way of thinking. Yeah, like some kind of...

higher, like it says enlightenment awaits, right? Your pilgrimage has begun, all that stuff. It feels like the prize at the end of this is like some knowledge or something like some, it almost sounds like it's trying to recreate like a Freemason type thing. It's definitely some kind of like, you know, proselytization, like converting people to a certain way of thinking. It doesn't need to necessarily be religious. Though I definitely, I mean, I'm not religiously educated, so I can't say this for sure, but there have been elements

in previous puzzles that would lead me to think that there are definitely some kind of like underlying spiritual beliefs there, like with the works they chose to pull from in their riddles and stuff. Like a lot of those are kind of religious scripture in some places, I'm pretty sure, right?

Uh-huh. Yeah. So, I don't know. So that was their final message, and that's going to bring us to this leaked email. A lot of the previous information discussed, particularly the information passed when the puzzles would continue beyond the real-life segments, is actually information sourced from the winners of their rounds.

A lot of the information was unverified for a long time, but has since been supported by others involved in the final legs of each puzzle. In 2012, one of the winners leaked an email. The winner edited the message to remove identifying information that they had assumed Cicada had included in the message to identify leakers, but in doing so, they also removed the PGP signature, naturally by editing it. That validated it as authentic Cicada correspondence. As thus, it can't be verifiable as authentic.

Well, yeah, this original email can't be verified, but people would go on to confirm it and people would also provide emails of their own that they received with the Cicada correspondence, PGP thing, signature still intact. So it's like confirmed without a doubt that this is a legitimate email now.

"'Do not share this information,' caps locked. "'Congratulations, your month of testing has come to an end. "'Out of the thousands who attempted it, you are one of only a few who have succeeded. "'There is one last step, although there will not be any hidden codes or secret messages or physical treasure hunts. "'This last step is honestly... we have... this last step is only honesty. "'We have always been honest with you and we shall continue to be honest with you "'and we expect you to be honest with us in return.'

You have all wondered who we are, and so we shall now tell you we are an international group. We have no name, we have no symbol, we have no membership rosters, we do not have a public website, we do not advertise ourselves, we are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves, much like you have, by completing this recruitment contest. We are drawn together by common beliefs. A careful reading of the text used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs, that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end, that censorship is wrong, and that privacy is an inalienable right."

We are not a hacker group, nor are we a wares group. We do not engage in illegal activity, nor do our members if you are engaged in illegal activity. Nor do our members if you are engaged in illegal activity. Pretend like there's a period after members. Yeah, so there was no periods or grammar in here, I'm pretty sure. This is translated as is.

If you are engaged in illegal activity, we ask that you cease any and all illegal activity or decline membership at this time. We will not ask questions if you decline, however... We will not ask questions if you decline, however... Jesus, I hate the way that this is written. It's all just big run-on sentences. We will not ask questions if you decline, however, if you lie to us, we will find out.

You are undoubtedly wondering what it is we do. We are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas. We advocate liberty, privacy, security. You have undoubtedly heard of a few of our past projects. And if you choose to accept membership, we are happy to have you on board to help with future projects. Please reply to this email with the answers to the next few questions to continue.

Do you believe that every human being has a right to privacy and anonymity and is within their rights to use tools which help obtain and maintain privacy, cash, strong encryption, and maintain privacy, cash, strong encryption, anonymity, software, etc.? Do you believe that information should be free? Do you believe that censorship harms humanity? We look forward to hearing from you, 3301.

So this email was eventually confirmed as legitimate when a future winner of the 2013 challenge would go on to post their email, including the PGP signature, to a pastebin for people to see. As such, it's the clearest example of who Cicada 3301 is ideologically, even if we still don't know who they actually are. I'll tell you who they are, fucking Redditors. They got dweebs. Yeah, that kind of ruins it for me, I'll admit. Yeah.

Because it was like, oh, it could be the CIO. It could be this think tank. Oh, what's they want? What's their agenda? And then it's like they write a whole book of religion and then it comes out like we are the voice of the... It's literally a V from V from Vendetta. Yeah. That guy...

But what if this is like a red herring and they actually are the CIA? It could be, but now I'm just imagining all the 301 guys are like 400 pounds wearing Guy Fawkes masks behind computers, hurriedly typing. Now it's not fun. They all have fedoras on and they're like giggling. We do not engage in illegal activity. And if you do, you're not welcome in our club.

Also, censorship is bad. Yeah, yeah. Like, we do not do drugs or anything of the sort. Like, that would matter to someone who's, like, trying to take down the walls of social media. And also, like... I'm so mad.

We're straight edge. The runic symbols and stuff like that are so cringy. It reminds me of those guys who are like, oh, you pray to Jesus? Well, I pray to Odin, a god that actually knows how to fight. And also, all those questions about like, is one equal to .99? It's no longer cool. Now I imagine like, again, like V from V from Fremdetta being like, how can we really know things if information's illegal, if the truth is kept from the public? Now it's just...

Okay, whatever. Yeah, as soon as it starts to become like the stereotypical Reddit user who posts to r slash atheism or whatever, like it's this person posting like a thread going, well, actually one doesn't equal 0.9999. Yes, yes. It's all actually like language. Yeah, it becomes I'm actually. I actually wrote this Libra Primus if you all would just refer to that. It has all the answers. Yeah.

I actually wrote a book talking about why this is very important and you all should believe it. It's written in Nordic rune so that Thor will love me. I pray to him every night and because Loki is actually my spirit animal. So I made all of this so we can talk about why I should be allowed to call politicians gay on the internet.

I'm mad. I'm also mad because it's hypocritical. They say, do not share this information. And then they say, do you believe that information should be free? Yeah. Get it straight. We only now all that talk of like, we need the highest minds just like is self-importance. Right.

If you can't stick to your own fucking ethics and morality and your own fucking recruiting message. In hindsight, I can sit here and write out an alphabet and then give random numbers to all of them and then send it out as a completely indecipherable code because it's gibberish. Now it makes all the code and stuff you did like that cool, you know a few processing languages. Glad we took that long to put it together only to find out

That you want to be able to do whatever you want online without getting your Twitter account banned or whatever. Yeah.

So what happened to the winners? We know small bits of information from solvers of the puzzles who have come out with their experiences with Cicada 3301, but it's difficult to prove the legitimacy of their statements. Two solvers of the puzzles, Marcus Wehner and Technology, were interviewed by Rolling Stone in 2015 and detailed what it was like to be part of Cicada. After completing the puzzles, the two were invited to a private chat forum where they were joined by around 20 other new people. Welcome, brother. Yeah.

As well as the longer standing members of the organization. Cicada shared that it was originally started by friends who shared the same beliefs. They wanted to increase privacy and security and ensure the freedom of information.

The recruits were then tasked with creating encryption software and would often have to report back to members of Cicada for reviews. They actually just hired, like, they didn't hire anyone. It's just free labor. They're just exploiting people for free. Yeah, what are they doing? They do all this to get, like, supposedly the smartest people in the world, and it's like, alright, I need you to code this. Yeah, I need you guys to make some encryption software. We'll check it later. I've gotta go play League of Legends.

I just hang out in Discord all day complaining about the government. This is how you felt about the Cinebench sheet, whatever that last episode was. The Cinebench sheet is cool, man. The piss on the sheet book or whatever. How you felt about that is how I feel about the Voynich manuscript. When Charlie was about that, that's how I am about this now. I'm so mad.

I know you're starting to see what I'm saying. I'm getting fired up thinking about this. I still got to say, yeah, the puzzles are cool. All right. I still want to say that. The puzzles and the mystery is cool. Yeah, but they're not as impressive now that it's just like, okay, it was 20 people. Yeah. It's kind of like solving them is impressive. It's just what it leads to makes it not impressive. The solving them is cool. Yes, I agree. Yeah. They want it. Okay. So this is a quote from Technologie.

They wanted to further the use of cryptography in the world so people could have privacy and anonymity and stuff like that. Those are some big-ended goals. Very broad, obviously. There was some end-to-end encryption thing that I was interested in working on. Technologie also commented on how Cicada wanted to appear like it had infiltrated private and public organizations. Technologie wanted to... I think it's just technology, right? Yeah, it's technology. Technologie, yeah.

I'm imagining the Cicada member being like, just hold on, I've got the president on the horn right now.

Hold on. Cicada wanted to appear like it had infiltrated organizations, even though it hadn't. And then technology's like, okay, well, I did all this. I'm going to make a blog post about it. And they're like, no, we got someone at Wired and he does it anyway and they get mad. This big, super cool, definitely not a hacker, but wants to be seen as a hacker group. Like...

It's upset because he posted it, but they were going to get it published in... Gosh, they're so petty now. I'm so mad. Another quote from Technology. I think they wanted to have the feel that they had these in positions in the government or whatever, but I don't recall a specific instance of hearing that like I did for Wired.

Our influence goes all the way to the top, to Wired. Like, Wired is a pretty... That's like the highest branch they could infiltrate. We're going to get to Wired, don't you worry.

On top of their regular lives and jobs, the recruits were being tasked with these assignments from Cicada. Over time, they began to drop off, probably due to the fact that the puzzles and the chase had been the original driving force of their interest. And when there was only one sole person left from the recruits, the website disappeared by the end of 2012.

There have been winners from 2013 that have come out with their experiences, which differ from the 2012 group. Apparently, instead of being invited to a website to join, they were told to be patient and wait, and then after a while, communication just stopped entirely. It's reported that five people completed the 2013 test and were left waiting for future correspondence from Cicada, which never came. Cicada made their final public statement in April of 2017, simply warning against disinformation.

That is where we end off. With all the currently available information about who Cicada 3301 is and what their ideals they represent, as well as the current standing of their most recent 2014 puzzles, still remain unsolved.

Nerds. Dweebs. Attracting dweebs. I'm furious, because this was always such a cool, mysterious thing, and now it's like, we're going to make a new system where everyone in the world can talk in code and call any person

person or public figure they don't like stupid and cringe without getting deleted yeah like yeah you believe information deserves to be free oh that's just the whole statement that's the whole thing like oh you think information deserves to be free you think that stuff should be private well here i make all these secret codes and then one day no one can ban our twitter accounts ever

That's what this is all about. I don't need you to quit your job because I need you on a more important task. Saving the world through an encryption software, if you don't mind. Oh, yeah, I'll check your work later. Maybe they'd have more... And also the framing of themselves is like the best minds in the world. Like, okay. The ego. But also, like, maybe they would have more... This is literally the Rick and Morty people. We joked about it. This is the Rick and Morty people. It is.

Yeah, I was going to say, maybe they would have more success if they didn't spend every waking moment creating all these puzzles. Maybe they should actually focus on trying to solve the issue of disinformation and censorship and stuff instead of coming up with these cool games. They are admittedly, again, very cool puzzles. I want to give them credit. I want to give them credit for what they did. It's very, very good. We just wish they were cooler at the end of the day. Yeah.

It would have been so cool. Like, imagine the final email, the last correspondence you get. It's like, hey, you solved all my shit. This is me. And it's just a picture of a guy smoking a cigarette. I thought it'd be fun. I'd be so much more whelmed with that. I'd be like, oh, that's kind of satisfying. So this guy made that, huh? John be good enough. Cool.

But instead it's some guy that's like, to join our group you've got to forego all alcohol. No swearing anymore. We're going to have all of the brightest minds in the world to take down the walls of corruption around us. But if you do any drugs, we don't want you because that's bad. And mom said that you can't come over if you smell like weed because dad did that once and they got into a fight. Now he goes to weird meetings on Tuesdays. So don't do that, but

to take down the walls of the establishment. I'm so upset. This time we push back.

But not by doing crimes. Yeah, no violence. Please. God damn it. We're going to push back, but not too hard because my stepdad Joe gets really mad and starts throwing stuff sometimes if I get too excited at my computer. What a hilarious statement. We're going to push back legally though. Legally. We're going to dismantle the government, but only in the ways they say it's okay. Through mainstream media like Wired, which we've infiltrated.

We're not going to be one of those extremists or hurt anyone. We're just going to dismantle society as a whole. I'm so mad. This entire episode was like telling me Santa isn't real. When they said we are not a hacker group, nor are we a wares group. It's basically like saying we are not cool. Don't listen to us beyond this point. Like it was such a self-report. Oh, well. It's not as bad as... It's not as bad as like the...

I guess like the QAnon stuff of like outright just like coming up with insane theories and then, you know, preaching the mistruth. It's just kind of like... Well, these people are actually smart. Like they're actually smart. QAnon people are like, JFK's been revived that I'm going to go wait for him outside when he comes through. Yeah. It's like if you take that kind of like... I guess the...

philosophy of like oh they're trying to the man's trying to tell us what to do and you add like 30 IQ points right but man I'm so I'm so mad yeah

Alright, well, still regardless, Puzzle's cool. Hey, I've got to report the news as it is. I can't lie to you and say that these guys were cool. You're just a piece of the man. You're a piece of the walls around us, the machine holding us down. Maybe that's why they didn't want that information leaked.

Do you think that the anonymous guys, the actual hacker group anonymous looks at them and is like, wow, that's stupid. What a bunch of dweebs. But also the anonymous people are also dweebs as well. Not to this degree, though. At least they're willing to be like, yeah, we're breaking the law to do stuff. We're going to do what needs to be done. They've done good work, though. Actually, anonymous has done things that have been good.

Okay, well, do you remember their aesthetic? Their aesthetics been hijacked to be super cringe. Of course, like the guy Fox stuff and all that and the V for Vendetta stuff and all that. That's really cringe. But the actual core quote unquote legit members can actually do something. I feel like everyone involved with this is like the Reddit neck beard type. That's that's the vibe I get.

Maybe we'll discover once we decode the book that they've written. The Libra Primus. It still has like 40 pages to go. Yeah, the rest of it's like, ah, you fell for the fake email saying we're all cringe. We're actually cool. That's what I hate about them. There's this inherent intelligent-based

uh, ego to them, like calling the book that they write the first book in Latin. Like, fuck you. I love that though. That's so cool. I actually like that a lot. Fuck you. Dweebs. All right. Original book. That's, that's going to do it. That's, that's the end of a cicada for now. Hopefully, I do hope that people do eventually solve the book though. I do want to see what's in there. Uh, it's way too much for me to handle. Oh,

So, someone smart out there, read it and decode it so that you can also be recruited to their little squad on their forum so you can make little backyard projects for them come to life. Free labor, stuff like that. Isaiah, can you shout out your movie tickets? Yeah, but I'm too mad to. Come on, use the rage.

Use it as energy. I made a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I made the movie with Stephen Hancock and have a royalty stalker based on the video games. It's been very cool. The support's been awesome. Thank you all so much. I think we're like 60% tickets sold, something like that now. We're going to four cities over the course of August and the first weekend of September. So if you want to get in on that, link will be in the description at x1entertainment.com slash stalker tour. And the support really does mean the most. Thank you all for...

uh for the support you've shown thus far and thank you too for allowing me to chill on the show it means a lot yeah check out that if you're interested yeah please go check it out it looks great the trailer looks fantastic thank you thank you highly recommend you guys go check it out charlie do you have anything you want to shout out any projects

Uh, no, nothing in particular. Okay. Uh, shout out to Alimentia Studios on YouTube. Uh, there was a link in our description that has been broken for the last month and he kind of like redirected it to his own channel, uh, which he could have done way worse stuff with that link. So I appreciate it that he told us that it was broken in a pretty polite and classy way to shout out to him. Appreciate that.

That's so good. He should be recruited as Cicada with that shit. That's great. It was pretty, it could have been way worse. It was like four episodes worth of links that have been redirecting to his YouTube channel because he like grabbed the link and then yeah. Yeah. Luckily he redirected it to that and not anything else. So thank you to him for being classy about it. And that's going to do it for this episode.

please feel free to rate us on Spotify, iTunes, all that stuff. Subscribe on YouTube, comment below, comment below your question, the, the, the answers to the questions that we went through before. I mean, actually interested in reading the actual answers if there are actual answers to them. And next episode, stay, stay with us because next episode we're going to be tackling the Bohemian Grove. I say, Oh, you, you love that one.

I do a lot, actually. I am excited for that episode. Sweet. So we're going to be tackling that next week. Stay tuned. We'll see you next time on the Red Thread. Bye, guys. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Don't go down these long, stupid puzzle chains only to find disappointment. Bye.