May 1. Another round of delivered messages. Another round of clues.
One of the delivered messages:
Who is the man behind the mask? That is the question that you will shortly need to answer. A little detective work from you and your friends will be necessary. sh
One of the boys received with his letter a scrap of paper with this:
simon4.ca/warehouse/warehouse54.html
And one of the boys received a pocket Enigma machine. These were designed for selling at Bletchley Park in England. It is a simplified version of the Enigma machine, but the basic design of a wheel that rotates with each letter is there (though the original Enigma had many wheels).
I wanted to do this because we had just seen the movie, The Imitation Game, and so the idea of having the kids solve a similar cipher was appealing. No simple substitution or shift ciphers at this stage, and it took the kids a while to work out how the pieces fit together. One had the device, one had the encrypted message, and one had the key, which is needed for the wheel to be in its proper setting – the one used to encrypt the message originally.
L QDDI 'BIH PPJCR PX UMQCL' CC LJ JQCQJZW
This one isn’t so easy to break without the machine, though it’s not impossible. Using the Pocket Enigma machine, and the II-P key, the code was decrypted to:
I arranged for the school librarian to place a photo into this book in the library. The boys broke the above code on a Sunday, and if I remember correctly, their next library period wasn’t until that Thursday.
But they found the photo and with the previous clues (at the warehouse54 website), they were able to figure out the answer with some industrious googling and then progress through the website.
For the website, the answer to the puzzle was: