Interest soars in solving the CIA's 'Kryptos'

For 15 years, a sculpture known as Kryptos has stood in a courtyard inside the heavily guarded Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Its coded message, made up of thousands of letters on a copper scroll, has stumped code breakers for 15 years. And although it's been seven years since anyone has made any progress cracking it, there's been an explosion of renewed interest in Kryptos since writer Dan Brown hid references to it on the jacket of The Da Vinci Code -- one of the hottest books in North America.

And that has made life interesting for Kryptos' creator, James Sanborn. Kryptos -- Greek for "hidden" -- seems to have attracted its fare share of fanatics.

"I've had to remove anything associated with Kryptos from my studio and home and I've considered (getting) an unlisted number," Sanborn told CTV's Joy Malbon at Washington's Hirshorn museum, where a miniature version of Kryptos is on display.

Though it's installed in an area only CIA agents and cryptographers are allowed to roam, code-breakers can work at solving the mystery on transcripts posted on the CIA's website.

Three-quarters of the Kryptos code has been broken, but it's remaining 97 letters have the best of the best code breakers stumped.

Code cracker Jim Gillogly is one of two men who were able to crack three of the messages, which contain: a reference to the discovery of King Tut's tomb; a poem; and a reference to something buried on CIA grounds.

"I was so excited I was bouncing off the walls. It was difficult for my wife to reel me down after I got the first part cracked," Gillogly told CTV News.

"Here's this puzzle sitting like a thumb in the eye of the intelligence agency, saying if you're so smart, what's this say?"

Sanborn worked for months with a retired CIA cryptographer to devise the codes used in Kryptos.

History of 'All Your Base'

Toaplan creates the Zero Wing video game.
Toaplan releases a port for the Sega Genesis console with the addition of an intro scene, which is then translated into english (very poorly) and released in the United States.
Toaplan goes out of business.
Someone from a Zany Video Game Quotes website notices the poor translation, and highlights the game.
Overclocked.org does a humorous voiceover of the Zero Wing intro in a fake Wayne Newton voice.
Dozens of game-related messageboards begin to post quotes from the parody, and images altered to show the phrase.
Most of the threads lose interest and die off quickly as the trend is pronounced dead countless times.
The Flash movie/video is released with images from the threads and music taken from the origional game someone had added the phrase "all your base" to.
AYB explosively expands to the general (non game messageboard-reading) public.
The origional site for the video is shut down within hours due to excessive traffic, and moves to PlanetStarsiege.
Lycos ponders how "All your Base" was transformed from obscurity to a top 50 search practically overnight.
Mainstream media begin to notice the trend, and stories appear in Time Magazine, USA Today, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, Tech TV, Wired, and many others.
As the 'remix' used in the video goes from 58 hits a day to several thousand per day, mp3.com notices the track has been ripped directly from the video game and pulls the music off their site due to copyright violations. It is later returned unchanged.
The trend continues to grow as it expands into nearly every corner of the web.
Large websites like Angelfire and Hewlett Packard sneak "all your base" references into their designs.
"All Your Base" is pronounced dead several times every day, yet it's 15 minutes of fame continue for some reason...

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