The $100,000 Puzzles That Were NEVER SOLVED

Hi everybody today, let’s get right into it. So, a little while ago, i made a video all about the hundred thousand dollar decipher puzzle, and today i am back to talk about the decipher two and the decipher three puzzle, both of which also had hundred thousand dollar prizes. As i said at the end of my previous video, there really wasn’t a ton of information out there about these two puzzles, but i’ve done some digging and i’ve even been in contact with a certain mr holland himself. So today, for the first time ever, i’m going to show you these two puzzles in detail and i’m going to tell you some of the answers. The decipher 2 puzzles were solved and i have some of the solutions for you.

The decipher 3 puzzles were never solved, but i’m going to give you all of the information that i have, and maybe some of you can finish solving them. I will not be offering a hundred thousand dollar prize, but i will i don’t know like give you a shout out on instagram. That’S close right. So if you haven’t seen my video about the first decipher puzzle, i really recommend watching that one first, because i go into a lot of detail about how the ciphers worked and how you go about solving them and i’m not gon na go through. All of that.

Again today, so i’ll link that video right down below just remember that, just like glory in buffy the vampire slayer season, five, we are looking for the key, well, the key text that will help us unlock these long lists of numbers all right. So before we do anything else, let me show you the unboxing of these puzzles and putting together the jigsaw puzzles. Oh i’m so excited to open these up and finally see what’s inside. So let’s start with the decipher 2

As you can see, both of these are brand new still shrink wrapped, so i’m opening them up for the first time since the 80s. So here it is the decipher two.

I actually love this the puzzle worth a hundred thousand dollars, but you can buy it for less. I mean i would hope so so if we take a closer look at the front um, you can see that they have a little blurb here. There’S a nice photo of the puzzle here. I have the original decipher box right here, so you can see that they’re pretty similar to each other. It looks like they did the same sort of photo shoot with a model’s hand.

You know holding the the puzzle piece, except that this one is silver instead of gold. I’Ll just quickly show you what is on the sides of the box, but not really anything new, just the same thing over again, and then here is the back of the box. We have a copyright date of 1985, a nice photo of warren holland and then this blurb. So you can uh pause the video here. If you want to read that they say on the box that this puzzle has four coded messages: each worth 25 000, which can be paid in gold, silver, diamonds or cash.

They also say that the puzzle is a two-sided puzzle, so i assume that it’ll probably be 150 pieces, like the two-sided version of the original decipher puzzle, but i don’t know for sure: let’s open it up and find out all right. So inside we have a rule. Booklet which i’ll go through in more detail a bit later, we also have a registration form and then there’s this kind of funky cardboard insert. So i’m just gon na take that whole thing out and then also inside is the uh jigsaw puzzle. Obviously i will say having this cardboard insert is a little bit nicer than the original version it just like takes up space.

It feels a little more intentional than just having this bag of pieces loose in the box. Oh once again, there is a lot of puzzle. Dust here so much puzzle dust the pieces feel pretty similar to the original version. Although we’ve lost the black cardboard, which i really liked from the original one. This is just your standard, cardboard, colored cardboard.

It is double-sided and once again it is easy to tell which side is the back and which side is the front. It has a bit of a metallic sheen, but it’s not like super glossy, so i’m going to put together this puzzle, then we’ll look at the decipher 3 puzzle and then i’ll go back through the rules and tell you how it all worked and what all of The final answers were [ Music, ], all right, so as i suspected that was very similar to the original decipher puzzle. So it went together without any issues. But here on the front, you can see that it says message number one and there are supposed to be four separate puzzles. So let’s flip it over and see what the other three are.

Here we go here. We go. Oh okay, so it looks like message. Two is a lot shorter message: three is pretty long and then message four is about median length, but once again we just have tons of numbers separated by commas, so it will be the exact same type of cipher that i described in the first video. But before i start telling you what all of these numbers mean like what the answers are, let’s take a look at the decipher 3 puzzle, so you can see that the decipher 3 puzzle is actually fairly different from the first two, it’s in a much smaller box.

So there is the front you can see that it looks like they didn’t, do a photo shoot for this one. So this is like a computer generated image of the puzzle, pieces and the puzzle. So once again, here are the sides of the box uh pretty standard, and then here is the back of the box. So it looks like the cypher got a new logo. They did do some kind of photo shoot with all of the pieces that come in the box and then, once again you can pause that if you want to read the entire blurb, that’s on the back.

So if we open it up all right, we’ve got a what is this? Oh, this is a um, a catalog for other products that the cipher had released by then, and then we’ve got a rule book i’ll go through that a bit later and we also have a registration form and it looks like they redesigned all of this. Oh okay, now this is fancier than the other two. We have a plastic insert this time with a velvet bag. Actually, that part is similar to the first one and that’s everything that is in the box and then inside the bag.

We have a bag of pieces. [, Music ] all right, so this one actually looks more similar to the first decipher puzzle. Oh a lot of these are already put together so i’ll just take those apart, as i see them once again, we’ve got a lot of puzzle dust accumulating here. So if we take a look at one of the pieces, you can see that we’re back to the gold um background of the puzzle. Once again it is a metallic printing, so it has a bit of a sheen to it and it is double-sided and look right.

There, on the side we’re back to the black cardboard except uh. This one doesn’t feel nearly as thick as the puzzle pieces from the original decipher. This cardboard is definitely much much thinner, so just like the decipher 2, this looks like a 150 piece double-sided puzzle, so i’m going to go ahead and put it together, the exact same way: [ Music ]. So, interestingly, you can see that this is actually at the back of the puzzle, because it says message two continued from the front and then we have message three. So if we flip it over here we go message.

One message two interesting that again, just like the double-sided version of the first decipher puzzle: they printed the front of the puzzle or they printed the front of the cipher on the back of the jigsaw puzzle, and vice versa, also something very interesting about this one. We have letters being introduced, so we’ve got an e, a z um. I saw a y on the front. So okay picture it. It is the 80s we have just finished piecing together the decipher puzzle.

Let’S turn off the new episode of saved by the bell and put down our can of tab. Let’S tease up our hair a little bit bigger and zip up our ski jacket. I was not alive during the 80s. For some reason, those are the first four things that i think of when i think of the 80s. Anyway, let’s put ourselves in the mindset of somebody who is looking at these for the very first time i’m gon na go ahead and read through all of the instructions and also compile all of the research that i’ve been doing.

Now that i know what is actually on each of the puzzles, so i will be back to spill the tea on the decipher 2 and the decipher 3 that rhymed also, i don’t think anyone said, spilling the tea in the 80s all right. So, as i mentioned, there are four separate puzzles on the decipher two and then on the decipher three. There are three separate puzzles, so in order to keep everything straight here is how i’m going to be referring to them. So, let’s start at the most logical place, the instruction booklet i’ll put scans of this entire thing down in the description. If you want to read the whole thing, but basically it explains that there are four separate messages: four separate puzzles and each one has a prize of 25 000 and then just like the rule book for the first puzzle, they explain how a cipher works and you Guys, when i was writing that first video, i spent so much time going through the mit paper, trying to figure out what the solution was, how it worked with the key text in a way that i could like easily explain it to all of you.

And then i read the rule book for the decipher 2 and they literally use the decipher 1 as the example. The solution is right here. If i had just opened it up and read this before, it would have made my job so much easier. But anyway, once again they give a couple of clues to the first puzzle and they set up a hotline for additional clues to be released in the future. But here’s the thing they only gave out the clues one puzzle at a time.

So in the instructions we only have the clues for the first puzzle and then the clues for the second puzzle would be released on the hotline after the first puzzle was solved and so on for the third puzzle and the fourth puzzle. So, even if you worked ahead and somehow managed to solve one of the later puzzles without any clues, you could only submit the answer once the earlier ones were solved and then that was the puzzle currently being worked on. So i’ve been in touch over email with warren holland and he told me that the reason that they did this was so that they could award prizes more frequently, and i think it’s really smart, because on top of that reason it also extends the gameplay. So once you have all the media surrounding, like whoever solves the first puzzle, people still have a reason to buy this product because they think that maybe they can solve one of the later puzzles and win the 25 000. Obviously so they only gave the clues one puzzle at a time, but they did give all four lists of authors up front and if you remember from the first puzzle, these are the authors that the key text will be pulled from.

One of the clues tells you which list of authors to look at for the first puzzle, but then the other three lists could go with the any of the other three puzzles, because we don’t have the clues to assign them to each individual puzzle. And there’s this one part in the rulebook that i found so interesting. They lay out all of these different ways to access the clues, including recording the hotline phone call with a tape recorder having your local newspaper, publish them, having your local game, store, publish them or sending in a self-addressed envelope. I guess it was a little bit of a challenge to get that type of information distributed before the modern internet, [ Music ]. So unfortunately, we don’t have as exact of a timeline for this puzzle, as we did for the first puzzle.

The original decipher puzzle was solved in april of 1985 and then the decipher 2 was released sometime around august of 1985

So you know they were right on top of it and then in the rulebook they say that each puzzle can only be open for a maximum of 18 months before they just move on to the next one. So we have a pretty long potential timeline, but i will be adjusting this as i go through what happened with each puzzle, but unfortunately there just wasn’t a lot of media around this puzzle. I found one ad for it in when was that in december of 1985 and then there’s literally nothing else until we get to a few articles about the puzzles being solved: [, Music ]. So, let’s start with the first puzzle. I actually have quite a bit of information to go off of for this one, even though i don’t have the final complete solution here are the clues from the instructions it tells us which group of authors to look at the number 492.

A single place has a certain pattern to create the key one way it gets you halfway there s, i n, so one of the winners of this puzzle was a woman named eileen novak, and there is a long article all about her from when was this from March 25th: 1986.

She won six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, which means that she was one of four winners and the prize was split four ways and before i get into the solution, can i tell you guys how they delivered her prize money? She received her prize enclosed in a 400 pound block of ice carved into the shape of a dollar sign. That is too funny. I wish i could see photos of that enclosed in the ice was 250 in cash and a check for six thousand dollars, and she also received a fruit basket and a bottle of champagne plus her daughter got married the week that the prize was delivered.

So a bunch of wedding guests were around when that all showed up. So if there is anybody out there who has photos of this, please get in touch with me. I would love to see them okay, so the article says that she bought the game in august of 1985 and worked on it until valentine’s day of 1986.

She solved it while being homesick with the flu, and that is like the most productive sick day. I’Ve ever heard of so this must mean that all four winners submitted their answers in february of 1986
Maybe there was a big clue released on the hotline that month, i don’t know so in the article.

They explain that the 492 clue refers to a passage from the book gulliver’s travels and then the solved message is a poem about the cartoon strip bloom county. Now i’m not too familiar with either gulliver’s travels or bloom county, so i couldn’t get from there to the final complete solution, but if any of you want to try solving these ciphers, i think this is a great one to start with, because we know what book To pull from, and we kind of have the gist of what we should be looking for in the final answer, two more fun facts: uh novak said that she had to buy a book of bloom county cartoons to make sure that she had spelled all the names Correctly because this was before everyone had the internet, and she also said that her 15 year old son told her to pick the least logical author from the list which helped her solve it. I don’t really get that one. Maybe it had to do with the additional clues that were released. I don’t know all right moving on to the second puzzle.

This is the shortest of the bunch, and it’s also the only one that i have the full complete solution to. So this was solved by tom chirpitch, a chemistry professor, and he was actually one of the winners of the original decipher puzzle. Remember there were 36 winners. He was one of them, so he is in this for the long haul. In the article he talks about the original decipher puzzle, but he’s pretty like cavalier about it, saying that one was pretty easy.

They gave you a lot of clues and i would just like to point out that he only started working on it on christmas of 1984, which is right around when the last batch of huge clues were being released. So it’s not like he was toiling away at it for a full year beforehand, with no clues at all, like the mit students that i talked about. But you know he did manage to write a computer program and he solved two of these ciphers so good on him anyway. Here is what the article says about the solution. Luckily, it is a little more specific about how to get there than the article about the first puzzle was.

I wanted to make sure that it actually worked. So i gathered all of the catch-22 chapter titles i removed all of the spaces and the special characters. Then my sister built a spreadsheet that reversed the orders of the characters and assigned each one, a sequential number pulling the letters out of that for each number we can decode the cipher. And finally, then you reverse the letters from the cipher and you get the final solution in memory of john lennon. Nobody told me there’d be days like these, so i assume the hints had something about needing to go backwards or reversing, because that is a lot of steps to go through to entirely figure out all on your own, but once we know how to do it, it Totally works and we have a final answer: don’t get used to it.

That’S the only one that i know the answer for [: Music, ], okay. So this is where the media starts to dry up in our timeline. We are at october of 1986 for the third puzzle to become active, and i couldn’t find a single article about it or literally any mentions anywhere about it. That is until i got in touch with warren holland. He was so kind and so generous with his memories, and he answered all of my questions to the best of his ability.

So he confirmed to me that all four puzzles from the decipher 2 were solved and the prizes were awarded and he gave me the name of the winner of the third puzzle, which was charlotte brown, and she was the only winner of that one. So she got all 25 000. He also sent me an ebay link to buy a historical photo of her and i bought it. I spent 26 on this, so i was really gambling that there would be some information on here that i’d be able to see. Once i had the high quality photo and luckily my gamble paid off, because i was able to pull so much information out of this photo.

Okay, so first, here on the back, you can see a little newspaper blurb, confirming that she was the winner of this puzzle. Unfortunately, this newspaper blurb doesn’t seem to be archived online anywhere, so if anyone is from west allis wisconsin and wants to go to the library and look through physical archives of newspapers from january 14th, 1987 i’d love to know if there was like an article that went Along with it, if there was any additional information, i also looked up the photographer and i sent him an email, but at the time that i am recording this, he has not replied but okay back to the photo. I started with the book that is open in front of her. That book is the source by james albert nickener. Unfortunately, though, nickenur is not one of the authors listed on our author list, so that’s a little puzzling so moving on to the piece of paper in front of her, this is the paper where she solved the cipher um right.

Next, to that, you can actually see the jigsaw puzzle. Luckily, she has very legible handwriting. So, by looking closely at this photo, i was able to pull like half of her solution and then i could fill in the missing letters based on you know my best guess of the words that we were making so i’ll. Read you the first half of the solution and just a warning. It’S a little more intense of a quote than i was expecting from a puzzle like this.

It goes i am paralyzed. If i let it touch me, i cry i can comprehend but cannot act on my comprehension. I am blind. I am scared. Its aloofness and power is so great, it’s magnitude so complete.

I thought and then there’s a second half that we don’t like can’t see from the photo. So this is the first puzzle to use letters in the cipher and it seems like those are just themselves in the solution, nothing to figure out there. So we can fill those in for the second half of the puzzle and then we can also look for duplicate numbers in the second half of the puzzle that matched the first half. And so we can fill in a couple more letters, but really not enough to form any words. Of course, i tried googling the phrases from the first half of the solution, and literally there were zero google results for any of the phrases.

I even found a full pdf of the book, the source, and i searched that for this quote, and it is not in there a lot of the individual words show up quite a lot, but nothing that has them in the same order as this quote that we’re Starting with so, what we have is half of an answer, but no way to know how we got there or how to find the second half and really no idea if this book the source is even involved. You know the author’s name isn’t on any of the lists. Maybe the photographer just wanted an impressive looking book in front of her for the photo i don’t know. I also wanted to mention that i sent all of the author lists to warren holland to see if any of them rang a bell to see if he remembered which author he was pulling from, and he told me that he was reading so much from all of Those authors at that time that he just couldn’t remember which ones he used. But if you want to try to solve these, remember that you only have to look at works published by them in 1985 or earlier, because that’s when this puzzle was released so one more fun fact in the rules for decipher 3.

They actually mention charlotte brown, not by name, but they refer to a 60 year old grandmother and office supply clerk from a small town in wisconsin. Doesn’T she look nice? I wish that i could talk to her about this puzzle, but i looked her up and i think i found her obituary. I can’t be sure that it’s the same person, but i think that she unfortunately passed away about 10 years ago, and so finally, we have the fourth puzzle. Now i do know it was confirmed by warren holland that this one was solved and the prize was awarded, but i don’t know when or by who for this one literally all we have to go off of.

Are the author lists? So if anyone manages to solve the third one, then we can narrow down the authors for the fourth one and vice versa, but other than that you’re kind of on your own [, Music ]. So before we move on to decipher three, i just wanted to give a little bit of context of why we’re missing so much information. I asked mr holland how it all worked, and he told me that he personally created all of the ciphers once a month. His team would bring him all of this.

Sealed submitted answers for him to review, and if it wasn’t solved that month, he would release a new clue on the hotline. However, all of the records from that time are buried deep in some warehouse. He told me that if he ever goes looking for them, he would let me know, but that it’s probably not gon na happen, and i do not blame him at all. I mean he did not ask for some random person to go sniffing around some project that he released 35 years ago, even just replying to my emails and giving me the information that he did is generous enough. So, by the time that the decipher 2 and decipher three puzzles were released, decipher had grown into a much larger company, they had a lot of different products, including their how to host a murder series, which was one of their most successful products.

So warren holland had a lot to do every day and even just writing the ciphers and reviewing the answers and choosing clues for the hotline like that was taking a lot of time out of his day that could have been spent running the company. He compares it to how much you remember from your second and your third child versus your first child, which i mean i don’t have kids, but i i get it. It totally makes sense. So one more fun fact in the decipher three rule book: they mentioned some of the winners and they talk about how some of them received their prizes. One was the giant ice sculpture, which i talked about earlier.

One person got it in a huge decipher branded bag delivered in an armored car with armored guards and others received them at a press conference in new york, followed by a hosted dinner at tavern on the green, the famous restaurant in central park. However, i will say i don’t know how successful this press conference was because there doesn’t seem to be any press that was actually written about it. But that is everything that i have learned about: the decipher 2. So, let’s just take a breather and then move on to decipher three [ Music ]. So here we have the decipher three going back to our timeline.

The copyright date on this box is 1987 and i found a single newspaper ad. That mentions the game from december of 1987, so i assume it was released sometime around then. They also ran this ad, which i saw in a bunch of different newspapers in april of 1988, and then it would sporadically pop up in different ads and articles over the years, but really nothing with any real information about the puzzle. And that’s because none of these ciphers were ever solved. So how was it supposed to work?

As i showed you before? There are three separate ciphers and just like the decipher two, they would only release clues one cipher at a time and then the winners would be anyone who submitted a correct solution, the first month that a correct solution was submitted. So if you were one of the winners of any of these three ciphers, you didn’t actually win anything, yet. Instead, you became eligible to participate in a runoff puzzle. This was going to be an all-new brand new cipher and the first person to solve it would win the entire hundred thousand dollar prize.

The prize was offered in solid gold, so there was no splitting it up. It was just one ultimate winner who won the entire thing. So if you were one of the winners of any of the first three ciphers, you would get a letter of eligibility for the runoff cipher. Then, after all, three ciphers were solved, the runoff cipher would be sent to everyone who was eligible and they would get new hints every few days. Whoever submitted the correct answer.

First would win a hundred thousand dollars and, as i said, there was no second place in the instructions. They even call out all of the different ways that you’re allowed to submit your answer, including camping out on the front doorstep of the accounting firm. Luckily, it did not come to that so in the instructions. I was hoping that they would use the decipher 2 as the example, but instead they used the original decipher 1 again and in fact, a lot of the text between the decipher 2 rule book and the decipher 3 rule book is exactly the same. So looking at the actual ciphers for message number one, we have three hints the number 10 the word end and we know which list of authors to pull from and that’s it really not a lot to go on and then for the other two puzzles.

All we have are those other two author lists, although remember once again, you only have to look at works that they published in 1987 or earlier. Unfortunately, the rest of the hints are just lost to history. So when i asked mr holland about this, he confirmed that none of the three ciphers were ever solved. He said that they considered extending the deadline for the first puzzle, but since running this – and you know choosing the clues and going through all the answers was taking up so much of his time. He thought it was best to just shut it all down.

If you look at the included catalog, they had a lot of different products by this time, so it totally makes sense why he just didn’t have time for it anymore. I also asked him whether he had already created the runoff puzzle, and he told me that he had all of that was completely set before the puzzle was released. It really was just the time that was an issue and also the accounting firm that they worked with. Was getting kind of overwhelmed by all of the answers being sent in so it was better for everyone to just end it when they had the opportunity. So i have to wonder – and this is entirely speculation from me – did nobody solve these because of how the prize worked?

There might have been less incentive to spend the time working on these ciphers if you weren’t, even guaranteed a prize, and if you had to solve an additional puzzle going up against people who um you know, definitely were also very good at ciphers. Also, there just wasn’t a big press campaign around this puzzle, literally, the only official thing that i could find was this one ad, so people just might not have known about it. Mr holland told me that most of the publicity for this puzzle came from people who were already fans of the first two puzzles and without the modern internet and social media it was just much harder to form communities around small niche subjects like this and keep everyone Updated with what was going on with them. So now that i have told you everything that i know about the decipher 2 and the decipher 3

I thought that i would share some new fun facts that i’ve learned about the original decipher puzzle. I’Ll be honest when i wrote that original video i did not know about newspapers.

om and just how extensive their archive is. I am not a journalist of any kind so when i found out about that site and i searched for the decipher puzzle suddenly, there was so much more information that i had missed the first time around and of course, some of this comes directly from warren holland Himself, so he told me that when the first puzzle was released, he went on a 40 city media tour. He promoted the product with in-store appearances, local and national news and print media. I also found an article from july 1983 when the first puzzle was first released and i just love this photo that they took. I also learned from this article that mr holland originally wanted the prize to be a million dollars, but he couldn’t get the insurance for that amount, so instead he lowered it to a hundred thousand.

I found more articles with more photos of him, but a lot of these just cover the same information, so i’m not going to go into detail on every single one of them, although in one of them he hints at decipher 3d, which doesn’t seem to have ever Been a thing there’s another article that says that he burned the typewriter ribbon that he used to type the original decipher solution. I don’t really know what a typewriter ribbon is, but seems like a little much. I also love this quote from him. It’S a great gift for your smart aleck brother-in-law, but then that’s the kind of guy who will solve it and he’ll never live it down. Mr holland throwing shade, but i mean i think we all know people like that, and then i also like what he says here about this puzzle, having a guaranteed treasure or prize, unlike the beale ciphers, that he was inspired by which he thinks are a hoax, that One supposedly leads to buried treasure and throughout the years, has inspired people to go and dig up literal graves.

I mean this would have been a great true crime story. If literal gravedigging was involved, so many podcasts would have covered it, but unfortunately or well. Fortunately, no grave digging, so you just get me here on my jigsaw puzzle, channel okay, so this next thing might be my favorite part of this entire thing. So you might be wondering why am i holding up the november 1987 issue of cosmopolitan? Well, if we open it up, would you check out who is bachelor of the month?

It is none other than our hero of the story, mr warren holland. He mentioned this in an email to me, and then i found another article that narrowed down, exactly which issue it was what a delightful piece of jigsaw puzzle history. He also mentioned that at one point he was on the cover of entrepreneur magazine. I got in touch with the editor of that magazine, but unfortunately they don’t keep archives going back that far, so, unfortunately, i wasn’t able to track that one down, but back to the newspaper articles. If we jump ahead to 1995, we have a little blurb.

That reveals another winner of the original decipher puzzle. It is john and janice denmark, so i went ahead and added them to the list of confirmed winners of the puzzles. This is the complete list that i’ve managed to gather. Unfortunately, it seems like the rest of the winners have been lost to history, but i do have another exclusive little tidbit for you. So in one of the articles about the original puzzle, holland mentions that he went through some different designs before settling on the gold jigsaw puzzle.

So i asked him what those designs were, and he told me that originally it was going to be a four inch, solid, clear, acrylic cube with a segment of the numbers screen printed on each side so that when you looked through it, you could see the numbers From all of the different, like all six sides, no other markings no instructions of what order to put them in so much more difficult than the jigsaw puzzle. But it was meant to be a beautiful coffee table piece. It would come in a velvet bag, but it was expensive to produce and he thought that the jigsaw puzzle would work better for the general consumer. He said that he kept one of the cube prototypes on his desk in his office for a really long time, but unfortunately that is also in storage by now, but i can picture it. It sounds beautiful if very difficult to solve as a puzzle and, finally, after the success of these types of puzzles, the decipher company ended up being very successful in the trading card game world as a little nod to where they came from one of the cards from Their trading card game fight club had a cipher on it, and the card couldn’t be used in gameplay until someone solved the cipher, mr holland actually did have some images of the card, so i’ll put those on screen what a fun little easter egg for anyone who Was familiar with the history of the company [ Music ]?

So that’s all i’ve got, but i have loved researching this. It has been so much fun to gather all of these different little nuggets of information and try to put them together to form a coherent story. I want to say a huge thank you to warren holland for coming up with these puzzles back in the 80s and for being so kind and generous and answering all of my questions today. So, even though the third puzzle was never solved, they did give away 217 thousand dollars to all of the winners of the first two puzzles. So i would call that a very successful product, but i still have hope that maybe today with the modern technology that we have, maybe some of you can solve some of these ciphers.

I put all of the information that i’ve gathered into a google doc which i’ll link right down below, so you can make a copy of it to your own account and then dig into it and start working on these. If you do manage to solve any of them, please get in touch. I would love to hear from you. My inbox is open, but please only get in touch once you have a finished solution. I personally am not going to be working on these any further.

I just have too many videos to make too many other puzzles to do, but i will keep the video description updated if any of them do get solved. And finally, as i mentioned at the end of my last video, these weren’t the only puzzles with huge cash prizes. So the next puzzles that i’m going to be digging into are the eternity puzzle and the money hunt both of these had prize money of a million dollars. This one was solved this one wasn’t so here’s what i want from you. If anybody has personal stories of working on these, when they were first released, please get in touch with me.

I don’t need information that is already publicly available. Trust me if it is out there, i have found it, but if you personally worked on these or have any information on them, that’s not publicly out there. My inbox is open. Please get in touch all right so now that you have made it to the end of this very long video your code word is going to be mystery, because, even after all of that, the answers to six of these ciphers is still a mystery. Thank you for watching make sure to subscribe for even more puzzle, videos and i’ll see you in the next one.