The CIA has discovered a document in the Individual Deceased
Personnel File of Major Thomas Caulfield, a spy for the Union Army
during the Civil War. Major Caulfield was instrumental in the Union
Army’s capture of Richmond Virginia on April 3
1865. Prior to this, he had
been captured by Confederate forces led by JEB Stuart’s Cavalry
Corps, and held in the prison on Belle Island.
Although this seemed an unfortunate event, it appears to have been
a carefully planned scheme to infiltrate Confederate forces and
gather intelligence on Confederate President Davis’ “Annihilator”
device. This was rumored to be a device
invented by Milo Rambaldi in 1470. Though its exact function is
unknown, it was thought to be “an instrument to end all wars”. The
Confederate government paid a large sum of “northern money” to an
Italian art dealer for the only known Rambaldi drawn plan. Major
Caulfield was able to steal the document and under orders of
President Lincoln, destroyed it. This thwarted Confederate plans to
defend Richmond
with the device, and changed the
course of the war….
At the height of the Cold War, the CIA uncovered evidence that
Caulfield did not destroy the document, but instead hid it,
presumably in the Richmond area. He disregarded President Lincoln’s order
when he found another Rambaldi document with the Annihilator
drawing. This document contained three drawings (one of Caulfield
as a young man, one of him as a prisoner on Belle Island, and a
face of a demon separating the two), with a single sentence in
Italian “scelga la vita o la morte; scelga la conservazione o la
distruzione”, which translates “Choose life or death; Choose
preservation or destruction”. The fact
that Rambaldi had created the drawings and wrote the sentence 400
years prior, predicting Caulfield’s connection with the
Annihilator, drove Caulfield mad. It is thought he stashed the
document, then committed suicide (at the time, his death was deemed
an “execution by rebel forces”, though he was found in his fortress
like secured room with a single shot from his own .44 caliber Colt
sidearm).
Under Rambaldi’s Caulfield drawings were a series of encrypted
messages that allegedly predicts the location of a “contenitore di
pietra” that holds the Annihilator document hidden by
Caulfield. It seems Rambaldi had
foreseen the location of the container and encrypted its
coordinates numerically. In the 1950’s, the U.S. Department of
Defense, under the guidance of Ivan Getting, postulated the numbers
could be interpreted as longitude and latitude coordinates. They
created the first three-dimensional, time-difference-of-arrival
position-finding system in order to input the numbers and uncover
the Annihilator. While they failed to uncover it because one major
set of numbers was missing, their system and its concepts were
crucial stepping stones in the development of the Global
Positioning System.
This takes us
back to the document found in Major Caulfield’s IDPF. It is a
handwritten paper outlining a series of steps to be taken on
Brown's Island,
near the Belle
Island prison site. Caulfield collaborated with Brother Spartacus of
the Order of the Illuminati, using information extracted from
Gnostic and Manichaen heresies and Eleusinian Mysteries, to develop
the physical code. It was initially thought to be map, with steps
leading to the exact spot where the container was hidden. After an
exhaustive multi-departmental search of the area, nothing was
found. CIA cryptographists theorize the steps may give the final
series of numbers necessary to solve the location code. If one used
a GPS device set on a track setting, the series of steps may “draw”
a clue. Copies of the Rambaldi and Caulfield documents are below.
Your mission is to decode the contenitore di pietra coordinates and
find the Annihilator drawing before the Covenant or K–Directorate
gets their hands on it…
You can check your answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.