Additional Hints (Decrypt)
[Google.] zh-Ynj - 8XUm. 1 ebj = 1 zf. Yvfgra gb Obevf svefg.(Decrypted Hints)
Find...
smellflower.jpg
spypic
9 
1 
1
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 October 6, 2009 by thyros (165 found)
I came across this mystery in February when someone posted about it on the GONIL forums. Since cracking difficult puzzles is about 50% of the fun I have in geocaching, I had to try it. I started with some research into cell phone signal encoding, made some guesses about how to decode Boris and Sasha's signal, and wrote some code to hack on the data. After trying various things, encoding them into audio files, and listening to all sorts of static and noise, I finally hit upon a set of steps that produced a signal. Boris's voice was there, under a lot of static and garbled a bit, but it was clearly speech. I listened over and over again, considered that it had to be a coordinate, listened some more, and then realized I might actually have Sasha's signal. Fortunately, I know some experts. I mailed off my file to my friends, who basically told me, "Yeah, we think there's a voice there, too, but we don't understand it under all that noise." I told them that it was a coordinate and what that implied for words that had to be in there, and they listened again. This time, they came back with "Well, we think it might be - - - - - - -." Switching Walsh codes to try to extract the other coordinate using the same pipeline yielded only static. I had one coordinate with which to work, maybe.I brought out a useful investigative tool, Google Earth, and searched along my longitude line until I found a likely spot. It was a ways off from my house. I wasn't sure if I had things right. I wrote down my coordinates and resolved to go hunting when I had the time. That took a while. My chances to go caching with a toddler in the house are pretty limited, and this one was too far from work to do during a lunch break. Months later, I mailed the hider just hoping to get a confirmation I was on the right track. He responded right away. My coordinate was off, but not by much. My expert friends had done remarkably well extracting numbers from my half-decoded garbled audio stream. I sat back and coded some more, tweaked things, coded, tweaked, coded, and so on. I got various versions of the garbled Sasha signal, but Boris's signal never emerged from my bits and bytes. Pretty soon into this, I broke out Google Maps and searched along the corrected longitude line until I found a spot that looked likely to be the right place. I wrote down my suspicion for Boris's coordinate, but I still never massaged anything comprehensible from the data. After a couple weeks of this, I got a little frustrated and just drove up and went to my coordinates. Sure enough, I found what I was seeking. The next day, with final cache coordinates in hand, I drove up again and logged the cache. The cache is in good shape, and is unlikely to be disturbed by anyone other than a geocacher looking for it. The Google Earth guessing method when supplied with one coordinate by the hider seemed a little cheesy, so I asked for another hint before I could conscientiously claim to have solved the puzzle. As it turned out, there were a couple of differences in the way I was decoding the signal and the "right" method. Fixing one immediately yielded a garbled Boris signal that I could understand, and gave me the coordinate I already knew. I still haven't fixed the other error, but at this point I've extracted two understandable coordinates, which would probably have been enough for me to find the cache even without the correction I was sent. This is probably the most technically involved puzzle I've tackled on the Geocaching site, but the research necessary to solve it does teach you a lot about how audio signals are encoded for transmission. It's pretty interesting stuff for those of us who are into this sort of thing. For the rest of you, grab someone who likes to tinker with computer code and try the puzzle anyway. Thanks for the puzzle, hints, and cache, cliff_nuts!
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December 7, 2008 by TeacherMike (3729 found)
Out with Bat today for a quick few. Out as Bat's feild assiatnt on this one. Usally I am the one doing the code breaking and intarigating but it was Bat's resources that came thru on this one to give us the intel we needed. So after some feild work we had the final peice in hand in no time. It was nice to see that everything in place after so long. TFTH.
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December 7, 2008 by BAT1800 (3216 found)
WOW! This one has been eating at me for some time now. I have looked at it and walked away countless times and this time it got it grip in to me and wasn't letting go. Mostly because I needed it for the D/T Matrix and the Komplete Caching Challenge.That being the case I decided to rely on my Top Secret Clearance and enlist the resources of NSA, DHS, FBI, DEA, ATF and finally the CIA (Cachers in Action). Finally it was the latter that was able to provide me with enough intel that I was soon on the hunt for Boris and Sasha. I must say that they are very elusive indeed. Even once I was able to crack the code of the captured chatter, I still needed to enlist assistance from some of our World Wide agents and even some of them had to reach out to some more local villagers. Once all the intel was collected we were able to learn of one of their last scene hide outs with further intel leading us to believe that they left a hint there as to where there current location may be. But wait,,, this piece of intel is quite old and in fact rumor has it that they were last spotted there exactly 1 year and 3 months to the day ago! None the less, it's all we had to go on so we suited up with a full team and headed out on Operation Freedom. We arrived at the location were agents had reported evidence of their presence and we were quickly able to decipher their final whereabouts. We carefully analyzed the intel, formulated a plan and moved in for the final capture. Within moments, we closed in on their hideout and surprisingly enough we found Boris and Sasha sitting out in the open immediately adjacent to their hide out. After a long (albeit painful for some) interogation, Boris and Sasha were escorted back in to their hideout and securely tucked away leaving little or no evidence that they are even holed up there. What an amazing cache this really was. The time and effort that went in to this one was truly amazing. Cliff Nuts, you have really out done yourself on this one and it is with great pride that I am able to log this one. This one will certainly go down as one of the most memorable puzzles I have ever done and this cache has earned a spot on the BAT1800 Best of the Best List. Thanks for the awesome puzzle!!! TNLNSL/TFTC, BAT
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September 29, 2007 by White Dane & Irish Setter (7611 found)
It's been about a year of working on the solution. First we enlisted the help of contacts at the NSA. While they are good at tracking phone calls from terrorist, it appears the secret code of Boris and Sasha was too much for their skills. This of course explains much of our delay in finding the cache. Our break in the case finally came when we had a chance to take a peek at the undocumented blueprints of GeoRon's 1970's enigma machine. Since we did not have the hardware to run this ancient style of decoding machine, we had to build our own 1980's version based on the original design as created by GeoRon. Our design was more efficient in the decoding process (where GeoRon's required a dual pass ours was able to do it in a single pass), but what does that matter when you only use it once and it take much longer to create it. We had the message but it needed further analysis, we next sent the information we had gathered to our translator. Luckily we had a polish translator on staff (Poland is close to Russia right!!). We needed to confirm what our analysist had deciphered. So some more research by our early helpers from the NSA came up with some good stuff on the internet. This confirmed we finally had what we needed. Because we had worked on it so long and re-read the instructions so many times in the beginning, when we finally had the information we needed, we mishandled the intel we had collected and drew some incorrect conclusions, even though the next step was right there spelled out in black and white for us to see. As it turns out our bungled attempt at solving the puzzle brought us within 268ft of the actual cache. But today as our 2100st find we got the Hootie Hoo. Thanks Cliff_Nuts for making geocaching so interesting. This is no lamppost skirt PNG.
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June 3, 2007 by PopGoesTheGeo (811 found)
#652. Finally!!!! First, I would like to thank Boris and Sasha. Then I would like to thank my friend Steve from church and an engineer at telecommunications company. Steve wrote a program to convert the data. Although I had only one coordinate, I was able to find Stage 2 and then finally the cache (on the second attempt since I transposed a couple of numbers). Now I just need to find a free, online bar code reader to work on some of the other long standing caches near my home I have yet to find. TFTC.
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Current Time: 3/17/2010 8:44:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time (3:44 AM GMT)
Last Updated: 10/7/2009 12:58:12 PM Pacific Daylight Time (7:58 PM GMT)
Rendered: From Database
Coordinates are in the WGS84 datum
