Enigma Series - 7 - Pig Pen Cipher Mystery Cache
Hanoosh: As the owner has not responded to my previous log requesting that they check this cache I am archiving it.
Regards
Brenda
Hanoosh - Volunteer UK Reviewer www.geocaching.com
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Enigma Series - 7 - Pig Pen Cipher
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The co-ordinates are NOT for the final cache location.
A simple puzzle using the Pig Pen cipher, also commonly known as the Freemasons cipher.
You need to be fairly tall to reach this one ! It is a small 0.25L snap-lock lid, plastic container.
Enigma Series - Enigma 7 - Pig Pen Cipher
Introduction:
This is a series of 25+ goecaches which I am deploying, the theme is codes, ciphers and cryptology. My inspiration comes from the Enigma machine, used by the German military during World War II and the efforts taken by the Polish, British and other allies to break the German secret codes used for military communications. It is widely believed that breaking Enigma shortened World War II by apporximately 2 years. Imagine if that did not happen, we would either be speaking German now or dead under a nuclear cloud....a sobering thought. This series of caches starts with simple codes and ciphers and moves forward to Enigma and state-of-the-art cryptology. If you like this series then I suggest two things: (1) Visit Bletchley Park (www.bletchleypark.org.uk) and (2) Read the book which I found
most interesting: "The Code Book" by Simon Singh.
Bletchley Park employed 12,000 personnel at it's peak with everyone sworn to absolute secrecy until 1972, incredible that not once did the Germans suspect such an intelligence operation was ongoing in UK, even the top ranking British military were not aware of it's capabiliites, only Winston Churchil himself. Military commanders were fed information by miltary liasion officers that came from tangeable "second sources" such as spies, prisoner
interrogations, etc. It was so important that Churchill signed a warrant stating Bletchley Park would get all resources necessary above and beyond any other cause during World War II!!
When most people talk about "secret codes" they quite often mean "secret ciphers". A few words to explain some commonly used terms:
Steganography - hiding or concealing a message.
Cryptography - scrambling a message.
Transposition - shifting the cipher characters.
Substitution - replacing pieces of the message with other characters.
Code - replacing or substituting words.
Cipher - replacing or substituting letters.
The Cipher:
The Pig Pen cipher basically allows each letter of the alphabet to be replaced by a symbol, this is effectively a simple substitution cipher. However, as symbols are used they can be easier to hide in a structure, painting or picture and were very popular with the Freemasons many centuries ago. This was popularised recently in Dan Brown's book "The Lost Symbol".
Refer to the cipher key picture on tihs cache's photo page.
Enigma 7 can be found by deciphering the symbols to give you the remaining parts of the co-ordinates for the final
Cache location. The location starts:
N 51 58.???
W 00 06.???
Picture - You can find the last three digits of North and West by deciphering the symbols in the photograph on this cache's photo page using the cipher map.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
50 zrgerf hc gur genpx sebz gur ebnq, ovt gerr ba gur evtug 2 zrgerf hc
Treasures
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