

(Repeated requests for confirmation have been ignored by the ACA and no one at the organization appears willing to confirm Graysmith’s claim.) Graysmith also claimed that his solution was confirmed by Greg Mellen and Eugene Waltz, both prominent members of the American Cryptogram Association. Graysmith later altered portions of this solution and included the second version in his first book. This sense of rightness is completely absent in the proposed solution. (It is noted that the initial ZODIAC decrypted message was particularly clear as to the meaning ZODIAC desired to communicate.) When a cryptogram has been decrypted properly there is an unmistakable sense of rightness about the solution. Just about any random selection of words could be arranged to be as ‘logical’ as those in the supposed poetic solution. First the random-like transposition system permitted the various vowels and consonants to be forced into words, then the words were forced into being poetry in an effort to give them meaning.
ZODIAC KILLER CIPHER CODE
On February 15, 1979, San Francisco police forwarded Graysmith’s solution, his worksheets and his code key to the FBI, and the Bureau reported its conclusions.īased upon the information available, it is the opinion of respondent that the solution is not a valid decryption… The total feeling generated toward the decrypted solution is that the solution has been forced. Some people may have believed that Graysmith had deciphered the code, but the FBI was not impressed. The FBI files included an early version of Graysmith’s proposed solution: The solution offered in Zodiac was an alteration of a version first presented by Graysmith in the late 1970s. In his book Zodiac, Robert Graysmith claimed that he had solved the Zodiac’s “340 Cipher.” Graysmith’s claims as a code breaker earned him some local publicity in 1979, but his solution seemed rather incoherent. Over the decades, many people claimed to have solved the cipher but, to date, no one has produced a coherent and credible solution.

Experts and amateur code breakers struggled with the cipher but repeatedly failed to find its hidden message. In November 1969, the Zodiac mailed his second cipher consisting of 340 symbols.
