Post Date: 2/16/2010
Note: If you have arrived at this point directly without ever having carefully reviewed the motivations and mechanisms involved with earlier steps, and if you also happen to be a skeptic (such as I) then all I can tell you is you are bound for disappointment if you proceed. Skepticism is truly a great quality, and it is quite necessary for intellectual pursuits. But when combined with impatience, bias, and lack of attention to detail, it forms a toxic mixture that will prevent you from understanding more complex concepts. Please go back to step 0 (link to the left) and review the path that brought us here.
Motivation:
As I mentioned at the end of the previous step, constraining the topic of candidate books to those related somehow to the Great Pyramid is actually not a very effective constraint at all. So this step is all about sifting through the potential information to arrive at a more focused approach.
I begin with the following premise: If a book code was used by Sanborn, my hunch is that he would not just pick some random book. The book of choice should have some sort of relevance to either the CIA and/or Sanborn himself, if only because that would make it more easy to develop and present subtle clues regarding which book is to be used. (Remember, this is a puzzle, and the keys are being passed with it.) And so I was motivated to investigate whether any books (or authors) had any sort of relationship with the CIA and/or Jim Sanborn. If this premise does not seem to lead anywhere, I could always back up a step or two and make new thrusts.
Pre-Step Observations:
Referring back to the previous step, I provided a list of potential books of interest. My favorite book on that list, for a number of reasons, was the Tompkins book. Of all of the (too numerous!) books on the Great Pyramid that resulted from a Google search, this was the only book that I actually purchased a physical copy of. Here is the reference again...
Tompkins, Peter. Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Harper & Row, 1971 (New York).
In the hopes that I could find additional evidence to consider this book worthy of focused study (i.e. a potential source for book code decryption via laborious trial and error) I looked up the author, Peter Tompkins, on Wikipedia. From that page and others, I found references to other works by this author: “The Secret Life of Plants” (1973), “Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids” (1976), “Secrets of the Soil” (1989), and last, but not least, “A Spy in Rome” (1962). Note the title of that last book. (Actually, of the titles listed, it was published first. But I wanted to set it apart from the others for a reason.) You may wonder why this man who writes such scholarly books would dabble in a story about a spy. Well, the answer is that it’s not just a story. That book is Peter Tompkins‘ diary. He was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (aka OSS, the organization that was precursor to the CIA) in 1943 and served as an undercover agent in Italy during World War II. Peter Tompkins was a spy.
And when I say that he was a spy, I’m not talking about some participant in a compartmentalized program who decided to start hawking information, a la “Falcon and the Snowman”. This man was an honest-to-goodness field agent that was recruited by “Wild Bill” Donovan (who has been referred to by some as the “father of the CIA”) himself. Tompkins contributed to the success and future of the OSS, which later became the CIA. Following is a snippet from an obituary and tribute to Peter Tompkins on Cryptomundo:
“Within espionage circles Coon’s work for the OSS was legendary. One of the first missions of Donovan’s spy organization was Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and Coon worked with Peter Tompkins. Carleton Coon was in charge of Torch and the affair was such a success that it insured the future of the OSS. OSS’s leadership, who were later connected to the Central Intelligence Group, then the Central Intelligence Agency, would never forget Coon for his contributions to the budding American intelligence community. Tompkins too became linked to spy work for several years and was thought of very highly within the OSS.
With paramilitary, parachute and secret radio training, Tompkins was sent to Salerno in southwestern Italy in 1943 to infiltrate agents into enemy territory. Tompkins spent five months filing intelligence by secret radio and promoting partisan activities before being transferred to Berlin to spearhead OSS activities there. He was OSS Officer in Charge, Rome Area, and after the liberation of Italy moved on to spy in France and Germany. He resigned from the OSS in 1946 and declined to join the CIA, unlike Carleton and the former OSS agent George Agogino who would go on to be associated with the CIA and the Yeti search.”
-Loren Coleman, tribute to Peter Tompkins on Cryptomundo
Given Mr Tompkins’ relationship with - and his apparent influence on the formation of - the CIA, I find it very likely that his name surfaced while Ed Scheidt was tutoring Jim Sanborn on the history and methods of the CIA. That he also went on to author one of the seminal books regarding the Great Pyramid is a very fascinating thing with respect to APEX theory.
Miscellaneous observations:
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(1) Note the possible curious relationship between the previously unreconciled Morse Code snippet “SOS” and the intelligence organization that Tompkins belonged to: “OSS”.
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(2)Note that one of Tompkins books, “Secrets of the Soil” could be abbreviated as “SOS”.
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(3)According to his biography, Peter Tompkins’ father was a sculptor. This may have further caught Sanborn’s attention while developing the Kryptos scheme.
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(4)In “Secrets of the Great Pyramid” (page 15) Tompkins explicitly refers to “polished red granite” as the material used for the “King’s Chamber”. Sanborn used “polished red granite” for the strata formations he placed at Langley.
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(5)The Great Pyramid is made mostly of limestone. Sanborn placed a chunk of limestone near the Kryptos sculpture.
The above observations are very compelling to me. Here is a person that not only played a role in the history of the CIA (which Kryptos is supposed to celebrate) but he also authored a book about the Great Pyramid. The relationships seem too connected to be a complete coincidence. However, the fact that multiple observations are not driven by complete coincidence does not ensure causality. Perhaps there is another, related, explanation...
From the above snippet regarding Peter Tompkins, I extract the following quote:
“OSS’s leadership, who were later connected to the Central Intelligence Group, then the Central Intelligence Agency, would never forget Coon for his contributions to the budding American intelligence community.”
-Loren Coleman, tribute to Peter Tompkins on Cryptomundo
One could argue that a much stronger endorsement was given to an agent named Carleton Coon than to Tompkins. So I decided to find out who this man was. From his Wikipedia entry:
“He developed an interest in prehistory, and attended Phillips Academy, Andover where he studied hieroglyphics and became proficient in ancient Greek. Coon matriculated to Harvard, where he studied Egyptology with George Reisner. He was attracted to the relatively new field of anthropology by Earnest Hooton and he graduated magna cum laude in 1925.”
-Loren Coleman, tribute to Peter Tompkins on Cryptomundo
This snippet indicates an interest in Greek language (e.g. the word “Kryptos”) and Egyptology (e.g. King Tut’s Tomb and Great Pyramids). Further reading of Coon’s Wikipedia page and/or separate bio indicates that he served as an OSS agent in North Africa during World War II. His book about that service, “A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent” (1980), could easily be a candidate source for a book code.
All of this observation regarding Coon’s service is certainly relevant to the history of the CIA, and so it is interesting. But what other relevance does he have, and does it have anything to do with the Great Pyramid? Delving a little deeper into Coon’s biography, I found an astounding fact: Carleton Coon was a professor of Anthropology at Harvard, and in 1948 he authored one of the basic textbooks of social anthropology, “A Reader in General Anthropology”. The reason why I find this astounding is that, according to Wikipedia, Jim Sanborn received a degree in social anthropology in 1968. Therefore, I find it extremely likely that Sanborn is aware of both Coon’s textbook (which was deemed “basic” to the field) and “A North Africa Story”. Actually it seems reasonable to suggest that Mr Sanborn’s fascination with secrets, cryptography, and espionage may have been born from that awareness. In other words, Jim Sanborn may already have held high esteem for Carleton Coon’s work long before he accepted the Kryptos commission. And there is little doubt that Ed Scheidt did too, if the above sources are believable.
Okay, so where does that leave us with regard to the Morse Code clues? I present the following as a promising suggestion:
DIGETALEEE INTERPRETATU: Step (4) Dig Tale Interpretation
TISYOUR POSITION: Step (6) (Wha)T is Your Position
VIRTUALLY INVISIBLE: Step (7) The Underground, because the top layer is “transparent”, or “virtually invisible”
SHADOW FORCES: ? Step (8) The Latitudes ?
LUCID MEMORY: Step (9) Keyword for Quagmire III
RQ: Step (10) APEX? - A reference to the Great Pyramid?
SOS: Step (11) - A reference to the OSS? A reference to a specific book and/or chapter by Tompkins or Coon?
Suggested Step Process:
For the moment, let’s constrain ourselves to publications by either of these two authors (Tompkins and Coon) each of whom have relevance to the history of the CIA as well as a relationship to Egyptology in general (Tompkins and Coon), the Great Pyramid in particular (Tompkins), or Sanborn’s education (Coon). I find it very likely that one of their works will provide the missing book code source. My favorites, in no particular order, are:
Tompkins, Peter. Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971).
Tompkins, Peter. A Spy in Rome (1962).
Tompkins, Peter. Secrets of the Soil (1989).
Coon, Carleton. A Reader in General Anthropology (1948).
Coon, Carleton. A North Africa Story (1980).
There are other books by these authors, and they should also get some attention, but the above 5 are my favorites for a variety of reasons. If you are going to help, please consider all three versions of the APEX sequence...
APEX 1:
“EBXAJRAAJPPBEHBLDVEPEXXDXOVFXPARFZPEFACAGPEDPRXN”
APEX 2:
“EBLAJRAAJPPBEHBLDVEPEAXDXOVFXPARFZSEFACAGPEDPRXN”
APEX 3:
“EBLAJRAAJPPKEHBMDVEPEAXDXOVFXPARFZSEFACAGPEDPRXN”
For this, I believe we need to group the characters in pairs or triplets, yielding anywhere between 16 and 24 words extracted from the appropriate book. This should result in a message of the expected length (around 100 characters.)
Step Summary:
Last fall, I had already determined (step 10) that I needed to obtain a book on the Great Pyramid because of various Sanborn & Scheidt verbal clues, some of the Kryptos elements, and my own intermediate results of APEX Theory (from step 9). My findings had left little room for anything other than a book code to finish my process. I procured one of the most popular books on the topic (“Secrets of the Great Pyramid”, by Peter Tompkins) and began trying to learn as much as I could about the Great Pyramid. (I also made a few shallow attempts to crack the code using that book.) My selection of that particular book was based on several things, including its popularity, its vintage (not so old as to be out of print and rare, like some of the others that emerged from the Google search, but not so new that it is post-Kryptos) and because of the brief description of its subject matter, which seemed to be spot-on. But it had nothing to do with the author, who I figured was just some scholarly gentleman who writes intriguing documentaries on history.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered that “scholarly gentleman” had been an undercover operative for the OSS in World War II, who sent intelligence via radio using Morse Code, and who also played a critical role in the (pre)history of the CIA, all facts that were most likely known to Ed Scheidt. And I had one of his (few) books in my hands for months, for entirely different reasons! That’s a pretty steep coincidence.
I’m thinking that this discovery has done two things: it has confirmed that my line of reasoning is fairly close to the mark, and if a book code is really the answer then it has also decreased my potential search space from millions of possible source texts down to a manageable number. I consider confirmation of my reasoning and a significant reduction in search space to be a major breakthrough, and I have posted that opinion on various message boards.
