Hi, thank you all very much for coming. I know it's a really miserable day to be standing outside in line So I really appreciate everyone that took the energy and effort to do that and I hope that my talk will be worth it So I have a really long talk and not so much time So I'm going to get right into it. These are the things that I'm going to be going over Kind of an intro of who I am and what I'm talking about. I'll be talking about a couple different codes Especially the CIA's cryptos code. I'll have some pictures of that and some other sculptures that were done by Jim Sandborn Who's the artist who made the crypto sculpture and I'll be talking a little bit about cryptography particularly visionary tables and some of the stuff I'm going to be going over very very quickly and Some speculations about the crypto cypher and then I'll tie it all together So who am I? My name is Ilanka. I am the general manager of online community at Symmetronic's Corporation I'm a game developer. We make massively multiplayer online games And I got involved with cryptography well I've been in into puzzles forever But I got into cryptography because I was speaking on games at a convention called dragon con in Atlanta Has anyone here been to dragon con? Okay, and I would be speaking in the electronic Frontiers track so I'd be there speaking on games and then the panel like right after me it would be the SE 26 Undergroup that would be coming in and talking about computer security So I'd kind of meet them that way and we kind of wave in the halls and have a beer at the end of the day and through them I heard about this code that had been uncracked for a year called the Freaknik 3 code and They said there was a prize and no one had cracked the code yet And I said that's nice and went on and did my thing and then it like about a month later I was homesick with the flu one weekend and I decided to take a look at this Freaknik code And I got really into it and did practically nothing for about a week and a half It's at work on this code and I cracked the code And I won a free trip to a hacker convention and free drinks free hotel all the free t-shirts all that good stuff And then I started cracking other codes and other codes And in fact I cracked so many codes that this is the flyer that came out for the Atlantic con code Down in a Atlanta a couple years ago and at the bottom of the flyer it said note Past puzzle crackers are ineligible for prizes Associated with solving the Atlantic con puzzle give someone else a chance Ilanka So So I've been coming here to DEF CON for a few years. This is my first year as an official speaker I was an alternate speaker two years ago. I was here speaking on steganography How many people came to my steganography talk a couple years ago? Okay, and I've also been giving kind of informal talks on cryptography out of my room I'd like put up a flyer and say come to this hotel or how many people come my hotel room talks, okay? And okay, so total how many people have come to a previous talk of mine whether it's steganography hotel Just any Ilanka talk, okay? Now you guys know that sometimes I will be putting little puzzles into my talks And I'll have like a secret message that's spelled out on some of the slides I'm telling you in advance. Now. I did not do that this year because I'm talking about one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world So I want all your attention on solving this code, so I didn't put in any other puzzles So you can don't worry about scribbling or seeing anything we're in fonts next year I may put a puzzle into the presentation I'm a little more background on me both my parents were professors at UCLA my mother taught dance my father taught mathematics My father was also on the in the early space program who worked for Hughes aircraft My father was on the team that launched the very first Geosynchronous Communication Satellite and So I've got a really wide varied background of things from from the social side of a campus It will be called the North campus and South campus the the hard sciences and the not so hard scientist sciences Cracked a bunch of codes After September 11th one of the other things I did was I organized a crisis center at my company We do internet games and many of my customers were of course in New York And so I put together a database where everyone could write in on the status of the people that were in New York Who was okay? Who hadn't we heard from who was who was an EMT that was working on the on the rescue efforts and one of my less scrupulous customers Pulled a really nasty hoax, which is he decided to use September 11th as an opportunity to declare himself dead And then was going around online pretending to be his own widow and was really traumatizing a lot of people And I was the person that figured that out and tracked him down and got him to post a public confession and a public Apology and there's articles about all this that are on the web if you want to go see those Some of you may have also seen something that I got some press for recently Which is a website called the world's most famous unsolved codes and that was on slash dot recently And I'm the one that put that together That's the Freaknik 3 code. I won't go into it in detail Then after I cracked the Freaknik 3 code I wrote this tutorial about how it was done and it's written in kind of a very tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk fashion and Through the Freaknik 3 code which had a few dead ends in it and red herrings one of those dead ends was okay Go solve this now and so there was a picture. There was a link to the CIA's crypto sculpture And this is really the first place that I'd ever heard of the CIA's crypto sculpture And I thought okay, that's that's interesting and and I looked at it a little bit and didn't really mess with it in in any detail And then after September 11th, I thought I was I was visiting my cousin in Washington, DC And my cousin had a close call on September 11th. He was on his way to give a briefing at the Pentagon and he was having printer problems and was running late and So he got the printer problems figured out and then he was on his way And he he called a cell phone he checked his cell phone messages and a cell phone actually crashed because there were so many messages from people saying Plane just hit the Pentagon don't go the plane hit right where he was going to be so some of the people that he was supposed to brief were killed So I went out after September 11th to DC to visit with my cousin celebrate that that he was okay And while I was out there we also did some sightseeing and he said what else do you want to see in the DC area? And I said oh well as long as I'm here. I'd like to see the CIA's crypto sculpture. He said okay We're CIA and I'm like, yeah, I don't know where CIA is and so then we started looking for it and It became I knew about it. I knew that it was it was commissioned in 88. It was dedicated in 1990 I knew that the systems the sculptor was a man named James Sanborn and he was taught about codes by a man named Ed Schyte But I didn't know exactly where the thing was So I wasn't gonna let that stop me I went on to Google and I looked around and there's no street address for CIA You can't just go on a map quest and then type it in and get directions to it okay a challenge and I Sort of knew what the building looked like because I'd seen like overhead views and Tom Clancy movies And I knew it was in Langley, Virginia, and Langley wasn't that big So what I did is I got a bunch of satellite recon pictures of the entire Langley, Virginia area and then And I went around looking until I saw the outline of the building and then I found the building and we checked what highways were near it And my cousin and I kind of drove by and we feel like drive by the service road and you know Just kind of check things out But when you take the exit there's no service right you take the exit and you're there You got this huge tall gate You got barbed wire along the top and you got this guard shack with really big guys with guns come all Pouring out of the guard shack asking a very reasonable question. Who are you and why are you here?  You can't get in it's for official business only And I'm like, okay, I've come this far and we tried every social engineering trick I had in the book Can I can I get an invitation now yet official business only is there a public tour day? No official business only can I get an invitation from my congressman now official business only so I'm trying all these things And again, these are big guys with guns and so got turned away and I damn official business only Well, I kept thinking about that for a while now something else I was doing at the same time after September 11 because I had all of this code Experience is I was wondering if I could use my code experience to help out with the war on terrorism So I had called up the local FBI in St. Louis and I live in St. Louis and I said hi I have all this code experience. Can I help and they said no so So I called them back the next week and can I help now and I was persistent I kept calling back kept calling back And finally I got an agent who said okay. Well, what is it that you know about what kinds of code systems? You know that and I listed out you know PGP and you you encoding and steganography and so Steganography, you know, we've been hearing these rumors that al-Qaeda might be using steganography as a way of sending hidden messages But we don't really know that much about steganography. I know there's big brains in DC that know this stuff but we're a St. Louis field office Could you maybe put together a talk about? Steganography and I'm like sure I'd be happy to so I put to get they thought I was going to come in and speak for 10 minutes, and I did the 70 slide PowerPoint presentation with with animations and everything and and the talk was really well received I gave it to the FBI and Secret Service post-inspectors customs agents and I'm as I was putting together this talk and I was thinking official business official business Maybe I can use this talk as a way of getting into CIA So when I did the talk I put this slide into the talk which is of the crypto sculpture And in fact steganography as most of you probably know is a way of hiding messages inside of digital images It's other things, but that's one of the things that it is So I got this image off of the CIA website and I hid messages inside this image as part of my talk And then every time I'd give the talk I'd say boy I'd really love to go to CIA, you know and and give this talk at CIA because I didn't know anyone at CIA Well two years ago as I mentioned I was an alternate speaker here at DEF CON speaking on steganography And I gave the talk and I showed the slide and and I think it was probably about a thousand people and was up in the big roof tent and At the end of the talk people were coming up to give me business cards and everything And one person came up and they came up to the podium and they leaned close and they said I work at Langley And they said I think I can get you in I'm like cool cool. I'll go. I'll speak. I don't want to be paid I just want a couple hours to go look at the crypto sculpture and they wouldn't give me their phone name I got a first name and a phone number and I'm like, okay So it's really someone CIA is it just someone who's saying that they're CIA and so after the convention We write back and forth and I made sure that they wrote to me from an official address So we had back-and-forth communication and they said yeah, we really do want you to come out and speak I'm like cool.  I'm like Make me an offer. I'll say yes. I don't want to be paid I just want two hours to look at the crypto sculpture We go back and forth and and I said fine reimburse my my plane fare or hotel I'm gonna 500 bucks really, but I'm not gonna haggle anything you offer.  I was like yes, okay, fine So I got my official business invitation and I was able to see the sculpture and I got some rubbings now after my visit I Took these rubbings that I got of the sculpture And I went and I posted them on on the web and then I started getting all this Correspondence because my website anyone that would go to Google and type in cryptos my website would come up So more and more people were contacting me and then other people had theories and I got some crazy theories Do I have people that wrote to me saying I've solved cryptos and I'm like cool What does it say and they'd say it's proof that space aliens control the government okay? Can you show it can you duplicate the method of how you got this message for me, please? And they'd send me things with like weird circles and spirals and things and I There's a lot of people that were very very intrigued by this by the system So now cryptos has four codes on it three of the codes have been solved The fourth part and this is the fourth part here is one of those famous unsolved codes in the world It's 97 or 98 characters the question mark there There's debate about whether it's part of part three or part of part four and So I'll take cryptos apart a little bit there are four panels on it two of those panels are a vision air table I'll go over what a vision air table is really briefly a keyword builds a cypher alphabet and the word cryptos is the first keyword On on two probably three of the sections it was solved in 1998 They're the first three parts were solved by a man named David Stein who works at the CIA The CIA is very careful to set to say he did it completely on his own time Since then he's he's gotten married he has a new baby and as anyone with a baby knows all your free time goes right out The window so he hasn't really worked on the code since then Jim Gloley who's a California computer scientist also solved the first three parts with a computer attack and then after Jim Gloley got written up in the paper then the NSA came up and they said oh, yeah We've got three people that solved those sections too, but we're not going to tell you who and we're not going to tell you It because that's NSA The artist man named Jim Sanborn who's still alive. He lives in Washington DC. It was born in 1945 He's attended a few different schools. He studied at Oxford University. He's traveled through Asia And when I started researching him, I wanted to find out what other sculptures he'd done And so I contacted his agent his gallery and I said do you have a list of everything he's done? And they said no, there's no such list. I'm like well Somewhere there must be such a list. They said no, there's no such list and it'd be much too complicated to make such list No one can possibly have a list of everything Sanborn's done So I said, okay, I'm gonna make a list of everything Sanborn's done and I started writing to art galleries all around the world and Packages started coming in I called my apartment Smithsonian West and just Catalogs from art galleries and I started getting I got my way into government agencies where they Approved the budget for various art and sculpture programs and I started collecting all this data about it And it's some interesting discoveries, which I'll go into in a minute This is a little bit about David Stein the CIA guy. These slides are also all on your CD They're also all on the web. So if I go if I skip anything really fast, you can get it later This is June globally the California computer scientists that solve parts one through three And I had this is a Many of you are from Los Angeles. This is the hamburger hamlet in Brentwood. That was not me and I'm a Talking to Jim. So while I was researching Sanborn's artwork, what I found is that after he made the CIA sculpture He made another version called the untitled cryptos piece, which he sold to a private collector and On the untitled cryptos piece it has all the text of cryptos on one side and on the other side It has a lot of encrypted Russian text I'm like, maybe this piece in some way is a clue or maybe this piece needs to be solved to solve cryptos We don't know and you're gonna hear me say we don't know a lot or I don't know because we have an unsolved code And we have speculation, but there's no certainty here So I found out the current location of this this piece. It was it went through a few hands a private collector here I'm using them there currently it's in the home of a Millionaire in Los Angeles and when I was in Los Angeles for E3 a couple months ago I contacted this millionaire through his art gallery and I said hi. I'm you know, I guys study cryptos Can I come in and take a look at the sculpture and he said sure So I went in and he was getting ready for cocktail party. There's servants running all over the place and and I saw some interesting things some differences there using close-up images of Side so on the one side We have text here that that's English This is the text of the CIA's crypto sculpture and on the other side we have all this encrypted Russian text and What I found is that this encrypted Russian text is also duplicated on another of Sanborn sculptures and that sculpture is called the Cyrillic projector Now this is a sculpture that used for some gallery shows in the early 1990s And then he sold it to the University of North Carolina, which is where it's been for the last seven years or so and The students at North Carolina have no idea what it meant. Well before I came along they had no idea what it meant They would see it. They thought it was group. They thought I had something with the local fraternities or something like that I'm serious that they did Okay, so differences that I saw Here this is a close-up of the untitled cryptos piece and you can see like with the diagonals that this is the visionary table It's a lot of diagonals of letters and then it launches into the ciphertext here and this END YAHR This is the start of part three of cryptos not part one of cryptos part three There's also some interesting things about these remember the YA HR section. I'll talk about those later So the way that the letters are arranged is different from on the CIA version and the order is different again It starts with part three not with part one. We don't know why but it's intriguing that you do it that way and Something else I noticed this is over on English side is there's a very clear difference that little things like the question mark This is the same the CIA version has a question mark and it has it has a few different question marks And those are in the same locations, but one thing the CIA version doesn't have These two dots These two dots exist only on the untitled cryptos piece and its sister piece which is antipodes Which is a slightly larger version which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC These two dots do not exist on the CIA version. Why we don't know But it's intriguing So getting back to cryptos The visionary table I'll go over how this is put together here notice also we have these reference alphabets So we have a through Z along the top a through Z running down the side here And these two spaces at top and bottom and those two spaces may be important with one of the theories So I'll go into those in a moment So first we talk about how to make a cypher alphabet using the keyword of cryptos You have 26 letters here, and I actually have a little animation of how to make a cypher alphabet This is like the first flash animation I ever did Okay, so what you do is you take the alphabet and then you take your keyword and you take the letters of that keyword Out of the alphabet in this case we're spelling the word cryptos And then you pile up all the rest of the letters after it So you still have 26 letters, but you can use any keyword you want and it kind of changes things It has that for an animation by the way So once you've got the cypher alphabet here and then on cryptos it just makes a grid So every one of these is shifted by one now an interesting property of it when you do it this way is you see We can read the word cryptos here, and you can also read the word cryptos going vertically here Now this is what happens when you use a single keyword you can also use a double keyword system So we would have the word cryptos here, and then you might spell out a different word here So you might have the second keyword of the word apple So you would take this a and move it over the margin and you take that P and move it to the margin And leave that one alone and that would be a different way of creating a grid And that's exactly what was used for the first part of cryptos So here's the first part which is the top two lines on the sculpture here EMUFP there and I won't go into this in detail But basically we have the keyword cryptos here, and we have a different word here Which is polympsest which means a scroll that it has had a message scraped off of it And then another message written on it So you might be seeing bits of the old message showing through and you take each word of these cypher texts And you put it on a different line, and then you trace up so the E Translates to a B the M translates to an E the U translates to a T and so forth so EMUFPHZ Comes out to B E T W E N or between So if you did that to the entire message there We have the two lines of cypher text with the keywords cryptos and polympsest And it comes out to say between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of Ecclusion So there's a typo it should say Elysian but it says Ecclusion Now this typo is hard-coded right into the sculpture and I've talked to the artist about I said was this just a mistake He says no it's deliberate, but he says it's not what it is that's so important as where it is It's orientation or it's positioning. What does that mean? We don't know, but it's something that the artist said Now part two starts with line three here the Fp and goes all the way down to the bottom of this panel here So all of this is part two This is the cypher text for part two And in this case with it's the same system, but with different keywords instead of cryptos and polympsest It's cryptos and abscissa And it says it was totally invisible. How's that possible? They use the Earth's magnetic field the information was gathered and transmitted underground Another typo there to an unknown location. Does Langley know about this? They should it's buried out there somewhere Who knows the exact location only ww this was his last message 38 degrees 57 minutes 6.5 seconds north 77 degrees 8 minutes 44 seconds west Id by rose or maybe id by row s we didn't have punctuation So we're guessing a punctuation here now anyone who's done you cashing knows that this thing about 6.5 seconds north a 10th of a second of latitude is a very very specific location about 10 feet across So of course pull up the maps look at that and it points to the general location of CIA headquarters, but Where in CIA headquarters way points to the courtyard where cryptos is does it point to cryptos? No It points to an area about a hundred and fifty feet southeast of cryptos now I've I didn't know this exactly when I was there But I've talked to people who work at the agency and they've gone and looked at that spot And they say they don't really see anything unusual. It's it's a normal courtyard. There's trash cans There's manhole covers which might or might not mean something But but nothing that looks specifically code related. So it's one of the very intriguing mysteries All right part three is this bottom panel here. It starts here and goes down to about the Fourth row from the bottom. Also, if you can see it on the slide This is the first part on the untitled cryptos piece. We had END YAHR and you can see that some of the letters are slightly out of alignment and Again the artist sandborn. I showed him some of these slides and he pointed at those and said those are important Okay So this is part three the ciphertext now someone who's experienced with cryptography when they look at the ciphertext Somebody's going to jump out at them They're going to notice something different and what it is is that the the Consistency of the letters is different from the other two sections here You're going to see a lot of E's a lot of T's a lot of a is a lot of O's Which is English Frequency table the most common letter commonly used letter being E TA OYN and so what this is it's not with a visionary system This is a transposition cipher all of the letters of the plaintext messenger here. They're just reorganized So there's a few different ways to pull this out one method that I came up with was to take all the letters and to put Them into these nice regular rows and at the far right here in this smack in the middle We have an S now remember the first section that ID by rows or ID by row S Which may or may not have something to do with this This is just speculation if you take that s and then you count down four one two three wrap around four And you get an L come down for one two three four you get an O two three four w one two three four l one two three four Why S L O W L Y slowly so we have a word and if you keep doing that you can zip out an entire message with that exact method And we have so it starts a slowly desperately And the plaintext here is slowly desperately slowly the remains of passage to breathe and encumbered the lower part of the doorway Was removed with trembling hands. I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner and then widening the hole a little I inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker But presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. Can you see anything Q? Who recognizes that quote? Howard Carter very good This is a paraphrased extract from the diary of Howard Carter on the day that he discovered King Tut's tomb It's from November 26 1922 Desperately is misspelled as well now. I think I'm not sure that this one was part of the puzzle I think that this one may have been a genuine screw-up But I don't know for sure because when when I asked Sam Bourne about the other two typos He said that those were deliberate when I asked him about this one kind of gave me a kind of Smirk and said it's possible anything's possible The extraneous exes are very intriguing as well. Sometimes they're used as sentence separators and sometimes not It could mean it could have something to do with different speakers It could be again the exes could be some part of a positioning thing We've tried circling the location on the sculpture where the exes exist to see if we saw some pattern and sometimes You like almost see a regular parallelogram or I studied astronomy something like it sort of looks like a Ryan and a We haven't found anything definite But they're definitely intriguing that they're in some of the locations, but not all exes and cues are commonly used as filler By cryptographers when they're writing a message if they need to have something that comes out to an even number of letters And you don't have the correct number of letters in the message. They'll add in exes and cues But can you see anything Q the Q might mean a question mark? And that's why we have this thing about the question mark at the beginning of part 4 Is it part of part 3 since part 3 ends in a question or is it part of part 4? We don't know the The only punctuation on the CIA crypto sculpture is question marks I don't around that time that I couldn't tell you the exact does anyone know the dates that Woodrow Wilson was president World War one Okay, so a little bit earlier WW might mean Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson's birthplace is actually near Washington DC I went driving by there and took pictures of the home to see if maybe it had something to do with WW Our leading theory on who WW is is that it means William Webster Who was the director of the CIA at the time that the crypto sculpture was installed and according to Sanborn was the leading force in getting More artwork for the agency according to Sanborn There was actually quite a feud among the CIA leadership that Webster wanted to give the CIA a kind of a softer image And that there were other high-ups in the CIA that didn't want the CIA to have a softer image And Sanborn thought that he was kind of getting caught in the middle of this battle For example, he talked about how he had an entire truck full of stone for some work He was doing at CIA that just disappeared one day and Sanborn was convinced that it was a message From some of the people at CIA that they didn't want them there others said it was just a screw-up sometimes Things disappear I don't know I don't know Was there a question here? Okay Now it's also possible that the can you see anything as a crib for the next section because what Howard Carter said after that was either Yes, wonderful things or yes, it is wonderful Which if the word yes is part of part four that might help us towards solving part four again We don't know this is just all speculation We're doing on time. Okay. So again, we come back to part four And now okay, so now we have Actually going back to the untitled cryptos piece So we have the text of cryptos was also on the smaller version and we had this encrypted Russian text on the other side So I'm like, well, maybe we need to solve this encrypted Russian text and it might give us a clue towards solving cryptos So I told you all this we started looking at it early last year and solving it Came out to be a three-step process transcribing it decrypting it and then translating and each one of them was difficult in its own way So it started when a man named Randall Boll like who's come to DEF CON on occasion and also comes to some of the other conventions like Freak Nick and Atlantic on on the east coast that I go to and he was driving through North Carolina And he stopped off and he saw the sculpture and he took a whole bunch of pictures and put them up on the web And I showed them to my cryptography group We've got about at that point We had about 50 people in the group now We have over 200 people in the group around the world that are all working really hard on cracking cryptos And he said let's get this thing solved So I presented to the group and we said okay, we need to transcribe it We need to crack this code and like two weeks went by. I didn't really hear anything from anybody. So I'm like, okay I'll start transcribing it. So I sat and I spent weeks working from photos transcribing each Character from the way the light was shining and looking at reversed images of the sculpture and came up with this transcript of The text that was on the sculpture and then I presented this transcript to the group And I said okay, here's a transcript of the projector at which point two of the people from the group came up and said oh, yeah We have transcripts too. I'm like, thanks for telling me But it was also good because at that point we had three entirely independent transcripts Which we could compare to make sure that we had one really hyper at hyper accurate transcript so we compared them all and we had about a dozen errors here and there and then I Nessed with it and didn't really find anything at cryptographically and we posted on the web and Because I wanted to release it to the world and see if maybe some other bright person out there might use our transcript and Figure something out. Well Maybe somebody did maybe somebody didn't in July. I Got a message from my customer service department at my game company and they said we got this really weird Letter through our anonymous feedback form. We have a form where customers can send us messages We won't know who the customers are and the message said forward this to in Lanka And so they forwarded it to me. They had no idea what it was about and In the message it said I have managed to solve the cryptographic portion of the cipher It is as advertised not terribly difficult Yes, I'm doing this anonymously because I have a sense of humor I mean they did say it was about the Cyrillic projector There was no name on it and our anonymous feedback form is really an anonymous feedback form So there was no way to trace it back So I was like, okay, so does this mean someone solved it and we need to do a press release and say it's done Or or what's the protocol here? So I went to Jim Galogale who used to be the head of the American Cryptogram Association And I said what what's what's the system here if someone says they've solved it But hasn't announced an answer do they get credit and he said no this has been talked over extensively and Just like in science doing something is not what gives you the credit for it's doing it and publishing what you've done Allowing others to verify and duplicate your work if it can't be duplicated then it's probably not real and He says that this is one of the foundations of science that it has to be something that other people can duplicate in an independent laboratory So I took this email and I filed it away again I didn't know for sure if the guy had solved the code because he didn't really give me any of the plain text and Went on with my business and we did some other crypto things and then in September I was reading my wed logs, which I do on a daily basis because I'm nosy and I saw that there was an interesting page linking to me that I'd never seen before and The page had this URL. It was an earth link net with the URL of cp solution that htm That's a really interesting URL. So I went and I looked at it and What it was was a Russian visionary table How how intriguing and I sent this along to the group and I said I again I didn't know if this was one of the crazies or if this was something real and I was at work So I couldn't really look at it at the time And then after work there's on a Friday evening I played with it a little bit and I found I started getting some Rick recognizable Russian text coming out of it This this may really be it So I stayed up until about three o'clock in the morning and it's not just a visionary table There's some other twists in it But it's about around three o'clock in the morning and I came up with something that was like this massive text that had a few Russian words in it, but I couldn't really read it and I was really sleepy and I went to sleep and I was trying to find people I knew an IRC who could read Russian and I couldn't find anybody who really wanted to help and It was frustrating and then the next morning. I am I got up and I actually had this problem where I Wanted to work on the code, but I had real life intruding I had some friends who I promised that I would help them move so they had boxes that needed to be carried So I'm like, okay, I'm on the verge of cracking this huge international code, but I also promised him I'd help him move so So I did my best to do both side carrying boxes and I had my cell phone and calling the cell phone I'm carrying more boxes and going on the front yard to try and get a good cell phone signal and I finally found someone who could Read Russian and in between carrying boxes and working the cell phone We we started getting bits and pieces out of it So that this was the text that I got after putting it through the vision air table Does anyone here read Russian? Yes, there are typos here so that made it complicated as well So you can verify a couple of the future slides that are coming up here so this is an English example of the problem and I won't make you suffer with this and we're also short on time So what this says is this sentence might be easily understandable to a native English speaker But someone not familiar with English would have a great deal of trouble reading or translating it plus the fact that there isn't any punctuation isn't any help either and And so this is what I was doing with the Russian. I wasn't a native Russian speaker. I can pick out a few words I have Slavic family. I used to be fluent in Serbic Croatian long long time ago But I definitely couldn't read it So but I found a native speaker a friend of a friend of my father and Working back and forth with the boxes in the cell phone by Saturday afternoon September 20th we had translated the whole thing and Also at the same time I had members of the cryptography group that were using that URL and we're tracing back the URL to find out Who who had that solution page and it was my name Frank core who lives in North Carolina And he had been the one that had sent me that anonymous message back in July However, he said that he'd gotten as far as the massive text and had never been able to get further than that He'd try playing with with the Russian dictionaries and Himself not being a native Russian speaker. He couldn't really get any further Also another number of my cryptography group came up and he said that around September 18th He too had come up to the point of that massive Russian text But hadn't wanted to say anything because he couldn't tell what it said So September 20th was really the first time that we knew what the message said And I presented this information to the group and it was it was verified and duplicated and so we went out and did a press release I won't read the whole thing to you but it basically came out to be two different texts and they use slightly different vision error systems as well which really screwed up frequency analysis counts the first part was instructions to Secret service agents we assume on how to develop a source and how you want to psychologically control the source and We've a psychological net around them, which you pull tight at the appropriate time So if you can control a source, then you can trust the information you get from that source and The second part was an extract from what looked like some sort of a memo about Sakharov who was a Soviet dissident and concerns that Statements that Sakharov was making were going to be used by the Americans for an anti-soviet agenda So I'm saying that this came from classified KGB correspondence How do we know it's classified KGB correspondence? Well, we found the source document for one of these parts and This is a this was smuggled out of Russia around The late 1980s, which is right around the time that cryptos was was being made and What I'll do is I'll expand this part here and that's the subject line And can you the guy who speaks Russian? Can you verify that this is close to what that what the second part was saying about? It says Sakharov in there and He's nodding Yeah, okay, and the reason that we know it was classified is because over here it says secret Now after we did the press release and it went up on slash dot and So my normal web counter and web hits I might get like three hits an hour or five hits an hour So I was like reading my web log the the next day and seeing the tracks by our in a three five eight nine thousand and thirty seven And over the course of two days, I probably got about fifty thousand visitors from slash dot my web server ran great I'm very proud of that and I really enjoyed reading the chatter that was going on slash dot and as Most of you know, it's very high-spirited very irreverent and I really enjoyed a couple of the joke solutions that were posted And and they said what the Seward projector really says is Vodka That was one and the other one and this is I think my favorite of the alternate Suggestions that what the Seward projector really says is keep information away from this and school Okay so So we went back and because there were typos in the Russian text and we went back and we looked at the projector and we circled where the typos where we wanted to make sure that our transcript was correct the typos hadn't come from us But now that the errors were in the sculpture We don't know if the the errors were again hard-coded in by the artist or if they were just a screw-up by some assistant Who wasn't familiar with Russian? Some days I think one some days the other Today, I'm thinking it was more more likely to be just a screw-up, but we don't know Okay, going back to cryptos Okay, now I'm going to be going into some really kind of blue sky stuff and and I'm just sharing speculation with you now This is an overhead view of CIA headquarters on the right over here Is this is the old headquarters building? This is actually the picture that I used to find the building in the first place I got this off a map quest and Over here on the right this is the old headquarters building and then in the mid 1980s they decided that they needed more room so they commissioned the new headquarters building over here and Along with commissioning the new headquarters building They also commissioned some art to be placed around the complex this white building here in the middle with the funny shaped roof Is the cafeteria? so there's a wall of windows here so that the Employees at the agency while they're eating can look out over the courtyard and in this courtyard is where the crypto sculpture exists And I'm going to have a close-up at a different time of year So again, we have the the white chick the the funny shape roots is the cafeteria wall of windows here Looking out of the courtyard this little squiggle right here. This is the crypto sculpture Now sandworn when he came in and did this he did not do just the crypto sculpture He actually did several pieces. He did the crypto sculpture here He also did this entire green Semi-circular area there's a duck pond here He's done quite a bit of landscaping here And he also did several pieces out here by the front entrance way and I'll have close-ups on another slide But there's several large slabs here with shoots of copper with Morse code messages And here's some pictures of those So they kind of stick out of the ground here's a walkway going by with Morse code messages and these things say like SOS Lucid memory T is your position There's also a compass engraved on one of these slabs Where the N on the compass does not point to north the middle on the compass does not point to north It is pointing towards another stone over there Which is it we believe a magnetic stone a lodestone sandborn has done other pieces that have lodestones as matter of fact This compass and one has done two other pieces around the DC area that have compasses like this I think they're one in Maryland one in Virginia and and this piece here And we've tried triangulating them seeing if they're pointing at an intersecting point. We don't know so but uh, it's it's interesting And I don't go into all these in detail because again We're running a long time. There are some other methods that have been proposed about coming up with the the plain text out of part 3 Someone's pointed out that cryptos is a key word for part 3 if you if you use the number 1 4 7 3 6 2 5 like the SL OW LI off of line 1 line 4 line 7 line 3 Now how does cryptos equal this word? Well, if you take the letters in cryptos and you alphabetize them and then you number them 1 through 7 and Then you spell it again correctly and move the numbers around you get the number 1 4 7 3 6 2 5 Which is exactly the key that could come up with part 3 now there's mathematical formulas a Daryl Orson who's the other co-creator of the cryptos discussion group Came up with a system where instead of diagonals you actually get nice verticals that come out with this message Again, we have the letters that are out of alignment And here's some close-ups of those the sandborn did say those were important someone's pointed out that on the tableau side at The end of the lines which should be the same as the cypher alphabet it should go E F G H I J L No, H I L L. There's two lines that end with the letter L This line should end with the J, but it doesn't it ends with L. Is this important? It might be it might be a clue We don't know One interesting One way to look at it is that before we know about the L We counted all the characters on the sculpture on the tableau side There were eight hundred and sixty four characters and on the cypher tech side there eight sixty sevens We're like okay eight sixty seven eight two that that's nice, and then okay, but we missed a letter So we have the L so now we have okay eight sixty five on one side and eight sixty seven on the other Okay, that's nice But remember I was talking about those reference spaces that were at the beginning of the alphabet on one side That we're taking about the same amount of space as a letter So if we include those two reference spaces, that's eight sixty seven and eight sixty seven and all of a sudden These numbers get much more interesting that there's exactly the same number of characters on either side of the sculpture Spelling errors I told you about Ceremon projector this was something that was just noticed. I think within the last week or so I'll show you a picture of projector in daylight and These plates are bolted together With the bolts that are very regularly spaced about four inches apart And someone noticed that there was an extra bolt on one line And you can't really see it on this side, but if we look from the other side, so we're looking towards the inside of it There's a bolt sticking out on the inside and this bolt is it exactly the same line as the keyword of Medusa Which is one of the keywords that was used for solving the projector So maybe this was some sort of an artistic thing to draw a viewer's eye to the line where the keyword was Maybe it's used for structural integrity. Maybe it's a screw up. We don't know But it's interesting here. Here are those reference spaces again Also, if anyone is familiar with vision air systems this vision air was a devised by a French Mathematician a few hundred years ago. It used to be considered the most uncrackable code in the world Now we can crack it pretty easily with computers as long as we have enough ciphertext to work from The reference alphabet here through Z is one method of doing a vision air table But the crypto sculpture the three the two parts that use vision air did not use this method of vision air they used a different method of vision air and But this method of vision air is the method that was used on the solar projector So again a very perplexing thing This is another old cipher system by Thomas Jefferson He encrypted messages this way where he had a series of wheels and he would turn them and you could reorder the wheels By different numbers and perhaps the reason that cryptos is designed like this way The thing is that it's a cylinder that's taken apart So maybe it needs to be put together like a cylinder and then we organize the wings. This is just a speculation Part four also we notice that the letters here we have kr There's a yp here and here we have a to s so we have all the letters of cryptos that are all kind of close to each other If we line them all up in seven letter rows we get several double letters that are directly under each other That's an intriguing aspect of it Cryptos has seven letters and again if we and so we have the seven letter rows is interesting These are the shite. This is the man who came up with the code systems for cryptos He said that he thought the last part would probably take ten years before it was cracked And this is something else that happened last December that is worth talking about and I know I'm only down to a few more minutes I had I had a contact at CAA who knew what the answer to cryptos was because the artist knows it It was given an envelope to the director and and this contact was very intrigued to see me visit CAA again And he said you need to get back on campus and and I was like well, I need official business and he said well Try what you can and if you can't get in let me know So I tried all my contacts couldn't get back in so I wrote back to this individual I said I cannot get back onto CAA you said maybe you'd pull some strings about three hours later I get this I am I get an I am from the screen name Molly H and the I am is one word one line and it said the key to cryptos is commit it and Comitech, I don't have any people who recognize the word commit it is the K in key in KGB Now I sent a message back to this individual. They said there was no reply. I sent another message back They were gone. I reached out to my security contacts I find out this is a screen name that was hacked and was deleted shortly after this message was sent to me Okay, so maybe it's a hint. Maybe it's a hoax. I don't know KGB Molly Hale also This may be a coincidence the head of the CIA's public affairs department is Molly Hale anyone who's written the CIA is saying I want in and gets back a letter saying no the letters probably been signed by Molly Hale Also, it was interesting that whoever said it used the word key not key word That's a very crypto thing to be saying and commit that does have seven letters Which matches with cryptos and some of the other things? Here's that source document and I'll just point out Comitech right there So was this a hint or a hoax? We don't know Whoever did send it we know this about them. They knew I was working on cryptos not hard Go to Google type in cryptos. My name comes up They maybe knew some CIA structure. Maybe they knew some crypto terminology Maybe they knew some Cold War history. Comitech is not a word that's commonly known And they did send a seven letter key and no matter what else we know about them We do know that they know how to cover their tracks Sandborn does have other sculptures around the world in many different languages He does tend to reuse things three of the sculptures use quotes from Adam Smith three have compasses one of those compass ones by the way is next to a sculpture called hidden under the three events and He also designed a restaurant in Washington DC called the Zola spy restaurant And one entire wall of this restaurant is covered with classified documents from Sandborn's private collection One of these documents and these documents are English Russian and French one of these documents is a source document for the surrender projector We have not been able to closely examine all these documents I mean they're like way up towards the ceiling, but if you used what a surrender projector document is possible There might be a source document for cryptos in there as well. He does have other references to cryptos around the restaurant So yes Um, Sandborn's father worked as a I don't know what's going on here. Yeah Sandborn's father worked for the Library of Congress for 30 years. So he was a one-of-the-head archivist Some real quick things about cryptos and pop culture I don't know how many people here have read the Da Vinci code But in the artwork of the book jacket there are five puzzles hidden within the artwork of the book jacket two of those puzzles referred to cryptos I'll go through these. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah On the back side on here. It says only ww knows and on another part We have in very faint light red on dark red music the latitude and longitude coordinates I don't believe that Dan Brown had any with the creation of cryptos as he was just fascinated by him So I get about 500 visitors a day from people that have read Da Vinci code and are now interested in cryptos This is one of the members of my crypto group He made a 3D model of the crypto sculpture and imported it into a half-life engine just so you could take a crowbar to it and shatter it in a thousand pieces And I don't have time for the NPR thing, so I'll skip that So Samurai cryptos has four sections of code three of the four have been solved He also has this untitled cryptos piece with two sides the CIO side and the KGB side The KGB side was what we solved last year when we cracked the soil and projector Both sides have spelling errors. We don't know how many are accidental and how many are deliberate Both Jim Sandborn and Ed Sheit have said that it was designed to be solved I asked I asked Sam one flyout is part four solvable. He said yes, it ain't easy, but it's solvable Anyone who wants to help I would love help translating some of Samborn's other sculptures He's got them written in the Iroquois, Algonquin, Abyssinian So anyone that has access to anyone can read those bizarre languages. I would really help 3D modelers, this is probably the most detailed 3D model we have so far of cryptos We want to make a full walk around so we can see the way the sunlight goes through it and anyone who's got 3D skills, you know And to get more information just go to Google and type in cryptos That's that's the easiest way to go. Also if you're on aim my screen name is Ilanka and I think I've got maybe two minutes for questions and then I'll be no time for questions so anyone who has questions I'm going to be going out into the lobby and You can ask me questions there. Thank you all very much for coming


Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today we're going to ask, what's the earliest English word? Then I'll be asking you for your opinion at the end, so stick around for the poll. Language change is a bit like boiling the proverbial frog. You don't notice how much a language has altered until you look back. It's hard to pick the point when English became English. Broadly speaking, English is the language that grew out of the collection of dialects spoken by Germanic mercenaries, invaders and settlers such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who came to Britain in the 5th century. It has changed a lot since that earliest form, now known as Old English, spoken by the people known as the Anglo-Saxons, but it is still all considered one language, English. Of course we can't know what the first spoken word in this language was, so what we're looking for is the earliest surviving written English word. So what's the earliest English writing we have? It's often said that the oldest Old English text to be written down was the law code of King Athelbert of Kent, composed in the early 7th century sometime before Athelbert died in 616, but after Augustine came to England to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 597, converting Athelbert to Christianity, making him the first Anglo-Saxon Christian king. The first sentence of the document reads, This Sindon Thadomas, the Athelbert Kinning, Asceta on Agostina Staya. These are the laws which King Athelbert established in Augustine's day. So then, is the earliest word this? Well, the problem is that the earliest surviving copy of this law code is a very late Old English manuscript from the early 12th century, and who knows how much it's changed in the recopying over the years, and if that sentence was even in the original. For the earliest Old English text that survives in its original form, not a later copy, we have to go to an inscription on an artifact. One such artifact is the Frank's Casket, a whale bone chest believed to date from the early 8th century. It's richly decorated with both pictures and inscriptions, written mostly in Anglo-Saxon runes. There isn't really a beginning to the various texts inscribed on the Frank's Casket, but the front panel which contains pictures of the Germanic legend of Weyland the Smith, and the biblical story of the adoration of the Magi, has inscribed on it a riddle about the makeup of the casket itself. Or the flood cast up the fish on the mountain cliff. The terror king became sad when he swam on the sand. The answer to the riddle is given as Hranespan, whale's bone, and it's a whale to which the first word of the text, fish, is referring. By the way, the Frank's Casket also contains a picture of the brothers Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf, connected with the legendary foundations of Rome, and an obscure picture including a horse which some have identified as a reference to the legendary foundations of Anglo-Saxon England with the two brothers Hengist, meaning stallion, and Horsa, meaning horse, the first two of those mercenaries invited to Britain. And it's to that foundation period of Anglo-Saxon England that we turn next. Because while the Frank's Casket contains perhaps the earliest extended text of Old English literature, there are artifacts from the earlier migration period with shorter inscriptions, such as the Undley Bractiate, found in Undley Common near Lake and Heath Suffolk, which dates to some time in the later 5th century, perhaps between 450 and 480. A Bractiate is a coin-like medallion which was apparently worn as jewelry. The Undley Bractiate contains a runic inscription which is the earliest example of the Anglo-Saxon variety of runes as opposed to the slightly different common Germanic elder Futhark. So this therefore would be a strong candidate for the earliest English writing. The inscription is a little hard to interpret, however. It reads, The last two words are clear enough, meaning reward for relatives, presumably referring to the Bractiate itself, similar to the Frank's Casket whalebone riddle. Neither word really makes it to modern English, except perhaps the fairly archaic mead, not the honey wine that the Anglo-Saxons drank, but M-E-E-D, meaning reward. The first series of characters, however, has sparked much debate. One possibility is that it represents a war cry. There is another artifact, called the Kragohol 1 lance shaft, which was found on Funen, Denmark, which also has a runic inscription that includes the similar string of runic characters, Gagaga. A war cry would certainly make sense on a spear shaft. Another suggestion for the Gagoga of the Undley Bractiate is that it means howling she-wolf in reference to the picture on the Bractiate of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, just like that picture we saw before in the Frank's Casket. So the entire phrase would then mean, this she-wolf to a kinsman is a reward. A third possibility is that Gagoga represents some kind of magical incantation or formula. Another similar Bractiate, called the Seelen 2C Bractiate, which was found on Seelen, Denmark, has an inscription which means, How do you how I am called the dangerous knowledgeable one? I give chance. And that last phrase, I give chance or luck, is often used to argue that Bractiates are some kind of magical amulets. So perhaps the Undley Bractiate, too, is some kind of lucky charm, and Gagoga is our earliest English word. We just don't know what it means. Our next candidate is more understandable. At Caster Saint Edmund in Norfolk, an urn was found containing over 30 astrogalus bones, otherwise known as talus or ankle bones, presumably gaming pieces. All but one of the bones in the urn are from sheep. That one exception is from a roe deer, and has inscribed on it the word raihan, meaning roe. And in fact, we get the modern English word roe from this. So again, like the Frank's Casket naming its material, this gaming piece names itself as the one roe bone in the bunch. The find was dated to circa 425 to 475, so possibly earlier than the Undley Bractiate, making this, potentially, the earliest inscription found in Anglo-Saxon England. The catch with this word raihan, though, is that it's inscribed in the runes of the Elder Futhark variety, from the mainland, rather than Anglo-Saxon runes. It's believed these game pieces may have been brought over by one of the invading Germanic warriors coming to Britain. So does it count as English? Oh, and what game exactly were they used to play? Well, one popular game at the time is now known as knuckle bones, though as we've seen, actually played with ankle bones. Much like modern jacks. You put one bone on the back of your hand, throw it up in the air, and pick another from the ground, then you catch the one you threw up, continuing on like this adding one bone each time. So, do you want to place your bet on this word? Both these inscriptions come from the Anglo-Saxon migration period when it was said Hengaston Horsa arrived in England bringing their troop of warriors with them around the middle of the 5th century. For our next candidate for the earliest English word, we turn to an account of that invasion itself, not from the Anglo-Saxons, but from the indigenous Britons. The Celtic writer Gildus wrote about the fall of Britain to those Germanic invaders, and in doing so, he seems to have preserved a word of these Anglo-Saxons. Gildus was writing in Latin, but he uses a non-Latin word in his text. Which means, then a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness in three Culeus, as they call longships in their language. Gildus presumably got this word Culeus, meaning longships, from some Germanic source, and indeed the word reappears in Old English as Cule, in later Old English texts, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was compiled starting in the late 9th century, recounting the arrival of Hengaston and Horsa. Meaning, in their days, Vortigern invited the Anglo-Race here, and they then came in three ships here to Britain. So, although the word first occurs in a Latin context, it could be said to be the earliest recovered word of written Old English. But speaking of the Angles, what about them and their language? Well, again, we can turn to Latin contexts, specifically the ethnographic writings of the Roman author Tacitus, who way back around the year 98 wrote a book called Germania, in which he describes the various Germanic tribes that had come into contact with the Romans. One tribe he mentions he calls the Anglie, which seems quite plausibly to be the Angles, who three and a half centuries later would invade Britain and give us the modern term English. And what does Angle mean? Well, it seems to refer to their homeland, now known as Angeln, in the part of Germany known as Schleswig-Holstein, which kind of has a hook-like shape, and that's what the name seems to mean, fish hook. Remember that fishy whale on the Franks casket? That name Angle is therefore related to the modern word angler, another word for fishermen. It in fact goes back to an Indo-European root which means to bend and gives us the other word Angle, as in corner, through Latin, as well as the word ankle, which by the way means that that previous possible earliest English word roe is written on an ankle or English bone. As a name, in fact, it's always been ripe for wordplay. Pope Gregory the Great, who sent Augustine to Canterbury to become Archbishop and convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, was inspired to do so when he saw a couple of fair-haired, pale-skinned Anglo-Saxon boys for sale in the slave market in Rome. And upon hearing they were Angles, pund that they were non-angly said Angeli, not Angles but Angels. And when he heard that they were from the Northumbrian Kingdom of Deira, he said that they should be saved Deira from Wrath. And finally, on learning that the king of that land was named Alla, he simply replied, Alleluia.  So perhaps in a sense, English itself is the earliest English word, at least in the form Anglie found in a Latin text, though one whose earliest surviving manuscript dates from the 15th century, well after the Anglo-Saxon period. But if we accept it anyway, the irony is that it predates the English language itself. So what do you think should count as the earliest English word? The laws of Athelbert and its opening word this? The Frank's Casket with its first word fish? The Ungly Bracteat with its possibly magical Gagoga? The Caster by Norwich Gaming Piece with Rehan on it? The Culus that the Anglo-Saxons used to come to Britain? Vote now in the poll and comment to let me know the reason for your choice. Or if you think none of these is right, and it's actually the word Anglie, English itself, you can say so in the comments, since the poll only allows five choices. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel and share it. And check out our Patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter, and you can read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net. Speaking of the Anglo-Saxon migration and Hengis, Torsa and Vortigern, if you head over to Jabsy's channel, you can see a video about the Anglo-Saxon invasions that we made together for his 3-minute history series, with lots more details about the 5th century.


The Challenge of the Yukon On King! On you Huskies! The Wonder Dog King, swiftest and strongest of Eskimo League dogs, blazes the trail through storm and snow for Sergeant Preston as he meets the Challenge of the Yukon. Sergeant Preston was typical of the small band of Northwest Monty Police who preserved law and order in the new Northwest country where the greed for wealth and power led to frequent violence and bloodshed. But in spite of the odds against them, Sergeant Preston and his Wonder Dog King met that challenge and justice ruled triumphant. Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Monty Police was making his usual patrol from Dawson to Selkirk. With him was Andika Rothers, a trapper who lived between the two towns. King, Preston's big, huge husky lead dog, was breaking the trail ahead when suddenly a gray sheep appeared. Preston, look up ahead! Oh! Oh! Oh, King! Oh, here, King! Andi, come in right here. You got him! Right on, King. Stay right here, boy, and don't move. That's the first time I ever saw a timber wolf try to attack a dog team. It wouldn't unless something were wrong with it, Andi. Let's have a look. That wolf would have attacked King if he hadn't called him back. Something funny about that.   Careful, Andi.  What do you think was wrong with him? You see that thick saliva coming out of its mouth? Yeah. This wolf has rabies in an advanced stage and it would attack anything it saw. Gosh! It was lucky you shot it before it got to King. The trouble is it may have infected other animals in this territory. Yeah? There's an Indian village near here, isn't there? Well, there's one about five miles west of here. And they may have dogs and horses. I guess I better go over there. Some of their animals may have been bitten. I don't like to take my dogs. But either animals have been infected. It may be dangerous. Well, why don't you leave them with me? My cabin ain't far from here and I got a shed. I can put them in. It's a good idea, Andi. I'll leave King and the team with you. I'll go over by myself. About a mile the other side of the Indian village toward which Preston was traveling, two men were filling bottles in a small cabin. The pale liquid they were pouring filled the cabin with a ranc odor. He he he he he. Them redskins can drink this. Steph is more than I can drink it. I love it.  What do we care? As long as they're willing to trade good furs for it, we don't have to worry about what is doing to them. I'll be glad when we get enough furs to pull out of here. I'm sick of making this. Heck, we ain't even started. We're staying here a long time. Why, is this the best trap in territory in a hundred miles? Those fox skin there bring an inner worth of fortune. As long as we don't tangle with the law, there's no danger of that. This village ain't near a town and the Indians have always been peaceful. We're far off the trail, too, as Redbird got back from his trapping. Yeah? And that last batch of furs today while he was away. Six of the finest pelts he ever saw. Give them to me for two bottles. Redbird's our best customer since he learned to drink. He's sure a good trapper. Redbird put his small bundle of furs in the corner of his hut. White fawn, his young squaw, looked at it anxiously. You not have good luck? No, trap's empty. This not good. Everyone say Redbird best trapper in village. This not true. Me good trapper. Maybe trade furs for firewater? Oh, stop talking. Someone come. Looks like white man. Any of you speak English? Redbird, come make fun. Redbird? Huh, you speak English? I'm Sergeant Preston, Northwest Mountain Police. Police? What police want? I want to find out how many dogs and mules you have in this village. Can you tell me? Many dogs, three mules. Any of them been bitten by anything lately? Or any of them sick? No. Our mule will come back with the bite on leg. Oh. Redbird away trapping. Our mule will get loose. Come back yesterday. I'd like to see it. Mule in shed, come. You say the mule was bitten. Hind leg bleed, maybe wolf or dog bite. Squaw talk too much. Here, mule. Yes, it was bitten all right. Part of the flesh torn off. That heals soon. Bite not bad. You say the mule's been loose? How long? Him gone two days. Maybe wolf or dog bite him. Redbird, I'm going to have to stay in your village for a few days. Will you take me to the chief? Come. Breakfast tasted good. We better get out to the still and get to work. Not many hours a day like this time of year. I guess you're right. Hand me that Parker, will you? I swear, you get lazier every day.  Here comes Redbird. I wonder what he wants. Ain't that time to drink up all that tarantula juice he bought yesterday? Hello, Redbird. Come on in. You want more fire water? No, me want to talk. White man come to village. White man? When? Yesterday. Who is he? Him say him police. Police? He say anything about the fire water? Him not know. Him say him come. Look at animals. Look at animals. Sounds crazy, Nick. Him make talk with chief.  Maybe you help Redbird stop him. Why does he want to shoot your mule? You'll go away, get bite on leg. Leg not hurt bad.  Him say mad wolf bite mule. He ain't after us, Nick. Must be a rabies scare. Yeah, but it ain't healthy to have him around.  Don't let him do it. Chief say him law. Chief say Redbird do what law say. We know white men's law better than the chief. Well, you need that mule. They cause many furs. Me know. Me trade furs for fire water. Any other animals in the village he wants to shoot? Dog of Kula, him sick. Police say him watch dog two, three day. Maybe shoot. Kula not like. Nick, maybe we better get up. Well, if I were you, I wouldn't stand for it, Redbird. Why don't you and Kula get rid of him? What you mean? Well, he's all alone, ain't he? Him sleep intent. You've got a good knife. Tonight when he's asleep, use it. You mean kill, but Nick a mountain. You and Kula can take a mountain barium. Why you just disappear? Nobody know what happened to him.   Maybe more white man come. We'll talk to him if they do. We'll say no white man was here. Oh, you see, we got a mule too. I don't want him shot. I'll tell you what I'll do. Here are two bottles of fire water. I'll give them to you if you get this white man out of the way.  Yep. And you don't have to give me any furs for it. Me ask Kula. You better do it tonight. He might shoot your mule tomorrow. And it'll be too late. Maybe. Oh, hello white fawn. You want to see me? Redbird gone. Him not know me talk to you. I hope you understand why I think your mule should be shot. Redbird doesn't. Redbird angry. Me come to ask you not shoot mule. Redbird got no furs to trade now. Him poor. Why, I thought Redbird was the best trapper in the village. Him get many furs before white men come. White men? Well, there aren't any white men in the village, are there? Them near village. Does Redbird trade them furs? Me no tell. Redbird beat me. Does he trade them for bottles? You know?  Not exactly white fawn, but I may find out tomorrow. Not shoot mule? Not unless I have to. You are a good man. Thank you, white fawn. Darkness had fallen over the Yukon and King Preston's big lead dog paced back and forth in Andy Carruthers' small cabin. Well, poor old fella.  I wish I could explain to you that's where your own good is making you stay here. Now come on. I'll put this rope on your collar, take you outside for a while. You're going to have to quiet down. It's way past my bedtime, but I can't sleep with you whining and scratching out all the time. Come on, will you? Hey, come back here! King! God, you shot him, pulled that rope right out of my hand. Here, King, come back here! He's gone. Preston's going to take my head off for letting him get away. Well, nothing I can do about it. Sergeant Preston was sleeping soundly in his tent in the Indian village when he was awakened by a warm tongue licking his face. What? What? King old fella, how'd you get here? Oh, I see. Rope on your collar. You book away from Andy. You shouldn't have come, boy. All right, fella. Lie down here beside me. Can't help being glad to see you. I missed you. Everything was dark and silent in the Indian village. The wind had died down and the trees stood motionless. Beneath their shadows, two figures stole silently toward Sergeant Preston's tent on Moccasin's feet. As they neared the tent, one of them drew a long knife. As the other silently pulled back the flap of the tent. Then suddenly a gray form hurtled through the air. Take your boy! Take your boy! What is it? All right, fella. Good boy. Got him, King. Don't move whoever you are. That dog will tear you to pieces. Well, it's a red bird. Guess I better take that knife. All right, King, off him, boy. Get up, red bird. I'm going to tie you and keep you here until morning. Preston sat in Red Bird's cabin as the pale Yukon dawn broke over the hills. Red Bird sat stolidly before him as Preston talked to him kindly. I know you're not a bad Indian, Red Bird.  That's why you did what you did. The mounted police are here to help the Indians and the Yukon, not to harm them. You want to shoot me all. I know it's hard for you to understand that, but if you'll help me, I'll see that you got another mule. Him good man, Red Bird. I could arrest you and have you hang for trying to murder me. But if you'll help me, I won't do that. What, what me do? I want you to get more fire water from these white men today. Have you any furs to trade?  Aw, so it was their idea. They'd be rid of me and you'd get to blame. I want you to go and collect those bottles, Red Bird. I don't know what happened last night. King and I will follow. Come on, we'll go to their cabin. Gosh, I guess Red Bird ain't wasting any time collecting. Hello, Red Bird. Come in. Oh, did you do it? Do you want Kula to get him? Sit down, sit down. Tell us what happened. Yeah, I got you fire water already. One bottle for you and one for Kula. Here it is.  Look your hands under arrest. That's better than that. You're selling liquor to the Indians. Well, we wasn't selling it. You were giving it to him as a reward for murdering me. Thanks to this dog, it didn't work out that way. Get together. I'm handcuffing you. What's these men, King? Red Bird, can all the furs these men have, the furs that you and the rest of your tribe traded for liquor? We'll take them back to the village and distribute them among your people. If any dogs or mules are sick, these furs will get more for you. You can't take our furs. I'm taking you back to Dawson. You won't need them in jail. These copyrighted dramas originate in the studios of WXYZ Detroit, and all characters, names, places and incidents used are fictitious. 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