Good afternoon. Today I have been thinking about Layer V and how it may apply to the hunt. I think that there are clues that don’t have to do with directly solving the poem but involve filtering down the search area through a number of different lenses. I understand that at the end of the day we have to use the poem to find an exact location, but what if we could dramatically shrink the map?

There are three lenses that I feel fairly solid on and they are elevation range, land designation, and animal territory. I have already shared a post about the potential elevation clue but I’m not ready to discuss the details of the others. I also feel confident that it won’t be a place far outside an area mentioned in the memoir. The memoir should be helpful in identifying areas of personal significance to Justin.

I had the idea that these lenses could be like the five W’s, or ten V’s. Who, what, where, when, and why.

Land designation = Who are we dealing with?

Elevation range = What elevation is the treasure at?

Animal territory = Where is the territory of the animal?

Time of year = When is the best time of year to search for or retrieve the treasure?

Places of Meaning = Why did you hide the treasure where you did?

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Have you found what you consider to be strong evidence for a filter? We have also been warned about the dangers of checked boxes, always good to keep that in mind.

Good morning! The number forty-two has been confirmed as pertaining to a clue by Justin himself, but what it could mean is open to interpretation. Today I want to offer an analysis on Rule 42 from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and address how it may be an elevation clue and or potentially related to the checkpoint.

"Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court." This arbitrary rule is levied against Alice by the King of Hearts as she grows tall during the trial. Alice initially protests insisting that she is not a mile high when it is pointed out that she is nearly two miles high. After stating that she won't leave because it's a rule that was just invented, the King claims that it's the "oldest rule in the book". To which Alice replies "Then it ought to be number one"

For some context, some scholars believe that Carroll is referring to article 42 of the Anglican Church. Carroll himself was a devout member of the Church of England and came from a high-church Anglican family. Article 42 addresses the eternal damnation of the soul. His use of rule 42 would appear to be a mockery and rejection of this tenet.

Considering the possibility that this could be an elevation clue and given the context, I would be of the opinion that the treasure would be hidden above a mile high, which is above 5280 feet. I have long thought that the thermocline offered an elevation hint as well, indicating a range from 5500 to 6500 feet. This would be in line with the rejection of rule forty-two. But then again, maybe that is the ladder of false humility and it’s the opposite of what I’m thinking.

"Rule number one, carved in stone. Never shall wheel touch checkpoint soil." Carmen's mother's border crossing commandment. Here we have the only instance of the word "checkpoint" in the book. Supposedly the extra chapter will not help anyone find the treasure, so take this with a grain of salt. If rule forty-two is the oldest rule in the book, then perhaps it ought to be number one. Like an ancient carving in stone, maybe the first commandment. No other gods before me, no false idols, no bronze beasts. The wheels of the sinner will not set foot on the soil of heaven. Borders are just arbitrary lines on a map, but at the end of the day we have to get out of the car. We have to leave our carefully constructed defenses and the borders of our own comfort. We have to go BOTG.

I take it as a potential commentary not only on rejecting fear based ideas and religious tenets. But also as a metaphor for letting go of what weighs us down, illustrated by leaving the car where we must forge on by foot. There is true sin that we commit and then there are those that would condemn us to an eternity of torment as punishment for breaking the arbitrary rules of a vengeful god. Where does the rule break down?

A fun little addendum here, Fenn himself had a list of rules to live by. I listened to a story about how he came up with his first rule after getting punched in the face as a kid. But he said that all of his rules boiled down to just one. "It doesn't matter who you are, it only matters who they think you are". A great nugget of rugged wisdom pertaining to playing the game of illusion that is the human world. The only problem with Fenn's ultimate rule is that you run the risk of eventually lying to yourself, and there is no hiding from that when you are staring down the void under the crushing weight of eternity.

There are some other ideas that I have relating to the number 42 that might need their own threads. This is probably my last post for a little while, but maybe sometime we can talk about the meaning of life and how arriving at an answer before the question is a great analogy for confirmation bias.

Good afternoon! First of all I want to say congrats to Rose and The Misfits for solving the cipher. I am done with the controversy surrounding the circumstances of the reveal, so save that for a different thread. Today I wanted to lay out some additional supportive evidence for the cipher result that I have found in the book. Perhaps these alignments are pure coincidence, but I find them compelling. I know they won't help to find the treasure, but I spent a day looking for them for the sake of curiosity.

The Margay Magyar - Cat Scratch Fever

It is reasonable to expect that someone could come up with Margay before they get to Magyar, and indeed that seems to be what happened. While that result is not compelling on it's own, there is additional evidence that points to the same theme with cats masquerading as dogs and vice-versa. There is some low hanging fruit with the two cats at the Westminster Dog Show and the curious bloodhound at the cat convention, but what about the two uninvited dinner guests? The Austrian gold ducats or "two-cats".

I have made a couple of previous posts sharing my cipher solves of "Tucker as my serval" and "JAGUAR", you can search my profile for them if you wish. While I was confused by the results, I felt confident that I was on the right path with the theme of the spotted cat showing up twice. Especially with the result that indicates the transformation of a cat into a dog or vice-versa. This turned out to be on the nose for the result that was revealed.

I now have the three spotted cats of six letters each, pointing to 666 as the number of The Bronze Beast. That three headed hound of hell that guards the ancient gates of Hades. Taking a look at The Bronze Beast, the second image (version 2.0) of Tucker as a puppy is taken next to some cat furniture, a scratching post that upon close inspection appears to have some good use. That speaks to paw prints that you hope are canine.

The Swiss Watchmaker

I can't take credit for finding the Rubik's Cube designed by Salvador Dali, but it creates a compelling connection between someone that was famously obsessed with painting melting clocks and a famous Hungarian inventor. Switzerland is roughly halfway between Spain and Hungary.

Update: I wanted to add an update here that I found after posting this. Calling out the scene from Gracie's where Justin approaches the counter with map and porcelain dog to find Gracie haggling over a pocket watch. Gracie with the cat-eye glasses and that same fever that keeps Justin hunting.

The Siege of Vienna Sausages

The siege of Vienna is a famous battle that marked a turning point in the Ottoman conquest of Europe. It marked the furthest that the Ottoman's would advance and the subsequent 150 years of war that followed resulted in the regaining of most of Ottoman Hungary. There is a lot to this story and there were two sieges of the city about 150 years apart. I'm no history major so forgive any inaccuracies.

In The Derailed Duo, Justin describes the landscape as having graduated from Swiss finishing school. Switzerland is a country that borders Austria to the east. The Tibetan monks of Buddha-pest offering prayers of support. In the following paragraph we have frozen Turks and a festive spirit that hung in the air, or would that be "hung-airy-in"? The conditions of freezing weather was one of the primary factors in the failed siege of 1529 with early snow and severe cold that forced the Ottoman retreat.

I also think about the banishment from the Dillon Supermarket, an incident involving frozen sausages that were most certainly of the Vienna variety. What did they do, try to steal the sausage? The Ottomans were eventually pushed back and "banished" from Europe following the turning point of the second siege of Vienna in 1683.

The Grand Budapest Grandmaster

In Posey Land we are introduced to The Lodge at Cloudcroft, a grand old Victorian dame. Here we have some additional context of the Great Migration, which can be applied to the migration of the Magyars from the Ural Mountains to the Carpathian Basin in modern day Hungary. Towards the end of the chapter his father's attention to his tackle is described as having the intensity of a chess grandmaster playing for world peace. A quick search on this reveals the Susan Polgar Foundation. Susan Polgar just happens to be a famous Hungarian chess grandmaster known for her work promoting chess as a tool for peace. Additionally, Susan is one of three sisters who are all famous chess players. Two of the sisters are grandmasters with the third an international master. Judit Polgar is widely considered the best woman chess player of all time and the only woman to have ever made it into the world's top ten.

Then there is Aiden, a monk sworn to the order of bookworm, or was it Buddha? Here we find a connection to Nikola Tesla through Einstein and DaVinci in the context of electrical engineering. Tesla lived in Budapest at the time that he had his vision for alternating current that would change the world.

Hungary for More

There are more tenuous and delicate threads that I seem to have found in all of these veins. They are hard to articulate and ultimately sound kind of crazy if you didn't think we were already there. Notably absent from the book is any word related to "hunger" so I'm curious if there is any context related to this in the book that may reveal more. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the rant and have fun!

I would like to introduce two additional ciphers that I have found. Together with the serval cipher I have already shared (here), they all seem to point to one thing. A rabbit, and by extension of the Easter Bunny, I have come to believe that the container is an Easter egg. The first cipher of "serval as my tucker" using 4:19 and 7:39 and the first word from each of these chapters, gives a cat with unique ears that border on rabbit-like. The next cipher I will share is "jaguar", or "jack-wire", which points to rabbit through "jack-rabbit". And finally the Matrix Cypher, another pirate betrayal. Here we are instructed to "follow the white rabbit".

I would preface the following with the fact that I have shared both the serval and jaguar ciphers with Justin quite some time ago, so neither of them is THE cipher. But perhaps taken together with the final piece of the white rabbit it might point to the container. His comment this morning seems to indicate that it has multiple parts and that the letter X is somehow important. I did share the white rabbit cipher and my new interpretation of what the other two ciphers point to with Justin in an email just prior to Seekers Summit. Maybe he didn't have a chance to read it until afterwards, or maybe I am just lost in a house of mirrors wanting to hold on to the idea that I figured it out.

Jaguar Jack Sparrow

Jaguar Jack Sparrow is the next porch pirate in line. Taking Forrest Fenn as Santa Claws, the Santa Fe-rryman who grants passage to ford the river below Iron Springs in The Treasure Trail. The cipher that Forrest gave us, Iron Springs BrowN, or ISBN. While it is true that you cannot choose your own ISBN, it is also true that you can buy your ISBN in advance of writing a book, giving plenty of time to figure out a way to use it. The ISBN is 978-1-966862-01-7

This cipher uses a simple A1Z26. Starting with the low-hanging fruit of the single digits 1 and 7, we get “A” and “G”. Next we need to divide by zero, i.e., split the zero off from the one. Like cultivating a tropical paradise in the arid desert. A zero applied to the A1Z26 is undefined, just like dividing by it. Take a small liberty here and use the “U” from undefined. So now we have four letters “UAAG”. Those can be rearranged to form “AGUA”. There is Iron Springs.

The final two chunks of the ISBN need to be reduced to a number that fits inside of 26. Taking a hint from Niven, get the sum of all the numbers in each block. The first block is easy because 24 fits inside of 26, giving us “X”. The final chunk gives us 37, so add 3 and 7 again to get 10, or “J”. Interesting that the Roman numeral for 10 is X. We now have “XJUAAG”.

If you followed along with the Serval cipher then you’ll know that there is a decoder ring that will get you from 18 to 24, or 24 to 18, “X” to “R”. The oRyX, the X-Rated Pink Panther Umbrella, X-Ray vision, the 18 to 20 keys of Niven the property manager paired with a 20 hour eviction notice. I don’t know about you, but when I hear 20 hour eviction notice I immediately wonder why it isn’t 24 hours. Kind of like hour 18 of a 25 hour drive at the age of 20. After applying the decoder ring we end up with the fully decoded text of “RJUAAG”. This is an anagram with a single solution, “JAGUAR”.

Was Shadow Foot really a raccoon? Perhaps Justin wasn’t actually the one in the pizza pajamas. The paw prints that they hoped were canine. What darkness camouflages the wildlife, is it nightfall or a melanistic color variation? Like a floor Jack punching above it’s weight class, a jaguar is a little big to be hanging out on the porch. Stuffed to the whiskers like a glutton for punishment, or an overstuffed sofa that’s lead serval scandalous lives (probably nine). Then there is the matter of the sports car. I don’t know much about this topic, but I know that Ferrari isn’t the only name on the market. This is no Easter Jeep Safari on the Moab Rim.

I couldn't help myself with the rant in the previous paragraph, but the Cable Conundrum is an important chapter here. The wine of 1's and 0's, plugging the loose cable (or wire) into the jack, the halls filled with the chatter of cats as rare as Bigfoot. Speaking of communion wine, did someone spike the punch-line? The additional holidays of Thanksgiving and Saint Patrick's Day. I find it interesting that the calendar distance between these two holidays is about the same as that between Christmas and Easter. There is also a link back to Iron Springs with the wine and the Chalice Well, a spring in England that runs red with iron, or as legend has it the blood of Christ.

Follow the White Rabbit

Most of us are probably familiar with the iconic scene in the Matrix. Neo asleep at his desk when he receives a cryptic message. "Wake up Neo, the Matrix has you". "Follow the white rabbit". He recognizes the white rabbit tattoo on the woman and follows them to a rave where he meets Trinity and finds his way out of the dream. The crew is later betrayed by Cypher, a familiar theme with the pirate thread. Cypher is a character that regrets his choice to take the red pill and wake up to the truth.

In the book, this cipher is introduced in The Conquistador Conquest through Uncle Hyram and his enigmatic book, or was it a record collection? The key to this cipher is understanding how mescaline is the only way to fly, as per the statement by Neo's nefarious customer at the beginning of the movie just before the white rabbit appears. The Conquistador Conquest contains a secret story about an experience of taking mescaline, a cactus-based adventure complete with an existential crisis. The secret semaphore of desert plants, appreciation at a molecular level, the landscape transformed into a shimmering canvas, a harebrained scheme, a lifetime suspicion of cacti. Try reading it from this perspective.

East-Star Bunny

With all three of these ciphers pointing to a rabbit I believe there is one additional step to understanding what the container is. Forrest Fenn as Santa may be a hint to the holiday theme. The additional association of the two noble furs, or emperor weepuls said to double your money. The three wise men who followed the star from the east. But we also have a Birthday to roll everything together into that golden moment. Perhaps the birthday is the day that you wake up from the Matrix.

I don't think that the container would be a hollow bunny like the chocolate you used to get in your basket. I think the container is an Easter egg both figuratively and literally. That metallic egg would be one tough code to crack. I would be very curious to hear if anyone has found a cipher that decodes directly to "EASTER", or "EGG", step forward please and share. I had the thought that perhaps some of the clock times may be semaphore but I haven't spent much time exploring that.

Three beasts, three ciphers of six letters each "SERVAL", "JAGUAR", "RABBIT". 666, lift and turn to 999, the purity of a gold bar. Or perhaps that is the gold in the golden moment of a birthday, Easter, and Christmas all rolled together. If nothing else I hope this has been entertaining. Have a great day!