Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 42 - Cicada 3301

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Soundcloud - @chilluminatipodcast Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/ThatOneLaserClown Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft Video - http://www.twitter.com/digitalmuppet

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Check out this versatile lineup at Toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Then, as always, just jump into it. Hello, everybody. And welcome, welcome to the next episode. Episode 42 of Chiluminati Podcast. As always, I am one of your three hosts, Mike Martin, and joined by my other two co-hosts, Alex Fosyane, who are still not particularly comfortable you not having a beard.

It's coming back pretty pretty quickly. It does come back very quickly for you anyway, unlike me. Yeah, I'm pushing it out every day. You got that borderline like when you go real low and you just go like a mustache, you kind of got like you're still very welcoming looking, but you're like borderline serial killer. I know I there's there's people

who are much less polite about that on this Internet. I just and obviously our other co-host, Jesse Cox, who did not shave his beard and who I don't think I have ever, ever, ever seen in my whole like six years, no one you know without a beard. I think the last time I didn't have a beard was 2010. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. What do you think?

What do you what do you think? What are the what's the over under on you going to like another smooth face? Um, maybe for my wedding day. OK, yeah, I figure I like that's appropriate, but I'd have to marry someone who wants to be with me. And that person probably is down for the beard, so might not happen. And preferably who makes delicious homemade tortillas. Here's the thing.

Look, if there is a just like a sweet, I'm going to say 60 plus little Mexican woman out there who's just like wants to make me fresh homemade tortillas. And then I just come home every day, but I come home. I mean, leave the room where I record downstairs. Yeah. Then we just like hold each other and she feeds me delicious tacos. Oh my God. That's the great image of you being created like a baby.

She's stroking the top of your head while the other hand feeding you tortillas. Oh, that sounds gonna be OK, baby. Perfect. Oh, yeah. Then we'll watch like Netflix shows when Netflix and chill. But by chill, I mean literal will just like drink horchata and have the best life ever. True love. Yeah, true love comes in all packages, all sizes.

Yeah, it's true. All all people just put it out there with each other. I love that. This is going to be an Alex episode today. So I hope you're as always very prepared because you don't know what you're going to get an Alex episode. And that's exciting before we even go that way. We've got a big announcement to make for a couple of years. I just want to say thank you for the support.

Like Illuminati was something we just kind of started and was just like, this would be fun. We're all interested in this stuff. And I think we could, you know, have a good time talking about it. It's grown and grown over the two years. And one of the extremely validating. It's extremely validating. It certainly pads the ego that needs to be padded inside me. It's an hour of nonsense.

But you all listen and we thank you for that. And for basically since we started, you've been asking for weekly episodes, which we would love to do. And, you know, as well as ways to directly support us through either, you know, Merch Buy or Patreon or whatever. So with that said, we're going to go ahead as people have requested. And we are going to open up a Patreon opening up the day this episode goes live. And what this is going to allow us to do is that we love doing this. This is a fantastic podcast to do.

But each episode requires an insane amount of work, usually research, writing things up, especially the multi-parters. So in order for us to want to do this once a week, we got to make sure like we are, we have enough viability to move forward. And so the one and only goal that we have is 5,000 a month. And if we hit that goal, we will go ahead and do weekly episodes of Chiluminati podcast. That'll allow us to take the time out of our schedules to do research, to write up scripts, to schedule things to make sure if we've, if we're going to be gone a week, we double up. Basically just allows us the time to put into the Chiluminati beyond what we already do.

Again, we can't thank you enough for the insane support on this podcast. And we are very excited to see what 2020 brings. They're just going to be two simple tiers, the $1 tier, which will give you, it's just kind of like a throw a little something our way as a thanks and access to the, to the community discord that'll be connected to Patreon and the $15 tier. That is just going to give you a green name and discord. But on top of that, after every episode of the Chiluminati podcast, we'll have a 15, 20 minute mini episode where we kind of talk about paranormal news of the week

or just weird things happening in our world and current events and stuff like that. And once we do like four or five of those, we'll bundle those. There'll be a timed exclusive for Patreon and then we'll release them as a one full episode. So you'll probably get like one of those every couple of months if you're not a patron. If there's anything else that I can not ramble about, boys, feel free to take it away. But I feel like, you know, I just wanted to get it all out. You're laying it out perfect. This is exactly what we want to do.

Like this is the way that we're going to do this, where it becomes more than just a hobby for us. Right? Right now, if you're happy with what you've got, you don't have to do anything and you're going to get at least that going forward, plus these extra episodes every once in a while that are us just going over headlines and whatnot. And that's just for doing absolutely nothing. But if you got a little extra spank in the bank, is that what people say? That is not what they say. Okay. Well, if they do, if they do say that and they do have that, you know,

we've got a little cream on the top of the crop. You know what I'm saying? I've got to work it out. Work it out. Cheese and the cheese greater. You know what I'm saying? Got a little bit of that. Focus really hard and then once it's there, once it's there.

No, got a little bit of money in the wallet right on top. Send it our way. No, I won't make it worth your while. You get you get a you get an episode every week. If enough people get on board and I feel like that's I feel like that's I would love to do this fucking like every week. I love this. I love doing this podcast.

So it's great. So what's the so what's the URL for people to go to that Patreon? It is patreon.com slash Chilluminati pod. Very, very simple. Just check it out over there. Like I said, three simple tears with the goal below. We want to do this every week and with your help, we can. Yeah, no pressure.

Just just some extra if you want. Yep. And with that, the reins are in your hands. Mr. Fasciani. Oh, OK. All right. Look, look, look, look, look, look, look, look, look. I know that I swore off doing modern Internet mysteries because they're crazy

and they're always insane and really weird in favor of better older legacy mysteries like the giant JFK thing I'm about to do. I mean, and I'm going to still do that, but since we needed another episode or two in the can before diving like whole dick into the Skinwalker Ranch, which we're going to do soon. No, we're on our way right here, boys. Can I tell you diving a whole dick into the Skinwalker Ranch is the best in your window I've ever heard.

I'm ready to do it literally. I'm ready to literally do that. You make you just make me a hole. You want to make me a hole and I'll dive right in. That's so bad. That's so disgusting. That whole that Skinwalker Ranch hole that you slide yourself into, there's no bottom.

Stop this. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, you can go all. Yeah, it's whole dick. Then some and then you just get in your body. Backwards and then you realize you're in a Sarlacc pit. It's way too late. No, stop.

And then you look like a Skinwalker. All right, but because of that, because we have this extra little nugget of time, I figured, you know what, why not take one last ride about around this weird cyber mystery block? And I and I'm going to do it with with probably the most famous of these mysteries that you of all of them. And but one that I think most people don't know the whole deal with. So I'm just going to say it.

Say it with me if you know it at home, Cicada 3301. I have. Okay. Yeah. So I'm sure everybody's heard of this. Maybe. I don't know. I'm basing this, for example, just to give you an idea of how big

this one is, I'm basing this episode or episodes depending on how long we go off of a Rolling Stone article. Okay. So it was like a major magazine article by David Kushner, January of 2015. And stuff has happened since then, but I'll let you know about that as we get there before we move forward. Just like all I know about Cicada is like it was maybe a recruitment program for something.

Yes. And that's it. That's all I know. That's kind of that's yeah. Oh, it's considered to be the first major ARG. Yeah. It's like it's like a sense. It's like the first one that's like, is this an ARG?

You know what I mean? Like it. Yeah. And basically it's it's super crazy. It's super neat and it goes a lot deeper than people realize. So why don't you get a glass of apple juice or some bugles? Whatever you guys use. Get a slice of key lime pie?

Get a slice of orgasmic key lime pie. Put on your brand new Beatles album. Yeah. I am. It's brand new. Relax. Kick back. Kick your toes up.

Kick your toes up. That's what I say. It's story time again. This time the story starts with two 15 year old boys called Marcus and Tech. That's worries me. This is a worrying beginning. Yeah.

So back in the first few days of January of 2012, when all of this got started, this guy Marcus, he was like a sheltered kind of homeschool style kid. He literally was a Boy Scout. He followed the rules like down to the letter and he was literally what he would literally was a Boy Scout like actually in nature Boy Scout, not just like how Captain America is a Boy Scout, but like he was like one project away from hitting Eagle Scout.

Just to give you an idea of the type of guy that he is and then Tech, that is not that guy's real name, but he's like super serious about anonymity. He was a high school nerd at the time. He was the webmaster for his campus newspaper and he coded like little weird projects on the side. So both young, but you know, a little bit more like because Marcus was homeschooled.

He had the ability to just sort of like do whatever even though his parents really didn't let him like fuck around online that much because he was still pretty young. 15 is pretty young and and Tech's the same way, but he had a more traditional high school career, but either way between January 5th and January 7th of 2012, both of them came across an image that was making the rounds on 4chan that was literally just white font on a black background and it just read like

this. Hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals to find them. We have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.

Good luck. 3301. Okay. So that was the first point of contact for this mystery. Marcus joined the IRC chat about it like almost immediately, but Tech, you know, he was a little more nervous about just jumping right into something from 4chan. 4chan has a bad reputation.

I want to point out because they said it in his article that he called it the chamber pot of the internet, which I thought was a hilarious thing. It's not important, but I just thought it was funny. But anyway, Tech saw someone on the IRC chat, which I don't know if you guys know what IRC is, but back in the day, it was a lot more prevalent than it is now. It's kind of like the precursor to like your discords and your

sky. What is the, what is the internet relayed chat? I think. Yeah, something like that. It's like a giant dynamic chat room basically that is based around like topics like rooms are created around hashtags basically also just for the sake of if we're going to talk about, you know, things like this, ARG is either an alternate

or altered or whatever the case may be reality game. And the whole point is that it's something where you and many other people get together to solve a riddle that is it takes place in, you know, the real world, but is not a real thing. Maybe maybe a great example is a game that came out several years ago. They made an alternate reality game where the result was you literally had to go to an island off the coast of Seattle and

go dig up a thing that gave you an answer that led you to another clue. So like they do this all the time. I think Fortnite was another one that did it. Yeah, I did it like there's always like an element of fun to them. They're very romantic like people really enjoy doing them. Right.

And a lot of the time they are a advertisement for something like above everything. The Joker in the Batman, the Dark Knight, the Joker had an ARG game. Yeah. Halo 2 had one like a bunch of a bunch of things had AI. The movie was like the first big like advertising campaign that worked like that.

But so Tech on this IRC, he saw some people talking about that terrorists sometimes would hide notes in image files and he opened the trailhead image, which said to find the hidden image in a notepad and he got an image. He got he got a message inside of the image opened in notepad which said in in like old Roman script, Tiberius Claudius Caesar says and then just like gobbledygook ciphertext and he took this clue to mean that he needed to use the

Caesar cipher, which if you don't know what that is, it's basically I think we talked about this before. It's basically like a symbol substitution cipher. So if you imagine like two alphabets sitting on top of each other and then you shift it a number of times so that like if you shift it three times right a becomes D right or a becomes E and you shift the whole alphabet along that same shift and that's basically how a Caesar cipher works.

If you can't figure that out from my verbal explanation, just look it up. It's very simple. You'll get it in a second, but that's how you that's what he that's what he kind of guessed this meant and then he realized that Tiberius Claudius Caesar was the fourth Emperor of Rome. So he did a shift of four and suddenly when he applied that

to this ciphertext instead of looking at gobbledygook, he got a URL which in turn led him to another web page that had a picture of a wooden duck on it and another creepy message which said, whoops, just decoys this way. Looks like you can't get guess how to get the message out. Okay, and it was at this point that he started to get more involved. This is tech.

I'm talking about again. This is at this point he started getting more involved in the IRC channel himself and once he found Marcus who was also working on this puzzle independently and realized that like, you know, these two guys were operating on a level. They like knew their shit a lot better than a lot of the other people on there who are more like goobers who were just sort of like repeating shit and messing stuff up for people.

They eventually moved their like solving effort off of the main IRC chat and into a private one with about 10 people in it that was called hashtag decipher and they all and this was a lot more organized and a lot more personal and a lot more like efficient. Now these other characters besides Marcus and tech don't really come into the story as I saw it very much but it is worth getting into how this article describes this guy John Hendrick

Gutorm from Norway. He's like a 26 year old stage tech for like rock shows and stuff but it's like near the Arctic Circle and he was he was quoted as saying if you ask someone to hear what he does he says fishing and fucking and in the winter less fishing. So I like this guy. He's a fun part of this article for me. But anyway this is the point where the article explains what

ARGs are which we already kind of did and then the president for secret organizations you doing this type of thing which they're you know theoretically doing here which is recruiting new blood with online ciphers. So in addition to ARGs which are sort of like this very entertainment based version of this type of communication right Alan Turing who you know from the what was the name of the Oscar movie with Fred what's the guy's name.

Oh I can't remember the name of it. It's it's Benedict Cumberbatch is in the movie. It's about Alan Turing. Yeah I know you guys like that war movie. I cannot remember. Yeah he made that he made the enigma machine basically but he used an insanely hard crossword puzzle as a recruiting tool for code breakers during World War 2 and in

2004 there was a billboard in Silicon Valley that popped up that Google put out that just said first first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e.com which if you solve that it leads to seven million four hundred twenty seven or seven billion four hundred twenty seven million four hundred sixty six thousand three hundred ninety one dot com which led to another math problem which actually led to a Google Labs page which said one thing we learned while

building Google is that it's easier to find what you're looking for if it comes looking for you what we're looking for are the best engineers in the world and here you are. So you could see how this could work as a legitimate recruiting tool that's actually very interesting I did not know Google did that. Yeah also the NSA has done stuff like this the Navy the CIA British intelligence GCH Q the like government communication

headquarters or something I think that's what they're called they've all run or plan to run similar things like this but none of them have claimed responsibility for 33 oh one and in fact all of them have denied being involved with 33 oh one in any way. But anyway. Hashtag decipher this group that they made was now on the case and after looking at a clue again.

You know the clue that we just got that said you can't guess how to get the message out they found this destegging program called out guests and steganography is the practice of hiding images inside of images through various means and so this is a software that decrypts these images automatically and it led them when they did this with the duck image it led them to a thing that said here is a book code and then it was followed by 75 pairs of numbers in the format number

colon number like one colon 20 or 3 colon 5 or 2 colon 3 and this got the group thinking about another classic cipher that's almost as almost as ubiquitous as a Caesar cipher but it's named after a 16th century French diplomat who is called blaze division air who is famous for using coordinates just like these ones which pointed to specific letters and specific books if you can imagine you have a book like say it's the Bible and I have the same Bible and I make like a

little key to like oh like line 10 word for position 3 or whatever that's like a letter and if you don't know what book it is that's like an unbreakable cipher and it only works with that like the Bible for example if you have a different printing like the 1926 printing versus the 1901 printing right it will not match up you want any variations of any variations of formatting or just like text that misaligned everything it has to be the exact same so nowadays when people

use it a lot of the time it'll be like cipher text that you just take out of like a paceman and put it in but the traditional but the traditional form is like books and it's freaking old school style yeah which is awesome so along with the book with the book code came a link to a post on Reddit but instead of a book as you would expect it to be it was just a bunch of letters and dashes and dots and there was the word welcome in English and a picture of a welcome mat and then it said

problems and then there was this like weird like jacked up picture of like some medieval art like a tapestry or a painting or something like that and this really like stumped people but then luckily I don't know how this is possible but this guy tech he apparently learned in fourth grade that the dots and dashes were some type of my enumeral system. I don't know that's what he said he said he solved it he said it was a my enumeral system they ran the pictures throughout

guests and they got a PGP encryption key which if you know what that is it's I think it's called like pretty good privacy or something like that is the company but it's a way to verify that messages are from the person that they say they're from okay that makes sense it's like a way that if you have that key you can like run it and be like yes this is this is a verified thing you can take this like ciphertext and put it in and then as long as that's there and then it

comes back good through the encryption that's how throughout this entire thing they've been able to verify that all the pieces of communication that say they are from. Cicada are actually from Cicada that's yeah that makes sense. So that's where they got that from. And it was in this key text that Marcus the other guy found the phrase Cicada 3301 which he initially figured was the group's name that's where he got that whole idea from plus

a couple other things that we'll get into in a second. But the problems section with the medieval art was even more weird because it said when you put it through outcast it said the key has always been right in front of your eyes this isn't the quest for the holy grail stop making it more difficult than it is good luck 3301. And at this point they were at an impasse for a minute they couldn't figure it out.

But luckily that dude from Norway he came in clutch as a pattern expert and while he did eventually end up solving this using the my numeral system that Marcus figured out as a guide just for my own enjoyment and yours I want to share that he was also quoted as saying I have a gift to find patterns where there aren't obvious patterns so you could almost call me a schizophrenic which I don't think is accurate but this guy to me is like no I don't think that is accurate

representation of what schizophrenia is I love this guy he's he's crazy it just seems like it really seems like so far up to where you were up to this point the little hints that you've put it really seems like whatever there is this group is trying to do they're like trying to put together like the nerd Avengers yeah they're just trying to get like the smartest people because like that line that you said early on is like you can't get the message out yourself for me was

like oh that means they want to they need a group to work together I don't know if that's exactly how it went down or how it is but with how you like you saying they pulled like ten ten people went off and did their own thing and then they like were hyper hyper focused on making this work do they have to as anyone ever checked the timestamps of these things Mike Mike so curious about how you can imagine if we let's say the three of us were setting up an ARG right yeah which by

the way one day I'd love to do lead to the release of electromagnetic push that is dangerous so but but but the idea is like okay we set up thing number one we have no idea how long it's going to take people we have no idea if people will find it we have no idea any of it but because we don't know we have to set up phase number two and then phase number three so I'm curious if there are timestamps or there's some way of knowing was all the stuff that you've heard so far and

all the stuff you're gonna hear already done and ready to go and just sitting there across 4chan and Reddit and websites and all this stuff was it always just there in the background or was it slowly put up over time yeah so DM style improv as the yeah so or so according to this so according to the PGP verifier you can track the the dates of things and everything up to this point yes was already there because as as you as will become very clear in a second this was all done in a

very short time everything that I'm explaining to you right now this all happened very very quickly but like like I'm saying like I'm about to say that this this Norwegian guy he actually had to go to the docked he had to go to an ophthalmologist because he was looking at his four monitors so long that his eyes literally went cock-eyed Jesus but this was in the first like this was less than a week after these things were initially found I'm saying I'm talking in the in

the realm of like days a day or so so anyway so that so the text decoded to something about King Arthur it was like text about King Arthur when they googled it it led them to a selection from this like sort of like historical text it's like a collection of early British pros that's known as the big Mabinogian and within that this was a Welsh romance called the Lady of the Fountain was this that's what this text was from so that that's about a night that's too busy being cool

and doing night shit to worry about his girlfriend and so she leaves it well it sucks for her she had a sweet night boyfriend but once they had that go away that's like the shield night anime but what was I gonna say oh yeah so they had the text they put it in and here's like a little blip from Marcus's notes showing how they used to solve the book code just in case anybody's having trouble figuring that out the first code is one colon 20 taking the 20th character of the first

line of decoded text we get a C continuing with the second line 2 3 and a is found and so on and so forth eventually this led to a complete cipher text solution which read call us at telephone number 214-390-9608 okay and at this point hashtag decipher the IRC group they're totally wigging out this is very scary they're afraid to call this number tech said he felt like he was a national treasure literally they were all staying up late they were doing 30

hour days it had only been a couple days at this point like I said started sketching tech out a little bit and he was beginning to feel a little unsure of everything but nevertheless they called the number which has a Dallas area code by the way and they got a computerized voice which gave them another clue which said this very good you have done well there are three prime numbers associated with the original final dot jpeg image 3301 is one of them you will

have to find the other two multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com to find the next step good luck goodbye so looking back over their clues they realized that final dot jpeg was the name of the original trailhead post that was going around 4chan and after realizing that it's pixel dimensions which was 509 by 503 are both prime numbers they multiplied all those numbers together to get 8,845,145,127 dot com which led to the first imagery we ever

got of an actual cicada in any of this and a running countdown clock which I think speaks to what you were talking about Jesse which said patience is a virtue check back at 17 o'clock on Monday January 9th 2012 UTC which our time window at the beginning of this was January 5th to 7th somewhere in there is where this started so they reached the end of this and there was still like and there was only like a day or so between when they were done with what they were doing and they they

really like ripped through that shit I mean it was a global coordinated effort but yeah they like chewed that shit right the fuck up which anybody who's ever run a game like this will tell you like you will you can never estimate how fucking quick people can chew through this shit and you'll never guess what type of dumb shit people can get stuck on for a year right so there was a really tense day you know just to give me an idea you know this was very much like a movie like

imagine like this happened the way that you would imagine it in a written movie like one day they're doing this they're like talking to people all over line this like crazy guy from the Arctic who's like I'm a schizophrenic is like solving puzzles you're getting stuff in front of his four monitors just seeing the matrix like you said yeah there's a timer you're like that's tomorrow what the fuck this all really happened this is all like verifiable this really is like

a I read an article yeah I very much remember this happening on the Internet I don't remember the details because I just didn't look into them at the time yeah so this day passes everybody sweating their tits off it's totally crazy they refresh right at noon or whatever time it was 17 o'clock Monday January 9th and they found something even crazier than what they expected to find which was 13 pairs of geographical coordinates seemingly leading to real locations all over the

globe and the simple command to find our symbols at the locations nearest you now when this happened this is when shit exploded because instead of being a thing that 10 people can quietly work on on the Internet because this was on a website and they you know are clicking this shit now everybody has these coordinates all over the world you know what I mean locations are spread across four continents everywhere from a rural road on the North Shore of Oahu to a

busy intersection in Seoul Korea to like a weird alleyway next to the University of Warsaw and Poland there was like people everywhere going to all these places Arkansas Paris people were like just going around and everywhere that they would go they would find these posters that were like taped up and they were on just like printer paper and it was this sort of creepy looking like sort of bit crushed image of a cicada top half of the page and a QR code on the bottom half of the page and if

you can imagine going and being like this can't be real and then going out and finding that shit pretty fucking wild stuff I don't know if that you've ever done anything like that before but I'll tell you is I have never done an ARG simply because none are really near around me that I get hype I get hype even when I find a geocache you know what I mean like fair even if I even if I'm just like it's there it's there I found it like it's a good feeling to find treasure so that that that rush

of you see to the treasure hunt the question is where is this all going to lead I know right so but but it does lead somewhere trust me so tons of strangers trusted you before Fosse on a I never let you down tons of strangers crowd source trips to the coordinates start finding posters Marcus is like already on his parents bad side because he's not sleeping he's forgetting to eat dinner he's not doing his homework like he normally does tech is like afraid he's going to like show up

somewhere and get murdered by a stab monster none of them now neither techno Marcus were able to actually go anywhere and do anything but that didn't stop them from examining the actual pictures that showed up online and eventually their group found that all of the QR codes either pointed to one of two new book ciphers okay the first one used the encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition and the other used a poem called a grippa by William Gibson who have you know who that is you

should read some of his books is a great sci-fi author if you listen to show you'll probably be really interested in some of the stuff that he's written and just in case you're wondering he too has also denied involvement in these events in any way he's still alive or at least he was in 2015 I'm not sure if he is now and also this isn't really relevant but speaking of the poem a grippa I just thought this was cool a grippa was originally only distributed on floppy disk and once

somebody put it into a computer to read it one time it would then it encrypt itself so nobody else could ever read it so which is like a cool little thing but you know kind of explains why maybe people were like could do this did you yeah yeah it fits past similar kind of vibe but also it started to seem like 3301 themselves were getting a little cheese off because of how people were treating this thing like an ARG and solving it online as a group for fun. How dare you

treat this thing the way it presented to you. Well I think they really intended people to take it seriously and they were kind of getting annoyed that like it was this huge global group effort that was like fun because both of the clues had this other warning with it that said you've shared too much at this point we want the best not the followers thus only the first few there will receive the prize or something like that is what it said okay okay so at this point the freakiness of

this thing is starting to hit like max levels. Even beyond not trusting cicada solvers are starting to become cautious of each other people are starting to drop out of the search so that the the IRC group that they had is like getting a little smaller like the little private one. Yeah just to give you an idea of how weird things were getting there was another there was a Chilean prodigy child in the group who was called Joaquin who had worked hard to preserve his identity and he

got a call that was like an emergency test tone on his phone at like 2am and he said like I know he said that got me so paranoid so I had a contingency plan with a friend where if I disappeared I would try to leave behind evidence like this dude was like fucking scared so it also got so competitive at this point right that decipher started making fake clues to start throwing other groups off because they really wanted to win this thing and eventually they got so

paranoid that they adopted the slogan everyone except you is cicada. So just to give you an idea of how fast this evolved in like this week span or whatever. From zero conspiracy in a few days. Yeah things were starting to get pretty fucked up and things hit a fever pitch for the group when tax got doxxed. He didn't want to get doxxed that was like his big fear. He was already very afraid and he got doxxed really affected

him. Yeah but shortly thereafter doesn't matter everything changed and the entire flow of the story goes away you didn't expect for a second. Okay about one month later on February 6th Marcus got a personal email from 3301 which said and this is a kind of a long one it said congratulations your month of testing has come to an end out of the thousands who attempted it you are one of only a few who have succeeded there is one last step although there will not be any hidden codes or secret

messages or physical treasure hunts this last step is only honesty we have always been honest with you and we expect you to be honest with us in return. You have all wondered who we are and so we shall now tell you we are an international group we have no name we have no symbol we have no membership rosters we do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves we are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves much like you have by completing this recruitment

contest and we are drawn together by common beliefs a careful reading of the text used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end that censorship is wrong and that privacy is an inalienable right we are not a hacker group nor are we a Wears group which if you don't know what that is that's like people who share Torrance and shit online we do not engage in illegal activity nor do our members if you are engaged in

illegal activity we ask that you cease any and all illegal activities or decline membership at this time we will not ask questions if you decline however if you lie to us we will find out you are undoubtedly wondering what it is that we do we are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas that we advocate liberty privacy security and then it ends with a couple questions says do you believe that every human being

has a right to privacy and anonymity do you believe that information should be free do you believe that censorship harms humanity okay that's the email that they wrote and then Marcus wrote back without a doubt count me in but with one reservation you have presented two conflicting ideas resistance of censorship and requirement to refrain from illegal behavior what of the people who would what of the people who would censor certain aspects of culture what of the pirates I

believe that there should be no restriction on the sharing of information do you ask me and the other chosen ones to cease sharing of copyrighted material thank you for a life-changing experience. Did they ever reply. Well I'll tell you in a second but we have to decide if this is the end of part one or not. That's an interesting question we're only like 37 minutes in

we're about at the halfway point. I mean what the halfway point hit us with the rest you think you go I think you go tease give us the rest. All right so he sent that email on February 6 2012 and a few weeks later on February 28 2012 Marcus gets a reply which was signed the same PGP just like everything else. Hello the next step is finally here and it included a username and it included a password and it included an address on a dark

web site and said welcome. Apparently 20 other people receive similar messages including tech and for the most part they all accepted and eventually ended up in a chat on the dark web with not just each other but alleged senior members of Cicada itself. Okay. Okay. They explain that they just before we move on yeah yeah me

it's coming off like like anonymous I know they're not hackers they claim to not be hackers but like like they're like anonymous except like more up their own ass right that's how it's coming across like we like to think think tank about philosophical things that humanity needs like motherfuckers what are you actually doing. Yeah I mean if you guys are reading DC Comics right now out there listeners there's like this event called Leviathan

where this like group is like they they like teleport away all the intelligence agencies on the earth and like make them into a sovereign nation that's like dedicated to like rebooting civilization to make it better for people right and this to me is like the same idea as that but just like done on like Skype you know I don't know. No I'm with you I'm with you. But yeah so they explained that the organization they were

now a part of came from a group of internet buddies with similar ideals who started a secret group in the interest of combining their respective talents to secretly developed kind of the same way that people made Bitcoin in like sort of like segmented off groups where you don't know anything you'd more than you need to to get your part of the job done right like how a heist works right secret little cells all over the world to further the causes of anonymity privacy and encryption for free right

it sounds pretty culty but apparently it was fairly practical like in terms of like what they were trying to do and how they were trying to do it and it was organized and people just kept recruiting more and more people until they knew like like there was people who are like groups of friends who are bringing each other in and kind of expanding in an organized way until there's members all over the place that's how they did the you know the dead drops you know that's how they were

able to do all that stuff and although it has no affiliation with any government or military various members allegedly are parts of various organizations often in the field of military or corporate intelligence from big companies and governments around the world according to them right okay and also this is just kind of interesting and not super mysterious but like all the cicada imagery apparently comes from the fact that they seek cicadas as nature's cryptographers because

they use a secret code to all the way they communicate with one another well basically what they do is they don't come out they only emerge every 13 or 17 years and they are both prime numbers 13 and 17 and because they do it in this weird configuration it throws off any predators that would begin to rely on the cicada for every year they show up at this time I can get them all yeah so it's like a secret it's like a it's like a it's like a cipher basically that's that's protecting

cool actually and that's and that's kind of like their whole philosophy in a nutshell right it's also cool that 13 and 17 prime numbers it's also cool that 3301 is a twin prime number both forward and backward it's prime number but anyway this on quote unquote class of cicada solvers that solve this version of the cicada puzzle which I remind you they say that it's not always like a cipher that they use to recruit people it just so happened that they were going for Crip like cryptographers

this time around and so they used this you know method of doing this this class of 20 or so that included tech and Marcus was referred with in cicada as brood B dot Oh B lower case B dot 0 H and they were tasked with working together to create software that fit the MO of the organization to be distributed for free online so that's what they're like little cells mission was right and eventually after collaborating with these people this led to something they invented that

was called the cicada anonymous key escrow system or cakes which was a technology that could protect whistleblowers by automatically disseminating sensitive information to the masses in the event that this whistleblower fails to check in by getting shot or kidnapped or put in jail or whatever getting hurt in some way it's like a failsafe for the information to get out there and they actually made this technology right which is pretty crazy the thing was now though that now

that it wasn't like this fun ass puzzle with all this mystery to it and they were basically just like working as like grunts and like a human interest charity now people just started dropping out disappearing fading away which slowly but surely happened to pretty much everyone in the group even tech that was part of B dot OH probably because he was already so wigged out by the whole thing except for Marcus Marcus stayed he was the only guy there for a long part of it by himself

working on cakes and slowly getting bummed out while simultaneously communicating with cicada and being like please recruit more guys I don't know what the hell I need more people to help me with this this is bullshit I'm like doing extra homework right I don't want to do this suddenly you're you're like you said you're kind of just became a cog in the machine like a group project you know what I mean where you're not doing anything yeah and so he didn't hear

anything back from them for months but a year on now from when this originally started now in January of 2013 an anonymous IRC user there was like basically kind of like a fervor again because it was like a year anniversary of the cicada thing so the IRC channels kind of popping off and an anonymous user popped in and posted a now famous post known as the warning which started out by saying I was part of what you call 3301 slash cicada for more than a decade and I'm here to

warn you stay away okay he said he was a foreign military officer who was scouted by the organization against his like without his knowledge like they came to him and they've been like we've been watching you we need you for this goal he initially found it to be inspiring echoing a lot of the stuff that the brood B dot oh member said about their ideology goals for the common good but he also said their beliefs are almost cultish in nature that they revered quote the global

brain as another type of God and called them a quote religion disguised as a progressive scientific organization. Okay so nobody on the regular internet knew whether this was true or not this was all just stuff that was like this guy rando came in it was some dude yeah but people like Marcus and tech you know who were part of this whole thing right found it pretty disturbing how accurate it was and that sort of gave it credence in their minds but also they may be suspected that it

was coming from inside the group to sort of trying to scare people off and show them like no this is not like a game that you should be playing for fun this is like a fucking real thing that if you care about it you should focus on right which I think was a big point of frustration for them as designers of this thing right it seems like it seems like that right from the beginning when they're like stop sharing it yeah but just a few hours after the warning was posted

lo and behold another cicada image one year later was posted for the first time since the previous February and it read hello again our search for intelligent and individuals now continues the first clues hidden within this image find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us we look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through good luck thirty three zero one and then this year's puzzle the twenty thirteen puzzles just as tough as the previous one if

not harder included all types of new things there was a Aleister Crowley book and if you don't know who he is he's like an occult weirdo British magician guy who like to have sex with other people's wives a lot and there was an audio clue that was like guitar music that like it when you analyze the frequencies you can like find this hum and like do like a spectrograph analysis and there was that I never figured there's like a message in there yeah I don't know that message

said like the in star tunneling to the surface we must shed our own circumferences find divinity within an emerge right so things were starting to get a little scarier a little more like zealot coltie yeah but but other than that everything was basically going just like the last time there were more qr posters on telephone polls that type of thing but eventually people just started saying that they weren't getting invites even though they'd solve the puzzle they're like I got

to the end and nobody's emailed me or that the people who made it maybe they were saying like if you did make it maybe you weren't allowed to say that you made it this time or whatever and Marcus hadn't heard anything either from from cicada in the dark web chat for some time at this point but eventually another guy from the brood that he was in a guy called sage contacted him and was like somebody contacted me with a verified message they told us we're laid off they

didn't tell me anything else and then he was like what and he went back into the dark website and it was gone he couldn't get back on to it it had been it had been removed and so that so that was crazy and he just was like oh I guess it must be over you know nothing came of it this time around whatever no one knew for sure what was going on but this time their software though they made it yeah

they made it Marcus Marcus like largely finished it himself and no one knew for sure there was a couple experts that were asked at this point what they thought was happening some guy said he thought it was like a government agency but then as he went on he was like actually you know what it's probably like a company that's trying to find something very specific and they're just putting on a ruse to like fuck with people or this other person thought it was probably just a group of

hackers who was like jacking off basically in a group chat just like fucking genius we are yeah but then one year later again on January 6 2014 almost to the day a Twitter account called at 1231507051321 made a familiar looking post with white text on black that read hello epiphany epiphany is upon you your pilgrimage has begun in light

middle weights right so now we're fully in like crazy town mode with this third yeah we we've crossed the line this third year yeah and at this point the article ends okay so this is where the article was articles from January of 2015 mentions that Marcus like disseminated his code on to the dark web for people to use because it was like in line with the sort of like values of cicada to make it free to anybody who

wanted to like take it and run with it to whatever end right and the puzzles this time they were very different and they said that Marcus was kind of working on it again and that there's people out there that are trying to work on this like 58 page document of runic script now that's like

really creepy and yeah so that's where the article and ended in 2015 but that is nowhere near the end of the story basically there's a wiki that's run by the like cicada solvers IRC the big like big main IRC group they have a big nice wiki that tells

you everything that's been happening and like how people solve different things and it's like a nice big community resource that people still update whenever there's anything but that year the Twitter puzzle continued with a self-reliance and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson book cipher but then it went hard left and became a chain of dot onion links

which are like exclusive to tour which is the like dark web browser so a lot of these have expired but like this was like next level hard like a new level of crazy puzzles these beautiful runic pages sort of trickled out they became a work known as the library primus that's like an encrypted text some progress has been made there was like one or two pages

solved partial solves but nothing new really came from cicada the next January in 2015 there was nothing new because people weren't fucking solving this thing and so that was the first time since 2012 there was no communication from them in January and once again everybody thought it was dead until July

when cicada surfaced again and they needed to do that to distance themselves from another organization that started calling themselves cicada 3301 which was hacking Planned Parenthood was trying to attack Planned Parenthood yeah and so they put out a message that was like signed with their PGP that was like some news organizations have recently claimed that 3301 is tied to the illegal activities of a group that is claim

responsibility for a tax against Planned Parenthood we do not engage in illegal activities we're not associated with this group in any way and no one's ever been involved in illegal activities we're not associated with this group in any way nor do condone their use of our name number or symbolism 3301 right so then that was in July of 2015 that went on for a while no new puzzle in 2016 but this time there was a message on the Twitter again encouraging people to

keep solving the library primus even though a page hadn't been solved in two years and it said hello the path lies empty epiphany seeks the devoted library primus is the way its words are the map its meaning is the road and their numbers are the direction seek and you will be found good luck 3301 be where false paths okay so that whole time people have been trying to solve the library primus including Marcus who originally

solved this whole thing no meaningful advancements have been made in public at least since but there's been a couple good documentaries if you ever watch this YouTube channel called great big story there's like a huge four part thing that has interviews with all these people in it and stuff if you want to watch more on it and it's all really interesting and I think there's another document that's coming out soon or something like that in life and it's still up right the

problem the puzzle still hasn't been solved as well as you said publicly no no yeah you if you go to the cicada solvers wiki it's called uncovering cicada everything is there for you if you want to go like fuck around with this there's there's still people trying to do it but there was one more instance of verified contact with cicada in April of 2017 which was reported by a new user in the IRC called silent but it was p s i l y n t one silent one on the cicada solvers IRC

verified here's how he found it he said I was looking for the last PGP encrypted message from cicada you know the old one linked from Twitter that said to verify with PGP searched for seven eight three five oh nine oh F on pace been sorted by date and there it was I thought it was the same validated it realized it wasn't the same realized the pace been date and brother been caught me posting in a discord right it's message was not super exciting was the same as before it said beware false

paths always verify PGP signature but other than that that's it cicada mystery both as a puzzle to be solved its intentions who those people actually were whether or not anything was actually real or not is unknown but hopefully one day someone will solve it well it definitely kind of leaves a lasting impression of like very bizarrely like amateur cult ish yeah but the the thing is the puzzles are stumping geniuses number one which is like crazy and then if

you look at these if you look at this runic thing like I'm gonna just like look up the library primus if you have a second like yeah pull up images of that of that stuff and just describe what you see because it's not like the rest of the puzzles are very like sort of like piecemeal you know they're very like it's very fancy looking like fantasy writing it looks like Lord of the Rings writing yeah the library primus is like a beautifully made like book of runes that has like has

like you know yeah filigree and stuff around it and you and and the if you go you can look on the on the page I'll give you the link if you want to show it to people there's there's one that has there's a couple of the pages that have been solved let me just drop this here for you oh this is wow this is fascinating so the first real page of this book when translated says a warning believe nothing from this book except what you know to be true test the knowledge find the truth experience your

death do not edit or change this book or the message contained within either the words or their numbers for all is sacred yeah what yeah what don't believe it but it's all sacred yeah and there's there's a few other pages that were like partially solved you can you can you can look at them I mean a lot of the text is here that you can read because it's just all runic but it is like one right here I'll read this one out welcome welcome pilgrim the great journey toward the end of

all things it is not an easy trip but for those who find their way here it is a necessary one along the way will find an end to all struggle and suffering your innocence your illusions your certainty and your reality ultimately will discover an end to yourself yeah I mean it's it's pretty it's pretty nutty and I thought there was only two pages solved fully but I think that's just because a lot of the other ones it's just like the meaning is not clear a lot of the text is here solved

but so much there's 56 unsolved pages I guess of this thing that's crazy I'm just like it's really pretty and what what little like information that you've been able to eke out of it with what their intentions are you do you talk about the God amongst all whatever very much sounds like collective unconscious like trying to debate or philosophize what is what is reality what it like losing yourself and end to self from it makes me think of like you know like ego death

like the end of yourself as an individual and awakening as a understanding of your own true nature as a human or something along those lines yeah and the idea that the genuineness of this is in question to me I'm not questioning that so much like the idea that there's like a group of people out there that are like super smart nerds that believe in this stuff and there this is the way they're expressing themselves seems very believable to me and I don't yeah I don't believe that it's just

a game somebody made up I think people are serious here but I just think that they're really serious about who they get involved and they really I don't know if they've evolved to a point where they're like you know going beyond the you know into the metaphysical realms here but there's some crazy ciphers there's some crazy stuff and I don't know it kind of like also opens this door to this like great genre of internet diving that if you haven't done it before you totally should

which is massive worldwide treasure hunts that never ended I can't imagine how many are actually still like I remember there was I remember there was some books that were called like the alchemist Dar or something like that that came out like 15 or 20 years ago that were like children's books that were kind of stupid and kind of had like kind of creepy art but the guy who made them was like an eccentric rich person and they were like global sensations that like had all these

puzzles and there was one where this guy buried figurines all over the place and they're still trying to solve that and then there's a game called masquerade back in the day that a similar thing and I remember there was like an Atari game or something that had a similar type of yes I remember the Atari one that was for adventure maybe or there was like as multiple games and if you like be each one then you sent it and you're supposed to get a prize like each game yeah it was like each game was

like a different season or something like that and yeah they they like it ran out of money before it finished yeah yeah I remember do you remember the million dollar the million dollar competition for oh god that psychic game that bombed on the original Xbox I was supposed to be a trilogy oh yeah um advent rising yeah advent rising yeah yeah yeah yeah well that was fun dude cicada like it I didn't know there was more to cicada because the last I had heard of cicada was around

I guess like that 2015 mark where they fell off and I was like oh I remember hearing that it was just like it led to nothing or it was a nothing like a heaping pile of nothing but I'm I'm actually it's it's I'm interested to see if they ever if it ever resurfaces anybody ever finishes decoding what they're supposed to decode maybe this episode will be the impetus maybe somebody out there maybe somebody out there is a master code breaker who can come with their with their

Pumbloom lapel thing and solve our code for us um but I feel like this is the closest and most realistic origin story that we're ever going to get for something that's actually close to the real Illuminati so that's why I chose this and I think that there is a place for you in this organization if you can find something of meaning in these pages and if and if you do it let us know yeah please if you if you find any updates that

you find on on cicada 3301 please let us know this was so fucking fascinating to me I I can't believe that it's a real thing it's very exciting that it exists and if you get in share the podcast with all of cicada 3301 get them into it yet we may not be the most intelligent thing for them to listen to since they're all a bunch of hyper geniuses but a good laugh is good for the soul that's true thank you Alex for for taking us down that wild ride Jesse is looking like

his mind is slowly unraveling and I'm not sure what's happening over the past 30 seconds yeah he's read the lyre primus he understands the secrets of everything I can't damn this is so infuriating there is a game on steam that I think it would be amazing if we played but uh it's called like time something or damn I can't remember the name of it it is a game that was the premise is very simple you the player get a letter in the mail that's like hey I need you to

work with me on this thing and it literally starts what this is if you want to play like a safe version of hacking codes and cryptology and all the stuff it's a game about that and it but it also is about UFOs JFK assassination time travel it's all right I need to come visit LA and we need to play it so bonkers I played it's in two parts and I played the first part and I tried to play the second but because the the first and the second part came out so far apart I forgot all the code

breaking I learned from the first part was like I don't know how to play this game anymore so I I don't know what it's called but I know it's the black watchman I played it what now is it the black watchman no it's literally is it the temporal invasion the temporal invasion is the name of it yes the temp the temporal invasion y'all it's crazy but awkward onkers it's so wild and it's like a very simple not overly complex game where you scan pictures you resize things you change the color on files

you you literally have to go to the internet and learn decryption things and run um they make it so you can actually find stuff so a great example is there's one puzzle where there was a sound file the sound files like right but if you learn what the what it is you need to decrypt you can literally go online and there's a program online that like oh you just move this there and it like decrypts it or there's one that is dots and dashes and if you just enter the dots and dashes

into a thing online it'll tell you what it is but it's like so crazy y'all you need to play it you need to play if this is if this interests you and you want to do this in a safe thing where you're not like you know tech worried that someone's going to call you to him yeah this is for you it's so cool you really need to I'm I'm 100% in I'm looking at it right now this looks awesome visit yeah come fly out for a couple days and we can play that or something it'd be wild it'd be wild to play

hell yeah dudes well thank you Alex for taking us down this wild rabbit hole of another internet mystery of the internet and internet mysteries that seem to exist at your very fingertips I hope you all enjoyed listening we're going to say goodbye but before we do hey if you want to support us check out patreon.com slash jilluminati pod help us and support us and we would love to basically to make more content for you guys it's all about just being able to make more for

you put that coffee in the grinder baby hell yeah give me fuel so I can sit up reading hunt for the skin walker all night long to the fire fuel to the fire as always if you want to reach out to us you can find us on our socials for myself it's at Mathis games for Alex at Fosse on AA and for Jesse it's at Jesse Cox and if you want to tweet at the podcast directly it's at jilluminati pod same thing for subreddit we are now on Deezer if you have Deezer our people

who have only used Deezer we got it we literally got approved the day of this recording we so go check that out you can go and give us reviews over there or wherever you listen to us go drop us a review we love you and we will see you next time goodbye bye