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Comment by puzzledobserver | Hacker News Reader

Is the argument that this is a simple procedure which yields recognizable English text? In other words, how does one confirm that this was indeed the encryption procedure originally used?

I ask because there are similar procedures one can apply to other documents, but they have been dismissed as coincidental. Bible codes are the example which immediately come to mind.

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Other than the fact that this method gives a full message, the message contains actual phrases which are very very relevant. For example "THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW" refers to someone who called a TV show 2 weeks before this letter was sent [0] pretending to by The Zodiac. Similarly, in that talk show, they discuss fear of "THE GAS CHAMBER", another phrase that appears.

These two alone make it astronomically improbable that this is random. There are a couple other similar phrases, such as his common misspelling of Paradice, and him frequently referring to people he killed as his "SLAVES" in the afterlife.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yrtcRBTg-I

(The talk show happened on October 22, 1969. The letter was sent on November 8, 1969.)

In addition to the evidence cited in other replies, this solution has now been verified by the FBI, who has in the past dismissed other supposed "solutions" as the kind of thing you're talking about.

The original report of the FBI's confirmation appears to be this SF Chronicle article: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-...

The odds that such a simple set of rules would create a message with no mistakes seem impossible. Bible codes just look for a short sequence of meaning hidden in chaos, ie a few 5 letter word patterns hidden in 1000 pages of gibberish, which are almost guaranteed to exist in any large body of text. In contrast this solution requires the whole message to make sense, which is much more entropy.

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