BOSTON (AP) — The information needed to decipher the last remaining unsolved secret message embedded within a sculpture at CIA headquarters in Virginia sold at auction for nearly $1 million, the auction house announced Friday.
The winner will get a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to go over the codes and charts in hopes of continuing what he’s been doing for decades: interacting with would-be cryptanalyst sleuths.
The archive owned by the artist who created Kryptos, Jim Sanborn, was sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auction of Boston. The archive includes documents and coding charts for the sculpture, dedicated in 1990.
Three of the messages on the 10-foot-tall sculpture — known as K1, K2 and K3 — have been solved, but a solution for the fourth, K-4, has frustrated the experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen.
The artwork resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side has a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side.
Sanborn has been contacted regularly by one individual for over two decades in an effort to solve K4, leading him to charge a fee for submissions. The artist decided to sell off the solution to K4, hoping that the new owner would maintain its secrets and continue the dialogue with followers.
RR Auction said the winner will also have a private consultation with Sanborn regarding the codes, charts, and his artistic intent behind K4, along with an alternate paragraph he referred to as K5.
The 'Kryptos' sculpture has gained worldwide attention as one of the most famous unsolved codes. Sanborn’s portfolio includes about 50 public sculptures, one of which memorializes a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.
The auction faced a potential disruption in September when two enthusiasts uncovered Sanborn’s original scrambled texts in his papers at the Smithsonian, but the sale proceeded with the entirety of his archive included instead of just the K4 secrets. “The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it,” Sanborn clarified, emphasizing that the key remains elusive.
The winner will get a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to go over the codes and charts in hopes of continuing what he’s been doing for decades: interacting with would-be cryptanalyst sleuths.
The archive owned by the artist who created Kryptos, Jim Sanborn, was sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auction of Boston. The archive includes documents and coding charts for the sculpture, dedicated in 1990.
Three of the messages on the 10-foot-tall sculpture — known as K1, K2 and K3 — have been solved, but a solution for the fourth, K-4, has frustrated the experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen.
The artwork resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side has a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side.
Sanborn has been contacted regularly by one individual for over two decades in an effort to solve K4, leading him to charge a fee for submissions. The artist decided to sell off the solution to K4, hoping that the new owner would maintain its secrets and continue the dialogue with followers.
RR Auction said the winner will also have a private consultation with Sanborn regarding the codes, charts, and his artistic intent behind K4, along with an alternate paragraph he referred to as K5.
The 'Kryptos' sculpture has gained worldwide attention as one of the most famous unsolved codes. Sanborn’s portfolio includes about 50 public sculptures, one of which memorializes a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.
The auction faced a potential disruption in September when two enthusiasts uncovered Sanborn’s original scrambled texts in his papers at the Smithsonian, but the sale proceeded with the entirety of his archive included instead of just the K4 secrets. “The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it,” Sanborn clarified, emphasizing that the key remains elusive.
