I meant to take a break today, but I found myself thinking about it still!

I went over every character, just trying to get it all straight in my mind and I came up with 32 characters used. Here's the picture I've got.



[edit on 16-8-2008 by Benevolent Heretic]

Uh-oh... I only count 31 glyphs used. Here is a layout of the actual pixels of each glyph, in a way that is symmetrical when flipped horizontally, vertically, and both (rotated 180). Eg, the pixel patterns exactly cancel one another out, when you overlay the flipped/rotated image as a subtractive layer.



I'm going to do a translation of the text using this key; let's see what glyph I missed!

PS: Thanks for the suggestion about flipping/rotating, BH

[edit on 16-8-2008 by Ian McLean]

Originally posted by Ian McLean

Ian, notice that the diagonals are so different. One has all the places filled. The other only has 2 at the top (not counting the corner, which is part of the left column)... Almost like those 2 are purposely separated. Those 2 are only used one time each in the puzzle.

One is the next-to-the-last letter of the 5th word. (apostrophe?)
The other is the 5th letter of the 4th word. (dash?)

If you take the entire right column and rotate it on the vertical axis and slap it over the left column, like you said, it lines up perfectly. If you then count the symbols in the left column, plus the ones in the filled diagonal, you have 23 "letters" plus the 2 symbols that are used only once above.

Just some thoughts.

[edit on 16-8-2008 by Benevolent Heretic]

I had an idea, what if the blocks represent a chunk of the keyboard? That way the clue could have letters, numbers and punctuation.

BCFKADA YMQVWZRO WYJHDRYJNL
TRBTNKJJ KEAKCBFINX AXWEOGG
GTTJOWIBYM BZXZMOO

What do you get from all of this?

Pretty sure the alphabet doesn't wrap A-Z,Z-A or repeat symbols.... think its a polyalphabet cipher, with a shift, like the second part of puzzle 4... the alphabet seems to change between words, though -- shuffling the grouping of the different segments of circle-glyphs.

Let Benevolent Heretic do the honor

Congratulations for solving the puzzle!

Six nuclear weapons disappeared from Minot AFB in North Dakota.
Five nuclear weapons were discovered at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.
Which leads to my chilling conclusion: Someone, operating under a special chain of command within the United States Air Force, just stole a nuclear weapon.

Perhaps

Nuclear warheads discovered ???, five (quintuplet) remains, conclusion stolen

[edit on 17-8-2008 by Deaf Alien]