The Mayday Mystery

In the 1980's somebody started placing cryptic ads in the Unversity of Arizona Daily Wildcat on every May Day, the practice continues to this day. The codes have gotten more elaborate every year.

The 'phenomenon' has come to be known as the May Day Mystery

The most recent ad: May Day 2009

There is a web site dedicated to researching the mystery that describes the history and maintains the research to date: The May Day Mystery Web Page


According to the Web Master:

Here is what I know:

* Someone is doing their historical homework: There is a wealth of obscure historical infomation here. Ranging from references to historical figures, religious and otherwise, to items and occurrences, there is a historical relevance to solving the Game.
* Someone is doing their mathematical homework: Once again, more strange symbols and whatnot. Ranging from physics to chemistry to binary encodings, the clues come in every shape and form. The Game's author seems to have a fascination with informational encoding systems and the like...
* Someone has extra money to burn on this puzzle: Full page ads in the Arizona Daily Wildcat aren't cheap, and the pages have been running for over 10 years. This leads me to believe they (the author(s))are older in age, or an established professional.
* The game's author is familiar with the Tucson area, and the University of Arizona campus: Like I said, it's a semi-local game, but you can't tell that until you really get into the clues.
* There seems to be a reward, or an endpoint: There are references to a safe deposit box located in a bank in the downtown Tucson area. See this page for an example. I'm not promising anything, as I have not yet unraveled the mystery. It could be a red herring, in which case I'll kick the author in the (censored) when I meet them.

All of this suggests a deliberate, organized effort to carefully construct a puzzle leading that leads to some eventual enpoint. I can guarantee you, the Mayday pages are not the work of a mentally-challenged individual and or/f*cking lunatic.

UPDATE: I take the above statement back. They could be completely loony freaks, but as of 1/15/99, I believe they are at least interesting loony freaks, and worthy of some sort of attention, whatever their intentions.

They're too systematic, they're too detailed. And, like I said, they're expensive.

That's what I know...

Although the Web Master asserts that the results are local to Tucson, he has received correspondence from the 'cryptographer(s)' that that isn't necessarily so.

Anybody wanna play? Visit the web page to get involved. I am hopeless trying to make anything out of it. Have fun.

[edit on 3/8/2009 by rnaa]

reply to post by rnaa


Star, and flag. how frickin wierd. It's really neat, and all, but just wierd. I'm sure a full page ad runs a couple hundred bucks at the minimum.

I checked out that site, and notified my friend who went to ASU and still lives in the locale area so he can check it out as well.

Very interesting stuff. Reading through all of it will take some time, though.

This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen on here in a long time.

You would have to assemble a team of professors just to translate a lot of it, much less decode it.