The following article is Part 1 of a six-part series on the Kryptos Plaintext discovery. The original free pdf document can be downloaded from https://stephenbishop.org/downloads.
PREFACE
This explanation is a novel visual approach to bypass the Kryptos K4 decryption and construct the K4 plaintext directly from the CIA New Headquarters Building (CIA NHB) shape.
I am confident that Kryptos K4 is cryptographically encrypted, and can and will be cryptographically decrypted. It is surprising that there appears to be a shortcut to deduce the K4 plaintext from the CIA New Headquarters Building (CIA NHB) shape.
However, this shortcut is *only* possible due to Jim Sanborn’s plaintext releases. Without the known plaintext, the K4 decryption would have been required before the plaintext could have been associated with the building shape.
The satellite image contains perspective distortion. This has the effect of skewing the perfectly square building walls to appear out of square. The distortion could be removed, but I didn’t want to go down the graphic tool rabbit hole at this time.
TIMELINE 1
On 2010-11-20, Jim Sanborn released the BERLIN plaintext. This marked the day that Jim gave up on Kryptos K4 being cryptographically solved. The plaintext releases have not been clues to the decryption method; they have been visual hints toward the direct discovery of the remaining plaintext.
On 2014-11-20, Jim Sanborn released the CLOCK plaintext to join the BERLIN plaintext and form BERLINCLOCK. Prior to this release, I was not aware of the existence of The Berlin Clock.
On 2018-03-06, while viewing a satellite image of the CIA New Headquarters Building (CIA NHB), I noticed that the center section of the building looked similar to The Berlin Clock. Please compare.
This is interesting, since someone who *did* know of The Berlin Clock could have noticed this similarity decades ago, prior to the plaintext releases. This alone probably would not have been a strong enough signal to suggest that the Kryptos K4 plaintext contained the words BERLIN and CLOCK, but connecting the CIA building shape to The Berlin Clock has been a possibility for 30+ years.
Apparently, Jim Sanborn was the first to notice the similarity, probably when he viewed an artists rendition of the proposed new building during his work on the Kryptos scale model in 1988. At some point during the K4 cipher construction, Jim chose “Berlin Clock” as part of his plaintext message.
The key point to understand is that the building looks similar to The Berlin Clock, and the plaintext contains the words BERLINCLOCK.
