A few years ago, I began a series of experiments to determine if there actually were some sensible fashion in which the Zodiac's claim of a bus bomb made sense in a context of the map, radians, inches and the Z32 cipher. Due to the short length of the cipher and its breadth of different symbols, it's been shown that you can shoe-horn virtually anything into it. Consequently, I considered the cipher a pointless effort and a waste of my time, so I proceeded to experiment without it.
My thought process was to break down each crime and letter into the 6 major components of inquiry: who, what, when, where, why and how. As I did this, it became apparent to me that there was a noticeable quality of "when" that manifested in Zodiac letters and how each crime played out.
For example, the killer primarily referred to previous crimes by an associated holiday; "Last Christmass, Fourth of July." These are "when" descriptions. At Lake Berryessa, he wrote the dates of previous crimes on Bryan Hartnell's car door. In the Nov 8th letter, the killer provided a list of months. It was in the Nov 9th 1969 letter (in which the killer included a 12-segment diagram) that the killer mapped the same list of months along a circle, and he began to use his trademark form of "keeping score." As this pertains to the map, I felt that perhaps this explained a little about the killer's thought process. Why did he use 12 increments on it as opposed to 16 or 8, as you would find in a traditional compass rose? Maybe he was just doing something he already did once before, so I rolled with that.
I conceptualized the 0, 3, 6, 9 diagram on the map as a calendar. 0-1 is January, 1-2 is February, 2-3 is March, and so forth through the end of December. Coupled with this, I understood that there must be an alteration of about 17 degrees to account for the killer's mention of Magnetic North. In those days, Magnetic North for this area was summarized as 17 degrees east per the 1965 epoch. Most researchers who have approached the map tend to detatch the Zodiac's diagram from the map, and rotate that clockwise by itself. My logic is that since this diagram is written on the map, and since it indicates true north, then the entire map should be rotated clockwise with respect to a compass, or in this case, a calendar, in turn depicting true north as if it were magnetic north.
The consequence of this is that the physical location of the December 20th 1968 crime now exists within a window of range that is identified as December, and the physical location of the October 11th crime now exists within a window of range that is identified as October. In short, there's a perceptible relationship between the geography of the crimes on the map and time by more or less just replicating what the killer did in his letter and making an adjustment to account for the reference to Magnetic North per the instructions.
I took a further consideration that not all months are the same duration. February has 28 days, January has 31, and so on. I re-depicted this calendar as 365 equal partitions of days and tested again with the idea that this provides roughly 30 times the precision in measurement than before. The end result is that while both crime locations occur within the appropriate windows of month, the physical location of the October 11th crime rests in a new sub-partition that is accurate to the very day. In other words, a drastic increase of precision still provides a granular and accurate result that anyone can replicate.
I made further corrections based on real-world data. What is the actual value of magnetic north on Mt Diablo when this letter was sent? Since this calendar effectively mimics the orbit and rotation of the earth, what happens if I make it 365.25 days instead of a perfect 365?
My final margin of error regarding the San Francisco crime was approximately 1/17.24 degrees. At 92.2 ft of error per degree per mile, the distance of ~30 miles from Mt Diablo to the crime location in San Francisco works out to ~160 ft/~1 hour, 25 minutes. I hit certain limits in my precision. Even though someone had gone through the trouble of making a pixel-perfect identification on the map of the crime locations, plain up pixel bleeding in photoshop renders distinctions smaller than 1/10th of a degree very difficult to discern even at very high resolution, so I ended up rounding to the nearest 10th. It may actually be closer than this, but it's definitely not worse.
Given the map's scale of 6.4 miles/inch, that works out to ~ 0.00473484848" on the map, or 0.12mm. For context, that's about the width of a human hair. Magnetic north did not fluctuate significantly between October of 69 and June of 1970. Perhaps then, what I found was an explanation as to why the killer chose to have Paul Stine drive him to that location. The idea that the Zodiac intended to accomplish something at a specific place and at a specific time (i.e., the essence of what astrology is predicated on) well, then he actually came really, really close to doing that and the 12 increments and mention of Magnetic North would be exactly the tools necessary to communicate how he did it.
The other two crimes are not located on the map. I decided to see if I could tie this principle of Earth's rotation and orbit to those crimes, and I was able to. Though they do not align with months or days in the way I previously laid out, it remains true that if you faced any direction and snapped a photo of the stars at approximately 12:10 AM on July 5th 1969, then faced the same direction at 6:30 PM on September 27th, (when the stars aren't even out) there would be about a 6-minute discrepancy in the position of the stars in the sky. This is about 1.5 degrees margin of error as the stars rotate in the sky throughout the night. since 100% error would be 180 degrees, then I just have to divide 1.5/180 to see this is a 0.8333% error.
Now that all 4 crimes had been accounted for in a description of time which is thematically related to the killer's chosen identity, I tried to see if this resonated in any sort of predictive way. I sorted through letters and suspected Zodiac crimes. I found three candidates.
1. June 8, 1967, an unsolved lover's lane type murder of Fermin Rodriguez and Enedine Molina. Scrolling around the calendar to the date of their murder indeed points to the location of the crime. However, this 1969 edition of the Phillips 66 map was not yet made. The maps differ by year, so I find it difficult and strained to think he knew what a 1969 edition would look like 2 years in advance.
2. The Halloween Card. This features the word "Paradice" on the back, and the postmarked date intersects with Paradise Drive in Tiburon, ca on the map. I tested this further by measuring distances and dates of the December 20th and Oct 11th Crimes with Mt Diablo as my point of origin to arrive at a linear graph. It turns out that using the crimes as a basis for distance and the date of the crime as a basis for direction lead to a fairly small area. I've included a picture that ranges from 12 AM to 12 AM and offers a 1 degree margin of error as a search zone. Within this circle is "The Little School" which sits all of 50 ft from a prominent circled cross on the Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church. In other words, this approach results in a candidate target for the killer's threat to bomb a school bus (Paradise Dr is still a school bus route), and the killer's symbol immediately next to each other. Both facilities have been there since at least 1964, plus the local terrain appears to be a pretty good match for the killer's drawing.
3. The kidnapping of Kathleen Johns. Time: Near the Vernal equinox. Geography: Near Vernalis (Spanish for spring) road.
What does this have to do with radians though, right?
A radian, being ~57.29 degrees, translates from degrees to 58 days, 2 hours and some odd minutes using the circular calendar. Starting from when the Zodiac wrote down the time of day at 6:30 PM on Sept 27th, that tracks backward in time to July 31st at about 4:15 PM, the very same day that the killer mailed his 3-part cipher with PM postmarks on each envelope. So, perhaps as much as about 4 hours margin of error there. 1 whole Radian describes the separation in time between two confirmed Zodiac actions with high precision, that's the meat and potatoes of that. When the killer says the solution has something to do with radians and inches along the radians, a number of radians and a starting point would feasibly produce a detonation date. It's not just geography that he'd be communicating, but also that "when" information.
All told, I think the z32 cipher may not even be a necessary component to determining where the bomb was intended to detonate, or even having some idea of what was going on in the killer's head.
My thought process was to break down each crime and letter into the 6 major components of inquiry: who, what, when, where, why and how. As I did this, it became apparent to me that there was a noticeable quality of "when" that manifested in Zodiac letters and how each crime played out.
For example, the killer primarily referred to previous crimes by an associated holiday; "Last Christmass, Fourth of July." These are "when" descriptions. At Lake Berryessa, he wrote the dates of previous crimes on Bryan Hartnell's car door. In the Nov 8th letter, the killer provided a list of months. It was in the Nov 9th 1969 letter (in which the killer included a 12-segment diagram) that the killer mapped the same list of months along a circle, and he began to use his trademark form of "keeping score." As this pertains to the map, I felt that perhaps this explained a little about the killer's thought process. Why did he use 12 increments on it as opposed to 16 or 8, as you would find in a traditional compass rose? Maybe he was just doing something he already did once before, so I rolled with that.
I conceptualized the 0, 3, 6, 9 diagram on the map as a calendar. 0-1 is January, 1-2 is February, 2-3 is March, and so forth through the end of December. Coupled with this, I understood that there must be an alteration of about 17 degrees to account for the killer's mention of Magnetic North. In those days, Magnetic North for this area was summarized as 17 degrees east per the 1965 epoch. Most researchers who have approached the map tend to detatch the Zodiac's diagram from the map, and rotate that clockwise by itself. My logic is that since this diagram is written on the map, and since it indicates true north, then the entire map should be rotated clockwise with respect to a compass, or in this case, a calendar, in turn depicting true north as if it were magnetic north.
The consequence of this is that the physical location of the December 20th 1968 crime now exists within a window of range that is identified as December, and the physical location of the October 11th crime now exists within a window of range that is identified as October. In short, there's a perceptible relationship between the geography of the crimes on the map and time by more or less just replicating what the killer did in his letter and making an adjustment to account for the reference to Magnetic North per the instructions.
I took a further consideration that not all months are the same duration. February has 28 days, January has 31, and so on. I re-depicted this calendar as 365 equal partitions of days and tested again with the idea that this provides roughly 30 times the precision in measurement than before. The end result is that while both crime locations occur within the appropriate windows of month, the physical location of the October 11th crime rests in a new sub-partition that is accurate to the very day. In other words, a drastic increase of precision still provides a granular and accurate result that anyone can replicate.
I made further corrections based on real-world data. What is the actual value of magnetic north on Mt Diablo when this letter was sent? Since this calendar effectively mimics the orbit and rotation of the earth, what happens if I make it 365.25 days instead of a perfect 365?
My final margin of error regarding the San Francisco crime was approximately 1/17.24 degrees. At 92.2 ft of error per degree per mile, the distance of ~30 miles from Mt Diablo to the crime location in San Francisco works out to ~160 ft/~1 hour, 25 minutes. I hit certain limits in my precision. Even though someone had gone through the trouble of making a pixel-perfect identification on the map of the crime locations, plain up pixel bleeding in photoshop renders distinctions smaller than 1/10th of a degree very difficult to discern even at very high resolution, so I ended up rounding to the nearest 10th. It may actually be closer than this, but it's definitely not worse.
Given the map's scale of 6.4 miles/inch, that works out to ~ 0.00473484848" on the map, or 0.12mm. For context, that's about the width of a human hair. Magnetic north did not fluctuate significantly between October of 69 and June of 1970. Perhaps then, what I found was an explanation as to why the killer chose to have Paul Stine drive him to that location. The idea that the Zodiac intended to accomplish something at a specific place and at a specific time (i.e., the essence of what astrology is predicated on) well, then he actually came really, really close to doing that and the 12 increments and mention of Magnetic North would be exactly the tools necessary to communicate how he did it.
The other two crimes are not located on the map. I decided to see if I could tie this principle of Earth's rotation and orbit to those crimes, and I was able to. Though they do not align with months or days in the way I previously laid out, it remains true that if you faced any direction and snapped a photo of the stars at approximately 12:10 AM on July 5th 1969, then faced the same direction at 6:30 PM on September 27th, (when the stars aren't even out) there would be about a 6-minute discrepancy in the position of the stars in the sky. This is about 1.5 degrees margin of error as the stars rotate in the sky throughout the night. since 100% error would be 180 degrees, then I just have to divide 1.5/180 to see this is a 0.8333% error.
Now that all 4 crimes had been accounted for in a description of time which is thematically related to the killer's chosen identity, I tried to see if this resonated in any sort of predictive way. I sorted through letters and suspected Zodiac crimes. I found three candidates.
1. June 8, 1967, an unsolved lover's lane type murder of Fermin Rodriguez and Enedine Molina. Scrolling around the calendar to the date of their murder indeed points to the location of the crime. However, this 1969 edition of the Phillips 66 map was not yet made. The maps differ by year, so I find it difficult and strained to think he knew what a 1969 edition would look like 2 years in advance.
2. The Halloween Card. This features the word "Paradice" on the back, and the postmarked date intersects with Paradise Drive in Tiburon, ca on the map. I tested this further by measuring distances and dates of the December 20th and Oct 11th Crimes with Mt Diablo as my point of origin to arrive at a linear graph. It turns out that using the crimes as a basis for distance and the date of the crime as a basis for direction lead to a fairly small area. I've included a picture that ranges from 12 AM to 12 AM and offers a 1 degree margin of error as a search zone. Within this circle is "The Little School" which sits all of 50 ft from a prominent circled cross on the Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church. In other words, this approach results in a candidate target for the killer's threat to bomb a school bus (Paradise Dr is still a school bus route), and the killer's symbol immediately next to each other. Both facilities have been there since at least 1964, plus the local terrain appears to be a pretty good match for the killer's drawing.
3. The kidnapping of Kathleen Johns. Time: Near the Vernal equinox. Geography: Near Vernalis (Spanish for spring) road.
What does this have to do with radians though, right?
A radian, being ~57.29 degrees, translates from degrees to 58 days, 2 hours and some odd minutes using the circular calendar. Starting from when the Zodiac wrote down the time of day at 6:30 PM on Sept 27th, that tracks backward in time to July 31st at about 4:15 PM, the very same day that the killer mailed his 3-part cipher with PM postmarks on each envelope. So, perhaps as much as about 4 hours margin of error there. 1 whole Radian describes the separation in time between two confirmed Zodiac actions with high precision, that's the meat and potatoes of that. When the killer says the solution has something to do with radians and inches along the radians, a number of radians and a starting point would feasibly produce a detonation date. It's not just geography that he'd be communicating, but also that "when" information.
All told, I think the z32 cipher may not even be a necessary component to determining where the bomb was intended to detonate, or even having some idea of what was going on in the killer's head.
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