Riddles 101

 

The key to most riddles is perspective, ascertaining who or what the riddle is about. Let’s take an example: What has three arms, wears a hat, and always follows a star?  This likely brings to mind either a three-armed alien following the light of our sun to wipe out the inhabitants of earth or three one-armed Wise Men following a star to Jerusalem in a twisted Christmas story. Thankfully, neither of these are correct. Let’s start with the hat. Who or what wears a hat? The only hat-wearing examples I can think of involve people (or poor, sad animals on Reddit). This perspective is key to solving the riddle.

Now let’s examine the word star. As a person, the only way you could always follow a star is if it were attached to the front of you. Can you think of someone who wears a hat, has a star attached to his/her front side and, in addition to the usual two arms, is also armed? The answer, I will only share if you promise not to tell. It’s all about perspective and looking past the distractions. 

Getting back to our unsolved riddle: All of the attempts I’ve read on social media to solve this riddle have approached it from obvious perspectives. I’ve read interpretations from the perspective of a visitor to the Fort Raleigh Historic Site—a park bench might fit in this case. I’ve read interpretations from the perspective of those who came looking for the lost Colony—the remains of the fort in the park might then fit. 

Remember our chess puzzle analogy, the good puzzle principle? We are looking for a queen sacrifice or the like, something unexpected. What is the least expected perspective in the park? Someone we might take for granted or overlook? Someone we might find in the Visitor Center? How about park rangers?

Under that

Which may be last touched

Or first seen standing

What is the first noteworthy task that the rangers perform every morning? Something that they would do while standing? Something similar to the final noteworthy task they would perform before locking up and going home? Yep, raising and lowering the flag. There is only one flag pole in the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. It happens to be next to the Visitor Center and on that pole flies one flag, the state flag of North Carolina. This is our mica connection. The state of North Carolina produces roughly 60% all US mica. Now, on the surface this connection may seem thin, but not if you consider it in terms of those annoying IQ test questions involving relationships, such as: A dog is to barking as a fountain is to water. The barking is produced by the dog, just as the water is produced by the fountain. Similarly, the driftwood is produced by the shoreline, just as mica is produced by the state of North Carolina.

So what is the second interpretation of this riddle? I find this absolutely brilliant! The North Carolina state flag is unusual in that it has two dates on it. The first refers to the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (May 20, 1775), and the second, the Halifax Resolves (April 12, 1776), both are considered to be the first declarations of independence by their respective levels of government. Therefore, “under that which may be…first seen standing,” refers to North Carolina being the first state seen standing up for American Independence. But, what of the “last touched” part of the riddle?

When the flag was first introduced in 1861, the second date on the flag was different. It was May 20, 1861, which was the date North Carolina declared it had seceded from the Union, the last state to do so. If you consider seceding from the Union a crazy act, the riddle now makes sense. The term touched, though primarily British, can mean crazy or to have gone crazy. Therefore, “Under that which may be last touched…” gives us Under that which may be last to have gone crazy. This places us directly beneath the flag of North Carolina near the Visitors Center, south along the path from the Dare Memorial. 

This concludes a lengthy preview of my book, The Secret of the Secret: A Treasure Hunter’s Guide. To obtain the whole book, follow this link or go to Amazon and filter on Kindle eBooks and search for my name “T. H. Lawson”. 

Even a Cat Will Do

I’ve mentioned the process part of mystery solving, but haven’t really discussed it much. Process is a bit like that friend of a friend with a great personality that everyone tries to set you up with. Technique is sexy, philosophy is deep—but process? Meh. Time and time again, a particular type of process enabled me to solve the most difficult clues, mind-benders that I never would have solved otherwise. My most valuable process by far is the use of a sounding board.

Roughly once a month while working for various tech companies, a coworker would wander into my cubicle and sit down completely exasperated saying something like, “I can’t figure it out! It makes no sense! I’ve tried everything!” They would proceed to explain the problem to me in terms I could understand, including background information and pertinent details—and then at some point they’d stop mid-sentence, their expression turning to resolve, and they’d say, “That’s it! That’s why it’s failing. It’s the only thing that makes sense!” And then they’d leave saying, “Thanks so much! You’re the best!” All of this would happen with me saying next to nothing. 

A sounding board doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a notebook, a blog, a whiteboard, or even a cat will do—but it has to be something. I know that process is not exciting. Though if you pitch it to yourself as, say, details to share on social media or your memoirs that you'll publish when you become famous, then it might actually be fun. I knew I would eventually want to share my analyses, so I organized my thoughts in note form, and that made all the difference!

It was only in trying to describe how the word “beckons” tells us which way to go, that I realized that it doesn’t.  It’s only a suggestion. The verb “beckons” merely means that the path calls to us. If we are standing at one end of a path, we would interpret “a path beckons to mica and driftwood” to mean that the path containing mica and driftwood at the other end is calling to us. However, if we read the sentence from the perspective of being on a path already, in the middle of said path, it then could mean that the path calls to us from two directions, from mica in one direction and driftwood in the other. The Virginia Dare Monument is on the path that connects the Visitors Center to the Waterside Theater. We would expect to find driftwood on the shore, by the theater. Maybe heading south toward the Visitor Center will take us to mica in some fashion. Maybe.

Under that

Which may be last touched

Or first seen standing

To the best of my knowledge, this riddle has never been solved. That being said, it is my favorite riddle in the whole world because there are actually two ways to solve it, both giving us the same answer! How cool is that?!

Welcome to Level 4.

The Lost Colony

 

In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh sent John White to lead an expedition to establish an English colony at Chesapeake Bay. During a stop to check on the remnants of a failed colony on Roanoke Island, flagship pilot Simon Fernandes forced White’s colonists to remain at Roanoke. White returned to England with Fernandes, intending to bring more supplies back for the colonists in 1588. Unfortunately, the Anglo-Spanish War prevented White's return to Roanoke until 1590 when he found the settlement in disarray and completely abandoned. The only clue was a cryptic word "CROATOAN" found carved into one of the posts. White interpreted this to mean that the colonists had moved to nearby Croatoan Island. But before White could follow this lead, rough seas and a lost anchor forced the mission to return to England. The colonists were never found.

The poem continues:

Where white is in color

With two maps

There are two beautiful watercolor maps of Roanoke Island and the surrounding area created by John White. These were some of the first maps depicting this area. 

After circle and square

Most people think this refers to the parking loop and lot for the Visitors Center and Theater. These do form a rough circle and a rough square. However, some, including me, think this refers to something in our current location, figuratively. At the heart of the Elizabethan Gardens there is a circular path surrounded by a much larger square path. You can see these paths clearly on Google Maps or any map of the park. I believe “circle and square” is meant to confirm that we are in the right place. 

In July and August

Byron again expects us to find an obscure reference. These words, or something quite similar, can be found on the Virginia Dare Monument, which is located between the Visitor’s Center and the Waterside Theater: 

ON THIS SITE, IN JULY - AUGUST, 1585 / (O.S.), COLONISTS, SENT OUT FROM ENGLAND BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH, BUILT A FORT, CALLED BY THEM  œTHE NEW FORT IN VIRGINIA THESE COLONISTS WERE THE FIRST SETTLERS OF THE ENGLISH RACE IN AMERICA.  THEY RETURNED TO ENGLAND IN JULY, 1586, WITH SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.  NEAR THIS PLACE WAS BORN, ON THE 18TH OF AUGUST, 1587. VIRGINIA DARE THE FIRST CHILD OF ENGLISH PARENTS BORN IN AMERICA…

With the exception of my “circle and square” interpretation, all of what I’ve presented thus far has been the product of the exceptional work of others. Now that changes. 

A path beckons

To mica and driftwood

Most interpret this to mean that we are to now find a path that takes us to the beach where we might find driftwood. But what of the mica? Mica is a natural stone, highly reflective, semi-clear, that can be easily separated into thin sheets, and has a number of commercial uses. It’s found in the far western counties of North Carolina, generally not on Roanoke Island. It seems that we’re being asked to find a path that doesn’t exist!

Welcome to Level 3. 

Roanoke Island

 

Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!

—Wright Brothers 

I’ll be honest. When I first began analyzing this puzzle, I wasn’t very excited about it. Based on John Jude Palencar’s prediction that this would be the next puzzle solved, I had gotten the impression that most everything had been worked out and that there wasn’t much left to do. In retrospect, levels 1 and 2 were figured out—but that was it! Let’s begin with how others have concluded that Roanoke Island is the general location of this casque, methods and conclusions with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Welcome to Level 1. 

In the Roanoke Island episode of The Secret Podcast, you can hear guest Brian Zinn solve the Roanoke acrostic in real time. It’s very cool. In Image 3, the items hanging to the right of the armor can be described as round, angled, nothing, and key. That gives us the Roanoke acrostic:

round

angled

nothing

key

Furthermore, just to the right of the largest bell there is a number 3 hidden in the cracks. Just to the left of the right-most bubble is the number 6. This gives us 36. Further down in the image, below the 36 is hidden the number 75, overlapping a bit. You can see these highlighted for you at thesecret.pbworks.com. These are the degree portions of the latitude and longitude for the Wright Brothers Memorial, which relates to the first line of Poem 11:

Pass two friends of octave

In December

Octave Chanute was a close friend of the Wright Brothers and a fellow aviation pioneer. This places us at the Wright Brothers Memorial. Orville and Wilbur’s first flight was in December 1903.

Ride the man of oz

From the Memorial we take highway 12 (December being the twelfth month) over the Washington Baum Bridge to Roanoke Island. L. Frank Baum authored the famous book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 

To the land near the window

In Image 3, just to the right of the window is the outline of Roanoke Island hidden in the cracks. This matches Image 3 to Poem 11 and confirms that Roanoke Island is our general location. The month of this puzzle is January as evidenced by one o’clock on the pocket watch. The birthstone is garnet and the flower, carnation. 

Welcome to Level 2. 

Now let’s look at the image and ask some questions. Again, you’ll need to acquire Image 3. This image is easily the most detailed of the twelve paintings. The sheer volume of information accosts the senses. Believe it or not, the following is all I’ve got for questions. The image is so cluttered and strange that only the following stand out to me:

• Why are there random items hanging from the arms of the armor?

• What is the meaning of the bizarre positioning of the fingers?

• Why is there an asymmetry to the breathing slits in the mouth of the helmet?

The poem continues:

There's a road that leads to

Dark forest

Now that we’re on the island, Byron expects us to find something quite obscure. I will take this opportunity to again thank the good people of The Secret Online Community for finding this and several other obscure clues in this puzzle. The plaque dedicating the Elizabethan Gardens in the northern portion of the Fort Raleigh Historic Site says:

The women of the Garden Club of North Carolina have planted this garden in memory of the valiant men and women who founded the first English Colony in America.

From this hallowed ground they walked away through the dark forest and into history.

The phrase dark forest refers to a place that is beyond civilization, where one must face their fears. It’s also a metaphor for something unknown and dangerous. It likely hearkens back to the Black Forest in Germany, a common locale for scary stories. 

40 Years

 

Suffice it to say, 40 years is a very long time for a puzzle to go unsolved. Two of the remaining nine unsolved puzzles are analyzed in the remainder of this book, puzzles that no one has been able to decipher for two score obits around the Sun. What specifically makes these puzzles so immensely difficult? Here’s my take:

Multi-step: These puzzles have many steps, upon layers, upon levels. They go on, and on, and on—and with the remaining nine puzzles, every step, layer, and level is needed. As for the three “solved” puzzles, the three previously described herein, some steps were, in my opinion, misinterpreted or skipped here and there, yet the casques were still found. Skipping steps with the remaining nine unsolved puzzles won’t pass muster (yes, I got it right this time). A partial solution will not suffice. 

Multi-disciplinary: The types of challenges in these puzzles are all over the place. Some require us to have an excellent vocabulary, such as needing to know that the word steps can also refer to flights of steps. Some are literary, like Walpole’s letters telling us that “his direction” meant north. Some are pattern matching, like finding the water tower in the Chicago image. Some are historical, for example needing to know when and where the USS Constitution got its nickname. Some are physical, like searching beyond Lincoln’s shoulder. Some are musical, in that we had to understand the origins and nuances of Bethoven’s Eroica Symphony and how that relates to music theory. Some are logical, such as avoiding the fence post error with the Cleveland puzzle. We must be experts in all fields at all times. Praise be to the Google search engine!

Aggregated: The more difficult challenges in these puzzles require combining the interpretations of multiple clues, seeing patterns in a large set of results, for example needing to notice that all of the clues in the Boston puzzle related to American independence. This aggregation of clues makes these puzzles exponentially more difficult. Instead of simply having to follow step-by-step instructions for a handful of clues, with these remaining nine puzzles we’re asked to correctly interpret a large set of clues and then fit them together in a nonlinear fashion, to find clues within clues within clues. This type of challenge is very unusual, particularly challenging, and the exact feature that I enjoy the most!

Unique: The common details among these puzzles—latitudes, longitudes, month, birthstones, and birth flowers—are just another deception, a simple way to give the impression of repetition when there is none. I see so many brilliant people endlessly trying to find a modus operandi for these puzzles, a way to figure them out by finding the similarities between them. But there aren’t any, none of substance anyway. Each puzzle is its own animal, its own unique set of challenges. 

Excessive: You could argue that these puzzles are too difficult, too complicated, too confusing. I disagree. I think they are exactly what they were intended to be. For example, a modern personal computer is ridiculously complicated, but no one complains that it’s too complicated. It is as complex as it needs to be. Just as some computer owners light up and display the inner workings of their computer because they appreciate this complexity and some owners do not, there are those who appreciate the complexity of these puzzles and those who do not. There are other poems and paintings by other poets and painters similar to those in Byron’s book that we the audience also struggle to understand, confusing works by master artists. Sometimes the creators explain their work and sometimes they do not. Sometimes audiences appreciate these artistic mysteries and sometimes they do not. This next puzzle is incredibly complicated, currently unsolved, and revolves around my favorite riddle in the whole world, which is also unsolved—well, till now!

Why We Believe

 

Because we can’t be experts in everything, much of what we believe is based on trust in our information sources—our parents, teachers, textbooks, news sources, scientists, religious leaders, etc. This is normal and works out for us most of the time, but it can also lead us astray. 

I once had a lengthy discussion about evolution and the vast age of the earth with a group of Christian friends who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. When I presented what I considered to be strong evidence in support of evolution and the earth being 4.5 billion years old, they simply found ways to cast doubt on or sidestep what the entire scientific community has believed for over a hundred years. One consistently silent member of the group was a geologist. As one by one the others left the conversation, he stayed. When only he and I remained, and everyone else was out of earshot, he stepped close and said quietly, “I don’t know about evolution, but the earth is 4.5 billion years old.”

What I learned that day is that belief, or at least expressed belief, doesn’t stem from logic or evidence. It’s born of necessity. We believe what we feel we need to believe. We strive to belong, to participate in social groups and in society. A belief in Creationism was seen by this group as a requirement of their religion, which had nothing to do with evidence or logic. In order to solve any mystery whether it’s philosophical, scientific, historical, or spiritual, we have to get past what we feel we should believe, or even need to believe. We can only discover the truth when we allow ourselves the freedom to believe exactly what we see, hear, feel, and think.

August

 

Walpole makes the case that the ancient Augustan Age (43 BC to AD 18) and the new Augustan Age (AD 1702-1714)—brief times of great prosperity and great scientific and artistic advancement—were all due to leadership that encouraged candor, honesty, and truth. These were short-lived periods of grand enlightenment, which were completely dependent upon having unusually permissive leadership. Walpole suggests that for a society to blossom, to make strides in the arts, science, history, and literature, there needs to be freedom of thought and freedom to speak the truth. It is in embracing truth that we are truly free. 

In truth, be free. 

It is no coincidence that Byron alluded to a letter about the importance of candor written by an author known for his candor using the names of two historians also known for their candor. Did you know that the month of August was named after Augustus Caesar, the same man for whom the Augustan Ages were named?

Much of what Walpole described in his letters, all of his letters, was injustices on an individual scale, subordinates in the military forced to take credit for their superior’s mistakes, individuals being forced to lie for the benefit of someone more powerful, injustices with no recourse, cases where the truth was successfully suppressed, events that destroyed lives, actions that today would be described as corruption. Back then, corruption was just accepted as part of life. The implementation of  individual rights, of civil liberties, didn’t happen on any large scale until after Walpole’s time. 

It’s difficult to evaluate the world we live in today relative to that of the past, relative to England in the late 1700’s and before. We usually think of “progress” as being linear, improving incrementally over time. But it hasn’t. Social advancement came in short spurts, if at all. We tend to believe that progress just takes care of itself, that incentives pushing us toward fairness, equity, and justice will always be there, driving us toward a better world. Historically, this has not been the case. 

For a quarter of a millennium, starting with July 4, 1776, portions of the world, the “free world”, have experienced an explosion in technology, science, medicine, art, literature, religion, business, and history. We are currently living in a long and exceptional age of progress and prosperity, an extended golden age far surpassing that of the prior Augustine Ages. Walpole appears to have been right! He predicted this. He had certainly read the writings of the American revolutionaries. He saw that historically, freedom, truth, and prosperity are inextricably tied to one another. It is the feeling of having the freedom to speak candidly, to be completely honest, that allows us to be fully creative, to reach our full potential. Maslow called this self-actualization, the highest level in his hierarchy of needs. We are living in a long and sustained Age of Enlightenment, made possible by our carefully crafted form of government and our principles of freedom of speech, religion, and thought. In other words, our progress and prosperity is a product of us being able to “feel at home.”

Would the world be as advanced and enlightened as it is now without the American revolution? It appears that Walpole (and Byron) would say, No. We might still be mired in some version of the backward ways of the late 1700’s. This, I believe, is why Palencar featured a Salem witch in his painting. The Salem Witch Trials are emblematic of a lack of religious freedom. It doesn’t get much worse than execution for suspicion of unsanctioned religious practices. 

Generations of Americans have lived their entire lives free from tyranny, retaliation, and oppression. It is easy to be unaware of how historically rare and fragile this is. It’s easy to assume that things will always be the same, that democracy and individual freedoms will endure because they have for hundreds of years. But this is a fallacy. Democracies fall. It is paramount that we value and protect truth and the freedom to express it. We should also take a moment to revel in our success. Our little experiment in democracy seems to be working swimmingly—not perfectly, but still, extremely well. 

This complex and profound message is the whole point of this exercise, the whole point of this puzzle. This is The Secret of The Secret for Boston. To anyone who would choose a dictatorship or autocracy over democracy, I give you the following quote: 

I am just sorry my own mother had to live under that regime for most of her life. I was lucky. I got out and, 14 years later, Czechoslovakia became a free country. So I feel anger, even fury, at this bloody system that ruined so many people's lives for no reason whatsoever.

—Martina Navratilova

Now do you see why I love these puzzles, why I care about them? It’s not about the casques, keys, or gems, or even the puzzles themselves. It’s about the secret each contains, a priceless gem of truth. This is why I had to write this silly book. Well, to be honest, for me, the puzzles are also priceless. It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how intricate and convoluted this particular puzzle is, words and phrases with double and triple meanings, how it meshes together Walpole’s letters, details of the American revolution, Old Ironsides, and the Statue of Liberty while making a profound statement. It’s magnificent, amazing, brilliant, a true masterpiece! This puzzle was challenging, but the next one is even more so, requiring us to figure out how and why a mysterious path beckons to us!