The Headlines puzzle was created by an NSA employee for
recreational purposes for cryptographers who just want to kick back
and solve something "easy" while honing their skills during lunch
breaks and off hours. Headlines puzzles require solving five
related cryptograms, each a simple substitution cipher with spaces
and punctuation shown. Each of the five is encrypted using the same
mixed alphabet shifted for each headline. See the full description
on the
American Cryptogram Association website. Headlines are
enciphered using a setting, a key, and a hat, which combine to form
the mixed K3 alphabet and its shifts. Be sure you understand this
description before you attempt to solve this puzzle.
There are three caches in this series using the same five
headlines. For the third puzzle you must find the hat. To do this,
solve the five cryptograms below and recover the original key
alphabet block. Then find the hat, a word that is in theme with the
setting and the key, and which is used to order the columns from
the key block into the original mixed alphabet. This is the hardest
of the three because you must solve the first two before you can
solve this one.
Once you have found the hat, assign numbers to all the letters
of the hat according to their places in the alphabet, i.e. A=1,
B=2..., Z=26. Multiply all the numbers together. Then find the
square root of that number and round to the nearest integer, to get
a five-digit number. Subtract from that 8627 to get another
5-digit number, and call that nnnnn. The North coordinate is N37
nn.nnn. Next add all the numbers of the hat word, multiply
that value by 42 and subtract 22 to get a four-digit number,
and call it wwww. The west coordinate is W122 0w.www.
Here are the five headlines:
1. XLI HS QGGL HBDZQ SE DOCIGBI NK *ANZJ.
2. *M.Z. VJDOKE NJARM UX FAD OXDUKMU XD UY
3. *BCNW'Y INUGBM YANUB OZFEO ... OZFEO ...
4. *ESLGEJ YJMLWFJ OH *HGDZEVM EYWOSLHW
5. YNDTHZDJRHCF NHSCFT TBCND TRCPD, KNHDAFM, CR AQNEU
Bring a pen.
The other two caches are:
Headlines: The Setting and
Headlines: The Key
For help on how to recover the hat, see this link:
How to Solve a Headlines Puzzle.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.