The mysterious radio transmissions have been solved, thanks to the agile mind of Mr. DJ Gamaliel, who received the mayor’s L$2,500 reward and shared his method.
First I gathered the full code published in the paper and wrote it down, broken up by the breaks. I figured it would be a hard nut to crack, but trust me, there is nothing too hard to crack. I’m from Chicago, after all, and I have seen it all. First I thought it was weather code—five letters, two of which were repeated, so my first thought was FLOOD, but nothing after that made sense. I even tried converting it to a cryptogram in letter form, seeing if there were any leads. But again nothing made sense. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I remembered my old friend Bugsy, rest his soul, who was a great guy that got a bad rap helping out his local community. A real “people person” Bugsy was. But I remembered something he showed me. We were in Tennessee, at a joint called High Point, heading to Chicago from Florida, where we … well, that’s not important, and I am getting off topic now. But I remembered him showing me a piece of paper with numbers on it. But it wasn’t like the numbers from the paper; these numbers were split in twos.
So where you had 1, 40, 50, 50, 4, using Bugsy’s method it became 14, 05, 05, 04. So I broke it up like that and got a string of two-digit numbers. First I assigned the two-digit numbers to letters, like this: 01=A, 02=B, 03=C, all the way to 25=Y and 26=Z.
Then you have your string that you need to break down. First 1, 40, 50, 50, 4, which becomes 14, 05, 05, 04, which translates to the word NEED, using the above cipher.
I did this with the rest of the numbers and got NEED ASSISTANCE, PLEASE HELP for the first string of numbers. For the second I got ATTEMPT NO LANDING HERE. Probably some military pilot code or something that came in on the crystal set. Those wires do cross. Amazing how that works too. Just amazing.
DJ Gamaliel is the husband of Shotgun Row’s newest resident, Arijah Ankh Khalid-Zyn. He is no stranger to radio.