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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy, this comes up every few years. I guess the words "unsolved mystery" must excite some specific neural pattern in our brains.

It's far from the last great unsolved mystery, though, as claimed in the title: I would definitely put (i) deciphering the last part of Kryptos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos), (ii) deciphering the Voynich Manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript), and, if you insist on adding treasure to the equation (iii) the Beale Ciphers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers) on any list of unsolved mysteries that fuel the imagination.

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There's also deciphering the ancient Greek written language "Linear A" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

It was recently added to unicode, and we don't even know what the characters mean.

Sounds like a good way to accidentally summon an elder god via emoticon. Now I have a new novel plot...

Maybe cstross will feature it in his next Laundry novel.

Remember, demonology is just a branch of applied mathematics!

And if you want to co-author a story with my idea, give me a shout. :)

..Or the Indus Valley civilization script.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

Quite tantalizing to have a ton of artifacts belonging to that civilization, along with seals having specific imagery (like a bull); and then not being able to decipher the what the symbols next to the script mean.

I don't think Kryptos counts as a mystery. It is a riddle for sure, which isn't entirely solved yet, but it is as much a mystery as the final puzzle of Fez: We know exactly who made it, for what purpose, what it contains conceptually, and that the creator is even still alive.

Voynich and the Money Pit are mysteries where none of these are true and many questions besides the solving procedure are still open.

(Though, to be honest, i strongly suspect that Voynich is the same thing as Kryptos and the last Fez puzzle: An artifact straddling a weird line between riddle and troll.)

Perhaps not as much of a mystery, but I do think the D. B. Cooper case is fascinating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper). The Wikipedia article reads like a popular adventure novel.

Don't forget the most recent theory: http://xkcd.com/1400/

Thanks -after loosing Friday to reading about the Money Pit, I've now lost today reading about Voynich...

Feel someone should mention the Taman Shud Case [1] as another one of those preplexing mysteries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case

Well, if we're doing treasure we shouldn't forget about the Lost Dutchman's Mine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Dutchman%27s_Gold_Mine)

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