For nearly 35 years, a hidden message has lurked in plain sight on a sculpture outside the cafeteria of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Now, a pair of researchers claim they may have found the decoded message – although many insist the puzzle is far from solved. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Created by American artist Jim Sanborn, Kryptos is a sculpture made of a large sheet of copper, curled into an S-shape, across which hundreds of jumbled letters are cut out.

Within this jumble are several cryptic messages that have been scrambled using different ciphers. The challenge is to decode them and reveal the underlying messages, or the “plaintext”, as it is known in cryptography .

Since its installation

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