ConceptsCrib
Concept · cryptography · in 67 mysteries
Crib
A piece of plaintext known or guessed to sit at a particular place in a cipher text.
A known or guessed stretch of plaintext, at a known position, used to recover a key. Jim Sanborn released four cribs for Kryptos K4 between 2010 and 2020 (EAST, NORTHEAST, BERLIN, CLOCK), and every reading on this site is tested against them first: a cipher system that cannot produce all four at their positions is ruled out before anything else.
Where it comes up
Voynich Manuscript
The scribes composed the text by executing a procedure individually, leaving hand-specific traces: each scribe's own bias in choosing between variant spellings, and his own transition and error profile.
Cicada 3301
A leaked 2012 email describes an international group with no name, opposed to censorship and committed to privacy.
Eye of the Sahara and Atlantis
The Richat Structure is the capital city Plato described: its rings were the city's alternating belts of land and water, it lay near the sea on a plain sheltered by mountains to the north, and it was destroyed about…
Q: Is the Richat Structure the place Plato described as Atlantis?The Richat is the ringed capital of Atlantis, a coastal city destroyed about 11,600 years agoYes: around Plato's date of about 9600 BC, rivers filled the Richat's rings with waterYes: Diodorus's Atlantians of western Libya, by the ocean and Lake Tritonis, are a North African AtlantisBy the fifth century BC Herodotus knew inner Libya as waterless and rainlessThe Akerdil and Bamouéré deposits are described as pre-Acheulean and Acheulean sites
America's missing scientists, 2021–2026
The committee's letters of 20 April 2026 cited press reports of a "close professional connection" between Reza and McCasland through an Air Force-funded research programme in the early 2000s, while describing the…
Kryptos
The cribs, with the K1 to K3 systems and the tableau, are enough in principle to identify the method by search.
The cribs, with the K1 to K3 systems and the tableau, are enough in principle to identify the method by…Without the method's extra elements (a key from Sanborn's life, a physical device, or the Berlin clock…The cribs do not give a consistent key under simple Vigenère on the KRYPTOS tableau.Bean's tests extract structure from the cribs strong enough to favour some families over others.Kryptos ciphertext (K1 to K4), plaintexts of K1 to K3, the K4 cribs, the tableau and the Morse text
Hurrian songs of Ugarit
The Ugarit scribes used the Babylonian system as the theory texts describe it, so the theory tablets constrain both vocabulary and performance.
Cretan Hieroglyphic
The 2023 INSCRIBE study found that some motifs CHIC excluded occupy the positions and combinations of recognised signs on seal faces.
The 2023 INSCRIBE study found that some motifs CHIC excluded occupy the positions and combinations of recognised signs…The same administrations kept the two scripts apart for two centuries, which some read as a sign of two languages or…The clay-attestation rule excludes by construction any sign used only on seals, and has been rejected by Jasink…CHIC: Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae (331 documents, 144 signs)INSCRIBE 3D models of Cretan Hieroglyphic documents (Bologna)
Vinča signs
The Tărtăria tablets are genuine early Vinča objects of about 5300 BC, deposited with the woman's bones and figurines in the pit Vlassa described.
Q: When were the Tărtăria tablets made, and are they genuine Neolithic objects from the pit Vlassa described?Genuine early Vinča tablets of about 5300 BCStarović's survey found inscribed objects in all 79 houses examined at 38 sites, with standardised recurring shapes…Vinča sign corpus (Vinca.xml, from Winn 1981)Dispilio radiocarbon dates (Facorellis, Sofronidou and Hourmouziadis 2014)
Byblos syllabary
Sequence analysis of the Unicode-transcribed corpus recovers morphemes and word boundaries without sound values, giving a language-neutral structure that no reading has yet been checked against.
Hattic, Kassite and the half-read languages of the cuneiform archives
Hattic is nominative-accusative, and the variation between an- and zero reflects other categories (tense, aspect or scribal practice) rather than alignment.
Hattic is nominative-accusative, and the variation between an- and zero reflects other categories (tense, aspect or…Goedegebuure rejects scribal error as the explanation for an- and zero with intransitive verbs and finds a semantic…Zadok describes Eilers's suggested Elamite relationship as unlikely.The earlier grammars of Kammenhuber and Girbal describe the prefix slots without an active or ergative alignment.
Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite
Linear Elamite scribes imitated Proto-Elamite signs after a break, so the resemblance is archaising, not descent.
Rendlesham Forest, December 1980
Halt's memo, written from the airmen's reports, describes a metallic triangular object with coloured lights that moved through the trees.
Halt's memo, written from the airmen's reports, describes a metallic triangular object with coloured lights…Halt describes a beam falling near the base and objects moving in angular bursts; Conrad, present that night,…Penniston has described touching the craft since 1994 and produced a notebook and binary code in 2010.
Inka khipus: the knotted-cord records
The system is better described as non-positional and without a concept of zero, closer to other ancient numeral systems.
Oak Island money pit
Q: Did the inscribed stone exist, and what was on it?Several people between 1864 and 1935 described handling a particular stone said to be it.Accounts of 1862 and 1864 describe oak platforms at regular intervals and layers of charcoal, putty and…Bowdoin in 1911 described a hard stone with no visible symbols.Dunfield's 1965 to 1966 excavation reported no sign of the tunnel described by earlier expeditions.Searchers in 1850 described five converging box drains under coconut fibre and eelgrass.
Hijacking of Northwest 305 (D. B. Cooper)
Gryder calls it a 'one in a billion' rig: a heavily modified military surplus bail-out parachute of the kind Cossey described supplying.
Antikythera Mechanism
The front showed only the sun and moon; the planetary text describes a display that was planned or simplified.The back-cover inscription names the planets and the reconstruction fits the described cycles with plausible…The authors themselves describe the result as speculative and dependent on the measured errors.The gearing is coherent and complete enough to be reconstructed as a working train, and the inscriptions…
Glozel: the inscribed tablets of the Fradin field
Q: Are the inscribed tablets of Glozel ancient objects, and if so from what period?The inscribed tablets and most of the collection were made between 1924 and 1936, in or near the Fradin farm.A medieval core enlarged by modern forgeryThe roughly 40 TL and radiocarbon dates fall into three groups, Iron Age to Gallo-Roman, medieval centred on the…Two inscribed vitrified tablets gave Oxford TL dates of AD 1910 and 1920, and the 1929 forensic examination found…The state's trenches found no Iron Age layer, the inscribed tablets with laboratory dates are medieval or modern, and…
Dead Sea Scrolls: dating, scribes and provenance
Enoch learns features that track something other than date (scribe, school, preservation, imaging), so its predictions are confounded.
Skinwalker Ranch
Many first-hand reports from the Shermans, NIDS staff and Lacatski over fifteen years describe similar classes of event.
Many first-hand reports from the Shermans, NIDS staff and Lacatski over fifteen years describe similar…The 2005 book describes staff sightings, some through night-vision equipment.AARO's report describes the Utah work.The historian of the wave finds most cases were scavengers, misdescribed by officials unfamiliar with…Garth Myers's account suggests the family did not keep the large chained guard dogs the 2005 book describes.The missing parts the family described (an eye, the rectum) are the soft tissues scavengers take first.
2004 Nimitz encounter and the Navy videos
Real objects were tracked at the altitudes and speeds described.The object accelerates sharply at the end of the clip, as the aircrew describe.Two experienced pilots in separate aircraft independently describe wingless erratic motion, which ordinary…Four aircrew describe the same shape, colour, absence of wings and exhaust, and sudden acceleration.
Herculaneum Papyri and the Vesuvius Challenge
PHerc. 1667's preserved surface, about 860 square centimetres in 22 columns, was unwrapped and transcribed except 33 square centimetres in the first three columns.
Roswell, 1947
The body accounts describe anthropomorphic dummies dropped by balloon in 1954 to 1959 and the casualties of a 1956 KC-97 crash and a 1959 balloon accident, misdated to 1947.
Ricky McCormick's notes
His mother said 'the only thing he could write was his name'; a cousin said he 'couldn't spell anything, just scribble'.
Marfa lights
No; the earliest written report found is from 1945, and the 1880s stories were first written down decades after the events they describe.
Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian
About 500,000 to 550,000 inscribed objects survive, more than 400,000 are catalogued, and transliterations exist for well under half of them.
Proto-cuneiform: the archaic texts of Uruk
The later copies preserve the archaic sign sequences, but whether their Sumerian readings were the archaic words is not shown: a later scribe could attach a Sumerian reading to an inherited sign whatever it first stood…
San José galleon
The 2025 review describes an overloaded ship carrying Portobelo-fair goods including Chinese porcelain, visible on the site.
Eteocretan and Eteocypriot
Eteocypriot is an unknown non-Greek language whose morphology can be partly described but whose relatives cannot be identified on present evidence.
Kensington Runestone
A contemporary review of the 1876 textbook describes strange letters and number signs that match the Kensington runes.
Phoenix Lights, 13 March 1997
Several witnesses, including a retired airline pilot and the then governor, describe a single enormous silent craft at low altitude.
Zodiac ciphers
In 2020 Blake generated a batch of 655,088 transposition variants and Oranchak ran them through AZdecrypt; a (1,2)-decimation of the first nine rows produced readable fragments, which cribs then completed . Joachim von…
Methods that use it 3
Per-scribe variant choice, transition profile and error typology
MTHVoynich Manuscript
Language-model description of folio images
MTHVoynich Manuscript
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Crib [Concept CPT0DECW00XAZGK]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW00XAZGK
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw00xazgk,
title = {Crib},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW00XAZGK},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW00XAZGK}
}