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In early 2012, a message appeared on the controversial site 4Chan, now best known for birthing the QAnon conspiracy theory, which stopped users in their tracks. It was the first piece in an online puzzle known as Cicada 3301 which announced: “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way through.”
In the documentary podcast Archive: The World’s Hardest Puzzle, Tommie Trelawny, a YouTuber devoted to unearthing arcane stories, and the journalist and producer Nicky Anderson delve into the murky world of Cicada 3301, the online mystery which beguiled surfers of the so-called “dark web” and prompted US Navy and National Security Agency recruiters to create copycat challenges where applicants were asked to decipher coded messages.
A community quickly sprang up around Cicada 3301 dedicated to collectively tackling clues which veered from basic wordplay to references to medieval poems, hidden book ciphers and Mayan numerals to mysterious pictures of ducks (don’t ask). These riddles soon spilled into the real world as clues included GPS coordinates which led to flyers with QR codes taped to telephone poles in countries including South Korea, Poland, France and the US. Stories abounded about who was behind the puzzle: was it the CIA? The whistleblower Edward Snowden? The Freemasons? How about the Illuminati? As for the prize, the world remained none the wiser.
In their attempts to work out who was behind the puzzle and what they hoped to achieve, Trelawny and Anderson chase down cryptographers, security specialists and, rather optimistically, a biologist with expertise in cicadas. There are echoes here of The Polybius Conspiracy, the intriguing 2018 podcast which investigated a video game that was alleged to have appeared out of nowhere in arcades in the early 1980s and made its users feel woozy and unwell; rumour had it that the game was connected to CIA mind experiments.
Having only heard the first three episodes of The World’s Hardest Puzzle, I’ve yet to discover whether Cicada 3301 turns out to be an elaborate mind experiment — or, indeed, if Trelawny and Anderson get any solid answers at all. The pair are given to bouts of hyperbole — the game is called “the greatest internet mystery of all time”, while its creators are hailed for “redefining the online puzzle scene”. Nevertheless, they do a valiant job of tackling the story from all angles, teasing out themes of internet privacy, conspiracy theories and the iniquities of the dark web. The story of Cicada 3301 is, it turns out, the ultimate internet rabbit hole, a riddle wrapped in a mystery that will make your head hurt in the best possible way.
