Puzzle #3: An Internet Puzzle Hunt (2020)

The third puzzle had us going back to an armchair-style Internet Puzzle Hunt, and as always, the trailhead begins with a YouTube video, which was released on July 17, 2020.

Congratulations go out to Phil from Detroit, Michigan, who came up with the correct solution just over 24 hours after the puzzle was posted. He won a cool $50 for his efforts! There was a random drawing set up for another $25 for everyone else that solved it, but nobody did.

(The next section is best read while following along with the SOLUTION video.)

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The Poem

We’re presented with some eerie grey forest scene, as if it were an analog TV broadcast. There's some gentle music playing in the background. Piece by piece, we're given the five stanzas of a poem, which we will walk through:

Three major bits to this poem tell us that what we are in fact looking for is a phone number. In the last stanza, “Reach out and touch someone, like our elders used to do”, is talking about the act of picking up the phone and making a call. It’s certainly something we don’t do nearly as much of as we used to do. And to explain it for those born after 1990, the line “reach out and touch someone” was actually a very popular ad slogan by Bell, and later AT&T.

Also, if you had the patience to watch the Puzzle video until the end, the music stops, and a pre-recorded operator breaks through. This tells you that you’ve been listing to hold music all this time, as if you have been on the phone waiting.

Bringing it back to the first stanza, it tells us “ten pieces will comprise the code”. A typical phone number that we would dial here in the US comprises ten numbers. And the “three verses you must plot”, tell us that we must use three verses to figure out the phone number’s area code, prefix, and then the last 4 digits.

We can assume that since the first stanza is setting all of this up, and the fifth and final stanza is telling us what to do with the information, then the second, third, and fourth stanzas must be the ones we need to decode. Well, let’s decode it!

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Solving The Area Code

The second verse starts out with “first”, so we know this is where we can figure out the area code. This verse all leads to one three digit number, but it’s giving us two ways to do it. One is more difficult than the other though.

The line “First, add Nixon’s prime four times”, is almost as tricky as Tricky Dick himself. Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, but Nixon’s prime is not 37—it is the 37th prime number, which, if you start from the first one, is 157. Add that four times and you get 628. In the second part of that stanza, “it could tell you where you are from Coit to Golden Gate”, both of these are landmarks in San Francisco, Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. The area codes in use in San Francisco are 415, and 628. If you’re in area code 628, you’re in San Francisco.

So, we now have our area code: 628.

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Solving The Prefix

Moving on to the third stanza to find the middle three digits of our phone number, this one seemed to be the easiest for those of you who tried to get me to tell you if you were hot or cold. It makes reference to temperatures, specifically ones that aren’t cool, or even warm. “The Far ‘N Heights” means Fahrenheit, the measurement system of temperatures we use here in the US. “to make one boil over” means the temperature at which water boils, which, if we’re using the Fahrenheit system, is 212 degrees.

So, our middle three digits for our phone number are 212.

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Solving The Last Four Digits

The fourth verse, and the one containing our final four digits, is another verse, much like the area code one, where it’s giving you two ways to arrive at the answer. It says “The last isn’t Marvel, but another”. The “another” referenced here for you comic book movie buffs is DC. It’s the Pepsi to Marvel’s Coke, if you will… “If the Romans counted rhymes” is a refernce to Roman numerals, and in that number system, DC is the number 600. The final two lines also bring us to that same number.

“Harmon didn’t hack it here, T’was only done nine times” is a nod to all you baseball fans out there. Harmon Killebrew was a legendary hall of fame ballplayer for the Minnesota Twins who finished his career with 573 home runs. Only nine players in baseball history were able to reach the 600 home run milestone, and Harmon wasn’t one of them.

So 600 is the number here. But… that’s only three digits, aren’t we looking for four? Yes, we are… and here’s where you just have to take the initiative and add a leading zero in here. 0600.

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Reach Out & Touch Someone

What we have now, is a complete phone #: (628) 212-0600. (The number no longer works but you can hear the sound file that one would have heard when calling the number!)

Now some of you may be thinking—I don’t want to call that number, what if it’s wrong? What if it’s someone enjoying their dinner or a business? If it makes you uncomfortable, then good! I want to knock you just a little outside your comfort zone, and if you dialed a few wrong numbers in an effort to solve the puzzle, then you did well!

Trying to text the number won’t give you any clues, but you will still know you’ve got it right, as you’ll get an automated response.

Calling the number brings you to the cold, hard realization that after all of your hard decoding work, this puzzle is just getting started and this is not, in fact, the finish line. Okay, so you’ve spent all that time trying to decipher a phone number and there is still no payoff?!? Well, back to the drawing board!

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Google It

So now we are being asked to log into a Google account and look for a clue in the Google Drive. It’s also asking us to go back to the prior puzzle solution videos for the information we need. “The user name is the answer to puzzle #1, plus the area code you just dialed, at gmail.com”

If we go back to puzzle #1, we know that the solution to that first one was “OVERTHINKING”. If we combine that with the area code we just dialed, we will get the user ID: OVERTHINKING628 at gmail dot com.

But what about the password? We have to go back to Puzzle #2 for that, and if you go to around the 6:45 mark of the SOLUTION video, we're told the treasure chest contained 7bluegems. Perhaps you noticed the first time you saw this, that this was spelled pretty oddly, no spaces or anything. Or maybe you didn’t think anything of it at the time at all. But here is our password… you just didn’t know it yet!

Logging into Google with this user ID and password will grant us access (This account is no longer used, so good luck trying to log into it now), and if you are familiar with Google accounts and how they work, you should have an easy time finding the Google Drive. The only item in the drive is a funky looking doodad called a QR code. A QR (short for Quick Reader) code is similar to a bar code, in that when it’s scanned, it provides information about a product or a website.

Scanning the QR code leads us to an image file on imgbb.com, with one final puzzle on it.

"FX XFU BP PX HSTAU VKTV KU BP FXV QBPVLSHUQ HD PXNUVKBFC LFUYJUEVUQ."
~RLWBLP ETUPTS

This last puzzle is a substitution cipher, where one letter of the alphabet is substituted for another. The goal is to solve the cipher, and email me the decrypted quote with the quote’s author as the subject line. The quote, when solved, reads:

"NO ONE IS SO BRAVE THAT HE IS NOT DISTURBED BY SOMETHING UNEXPECTED."
~JULIUS CAESAR

Only one person even got as far as cracking the phone number part of this puzzle, and once he did, actually worked through everything else and got the final answer emailed to me within about 20 minutes… it was quite impressive! So, I PayPal’d him a cool crisp 50 bucks for his effort.