Starting on the 21st of April 2023, the Puzzle X Treasure Hunt lasted for just two days, before the treasure was ultimately found by a group of three lads: Ben Fischer, Mike Novak and Tony Weber. More of those sweet plastic gems and a few pieces of silver awaited them at the treasure location… Fredrick Miller Spring in Eden Prairie!
I’m going to go into this assuming you’ve seen the Puzzle #10 trailhead video, otherwise, you may well be wondering what I’m talking about. If you haven’t yet, go spend five minutes and watch it, preferably in full 1080 resolution, as it was intended to be viewed. It's right at the top of the Media Repository.
We find ourselves behind a desk in a darkened room, an office or a study perhaps. An old reel-to-reel film projector points toward a blank projector screen.
On the desk are what appear to be more old items: a rotary dial desk telephone, a folder that contains Top Secret military information, film canisters with the words “PROJECT ATHANASIA” and “TOP SECRET” on it, a photo of a man standing in front of a single engine aircraft, a Shell road map of Minnesota, ,and lastly, a rack of Scrabble tiles with some very non-Scrabble-like hex symbols on them.
So, a lot is happening here even before the projector fires up, and once it does, you’re suddenly viewing a classified Army film entitled “PROJECT ATHANASIA”.
The film is dated 1957, which by the looks of all the old stuff kicking around, is a very recent film in the scene we find ourselves in here.
By now you’ve seen the word “ATHANASIA” mentioned three times, and perhaps you’ve heard or seen it somewhere before?
Puzzle #9’s solution was a one-word answer, and that word was, yes, ATHANASIA.
The cliff notes version of the military film goes like this: It depicts a too-weird-to-be-true story in the town of Fallholt, Minnesota, in which two farmers had uncovered a sudden sinkhole while working their corn field. In the course of exploring this sinkhole, they unknowingly encountered a strange source of radiation within it that eventually killed one of the farmers, leading the surviving farmer to contact the town Sheriff, who then turned the matter over to the National Guard, who mobilized a small unit from the Army Corps of Engineers to covertly investigate the site.
The film mentions and shows a photo of the deceased farmer, and lists his name as CHARLES SVENSSON. Coincidentally (or not), the folder has the word SVENSSON written across it in large black marker.
Because of an experiment that the farmers conducted, and the Army’s own research, It has been found that time moves differently within the influence of the radiation radius of larger deposits of the element.
The element is so new that as of the time of this film, it hasn’t even been named.
This film does not get into details of what Project Athanasia ultimately is, but it’s clear that in general terms it aims to find a benevolent use for this strange element once more understanding is gleaned from it.
Just as the film ends, a YouTube preview screen for a video called “April 6, 1987” pops up until the projector shuts down and the puzzle video ends.
Perhaps you’d already noticed this video when it was posted back on, wait for it, April 6th. Perhaps you hadn’t. Perhaps now you’re kicking yourself and saying “WAIT, WAS THAT PART OF PUZZLE NUMBER TEN?”
The short answer? Yes. The long answer? Get ready for one of MANY tangential discussions I’ll be having with you. Seriously, there are so many goodies buried in this project that I just have to share with you, that you may as well just buckle up and enjoy the madness.
It's a left turn from the old fifties office and the military film, but what we’re about to dive into will make so much more sense if you’ve watched April 6, 1987. So go do it.
April 6, 1987 takes us right to the events depicted in Puzzle #9 A man is asleep in front of a television that’s tuned to KTBS TV in Shreveport, Louisiana. The station is signing off for the broadcast day.
As the camera slowly pulls back, we see the snoring man’s head and his couch. As the night’s color bars and tone are broadcast, a sequence of strange hex character symbols start to appear on the screen’s lower third.
As the cipher plays out, we see and hear a young girl who is sneaking out of the home, trying not to awaken the snoring man. The door closes, and we’re immediately thrust into the perspective of this young girl, leaving home, alone, late at night. It’s hard to make out but the house is in shambles.
Haunting music begins to play, and soon we are seeing from her point of view, she is wandering the side of the road in the darkness. Not even a flashlight.
And then… a trailer. A brief flash of purple light. Then… nothing.
Finally, we see a poster: Out of Grand Cane, Louisiana, a 14 year old girl named Andi Moseler has gone missing. Last seen: April 6, 1987.
The hex symbols are a simple substitution cipher. Not every letter of the alphabet was reprsented, but when decoded he message reads:
“Dad, you are scaring me. Your drinking is out of control. You blame me for Mom dying. I will miss you.”
Heavy stuff right there. So not only do we now have the key to most of the cipher, we can now make some sense of what we’re witnessing:
On April 6, 1987, in the tiny rural town of Grand Cane, Louisiana, 14 year old Andi Moseler left a note for her father, stating her grievances and her intent to run away from home, which she did. We learn that her mother is no longer alive, clearly a huge point of tension in the household. We can assume that her runaway travels have brought her to this mysterious trailer, from which we saw a brief flash of purple light through the diamond-shaped window, and then, the inevitable missing poster.
Oh… also, her father’s name is Bruce. How do we know this? Here’s some extra info you might have missed: In Puzzle #9, a secret phone number was revealed to play the outgoing message of Bruce Moseler, who sounds like quite the Southern gentleman until the end of his message, when he can be heard starting to scold someone named Andi just as the beep happens.
This wraps up the events in Grand Cane. (For the moment.) We’ve gleaned all we need from April 6, 1987. Let’s get back to the office.
Now, let’s just wrap up the business of these cipher characters. The ones on the Scrabble rack are actually just the missing letters of the alphabet if you’d happened to have solved the cipher from 4/6/87. Now you’ve got the complete cipher! The dots on the front of the rack: 4, 6, 8, 7. It’s just meant to point you in the direction of the video you’d need to fill in the blanks. Here’s another fun little easter egg: 4687 was also the combination to the lock that guarded the treasure in Puzzle #8.
The phone and the numbers on the dial, we’ll get to later. (Yep, that’s a whole other tangent.) The film canisters… well, we just saw the film. Wait, canisterS? Is there more? (Yep, that’s a whole other PUZZLE!)
The folder and its goodies are our aim here.
Moving past this part of the puzzle requires more observational effort. In the beginning of the video, I made a point to leave the Truck Puzzles website address out there for a couple of extra seconds. Maybe you noticed this. Maybe you went there.
The site (at that time) greeted you with a list of completed past Puzzles, 1 thru 9, and a list of links under Supplementary Material, including April 6, 1987. But curiously, no link for Puzzle #10.
A keen eye will detect that the URLs for each puzzle's page are Roman numerals.
Back to the desk in our office, a closer look at the file folder’s tab shows a slash with an X after it. If we head back to the website and manually change the URL to add the /X after (it’s case sensitive, as one unfortunate veteran puzzle pal seemed to realize late in the game) it takes us to a dedicated page: PUZZLE X!
NOTE: Rather than try to re-create it, I am linking here to the /X page and materials as it was originally presented to game players. There's a quite a bit to go through. Also, I will not be including any of these materials in our Media Repository, we'll keep those self contained inside the archived site.
The archived website page shows us two things: on the left, a strange pamphlet-looking document with hexagons all over it and hex cipher symbols over a photo of a stream.
Now that we have the hex cipher cracked, we can decode the message on the pamphlet, which reads SPRING. Well, it certainly is a photo that could pass for a spring, and the hunt did take place in mid-April, when spring was finally upon us!
In the pamphlet's lower right, a potential phone number for the TP Hint Line has been burned away from the corner, obscuring much of the number. We can really only see the area code, which is (952).
The Truck Puzzles Hint Line could be valuable information that awaits on the other end, if one were to pursue it. But it's not required.
From here, there is a fork in the road. Paths emerge. Does one try and figure out the hint line phone number and its certain nuggets of wisdom within to help find the treasure? Or do we crack open the folder and see where that leads? I can tell you we’ll explore all paths, but the trio who found the loot didn’t need no damn hint line! So to lead us off from here, the area of interest is the Top Secret Army folder and the contents within! Let’s explore.
The first item is a cover letter from a military officer to Fallholt's Sheriff, dated August 5th, 1957.
We come to realize now that the office we’ve been hanging out in is that of Fallholt Sheriff George Perry, who has received the folder and presumably the films from a Major Lethbridge-Stewart. The expectation seems to be that the Sheriff needs to keep these strange happenings at the Svensson Farm quiet.
Back to the folder, we also have selected pages from Bill Svensson’s typed journal. There are eight full pages and I’m not going to go through the entire thing, but it is a critical part of our story.
The cliff notes version of the journal pages go a little something like this:
On May 24, 1956: Bill Svensson was tilling his corn fields when his tractor fell into a sudden sinkhole, damaging the farm equipment. He mentions possibly needing to fly in to Anoka for parts. In fact, Bill mentions flying quite a bit and laments the fact that he needs to spend so much time working the farm as it cuts into his flying time.
The following day, the Svensson brothers pulled the tractor from the sinkhole and realized that a small cave with plenty of room for people had opened up. Excitedly, and with dances of precious metals or oil in their heads, they went back to the barn, grabbed some old miner’s helmets, and explored the small cave for a bit. Bill noted a very low humming noise that one could feel more than hear. Almost a very dull vibration.
The Svenssons headed to their local hardware store for pickaxes and some other digging equipment, and at 9am on the morning of Saturday, May 26th, they headed back inside the sinkhole for more exploration.
After a long day of swinging pickaxes and moving rocks, the Svensson brothers didn’t find any riches, and exited the cave, exhausted… more so than usual. Expecting to see the evening sun, they were greeted with the sunrise. Confused and exhausted, they concluded that they must have lost track of time inside the cave and spent an entire 24 hours there.
On their walk back from the sinkhole back to the farmhouse, they noticed the town postman, out delivering letters, and noted this was odd for a Sunday!
Upon their arrival at the farmhouse, they turned on their television and were greeted with Saturday morning cartoons.
Looking at their clock and seeing it was only 9:30 am, they knew something was very wrong. After all that time they spent exploring the sinkhole, how could only a half hour have passed?
They slept for nearly two days, and still were not fully recovered from the exhaustion, but their thoughts turned obsessively to this sinkhole, and the mystery behind it. Clearly there was some sort of time altering anomaly here.
Chip concocted a plan: one brother would head inside the cave, one would wait outside. Each had a stopwatch that was synced. The person inside the cave would stay there for eight hours, and when he came out, they would compare their timepieces to see if it showed a difference.
They flipped Chip’s lucky silver dollar and he was the one who would spend eight hours inside the cave. They each brought a lantern and some basic camping gear.
Chip did in fact spend the entire eight hours inside the cave, but he did not sleep, he couldn’t sleep. His brain was bombarded with all kinds of intrusive thoughts, he got headaches, even vomited a couple of times. Eventually he was hallucinating all sorts of stuff, and finally, after eight hours of mental anguish, Chip crawled out of the cave, looking like a shell of himself.
Bill had barely set his camping gear down before Chip had come back out of the hole.
They compared stopwatches and it confirmed what they had suspected: as eight hours inside the cave had passed for Chip, Bill had barely seen a minute pass before seeing his brother come out in a weakened state.
They could not wrap their heads around what they had discovered, but Chip was in such a bad state that Bill needed to help him walk back to the farm house and get him into bed.
The next morning… Bill discovered that Chip had passed away in his sleep. Bill was distraught.
On June 15th, wracked with guilt and unsure of what to do, Bill took Chip’s ashes and flew his plane for the first time in a long time to one of their favorite places. A place where they love the water, and have even taken some back with them to make coffee from time to time. Bill scattered Chip’s ashes in the creek and hid his brother’s lucky 1897 silver dollar in a safe spot close by.
(This right here is our key– our treasure! The place we need to be looking.)
To finish out the journal– it took Bill until the spring of 1957, nearly a full year since they discovered the cave, to finally come clean about it, and he asked Fallholt Sheriff George Perry to come to the farm so he could show him what was going on.
Knowing it could kill him, Bill convinced Sheriff Perry to re-create the experiment that the Svensson brothers had tried a year earlier. Bill headed into the cave with copious amounts of booze and pills, and passed out after a half hour. After eight hours, he awakened with a splitting headache and a bad hangover, and ventured out to see a flabbergasted Sheriff.
Bill ultimately survived the ordeal, theorizing that because he wasn’t awake the entire time, he didn’t suffer the same fate as his brother. Sheriff Perry alerted the local National Guard, and, well, you know the rest.
Bill would sign a lucrative deal with the US Army for control over the acre of land immediately surrounding the sinkhole, and everything underneath. He would retain the other 199 acres of farmland.
Bill could never know what was happening or what ultimately was discovered, but he was rewarded handsomely in the form of $1m dollars per year, tax free and adjusted for inflation. He was able to hire farmhands and an accountant, and the farm would pretty much run itself, giving Bill all the time he wanted to fly his plane around Minnesota.
And yeah… that’s the cliff notes version!
The next item in the folder is Bill’s 1956 flight record.
This single page has three columns of hex symbols and icons, with specific dates at the head of the columns, dates of flights that Bill made. Since we’ve got the key, we can decode the hex symbols, which are just groups of three letters that don’t seem to spell anything in particular…
Until you realize that airports commonly have three letter codes to identify them, for example MSP is Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport.
So what we’ve got here is a list of airports Bill stopped at, and the icon next to them presumably describes the purpose of each visit. He sure gets around, doesn’t he?
We know from the journal that on June 15th, Bill made the trip where he scattered Chip’s ashes, hid his lucky coin, (our treasure), and it was in a place where the water was sought after.
His stop to procure the water was made at FCM: Flying Cloud Airport, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Once in Eden Prairie, where might one go where there’s a creek with excellent potable water? Barely a mile from the airport, we have FREDERICK-MILLER SPRING!
So the story’s been told and the treasure’s been found. You’re free to exit the ride now if you’d like, please do exit through the gift shop! Or… stick around and we’ll look at the path unexplored!
The Truck Puzzles Hint Line on the weird pamphlet looking piece is burned away, save for a few digits. We’ll need to piece together the rest.
Back to the Sheriff’s desk, the dial on the rotary phone says, TPHL 0878. If we take that info back over to our burned clue, it definitely fits! So all we need now is the three digit prefix.
There were clues for this part all over the place.
First, when the military training video starts to run its upside-down countdown at the start of the reel of film, certain numbers flash on the screen with a very subtle tinge of green. The numbers 9, 5 and 3 each have this characteristic.
A super deep hint is buried in the large Shell map of southern Minnesota. If one were to connect all three of the flight patterns in Bill Svensson’s 1956 flight record sequentially, they form the digits 3, 9 and 5.
Lastly, the digits were buried in the dimensions of the brochure image itself: 395 pixels by 878 pixels.
The Hint Line phone number is now complete: (952) 395-0878. (This number is no longer working.) When the number was dialed, you'd hear the following:
Not just any old puzzle, it's boots on the ground.
It's helpful to know where old treasure was found.
No need to revisit, just mak enot of the plot,
And a proper alignment will help you a lot.
Great, all that work and you get a silly poem and the sudden urge to take a leak.
Let’s break it down: most of you know that my puzzles generally alternate between armchair and treasure hunts requiring boots on the ground. Lines two and three are saying you might want to look up the locations of the previous treasure hunt sites– there had been four previous to this– and plot them on a map.
Lake Nokomis, Nelson’s Ice Cream, Vermillion Falls, Lund’s Pine Creek Park. They sure do form a nice diamond shape, don’t they?
This is the part where that odd piece of art sitting amongst the documents inside the Top Secret Folder. It was a digital piece I made called “The Archer and the Frog”. I’m not much of an artist but I kinda dig it.
The jewels that the archer has both on his hands and on both ends of his bow correspond perfectly to the map of previous treasure sites.
Knowing this, the green jewel on the frog’s crown must signify where the treasure would be located for Puzzle #10.
Putting it back over a map, a proper alignment means bisecting the diamond pattern right through the middle, and if you follow the archer’s arrow, a straight line is formed, putting us right in the crosshairs of our treasure!
So, you could say that The Archer and the Frog was actually a treasure map!
Puzzle X Media Repository
This is the room we find ourselves in: an old office with a projector and things strewn about the desk.
This folder had the name SVENSSON written across it. Click THIS LINK to go to a separate page for the contents of the folder.
The ciphertext in the April 6, 1987 video looks similar to the Scrabble tiles in the office scene.
Final scene in the April 6, 1987 video: the Missing poster of Andi Moseler.
The website was rudimentary at that time, and curiously was missing Puzzle #10.