Alright. Black Hills Radio Control, or BHRC as it has come to be known, was the next step along the way. It's showing almost a shoulder patch of sorts in a keystone shape with a radio tower and a flashing lightning bolt, and flashing bolts around the top of the tower. You can also hear an odd sound file looping, almost like skewed Morse code. A lot like Morse code. Exactly like Morse code. HetMasteen translated the code to find it was taken from a book called "Civil War" by Lucien. The quote is the inset from the book link, starting with "Just so flashes..." Discussion between drizjr and HetMasteen further revealed that the smaller bolts at the top of the radio tower were also Morse code- but numbers only. After a hitch or two, drizjr posted these numbers. Using these numbers, and a modified Beale/book cipher(Beale- the painter of the magic lantern slides, remember?), the words were counted out in the quote to reveal- "dearther." At the time, the topic of discussion was- what's a dearther? Wild speculation and definitions helped in no way. HetMasteen, however, did discover that dearther.html was the next step in the Tooman way. Dearther lead us to a group of radio flash programs, and we've heard everything from static, to Morse code, to a presidential campaign- all of which we'll cover when we get there. Oh, and dearther? Merely an anagram for "red earth," the password to the AYAB site. :)
The first lead from BHRC came well after its finding, over a month after it's discovery. Morse code... that lead to www.sakanasherald.com.
Coming to you live from the Black Hills, right here on KTOM...
We moved on from Ajkin.com to drizjr's first discovery- areyouaborder.com, another cryptic site. AYAB showed a slide show of pictures from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." At the bottom, a text input box, and a submit button. HetMasteen made up a pretty good summary of what we saw, complete with screenshots of each image. With everything we throw into the box, we're taken to eye.html, merely a series of pictures that show an eyeball, and then a raven flying away, eye in his beak. Later on(I'll explain how we found it in a future post) we discovered that "red earth" didn't take us to eye.html, but rather to earth.html, the same sequence as eye, but with a small Earth in the raven's beak. We begin digging to try to find out what might be pertinent about the pictures we're seeing. We found out that the images were Magic Lantern slides. Call it a predecessor to moving pictures. We found out through much digging(and I'm sorry, I can't find in the forums where) that the slides for The Raven's Magic Lantern were painted by Joeseph Boggs Beale, proclaimed by victoriana.com to be American's first great screen artist. We never really got too far into the site before drizjr discovered via a reverse IP search that there was a very similar URL to AYAB- www.areyouabordernevermore.com. AYABN automatically redirected to our next site, and our biggest puzzles up to that point, at www.blackhillsradiocontrol.org.
