Wizard of Oz: Discussion and Brainstorming

[wgardner]

For those who may want to share general ideas and/or things they're looking at.

[wgardner]

Lots going on!
Gray numbers sometimes upside down (15 vs 16)
Rebus film frames, or need to find their order in the film and reorder them?
Something coded in the flower stem curly things?
Numbers in crystal ball are irregularly spaced, but that could just an art artifact?
Looks morse-ish to the right of the crystal ball, but irregular
Vertical dots and dashes above the film strip?
Orange numbers are odd: sometimes have 1 number after colon, sometimes two. -s? And then bottom right is blue instead of orange...
Morality Sequence with different shadings. Polyb? morse?
Something coded in the collar?
Marvel Gaze??
Synchronicity?? Might be aligning things (e.g., the timing of the film frames)
Long text string in the middle...
Is anything hidden in the overall riddle?
What is the small clue and what is the dark clue?

[wgardner]

7 brown numbers and 7 brown frames from the film are probably related...

[ILLUMINATINPS]

Ill chime in since Im not a number puzzle savvy guy. Even with you saying there is a Polybius square on the collar, Im still not getting it. BUT, there is an obvious connection of this puzzle to Pink Floyd. Morality Sequence is a track by Floyd. The old myth is if you play Dark Side of the Moon IN SYNC with The Wizard of Oz from the beginning, the music syncs up with movie, so long you mute the movie. Not sure how that plays into the puzzle, but I'd bet a buck or too that this is why we are seeing :Oz, Pink Floyd, and Synchronicity altogether. As for the orange numbers, at first glance it looks like a book cipher. Ran it through Fenn's poem but am not getting anything. 22:10 would suggest 22nd line 10th word, however none of Fenn's lines have 10 words.

[ILLUMINATINPS]

nevermind. got the polybius

[roundabout]

I think that the "broken shapes" on the 5 lines to the right of the crystal ball is a music sheet cipher.
www.dcode.fr/music-sheet-cipher
I think you have to look at it in a mirror, though! I'm trying to make out the notes.   If you turn the page 90 degrees counterclockwise so that this part is in the upper right hand side, you can make out notes, but they only look right when you hold a mirror to the left of it.  Hmmmm a music connection...I wonder if it's a song title. It looks like 8 notes.

I had no idea about the Forrest Fenn connection to Wizard of Oz until I looked up "Crystal Gaze" awhile ago, and  found this MW forum post that connects Wizard of Oz, Forrest Fenn, and "Codex", the book by Douglas Preston!  

mysteriouswritings.proboards.com/thread/3155/xth-clue-wizard-oz

[ILLUMINATINPS]

They are indeed music notes, and they seem to show eighth and sixteenth note. The notes on an E to E scale are F E F E G D G G

[wgardner]

Nice find with the music! I see it most easily when I hold my printout backwards up to a bright monitor. It could be a cipher or it could actually be a lick of music that, when played, refers to something else (like another Pink Floyd track?).

On an unrelated matter:
MORALITYSEQUENCE = 16 purple letters. There are also 14 purple + 2 white = 16 letters in the middle of the Big Block of Letters (aka BBL).

[roundabout]

The D-code site seems to be the only site I can find on the internet that shows how to use this music note cipher. This site has all the notes laid out on the page so that you can click on possible notes to test them out to see if they spell something.  It's hard to make out some of these notes. I think the first one has only one part of the note showing, but I think I can see what it is. The one on the end is the hardest to see.
www.dcode.fr/music-sheet-cipher

[pop]

The 'negative' music notes in the bottom right have their "stems", "note head", and "flags" in the top right/top left/bottom left. On a printout you can fold the paper in half to see it easier. (I haven't noticed anything else folding it in half...)

There is a morse code "saying" in three (I think) of the flowers. I had to zoom in electronically to see it.

Also, electronically, there is something in the scarecrow hat near the "N".

Last, I think I have the "BH" figured out! (I think it is a signature from the puzzlemaker!) I'd be darned if it ciphered out to "GB"!

[wgardner]

Aug 16, 2019 15:18:41 GMT -5 ILLUMINATINPS said:

They are indeed music notes, and they seem to show eighth and sixteenth note. The notes on an E to E scale are F E F E G D G G

I see most of what illuminatnps sees (assuming Treble clef and not Bass clef). I also see two notes at the beginning (maybe an F at the start and then a low C or D?). And I can't tell if the highest note is an E or an F.

You can encode text arbitrarily into notes with arbitrary offsets. With only a handful of notes, it may be tough to decipher if that's really what's going on here.

The notes also have timing. There are quarter and eighth notes. Either this is an actual brief melody to serve as a reference or they're added just for confusion or they encode as well (e.g., 1/8 note add 12 letters, or something like that). 

[roundabout]

I remember that another hunt used the music sheet cipher from the Dcode site. There are different ways to encode the 59 letters, but if I remember right, the way that it was encoded in the other hunt was this way: The first half of the alphabet is the eighth notes from the bottom C on up.  The second half is the quarter notes from low C on up.  (If I remember it right, the last very last one or two highest notes are left out, so that there are 26 instead of 28.). And in this system, the "rest" symbol means a space between two words. I'm pretty sure that's the way this one is done, because all the notes are either eighth notes or quarter notes, and they're all treble clef.

On the Dcode site, you can click on the notes that you are more sure about, and leave spaces for the ones you're not sure about.  Then you can cllick "decrypt" to see if the "sure" ones spell something promising.  Then that might help to figure out the more "iffy" notes.  
www.dcode.fr/music-sheet-cipher

[roundabout]

I found the red herring!  I won't get fooled again!  

[gonealone]

I can't get over the fact that the numbers in the crystal ball look just like the Fibonnaci spiral. No luck doing anything with it yet though

[roundabout]

I thought the same thing when I first saw that!

I had forgotten about the Wizard of Oz connection to Pink Floyd until I read what Illuminatpr posted here.  I found this interesting thing on songfacts.com -- about the "Mortality Sequence" ("Great Gig in the Sky") in the album "Dark Side of the Moon".  
www.songfacts.com/facts/pink-floyd/the-great-gig-in-the-sky

It says, "This is one of the songs that synchs up to the movie The Wizard Of Oz. If you start the album at the third roar of the MGM lion, this will start just when the tornado scene comes on and end just when the scene is over."

So those are the lyrics we'd hear while we're seeing those 7 brown things in the brown filmstrip from the movie's tornado scene -- boat, cow, house, etc... As wgardner posted, the 7 brown frames in the filmstrip probably go with the 7 brown letters.  And the 7 brown letters are directly underneath "Morality Sequence". Hmmm...