With Lost's final season kicking off Tuesday night, it's time to do a little time traveling of our own.
A clue about the weird, four-toed statue on the island was buried deep within the May 2009 issue of Wired magazine, an issue guest-edited by Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams and devoted to mysteries.
The magazine was riddled with hidden messages and puzzles, including an incredibly complex code that required readers to piece together clues in an episode of Lost and a 5-year-old issue of Wired. Whoever solved it would've gotten advance insight into the big reveal in Lost's Season 5 finale last May – but nobody figured it out in time.
The coded message didn't come with any instructions, hints or clues. In between feature stories in the magazine, a spread featured the Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket that figures heavily in Lost, as well as a string of seemingly random numbers. (No, not those numbers.)
To create the puzzle, Wired tapped security expert Bruce Schneier. "I'm a cryptographer," said Schneier. "Hiding information is what I do. That's why they got me."
Schneier came in knowing he'd have something to work with – the fact that the August 2003 issue of Wired would make a cameo appearance in an April 2009 episode of Lost, which aired while the Abrams issue of the magazine was on newsstands.
Schneier created a code that pointed readers to a specific page from that old issue of the magazine. "There's a story on time travel in that issue, which worked out great," Schneier said, since time travel is a central theme of Lost. "It was just a matter of signaling to people that they should get that issue and go to that page number."
Schneier deliberately made the code difficult enough to stand up to internet-enabled sleuths. "Twenty years ago, I'd be thinking about average solvers," Schneier said. "In the internet age, people solve in public, in groups."
Schneier used a Vigenère cipher on the first of two pages. That one was quickly cracked April 23, a week or so after the issue hit newsstands. Reader Steven Bevacqua – who was also the first person to crack another hidden message in the issue – discovered that the numbers on the first page yield the message: "Use letters backwards from end."
An informal community of users puzzled over what to do with that tip for almost a month. Blogger Jon Leyba from Mestizo eventually figured out what to do with this hint. You had to take the 5-year-old article on time travel, and the numbers on the second page of the coded message in the April 2009 issue, and do as follows:
All that fancy footwork yielded a message that Lost fans should understand:
T H E F O U R T O E D S T A T U E I S T A W E R E T
The statue in question was shown in Lost's Season 5 finale May 13, 2009, and the coded message in Wired was the first official confirmation of the idol's identity.
