Then there are days when I absolutely love what I do. Today is one of those days and let me tell you why.

Over the past few days I’ve been tinkering with the site to see if I can increase it’s ranking in Google, by far the most popular search engine in the world. I did some things that will hopefully help more of the pages, especially the puzzle pages, show up in search results. Today I tested it out by typing just Cluechaser into the search bar. I was happy to see that many of the results were my puzzles. While scanning through the images I found several that were not mine. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I have fans.

No, not this kind of fans….

But rather this kind….

Okay okay, I obviously doctored that picture for my own benefit but I did find some real live pictures created by fans of Cluechaser. Here are a few of my favorites:

Here are few that are done in the style of those motivational posters you see in office buildings and such. They promote the upcoming Game 3: Chasing Shadows puzzle contest.

And finally, some more motivational type posters:

These last two are my favorites:

Seeing something like this really lifts my spirits. It’s because of Cluechaser fans that I persevere and continue to find the energy and the will to finish creating the remaining puzzles for Game 3: Chasing Shadows. I know it’s been a long time in the making and those few dedicated Cluechasers out there have been very patient. I thank each and every one of them for their loyal support. I feel very strongly that the game will be ready before the end of the year. If all goes according to plan it will be the best puzzle contest yet. I’m confident you won’t be disappointed. It will be quite a challenge.

Truthfully, I’ve haven’t been looking forward to this review. Its kind of like when you had a party the evening before and left all the cleanup for the next day. You wake up in the morning, crawl out of bed and as you head toward the living room (ground zero) you have this feeling of dread wash over you. You wished you would have just stayed up later to clean because now everything has been sitting out all night and things have been broken and you’re not sure how to fix them. You survey the room, see the extent of the cleanup job, and suddenly have the inexplicable urge to turn and just run out the door and never look back. This puzzle is like that in the sense that it has many pieces and most of them weren’t kept together after the game ended so it has taken a lot of work to gather it all up again.

Unfortunately this is only the first of 3 or 4 puzzles between this game, The Missing Mr. E, and Game 2: Puzzle PiEces that I have this anxiety over. Fortunately though, I seem to have anticipated this a bit and left myself good enough notes that I should be able to stumble through this without too much pain. I have yet to look at the others to see if they will fair the same.

So lets jump in and get this started. I believe this puzzle was accessed by clicking on the “A is for Apple” pic on the wall above the bookshelf in the office which, after the successful completion of the previous puzzle, was now active.

At this point in the game I had some important information related to the storyline that I had to disseminate to the players in some way. This puzzle became the avenue to accomplish that. It is actually 5 puzzles in one, each type of puzzle representing a sentence.

I believe this puzzle, or at least the first part, is a type of rebus. At the time I created it I thought it was a pictogram or pictograph puzzle. I remember doing these kinds of puzzles when I was a kid and always enjoyed them. When creating it I found that it was difficult to put together. Sometimes the picture you need just isn’t easy to find.

Each picture or series of pictures represents a word. So in this first picture you have 4 words. It should be pretty easy to figure out what they are (you can click on it to see it larger). I wanted to use a picture for everything so I had some trouble finding a picture for the word “The”. The pic I used has actually been modified. I erased whatever word was on the knuckles and added my own letters. I mean really, who tattoos “the” on their knuckles?

The next series of pictures requires a little more work. You start with the first picture, a tea bag. Next the “+” sign indicates you should add the next pic, “MDX” to it. Next is the minus sign followed by a bag. So if you remove “bag” you find that so far you have “teamdx”. The next pic indicates you should remove “dx”. Then add the underlined word in the next pic, “coed” and finally remove the “co” leaving you with the word “teamed”.

The next pic is all by itself. Pretty self explanatory…”up”. This is followed by “panda” which becomes “and” after you follow the next pic and remove the “AP”. I suppose it might cause some confusion if you weren’t sure which “a” to remove. But once you realize taking out the first one gives you “nda” and the second gives you “and” it seems pretty logical which one is correct.

Up to this point you have the following message: “The US and China teamed up and”.

Continuing on with the next series of pictures gives you:

“Green Acres” minus “green” plus “Ted Koppel” minus “apple” (at this point you have “crestedko”) minus “osk” (now “creted”) plus “A” equals “created”.
“ABC” minus “BC” equals “A”.
“rest area” plus “chick chat” minus “at-at” minus “chick” equals “resreach”. I figured the players would realize the word is a bit scrambled and should really be “research”.

This is followed by:

“gold” minus “old” plus (”trout” minus “tt”) plus “P” equals “group”.
“last call” plus “superman” plus “p” minus “last supper” (so far you have “callman”) minus (”coleman” minus “cole”) plus “deed” minus “ed” equals “called”.

And you finish off the first sentence with:

“green light project” minus “green light” equals “project”.
“Coca Cola” – “COCA” plus “b” (the hand is representing the letter B in American Sign Language) equals “Colab”.

My original plan was to do the entire message like this. However, you can probably imagine how long it took me to put that one together. And I had 4 more sentences to go! I knew then that I had to figure out something different. That was when I decided to code each sentence in a different type of puzzle.

I really have no idea how I came up with the next one, but I like it. It’s just so simple yet not obvious. At least not right away. I imagine the players looking at it and saying “what the….?” But after you look at it for a few minutes I think the solution starts to become clear.

There are 3 parts. The first part is solved by following the roman numerals. I thought using roman numerals looked better than regular numbers and added a bit of difficulty to the puzzle. Following them gives you the words, “There were”.
The next part is obvious, “18″
The third part is a litttle trickier. Again you have to follow the numbers but it might take a little time to figure out which direction the word goes. It’s solution reads, “First three letters of scissors plus dentists minus first letter”. In other words, “sci” plus “entists” which equals “scientists”

Seeing a need to speed this up even more I looked for ways to code the remaining sentences faster. I decided to use semaphore for the third, American Sign Language for the fourth and morse code for the fifth sentence.

So the third sentence translates to:

The fourth to:

And the 5th to:

That URL no longer leads anywhere. It was only active during the game and it led to the next puzzle. Once there the players learned the next number in the sequence which was 4.

I don’t have much else to say about this puzzle. I don’t have any strong feelings about it. It served its purpose which was to communicate important background information from E to the players. I was able to deliver it in a variety of unique and interesting ways although none of them proved to be very difficult to solve. The same thing goes for the next puzzle, Doctor Letter. It was also quickly solved by the players but it also included a hidden clue that I’m positive was overlooked by every single player. It was pretty subtle. Read about that one in the next review.

I even like to play a little game while I’m sitting there.

I try to guess the production company based on their logo clip. You know what I mean. The easy ones are 20th Century Fox with it’s search lights, or MGM Studios with it’s lion, or Paramount Pictures with it’s flying stars and mountain.

Where am I going with all this? Well, it’s no secret that I enjoy making videos. I long for the day when I can afford some top notch editing software so I can really see what I am able to create. In the meantime I’m happy fiddling around with Windows Movie Maker. I decided that it was time for me to make my own production company logo clip. I can then attach it to the end of the videos I make. So I began the process. First by hunting down some 10 or 15 second long music that was original and memorable. Some production companies use music, like Disney, while others are silent, like Amblin Entertainment.

So I picked out a few different tunes. One I liked a lot because it included whistling and few things stick in your head like a good whistling song. How many of you can whistle the theme to The Andy Griffith Show? If you’ve seen it more than once you probably have the tune memorized. It’s that catchy. My second favorite had a more western sound.

Next I needed to figure out what the clip would look like. I started by looking at add-on clips that you can download for Windows Movie Maker but none of them appealed to me. So then I searched for free clips. I wanted something that invoked a sense of nostalgia. Something that would harken back to the old days. Like the 60’s or 70’s. Back when things were less complicated and more pure. I found one of a young kid running up a grassy yard toward a window that had home-made pies cooling on the sill. I thought it would work very nicely until I discovered that it cost $40 to purchase it. Back to the drawing board I went. I then decided to go back even further in time. Since I go by the name Cowpatty Bill I reasoned that maybe the clip should be about cowboys.

I dug deeper into the bowels of the internet and found a website that contained royalty free movies. One of the oldest movies they had was called “The Great Train Robbery”, a 1903 American action Western film by Edwin S. Porter. The entire movie is 12 minutes long. I watched it, looking for something I could use. I was just about to give up when, at the very end, there’s a scene of an old cowboy staring directly into the camera and slowly firing all 6 rounds from his gun. Aha!! That was it. I downloaded the clip, converted it to a .wmv file and imported it into my editing software. I selected just the scene with that old cowboy. I added some after effects, like making it a little more grainier than it already was, I sped it up 2 or 3 times so he fired his gun faster, and had it fade out. I then added the western themed music I had found earlier and finally the production company name at the end and ta-da… it was done.

I also created a variation where I used the whistling music but it just doesn’t fit as well as the western one.

So now, for your viewing pleasure, here is the production company clip for Cowpatty Bill….

Here’s it is.

ClueChaser Puzzle Shirt by ClueChaser

So be quick and run over to Zazzle.com and be first in your area to proudly sport the new look.

I’ve always been impressed by vanity plates on cars. I think some are quite original and I especially enjoy ones that make use letters and numbers together to spell something. I recall in my youth toying with the idea of getting a vanity plate that said…

This particular puzzle is multi-layered. First the players needs to decode the words on the plates to understand the message E is giving them. It’s important to the story line. Here is where they learn that there are coded documents that need to located and sent to someone to be decoded. The plates also tell them that there are clues hidden in the puzzles. I don’t think that was new information to anyone but since a lot of the players were new I thought it would be good to let them know that there was more to this puzzle than what meets the eye. One thing I hoped they would notice was that the hyphens on the plates meant the end of a sentence as opposed to each row being a sentence.

Using the message board to communicate with each other it wasn’t too long before someone mentioned that the alignment of the plates as well as the states represented were interesting things to consider. Shortly thereafter the realization that the two letter abbreviations for the states spelled out an entirely different message sparked a flurry of conversation as they raced to learn what the message said.

I think the fact that I made the first sentence short helped immensely in getting people going in the right direction. Another help was that the plates were laid out in way that each row of plates was a single word. All they had to do was unscramble the letters.

Creating a hidden message using only two letter state abbreviations is not easy to do although it didn’t take me as long as it could have. I kind of did it backwards. First I figured out what words could spelled and then used those words to make up a clue. It was bit awkward. For example, I could spell “a password” but had to leave out an “s”. I figured players could still figure it out. Similary, I could spell out “Christmas” but without the “t”. Once I discovered I could also spell “island” I then looked for a way to use them all together. Imagine my surprise when I learned that there was a “Christmas Island” in the world.

One thing I very much like to do is to insert clues in other puzzles. In this case, the sharpest of players recalled the previous puzzle (Letter from E) where it mentioned a pet bird from E’s uncle who worked on an island and the bird’s name was Goldy. This info plus the clues from the license plates that mentioned “flag” and “animal” helped steer the players to the answer they needed.

I also like to create puzzles that take a little research to answer. I don’t think there are too many people in the world that know off the top of their head what kind of bird is on the Christmas Island flag. But a few minutes with Google and the answer became clear.

It took players 2 hours and 46 minutes to come up with the correct answer. The correct answer provided the players with the next number. In this case it was 53.

Challenge yourself to see if you can solve it faster.

It has become tremendously popular to exchange the subtitles for other more comical ones and have Hitler ranting about any current event under the sun. Nothing is overlooked. There are clips about what Hitler thinks about Obama, about the new Iphone, about Microsoft, about Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift during the grammy’s, and just about anything else you can think of. There are hundreds of these videos all over Youtube and other video sites.

I myself have made a few of these parodies. All of mine suggest that Hitler fancies himself a puzzle solving master and is upset that he can’t win any of the Cluechaser puzzle games. It’s all in good fun and in not meant as any kind of commmentary on Nazi’s, Jews, or the Holocaust.

As mentioned yesterday, one of the videos that I had lost and then found was a Downfall parody video. I happily posted it to Dailymotion.com to join the other two in the series that were already there (and have been for some time).

The other day I got an email from Dailymotion.com stating that my video was blocked because they had been notified that it included copyrighted material. They were of course referring to the Downfall movie.

In the last year or so, Constantin Films, the makers of the Downfall movie have been working to have all parody clips removed. I don’t want to get into the legalities of it all except to say that the movie is probably more well known now because of the parodies that it would ever have been without them.

The email I received from Dailymotion included a link to their terms. So I read them. It mentioned that if someone felt that they were the victim of copyright infringement that they had to follow a series of steps including identifying the url of the video in question, explain part of it was copyrighted, and some other stuff.

I’m pretty sure that my video was flagged through the use of this fairly new technique known as video fingerprinting. A whole other issue we could get into is whether these parody videos fall under the protection of a legal term known as “fair use” (which I believe it does).

I decided to challenge the accusation. I sent an email to Dailymotion asking them to provide me with copies of the information that the accuser should have sent to them as per their guidelines. I said that if I determined that the procedure was correctly followed and agreed that the video was a copyright infringement then I would promptly remove it. Otherwise I expected it to be restored immediately.

A few minutes later I received another email asking for the exact url of the video in question. I sent them the requested information. A few minutes after that I received another email saying that the matter was resolved and my video had been restored.

SUCCESS! So now all my Downfall parodies are available to be seen. Here they are for you to see. The first is the original bunker scene and the other 3 are from other parts of the movie. I decided it might be kind of fun to make them into a kind of sitcom called Adolf. Enjoy!

Side note- If you watch part 3 of 3 you might find that it looks vaguely familiar to the Hitler’s a player video. Well that’s because it is. I took a portion of the clip and flipped it. So it’s a mirror image. I think it looks pretty cool.

Hitler’s a player (Downfall movie parody)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 1 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 2 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 3 of 3)

Several months ago I had created them but hadn’t posted them on the site yet because I wanted to get further along in the design of the Game 3: Chasing Shadows puzzles first. Some time later they disappeared. Over the following few weeks I searched my laptop, home pc, work pc, every flash drive and every email account I had looking for them. I couldn’t find them. And then suddenly, they turned up. I found them quite by chance in a forgotten backup folder that I had uploaded to the Cluechaser server for safe keeping. Buried deep within the folders they lay.

Their loss had greatly discouraged me and the thought of having to recreate them only added to my procrastination over finishing game 3. They were not of paramount importance to the overall game but they helped set the stage for the present day events that occur in game 3. Add to that the fact that I spent several hours on each video and hated to think it was all for nothing.

Now that they are found I have a more energized desire to finish the game. I know dozens of people are patiently (and in some cases impatiently) waiting for me to release it. I do want to finish the story. I’ve put many many hours into it and certainly feel the NEED to conclude it.

Maybe now I can find the time to exercise the gray matter enough to punch out a couple more puzzles and wrap them all up in a nice bow and present it to the faithful Clue Chasers out there. I very much appreciate your patience and dedication.

So without further ado, here are the final two videos that are part of the Game 3: Chasing Shadows pre-game warm-up. Please enjoy them.

A problem I had with the previous game was that because it wasn’t in a secure location any of the puzzles could have shown up in a Google search thereby allowing a player to jump ahead. To prevent this from happening in this game I required players to register. That way I knew how many I had and also allowed me to email them a username and password that could be used to access the puzzle site which resided on a secure server.

So when the start time came I posted the link to the secure site and players used the username and password to access the game and get their first look at it. The first thing they found was this:

That message set the stage for the game. Now the players knew that Fletcher Edwards was missing, that mysterious people were looking for him and his friend Iggy is concerned. This combined with the intro video gave the players the background information they needed to begin the journey.

Included on the intro page was a link. Once clicked the players were greeted with a picture of the interior of an office. My intent was for players to understand that the office was a room of E’s house which was the house seen in the intro video. Since he is a scientist I thought he should have a nice looking office. I searched a long time to find the right picture for this. I first tried to find one that was in disarray but finally decided a nice neat upscale office would work just fine.

I think it’s pretty clear that the picture was doctored. Several items were added. Eventually the players would learn that each item would become a link to a puzzle once they got to that point in the game. At this point though, the only active link was the one attached to the crumpled up wad of paper on the floor. Once players found that and clicked on it they got to see the first puzzle (click on the picture at the top of the post to see a larger version of the letter).

I wanted as many people as possible to play the game and figured the further they got into the story and the puzzles the more interested in it they would become. Therefore I designed the puzzle to be very easy.

The letter makes it clear that Edward Fletcher (aka Mr. E) is gone and plans to be for awhile. He trusts his friend Iggy enough to tell him this and also to place the care of his bird Goldy in his hands.

If this were a real-life letter perhaps the bit about the pet bird would not seem strange but in a puzzle game everything is a potential clue. In this case E’s pet bird is actually a clue for the next puzzle. As is the mention of the island. I think I’ve gotten quite good at inserting clues into puzzles that will be needed for future ones.

Players noticed right away that there were several spelling and grammatical errors in the letter. By taking the extra letters, missing letters and, in the case of misspelled words, the correct letters, players were able to spell out the answer to the puzzle.

Another goal I had with this game is that all the puzzle answers would themselves provide clues to the mystery. In a later puzzle I would provide a clue to the players as to how the puzzle answers should be arranged to help shed some light on what was going on.

One thing I never noticed until now is that there is a mistake in the answer. A letter is missing. Obviously players figured that out but I can’t believe I never noticed it. An “A” is missing. I spent a lot of time on this puzzle making sure I arranged it correctly to reveal the answer and I just don’t see how I missed that. And I don’t recall anyone ever pointing the mistake out to me. Anyway, there should an “A” as the third to last letter.

It took players a mere 39 minutes to solve it. Once the correct answer was typed in the players were taken to a congratulations screen where in addition to a link to follow, they were give a number. For this puzzle the number is 50. It would be a wise choice for the players to write that number down. It becomes very important later on.

By clicking the link, players were taken back to the office where now a new link was activated. This time over the license plate on the wall. This took the players to the next puzzle License Plates which will be reviewed next.

I realize that some of you are probably saying “Wait, if this is game 2 then why is it called Game 1?” Great question. Although it’s true that this is the second contest, it is the first game in a three part game series called the Mr. E Series.

After the success of Puzzle Master I was eager to get going on another contest. I decided it would be fun if the puzzle answers themselves were clues that helped solve a larger puzzle. I thought that it would be more exciting for the players. That way they could feel like detectives solving a crime.

In addition to this I designed the game so that each correct answer gave the players a number. These would be need later in the game in order to solve the mystery.

I’m not sure how the Mr. E story line got into my head but I spent several days just writing down all my ideas. Eventually they all sort of came together into an international mystery involving a scientist, his associates, and an ultra-secret department of the US government.

My intent was to create a conspiracy theory. I wanted it to be plausible and contain some elements of truth. I even named the character Fletcher, giving a nod to the Mel Gibson character in the movie “Conspiracy Theory”. I used Edwards as the last name because I needed something that started with an E, to go along with Mr. E (which most of you realize I’m sure is a homonym for “mystery”).

I decided that I wanted to promote this game somehow and get as many people interested as I could. I posted on puzzle message boards, I wrote a press release, and also took my first steps into videography. I discovered that Windows Movie Maker, a video editing software was free and already installed on my PC. So I learned how to use it. I scoured the internet looking for pictures and sound that I could use to convey the mystery of the game. Considering it was my first video ever, I’m still pleased with it today although I think the ones I’ve made for the games since then are MUCH better.

Overall, I really love the storyline. To me it’s exciting. A scientist, fearing for his life because of a secret he’s stumbled across. He doesn’t know exactly what it means but he knows that others have been killed in an effort to keep it from becoming public. He disappears and goes into hiding but leaves clues hidden in puzzles for someone to solve, gathering bit by bit the knowlege that would be needed to discover what the secret is. I think it would make for a pretty good movie or at least a book.

The game started on April 1st, 2008 at 8AM PST. It would turn out to be the shortest Cluechaser game ever. The last puzzle was solved by two players named towerofbabel and e8 working together a mere 3 days 6 hours and 22 minutes after it began. This was about 1/10th the amount of time as the previous game. I didn’t mind the short play time too much. I had designed it to be easier because I wanted more people to play it, finish it, get drawn into the storyline, and be eagerly awaiting the next game. It worked pretty well because more people did play than before.

Now that you know the history, join me for the next few weeks as I tear apart Game 1: The Missing Mr. E and explain each puzzle, how it works, how it was created, and share any stories behind it. You will also have the opportunity to try and solve it on your own and experience for yourself the excitement of unlocking the first few tantalizing clues to the mystery.

Let’s start by watching the trailer video:

First, some notes about this video. The warning at the beginning was not originally there. I added it later at the request of my wife. You see, during the creation of Game 1 a couple of strange things happened. After I started uploading the puzzles to the web and putting the game together I added a hit counter to each page so I would know when a player started on the next puzzle. This way I could track everyone’s progress. Since the game hadn’t started I had all the counters set to zero. Imagine my surprise when one day I see that there was one hit on several of the pages.

Luckily one feature at my disposal was the ability to see on a map where the visitor came from. I zoomed in and discovered that the visitor was from somewhere within Washington, DC. Since the game was about things like government coverups and conspiracy theories and secrets between USA and China this “visitor” caused some hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. Of even greater concern to me was the fact that all the puzzle pages were in a password protected area. No one should have been able to access the puzzles unless they had the password or knew how to hack their way in. Was this the FBI or CIA checking me out? Needless to say, I was concerned.

Then, the very next day three guys came into the office where I worked and started looking around. They said they were with the fire department and just doing a routine check. It struck me as very odd. I thought about my Washington DC visitor and this got me even more worried. I told my wife about it and she tried to convince me to stop working on Cluechaser. I refused but compromised by adding the warning to the video.

In the end, nothing came of my mysterious visitors. Just coincidences I guess. I decided perhaps my DC visitor was really just myself. I may never know.

The second note regarding the video is that it begins to set the stage for an alternate reality that I needed to create for the players. It hints at things to come. Little of this is revealed in this game but it is in the following game, Puzzle PiEces.

And now, on with the video:

Intro video

Their discovery would become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bible enthusiasts and just about anyone who’s familiar with the Bible has heard them. If not, here’s a summary:

A total of 11 caves in the area were found to contain scrolls, mostly in fragment form, for a total of 972 documents. These are typically divided into three categories. About 40% of the scrolls are considered “Biblical” manuscripts, 30% are “apocryphal” or “psuedepigraphical”, and 30% are referred to as “sectarian” manuscripts.

The caves were numbered based on the order of their discovery. Items found were numbered according to which cave they were located.

Perhaps the most curious item of all was #3Q15 found in Cave 3 on March 14, 1952. It is known as the Copper Scroll.

I had heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls a number of times over the years but hadn’t done any research myself. If I had I would have found out about the copper scroll sooner. Instead it came to my attention through the fiction novel of the same name written by Joel C. Rosenberg. I googled it and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the scroll actually exists.

All of the documents found in the Qumran caves were written on either papyrus or parchment with the exception of the copper scroll which was written on, you guessed it, copper. A long sheet of copper mixed with a small amount of tin. It was extremely corroded and could not be unrolled without destroying it. It took about three years before a safe way was found to open the scroll. By cutting it into 23 strips the contents of the scroll could finally be fully viewed.

There is some speculation regarding the scroll’s date but most experts place it’s creation between 25 and 135 AD. The words were mostly likely written using a hammer and chisel method and are in a form of Hebrew that is different from other scrolls found in the caves. Also unlike the other documents the scroll did not contain literary work but rather a list describing 64 different locations. Locations where treasures of gold and silver estimated to weigh several tons were hidden. The last entry apparently refers to the location of another scroll that contains additional information about these treasures.

The opening lines of the scroll say this:
In the ruin of Horebbah which is in the valley of Achor, under the steps heading eastward about forty feet: lies a chest of silver that weighs seventeen talents.

As you can see, the reference is somewhat obscure. Adding even further to the mystery is the appearance of two or three Greek letters at the end of seven of the Hebrew sentences. Here are some additional lines of text taken from random parts of the scroll:

~ In the tomb of the third section of stones there is one hundred gold bars.

~ Forty-two talents of silver coin are in the proximity of the black stone at the threshold at the sepulchral chamber.

Curiously, of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is the only one made from any type of metal, presumably so that it would last a long time. However the text assumes that the reader would have intimate and recent knowlege of the locations. Because of the obscure references it would seem that the intent was for these items to be retrieved relatively soon after they were buried or hidden. It would appear that all of it is located in the same general area, perhaps a small village or a specific section of a larger city. Why the author chose to use copper to list the locations instead of papyrus may never be known.

Have any of the items listed been found? The general consensus is no. In 1955, three ceramic vessels containing a total of 561 silver coins were found under a doorway at the Qumran excavation site. Some argue that this is one of the treasures listed but there is no evidence to support this.

Where the treasure came from and who it belonged to is still a mystery. Experts continue to look for these answers. As you would expect, several theories have been offered.

Some believe that the items listed refer to Temple treasure hidden before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD. Historical writers of the time such as Josephus however indicate that the treasures were still in the Temple when it fell to the Romans. Perhaps some were removed and the scroll was created to keep track of them.

One man, Jim Barfield believes that the scrolls refer to Tabernacle treasure, hidden for safekeeping before the previous destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at the hands of the Babylonians in 425 BC.

Since the scroll was found in a cave that contained other scrolls attributed to the Qumran community, one theory is that the treasures listed belong to them. It is difficult to explain however why a community characterized as abstaining from the possession of wordly goods would have amassed such a large fortune of gold and silver.

There are several other theories some which seem plausible and others that have no basis of fact to support them.

Is it a hoax? Some seem to think so. Someone certainly went to a lot of trouble to create the scroll. If it truly is a hoax, who was it supposed to fool? Surely the author didn’t have in mind sheep herders two thousand years in the future.

What do I think? I think the scroll is real. The fact that it lists the location of supposed hidden treasure is fascinating. Add to that the addition of Greek letters at the ends of several of the Hebrew lines and it reminds me very much of a puzzle you might find here on ClueChaser. It’s very clever.

But I have my own theory regarding the existance of the actual treasure. I doubt anything is still at the locations suggested by the scroll. My guess is the scroll has served it’s intended purpose. The treasures were buried and the scroll was created to record the locations. A short while later it was used to find and recover the treasures. A scroll made of copper would have value and perhaps it was unwise to simply throw away so instead it was discarded in the back of the closet, or in this case the back of a cave.

Perhaps one day we will know the truth behind the Copper Scroll. Until then we can only wait and let our imaginations run wild. Regardless it is certainly worthy of the title of “Ultimate Puzzle”.