May Day Mystery – Cryptography Part I

Strange Matters Podcast

Campfire Audio Productions

Science, History, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences

4.4 • 987 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2016

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On May 1st of 1995, a student at the University of Arizona named Bryan Hance was reading through the local college paper when he came across a full page advert which contained a cryptic mix of images, maps, languages, and equations. Coincidentally on the same day of May 1st for the next two years, Bryan would again see these bizarre full page ‘May Day” ads of seemingly random and nonsensical images. Deciding to dig deeper, Bryan would soon find himself obsessed trying to uncover and decipher one of the strangest coded mysteries of the modern times.
Soon more light was shown onto this mystery. These full-paged May Day cryptic puzzles went back in the local paper for decades, with additional smaller advertisements placed throughout the years as well. Still, no one knew who was behind them or what purpose they served. Through the years many people from all over the world have tried to crack the code behind the May Day Pages, which hides its clues in obscure historical, mathematical and geographical puzzles.
Are these May Day adverts the work of a secret society as a way to get their message out? An eccentric game which will lead whoever can solve the puzzle to a vast fortune? Or simply the rambling works of an unstable but genius madman? Tune in and hear all the theories and ideas behind this modern cryptic mystery!
View the May Day Mystery Website to view all the texts!
To listen to more great podcast please visit Dark Myths Collective
To hear Part II of our Cryptography series, as well as getting access to all future bonus episodes, please visit our Patreon Page

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the Strange Matters podcast where we discuss everything
0:18.0	just outside the norm ranging from the bizarre and unexplained to the supernatural and
0:23.2	everything in between. I'm your host for this episode Eric
0:27.6	joined by my fellow co-host Sean.
0:30.0	Hey everybody. So this was originally planned as a Patreon exclusive episode only.
0:35.6	However, as a treat to all of our listeners, we'd like to share a sneak peek into one of the topics that we thought was pretty interesting that we covered in this episode,
0:45.2	which was all about cryptographic and coded mysteries.
0:49.4	So we have the first part here for everyone to listen to, and if you would like to hear the rest of
0:53.7	the episode as well as getting access to all of our future bonus episodes please
0:58.9	consider supporting our podcast on patreon.com slash Strange Matters.
1:03.0	We hope you enjoy this mysterious topic.
1:06.0	So I want to start off this episode by saying to all our listeners,
1:11.0	you guys are constantly sending us a ton of great
1:13.4	suggestions and these are some really interesting topics most of which we
1:18.0	look into at least briefly unfortunately there's just no way with our jobs and everything keeping us busy during the daytime that we're able to get to all these suggestions.
1:28.0	So please don't be offended if you don't hear your suggestion anytime soon, but please keep reaching out to us.
1:34.8	We really like getting feedback and topic suggestions.
1:37.7	Yeah, definitely.
1:38.3	I always like hearing about people's takes on different episodes that we've
1:41.9	covered in the past and ideas for future ones.
1:45.7	But as for this episode, we are going to be talking about a few different cases involving
1:50.4	cryptography or the art of either writing or solving a cryptic code.
	...

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