A coded letter sent last year to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois has the lab, and outside coders stumped. The letter was sent anonymously last March in a hand-addressed envelope via regular mail to the physics lab's public affairs office.

After sitting on the letter for more than a year, the lab posted it on a physics blog in May, hoping to get help cracking it.

Thousands of sleuths have taken a stab at it so far and have succeeded to crack two parts of the letter. An engineer at the Canadian Space Center used a variation of the base-3 system to uncover a line that reads "Frank Shoemaker would call this noise," which refers to an 86-year-old retired Princeton University physicist who helped design the magnets used with the lab's first particle accelerator, known as the Main Ring. Another line in the letter has been cracked to read, "Employee number basse sixteen."

A Chicago Tribune story about the letter offers some possible explanations behind the two sentences and what appears to be a typo in the second sentence.

But, like the famous CIA Kryptos sculpture (which also has a typo), one final section of the letter (pictured above) remains unsolved. The lab is hoping outsiders will help them unravel the clues. You can see the entire letter on the physics blog where it was posted. An undated update to the blog post indicates that they suspect they now know who may have sent the letter.

Coders post your solutions in the comments section below or send them directly to me (you'll find my e-mail address in this blog's righthand column) with an explanation about how you cracked it.

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