“I think it’s fantastic. You had people who were looking at this from completely different perspectives. You had the linguists, the real English-major types. You had math types doing cryptographical analyses, and artist types examining the visuals. You even had X-Files types. This appealed to so many and brought so many people together.” Mike Moffatt economist, University of Western Ontario

The problem with a good mystery is how to end it. Rare is the solution that is as interesting as the mystery that propelled us to it. In that sense, the case of the Weldon code is an exception.

On a Sunday afternoon in early March, Mike Moffatt, a noted economist at Western University in London, Ont., opened a textbook at the university’s W.B. Weldon library and found a plain white envelope that contained what appeared to be a cryptogram.

It was a small note written in an apparently custom alphabet that resembled a combination of wingdings and hieroglyphics. The characters were birds, fish, clouds, windmills. “It looked like an alien Ikea catalogue,” Moffatt later told me.

Also in the envelope was a green plastic leaf marked with two dots, one in red paint and one in cyan. All the characters were black except the leaf symbols, which were green. On the bottom left corner of the note was a generic photo of a white pillow. On the back was a URL, 000xyz.blog.ca, which led to an empty blog.

Moffatt spent about an hour trying to break the code before deciding he “was never going to figure it out.” He posted an image of the note on his personal website, which is usually devoted to economics, and asked for help.

“This is really bothering me,” he wrote. It wasn’t long before he began to receive emails from others who had also discovered notes at Weldon, some as far back as two years ago. Within a week, Moffatt knew of four more. By last Saturday, the count was 19.

I found the 20th note and decoded it. I can tell you this — the Weldon letters carry a generous and humanistic meaning.

The journey begins

My search began Monday of last week, after I read an account of the case in this paper and was at once transfixed. By that time, much had been established but little was understood.

All of the notes (but one) had been found at Weldon between the 16th and 17th pages of books on shelves roughly five feet off the ground. They were laser printed and each was accompanied by an object — a feather, jewel or leaf — the colour of which seemed to determine the colour of the corresponding symbol. (The other symbols were black.) All the pages displayed a commercial-looking image of a pillow, vase, drinking glass, table, cardboard box or picture frame. Each was stamped with that maddening URL.

From the early days of the case, the Internet churned out theories both ingenious and insane. The hope that the code was a basic substitution cipher in which symbols stand for letters quickly evaporated upon testing. One promising theory involved an apparent overlap between the Weldon alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Many argued vehemently and without basis that the symbols were some variety of the wingdings or dingbat fonts.

Some even said Mike Moffatt had planted the letters as a misguided publicity stunt.

For my part, I was obsessed in particular by the puzzle’s wordplay: how “feather” goes with “pillow,” “glass” with “vase,” “box” with “frame,” “table” with “leaf” and on and on. Surely that was no coincidence.

I lost two days to a theory about how the notes were a commentary on the decline of the natural and the rise of the digital. This was buttressed by a Bible passage I discovered, Chapter 6 of First Corinthians, in which Paul explains the importance of evolving beyond the physical. The passage appears on lines 16 and 17, the same as the page numbers where the notes were found. Surely that was no coincidence.

Again and again, I thought I could see the answer in the distance, but it might just as easily have been madness I was approaching. Even after I closed my eyes to sleep, the image of the code remained before me, its shapes burned into my brain: cube, leaf, arrow, apple, sun . . .

On Thursday, I realized I needed help. I wrote to an Egyptologist at the University of Toronto, who told me the notes’ markings resembled “a child’s set of rubber stamps” and “certainly not Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

I also asked a handful of the world’s foremost cryptographers if they would examine the code. Lars R. Knudsen, a renowned codebreaker from Denmark, agreed to distribute images of the puzzles to his team. A programmer friend of mine examined the 000xyz blog for clues, but that seemed to be a dead end.

Meanwhile, the story was gaining traction in the international media. The highly trafficked U.S. website Boing Boing ran a piece on it. Users of Reddit, the massively popular aggregation site, created a subcategory dedicated to solving the case. Message boards and chat sites sprung up from communities of cryptographers, gamers, linguists and conspiracy theorists. Mike Moffatt reported hearing from hundreds of people with questions and hypotheses.

The pressure on the problem was building; it was bound soon to break.

Competing theories

By Wednesday, March 26, the 000xyz.blog.ca page had been viewed around 400 times. Two days later, a story in the Metro newspaper of London, England, reported, that number was around 50,000.

Confounded cryptographers were becoming desperate. Since there were 52 characters in the code, twice as many as in the Roman alphabet, some started to look at larger alphabets. Japanese was a particularly popular choice. Some said the key was to examine the notes through 3D glasses or under infrared light. Others said 000xyz clearly referred to cartographical co-ordinates. The wingdings and dingbat set persisted in the face of irrefutable proof that they were wrong.

The first major breakthrough in the case came from a chat room where coders were collaborating on the cipher. A user by the name of +Myst0wn succeeded where my programmer friend had failed and somehow discovered www.blog.ca/user/00000 , the blog.ca profile of the owner of 000xyz. What little the profile said held worlds of promise. If the information was to be believed, the 000xyz blog had been created in 2012 by a woman in London, Ont., who was 23 at the time. Most intriguing was the blog owner’s user name: “Sculpture 2.0.”

The phrase “Sculpture 2.0” has no fixed meaning in the art world, a Google search revealed. But as I followed the term’s trail through the Internet, I repeatedly came across what seemed like a strikingly relevant concept — the late German performance artist Joseph Beuys’ notion of social sculpture.

In social sculpture, the artist’s materials include not just canvas or marble, but also the space in which the work appears and the audience that views it. In 2003, an artist named Christy Thompson placed trophies engraved with the phrase “Good for you” around Vancouver. The sculpture encompassed both the trophies themselves and how passersby responded to them. Did they take the trophy home? Were they validated in some way by the message? Did they assume it wasn’t for them?

Perhaps the code of the Weldon letters and all the efforts to break it, including my own, were part of a work of social sculpture for the digital age.

A Google search of “social sculpture” and “London, Ontario” returned several names, but only one of them, Kelly Jazvac, was associated with Western University. Jazvac is a 33-year-old installation artist, sculptor and teacher, whose work has been praised as “playful” and “intelligent.” The more I read about her, the more confident I became that she was somehow involved.

I wrote to her and asked if she was aware of the letters and whether she thought they might be a work of art. Her carefully worded response was encouraging. “Yes, I indeed have heard about those letters!” she wrote. “And I can definitely be of help in respect to the question of them being an art project.” Too bad she couldn’t talk till Sunday.

I then called Christof Migone, an artist and colleague of Jazvac’s at Western, to ask whether he thought someone from his faculty might be behind the project. He was dubious. “I don’t think the notes are visually interesting enough to be the work of an artist,” he said. “It’s more likely that this is some sort of elaborate scavenger hunt.”

But when I proposed the notes might be part of a work of social sculpture, he allowed that it was possible and suggested I get in touch with Jazvac. “If it is a sculpture,” he said at the end of our conversation, “it would be more beautiful if the mystery were never solved.”

Even as I worked to solve it, I didn’t disagree. But I couldn’t stop now. We are built to wonder — and I wondered whether the Weldon letters said nothing more than that.

London calling

On Saturday, I took a train to London, where the sky was the monochromatic grey typical of the other London. In the cab on the way to the hotel, the driver spoke excitedly about the letters. He knew the answer, he said: an Islamist conspiracy. I ate dinner at the hotel restaurant and watched the grey sky go black before heading to Weldon to see what I could find.

The library was largely empty. I stalked through the stacks, aisle by aisle, scanning the tops of books in search of any unusual protrusions. A few moments after I entered each new darkened aisle, the lights would flicker on.

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In a book on ancient cultures, I found a yellowed syllabus for a course on late Mesopotamia that appeared to date roughly from that period. In the philosophy section, I found — in an obscure work of critical theory — a red post-it note with its own oblique message: “Is Daniel his lover?”

I walked by the mind-twisting works of Husserl and Heidegger and Kant and others whose own cryptic puzzles have long lured meaning-seekers into the stacks. But it was in a little-known tract on cognitive psychology that I made my major discovery.

After I’d been at it for about an hour, I noticed something sticking out of the early part of a book called Mind Matters. I opened the book to page 16 and a saw a little white envelope.

I had to steady myself. From inside the envelope I pulled a note much smaller than the ones I had imagined. On it was printed the now-familiar glyphs and inside the note’s fold was a bright orange feather painted with four green dots and one white one. On the bottom left corner of the page was an image of a pale wooden table.

Before I could study the book for clues, I was startled by a voice.

“Are you looking for letters?” asked a security guard.

She was visibly tense and had the weary, under-sunned look of someone who works nights. Only her green eyes were bright.

“Yes, I just found one,” I said.

“Are you going to report it?” she asked.

The wording of her question prompted me irrationally to wonder whether she somehow knew who I was and intended to stop me. I worried she was going to confiscate my letter, though on what grounds I couldn’t imagine.

“I plan to,” I said tentatively.

She cheered up a bit. “That’s good,” she said. “You need to share what you’ve found to help people solve this thing.”

Finding the key

On Sunday came the first sign of sun since I had discovered the code.

I met Kelly Jazvac at a London coffee shop. She greeted me with a smile. “I think I can help you,” she said.

She explained that the Weldon code was an art project that came out of a second-year sculpture and installation class she taught in 2012. The artist, then an undergraduate student, placed 121 letters in the Weldon stacks and moved on with her or his (but probably her) life. Jazvac told me the artist was shocked by the project’s recent fame and wished to remain anonymous lest she be treated unkindly in the media. (The artist later declined my offer, via Jazvac, for an interview under the condition of anonymity.)

It turns out the code’s symbols do in fact correspond to the Roman alphabet — 26 capital letters, 26 lower case. But in each of the letters they are arranged randomly, thus making the notes meaningless, in the literal sense, and the code impossible to crack. (Later Jazvac passed along the encryption key the artist had given her and I used it to translate my letter. It begins, “JsdlLoqiwb . . . ”)

The artist drew the invented alphabet (it is, finally, neither wingdings nor dingbat), then used a program that allowed her to turn her symbols into a digital font. She named the font Sculpture 2.0.

The particular meanings of the leaves, jewels and feathers, the paint splotches, the page numbers and the books chosen, among other details, remain a mystery, albeit a less seductive one.

I asked Jazvac what it all meant. “I think the artist wanted to say something about how we store and access knowledge,” she said. “That’s why the library was important.” When I asked her whether all the attention, two years after the code was created, had changed the value of the artwork, she paused, and then said, “In the sense that this was also about community-finding and community-building, I guess it has.”

After I left Jazvac I met Mike Moffatt and told him what I had learned. I asked if he was disappointed that the code was not a code at all, but a sculpture.

“I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “You had people who were looking at this from completely different perspectives. You had the linguists, the real English-major types. You had math types doing cryptographical analyses, and artist types examining the visuals. You even had X-Files types. This appealed to so many and brought so many people together.”

Mike Moffatt, the Weldon security guard and I, and the still-growing group of others around the world were drawn in by these objects of rare wonder. Bound by shared curiosity, we did something essentially human: We gathered in old spaces of inquiry and created new ones, and together we searched for meaning. Forget what the code of the Weldon letters says; look at the beautiful thing it did.