GKNOVA6

A screenshot of the first version of GKNOVA6.com.

"Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed."

— GKNOVA6, quoting Francis Bacon

GKNOVA6 was a viral website that functioned as a promoter for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The flash site originally consisted of an old television with five vertical lights (one for each "channel"), with other televisions being turned on as the site was updated. The site originally contained many references to the Cold War and nuclear weapons, including a photograph of John F. Kennedy delivering a speech about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its name bears a resemblance to the biochemical agent Nova-6, which is featured heavily in Black Ops.

In one piece of intel in Call of Duty: Black Ops, the GK company is said to have been used by the Soviet Union to distribute Nova-6 to its agents in America.

Following the official Black Ops reveal and the site's own decryption, the site was radically changed to show frantic images of Zombies running unleashed in an unknown facility. This is actually what the game looks like when the player selects the Zombies option in the main menu.

GKNOVA6 has since been taken down.

Discovery of the site

In early April 2010, an unmarked USB storage device was sent to several video game sites such as IGN and Kotaku. It contained a text file with the following words:

Cryptography
Isotope
Philanthropy
Hydrogen
Ember
Rebirth

The acronym of these words forms CIPHER.

It also contained an audio file in which a man says: "What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also." This is followed by a woman saying:

M O D [sound of 3 chimes] Z Z Z J N Q R Y D 3 F R P

The quote is from Julius Caesar. These suggest to use the Caesar cipher which consists in shifting each letter to Nth position after the original (N is fixed for each text) to encrypt it. In this case, the three sounds indicate that it has been shifted three times to encrypt it, so the letters must be shifted back three (letter D) times in order to decrypt the code:

W W W G K N O V A 6 C O M

This code has been first decrypted by video game blog Joystiq.

When first visiting the site, another audio file will play. This file is exactly 1 minute and 15 seconds long, a possible reference to Element 115.

Solutions

First transmission

The male voice says: "Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed." It is a quote from Francis Bacon followed by a female voice saying:

M O D [sound of 2 chimes]

Then both voices spell the letters "N O V A S I X" repeatedly (some letters are spelled by the man, and others by the woman but the scheme is irregular). "Hell is Purple" can eventually be heard.

Bacon's quote indicates that it has been encrypted using the Baconian cipher. Since this cipher is too complicated to be decrypted manually, "Hell is Purple" suggests to use the Internet site, Purple Hell featuring a tool for encrypting/decrypting Baconian ciphers. The cipher consists in replacing each letter of a plaintext by a group of five of the letters A or B. It must be considered that each letter spelled by the woman is A and each letter spelled by the man is B during the "N O V A S I X" scheme. There are two versions of the Baconian cipher: the two sounds after the M O D indicate to use the second version of Purple Hell's converter.

Ciphertext: AAAAAABBBBBAAABABAAAABABBBABBAAABAAAABAAABABABAABBBABBAABBBA
Plaintext: APRIL WEEK TWO

It points out that the site's update will occur during the second week of April. The second transmission was indeed on April 9, 2010 during the second week of April.

Second transmission

The second transmission shows a group of officials and a picture of J.F.K.

"On the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia he commanded for the League."

— GKNOVA6's male voice

M O D 1 9 6 9 – D U G B T R L R F M * G W O X A W D N S N O C * Y X N M

Count Gronsfeld is the person the man was talking about. So the code has been encrypted using the Gronsfeld cipher, a variant of the Vigenère cipher. 1 9 6 9 is the cipher key.

C L A S S I F I E D * A N N O U N C E M E N T * S O M D

Matt_Teddy on Twitter cracked the code, which he thought to be "CLASSIFIED ANNOUNCEMENT SOLD." It was later found out that it was actually "Classified Announcement SOMD."

This lead to SOMD.com, a website for Southern Maryland which is where the packages were sent from. The website is used for local news, event planning and community announcements. There was an announcement within this site pertaining to GKNOVA6, posted by a user named "Eve Reign." The posted announcement was a long and entirely lettered cipher:

NOVA
Posted by: Eve Reign on Friday, 9 April 2010, at 3:20 p.m.
LWLXRMSYWN.GVVOXXPXBVOKTPXAVSFTMBK -AONTHLRDOF.DHXSWEJHCQSQFWTCZUBCAM
LWLXRMSYWN.LRDOFUINENYMGNPBMSYWNHAM, -YFTTXEWPGJL.XVORLUINEASPTCZUBJWGILVF
LWLXRBGG.CCGRNYMGNAEMOWXAAGMSYWNGVVO, -GCYSRZYKXR.YBCBGCYGVVOXDOKSWEJUINE
LWLXRMSYWN.XVORLCCGRAONTHLVFCWKYG, -FMFWCMXIMX.RTLHGPBWTMBKNSNTZBIM
XXPXSQFW.HYORVPAKYHAMCAMMBKAONTH, MUZOWHYORV.CAMIGRAONTHLRDOFHYORVOAVBM
You can find me at the Cheeping River. It’s near the Cheering Viper.

Cheeping River and Cheering Viper are anagrams of Vigenere cipher. Using the word "SPUTNIK" as the passphrase for this cipher, MrToasty on movieviral.com decrypted it:

THREEEIGHT.NINEFIVEONESEVENNINESIX -SEVENSEVEN.ONEFOURSIXFIVEEIGHTSIX
THREEEIGHT.SEVENFOURFOURTWOEIGHTONE, -ONEZEROFOUR.EIGHTFOURSIXEIGHTZEROSIX
THREETWO.NINEFOURTHREEEIGHTEIGHTNINE, -ONEZEROSIX.FOURONENINEFOURFOURFOUR
THREEEIGHT.EIGHTNINESEVENSIXSEVEN, -SEVENSEVEN.ZEROTHREESIXFIVEFIVE
FIVEFIVE.SEVENFIVEONESIXSIXSEVEN, THREESEVEN.SIXONESEVENSEVENSEVENEIGHT

When put into numbers, this decrypted code indicate five major locations during the Cold War:

• 38.951796, -77.146586 – Langley, VA (CIA Headquarters)
• 38.744281, -104.846806 – Cheyenne Mountains (NORAD)
• 32.943889, -106.419444 – White Sands Missile Complex
• 38.89767, -77.03655 – White House
• 55.751667, 37.617778 – Ivanovskaya ploshchad, Russian Federation (Kremlin)

Third transmission

The third transmission which came out on April 21, 2010.

"They used the earth's magnetic field X the information was gathered and transmitted."

— GKNOVA6's male voice

M O D [sound of 4 chimes] – 10 21 26 1 26 19 * 25 16 22 2 20 1 21 23 16 26 22 19 3

The quote is from the decrypted plaintext of the Kryptos sculpture's second part. It has been solved using a keyed Vigenère cipher also known as Quagmire III.

"Nothing in life is to be feared it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less."

— Marie Curie

M O D 1 0 0 – [Tones follow at these frequencies in Hz] 200 800 1800 3200 2400 800 200 * 200 800 1800 3200 2100 900 200

"Outside of consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things."

— Heinrich Hertz

M O D Can’t you see the whole spectrum? - [Donated By (Delted)Im Use audacity in the weird sounds repeated twice and show this:
FREEDOM-7
 5+5=10 (2 Times)]

"-Kenneth what’s the frequency?
-Linear not algorithmic."

— GKNOVA6's male voice and Kenneth

The quote from Kryptos may first seem to suggest using the Quagmire III as the cipher following the previous transmissions. But this is only a misleading, and the 4 sounds after the M O D indicate the 4th tableau of the Kryptos' transcript. The letters of the tableau's first line must be numbered:

N G H I J L M N Q U  V  W  X  Z  K  R  Y  P  T  O  S  A  B  C  D  E
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Then, each number spelled by the woman must be replaced by its associated letter from the tableau's first line:

U S E N E T * D R A G O N S B R E A T H

A Google search with the keywords "usenet", "dragonsbreath" and "nova six" leads to a thread within the conspiracy discussions of Google Group. A user named Nova Six posted the following:

NOVA TRUTHSEEKERS 

I want this story told. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Tell All But Ultraviolet November.
Send All Relevant Items Now.
Situation Offers Many Appropriate Nights.
we’ll have a GAS.

The elements are in the sounds and words. Look and listen.

-DRAGONSBREATH
Tell All But Ultraviolet November. = TABUN
Send All Relevant Items Now. = SARIN
Situation Offers Many Appropriate Nights. = SOMAN

These are all nerve gases of the G-Series.

The first part of the transmission has been solved by Shizzire of the CoDz forum.

For the Marie Curie code, MOD 100 stands for: divide by 100. Each frequency must indeed be divided by 100:

2 8 18 32 24 8 2 * 2 8 18 32 21 9 2

2 8 18 32 24 8 2 is the number of electrons per shell in Plutonium (Atomic number 94; Symbol Pu; Discovered by Enrico Fermi).

2 8 18 32 21 9 2 is the number of electrons per shell in Uranium (Atomic number 92; Symbol U; Discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth).

Fourth Transmission

A male voice is heard saying "Azure has the task." This is repeated three times.

If the temporal frequency is analyzed, the following words are found: Napoleon = d Karl = b.

The NOVA TRUTHSEEKERS group was updated with a new post from Nova Six:

Azure: Since you have provided us with this information, we give you
a new task, and see if you can deliver.

We are looking for a specific document, one that we would very much
like to find. This document is posted by someone who remains just out
of our reach…for now. We have
intercepted communications with a code
that we haven’t been able to crack. Post this document in a public
place, and we will correspond again in the future.
Transmission is as follows:

They came in a black helicopter to try and aid the dead president.
Even the cabal could not stop the spy.
An interesting Conspiracy, one the world would not soon forget, had
they ever known.

Searching the third line of the "transmission" revealed another Google group with a link to a download. The download required a password, which was found when another group started by the same user had the fourth line spell out with the first letter of each word, MASON. A document that was supposedly signed by John F. Kennedy (the blotted out signature looked nothing like his) was found in the download with the first letter of each sentence spelling out TREYARCH, confirming the developer's involvement in the viral site.

Azure later posted the following in reply to Nova Six's post.

As Requested 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27543574@N06/4566876865/

The link leads to a picture of a top secret document from the White House posted by Azure and under it in text is what Azure deciphered from the picture. A Flickr user by the name of GKNova6 commented the following.

Well done. We will be in contact. EOM.

This document can be seen in the Uncut Reveal Trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops which was released on May 18 at 8:30 pm EST.

Fifth Transmission

The fifth Transmission which came out on May 5, 2010.

The woman starts out the transmission by saying this:

M O D N S A M 55

By performing a spectral analysis upon the sound, following text can be found:

Subject: NOVA project -
We are on schedule thus far. Stability has be
however, are promising and yield results beyo
The remaining issues and action items are as
   a) Stability is still an issue - We are h
      - Stability Report No: NOVA.SR 2010032(This may be NOVA.88 2010032 or anything.)
      Testing with trial batches to derive th

Note that the text is cut from its rightmost side.

If this is shuffled around something like this shows up, apparently it all fits together perfectly:

2010/(0)3/2 also appeared in the teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops.

The rest of this document can be found here. This was in a suitcase with a GK logo on it. It was given to CODZ.

Searching about nsam55 brings up a letter sent from JFK to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961. The letter is hard to read and is typed above the actual letter.

Full credit to Jurryaany for finding and decoding the letter

DISPATCHED
N.S.C.
Jun 29 3 02 PM '61


							June 18, 1961

National Security Action Memorandum NO. 55

TO:		The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of staff
SUBJECT:	Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President 
		in Cold War Operations


	I wish to inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff as follows with regard
to my views of their relations to me in the Cold War Operations:

	a. I regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my principal military
advisor responsible both for initializing advice to me and for res-
ponding to requests for advice. I expect their advice to come to
me direct and unfiltered.

	b. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense
of the nation in the Cold War similar in that which they have in conventional hostilities. They should know the military and paramilitary
forces and resources available to the Department of Defense, verify their
readiness, report on their adequacy and make appropriate recommendations for their expansion and improvement. I look to the Chiefs to
contribute dynamic and imaginative leadership in contributing to the
access of the military and paramilitary aspects of Cold War programs.

	c. I expect the Joint Chiefs of Staff to present the military view-
point in governmental councils in each way as to assure that the
military factors are clearly understood before decisions are reached.
When only the Chairman or a singe Chief is present, that officer 
must represent the chiefs as a body, taking such paramilitary and
subsequent actions as may be necessary to assure that he does in 
fact represent the corporate judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

	d. While I look to the Chiefs to present the military factor with-
out reserve or hesitation, I regard them to be more than military men
and expect their help in fitting military requirements into the over-all
context of any situations, recognizing that the most difficult problem in
Government is to combine all assets in a united, effective pattern.

cc: Secretary of Defense
    General Taylor

cc: Mrs. Lincoln
    Mr. Smith
    McG. Bundy*s file

Sixth transmission

The full screen upon entering the password of Transmission 6.

The screen shows that a password is required to access the cinematic.

At the beginning of the transmission, a woman starts off by saying:

MODGK0984242P

After that, she says letters that could be the possible password.

TRD*SRA*SRC*DRB*IRE

After reading the swf file, it reads /(--FREEDOM)+-. It can be rearranged with the five three letter code resulting in TRD/(SRA-SRC-7)+DRB-IRE. Substituting identification numbers results in 1915032/(2010032-2010022-7)+0510032-0002036 and adds up to 1146340. 1146340 is the password for the screen. Upon entering the password, it shows the full screen of what appears to be a medical area. A man can be heard breathing heavily, some machines, and a EKG machine. Also, there are three television screens that cycle the same patter over and over again. When combined, the circles form the GK symbol.

PerdíElJuego of unfiction.com solved the message.

World Premiere Trailer

JFK signed document also found through GKNOVA6.com's transmissions (0:18).

Classified document with the GK logo (0:19).

The world premiere trailer contains references to the GKNOVA6 site, confirming once more that the latter is related to Call of Duty: Black Ops:

• At 0:18, we find the same copy of the JFK signed document that has been given by Azure on the Google groups topic created by Nova Six.
• At 0:19, a GK logo can be seen on a classified document.

GK briefcase

The GK case.

During the preview event of May 21, 2010, CoDz's administrator "carbonfibah" received a mysterious brief case with the GK logo.

The contents of the briefcase can be found here

Zombies

The website changed to an orange hue and all of the screens showed clips of zombies moving about, scientists fleeing, scientist corpses being reanimated, experiments, corridors and rooms within some facility, a helicopter flying over the area before crashing, boards being ripped off, and soldiers firing. In the background, a zombie walks by and attempts to break in. The number 47093 can also be seen multiple times. Also there is a red flashing light indicating a place where they're testing zombies. In one screen, a scientist is shown leading a man into a chamber with the letters BHИMAHИE above the door. The scientist then straps down the man's arms and places a mask over his mouth. Bнимaниe is translated from Russian to English as "warning." The website actually is what the room looks like when the player selects the Zombies option in the main menu.

47093

If one should treat this number as April 7, 1993, it coincides with a nuclear accident at the Tomsk-7 Nuclear facility in Seversk, Russia.

Zombie redesign of GKNOVA6	Gas zombies in GKNOVA6

Trivia

Main article: GKNOVA6/Trivia

External links

• GKNOVA6.com
• Cipher decoder