Secret Messages We Discovered Years Later

There's something magical about getting a secret message from the past. It's people reaching through time to give information to those who haven't even been born yet, letting them know something they think is important enough to record. Sure, there are obvious ways to do it, like through books or recordings or official time capsules, but that's boring. What's really cool is when the message is hidden and unexpected, only stumbled upon accidentally years later.

It doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes a note from the past is discovered in the most unlikely place. Many times it's related to war, since conflict necessitates the sending of secret messages, often in code. Other times it's completely random, with people hiding notes in statues, behind walls, even in video games. Since no one knew they were there, these secret messages could have stayed hidden forever. It's only by accident they were found, so keep your eyes peeled for the unofficial kind of time capsule. One could be anywhere.

Americans often think of Europeans as very suave. But there are geeky ones, too, like the people who wander around fields with metal detectors. When two major wars were fought on your soil in the last century, there's plenty of metal stuff to find.

In 2015, in Tuscany, a group of detectorists found a bullet, according to posts on an Italian metal detector forum (via Gizmodo). Nothing unusual there. But this one was inverted into its case, so something was obviously up. They opened it and found a coded secret message inside. Apparently, this was a standard way of hiding notes during the war, since you could just chuck the bullet away and it wouldn't be noticed among the other ammunition on a battlefield.

A poster on another forum got out his grandfather's code books and claimed to work out the message. Supposedly, it says "THEY – THROW – GRENADES – WE – PULL – PINS – AND – THROW – BACK – NOTIFY REINFORCEMENTS STAND DOWN – NOT NEEDED." It's an odd message, but the explanation is even weirder. Some Italian grenades had two pins, and soldiers needed to pull both to make them live. It appears German soldiers were unaware of this, and were pulling just one pin, then throwing the unprimed grenades at American troops, who pulled the second pin and then threw them back. The Americans wrote they didn't need reinforcements because the enemy was helpfully supplying free grenades and they were in absolutely no danger.

When you are still using churches from the 12th century, they're going to need work from time to time. So it was with the cathedral in Goslar, Germany. The Washington Post reports that in 2018, roofer Peter Brandt was doing some maintenance when he found a secret message in a bottle hidden under the eaves. It had been put there 88 years before and was signed by Peter's own grandfather, Willi Brandt.

In 1930, Willi was just an 18-year-old roofing apprentice. He and the other guys working on the church roof back then decided to write a note to the future. They talked about how hard things were economically, recording they "worked an entire week for 1 pound of butter and 1 bread." But they had faith things were going to get better, writing, "Difficult times of war lie behind us. We hope for better times soon to come." Since it was 1930, their hopes would obviously not be realized.

Willi would enlist as a soldier in World War II and was captured by the Russians. Peter said when he knew him, his grandfather would never talk about the war and never mentioned leaving the note, even as Peter learned all about being a roofer from him. The original secret message was added to the town archives, but a copy (with an additional note from the current mayor) was put back in the bottle and placed under the cathedral's roof again. It's hoped it will be found by roofers in another 100 years.

People have made time capsules out of plenty of weird things, but Jesus' butt must be up there for one of the strangest. National Geographic reports in 2017 Spanish historians were restoring a statue of Jesus from the 18th century. The figure of Jesus being crucified was starting to crack and coming loose from the cross, so they took it down, and while putting it on a worktable they realized there was something inside. After removing the Lord's carved wooden loincloth, they found a hollow bottom with two hidden letters. The documents turned out to be from 1777, written by a chaplain named Joaquín Mínguez.

Mínguez certainly liked the sound of his own voice, so to speak. His letters were incredibly detailed. They recorded who made the statue and other work the artist had done for various churches in the area. He then described how well different harvests went for "wheat, rye, oats, and barley and stores of wine." But not everyone was happy and well fed, since Mínguez named all the diseases plaguing the village, like typhoid fever. He recorded that the people who were not busy dying were having fun playing games like cards and balls. Then he moved onto national news, talking about King Carlos III and his court in Madrid, plus the Spanish Inquisition, which would last another 57 years.

According to one historian, the amount of detail in the letters probably meant Mínguez intended them to be "a kind of time capsule for future generations."

Humans aren't the only victims of war. The New York Times reports that in 1944, a carrier pigeon code named 40TW194 was carrying an encrypted message from France when something went wrong and it ended up dying in the chimney of a house in Bletchingley, England. There the pigeon and its message stayed until 1982, when homeowner David Martin was cleaning it out and found the skeleton with the note attached.

In 2012, after "sustained pressure from pigeon fanciers," Britain's current code-breaking unit agreed to try and figure out what the message said. They didn't dedicate crazy amounts of time to it, obviously, since they have more pressing things to work on, but after a month they said they couldn't figure it out. A historian said of the code, "If it's only used once and it's properly random, and it's properly guarded by the sender and the recipient, it's unbreakable." Even if it was based on a more regular code, it was "unlikely" to be cracked, since the whole point was for the encryption to be ridiculously hard to break.

That didn't stop one Spaniard who heard about the pigeon and its message. According to the Telegraph, in 2015, Didac Sánchez claimed he had figured it out after three years of being obsessed. He read up on wartime encryption, put together a team of "top computer scientists," and spent €1.5 million on the effort. Then he refused to tell anyone what the secret message said, so who knows if he really succeeded.

In 2018, the effects of a drought and heat wave uncovered a whole bunch of cool stuff in Ireland. According to History, there was "the discovery of the supposed home of St. Oliver Plunkett, a Roman Catholic martyr, and the discovery via drone of an ancient henge dating to 3,500 B.C.E." And then there was the wildfire that burned away undergrowth to reveal a giant World War II-era carving on the coastal cliffs, partially eroded at that point, that said "ÉIRE" (meaning "Ireland" in the Irish Gaelic language). There were originally over 80 of those signs, but this one had been forgotten about. The idea behind it was to let German bombers know they were flying over neutral land and not to attack.

Yeah, about that. Ireland didn't officially side with the Allies during World War II, basically because they hated Great Britain more than the Nazis. Before the war started, the country said it wouldn't join any conflict the U.K. was fighting in, so they stayed neutral. That was the official line. Unofficially, they knew which side were the good guys and helped them out. Around 43,000 Irish people enlisted in the British armed forces. The Irish government gave the Allies information about German planes and submarines off Ireland's coast, while also letting Britain use its airspace. When German troops ended up in Ireland they were detained, while Allies were allowed to return to the U.K.

And the carved signs didn't stop all attacks. In 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed Belfast, killing over 1,000 people.