EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

A teacher couple of Salinas, California, Donald and Bettye Harden, were able to solve the cryptogram on August 8, 1996, within only short time after its publication. While the cracked cipher revealed terrifying information, it did not contain the name of the Zodiac Killer. However, the decoded cipher’s last eighteen characters showed the letters EBEORIETEMETHHPITI what has been thought to be garbled text. We carefully studied the Zodiac’s 408 cipher and particularly its last 18 letters EBEORIETEMETHHPITI (hyperlink to 3 part cipher solution image) and after some extensive research came to our own conclusions and theory:

1.	The last 18 characters of the 408 cipher have been decoded correctly
2.	The last 18 characters of the 408 cipher are not garbled text
3.	The last 18 characters of the 408 cipher represent actual words
4.	The last 18 characters of the 408 cipher do have a coherent meaning
5.	The last 18 characters of the 408 cipher give possible clues on the Zodiac Killer’s identity

Due to the lucky coincidence that one of our team had years of Latin at school, we realized that the letters ‘ORIETEM’ might represent what appeared to be a valid Latin word. Our subsequent research confirmed this very quickly. If you search the Internet through popular search engines, you will find numerous matches. It becomes even easier and more obvious if you are using the Latin words ‘AD ORIETEM’. So, if ‘ORIETEM’ indeed is a valid word within the last 18 cipher characters, it leaves us with ‘EBE’ on its left and ‘ETHHPITI’ on its right side. ‘EBE’ is obviously extremely short. Therefore, we considered it as highly probable that it stands for a single word only. So the last 18 characters of the Zodiac Killer’s 408 cipher now looked like ‘EBE ORIETEM ETHHPITI’, with ‘EBE’ as single word, and ‘ETHHPITI’ either representing one word or two words, less likely three words, and very unlikely four words, due to its comparably small number of letters. While it was not too hard to find the possible meaning of ‘EBE’ after we realized that it may stand for a religious acronym, ‘ETHHPITI’ was way tougher to identify. The only possibility that we found to split ‘ETHHPITI’ was into ‘ETHHP’ and ‘ITI’. Consequently, we split the last 18 cipher letters ‘EBEORIETEMETHHPITI’ to read: After further explorative Internet research, has been split into the words “EBE ORIETEM ETHHP ITI”. The attempt identifying the words resulted in the following findings:

EBE	E.B.E.; religious acronym for ‘Everybody Become Enlightened’
ORIETEM	(AD) ORIETEM; the direction of religious mass celebrants facing a central place of revelation, the sun, the Lord
ETTHP	ETHHP; ancient word from Sahidic Bible texts of 1 Corinthians 2:7 and Revelation 2:17, meaning “having been hidden”
ITI	ITI; Sanskrit word to indicate the end of direct speech or writing

To verify our findings, type ‘EBE Everybody Become Enlightened’ in your favorite web browser, or use one of the popular acronym finder websites otherwise. If you use an  acronym website for your search, a number of additional search results for ‘EBE’ will be offered. However, if you run a simple elimination you will find that ‘Everybody Become Enlightened’ is the only plausible option left. Others do not qualify due to age younger than the letter or for other obvious reasons. You can try similar with the search word ‘orietem’ and the search phrases ‘ad orietem’ or ‘ad orietem posture’. There is a wealth of information available on the Internet to those interested in more detailed information. If you try ‘ITI’ with an acronym finder, it will produce a large number of results that mostly refer to company names and institutions. In our opinion, the meaning of ‘ITI’ cannot be found by means of an acronym finder, simply because it is not an acronym. The word ‘ITI’ and its meaning is actually not too difficult to verify, it is only buried under the many ‘ITI’ acronyms on the Internet. If you try ‘ITI Sanskrit’ as search word, it will immediately produce more meaningful results.
When we searched for the possibly meaning of ‘ETHHP’, most of what we could find on the Internet referred to information technology and code. We knew that this simply could not be the right avenue, considering that we were analyzing a cipher of the year 1969. Therefore, any  IT context could be eliminated as extremely unlikely. While we had what we considered a plausible explanation of the acronym ‘EBE’ and the words ‘ORIETEM’ and ‘ITI’, we found that ‘ETHHP’ was much more difficult to clarify. ‘ETHHP’ was the missing  link that would either confirm or dismiss or hypothesis that the 18 characters were actual plain text words and not garbled text, or the result of different cipher code, or similar.
With further Internet research we finally found ‘ETHHP’ in another context than code and IT. On one hand we were surprised on the other we were not that it was again in a religious context! To verify, type search word 'ETHHP' or search phrase 'ETHHP Bible' in your favorite search engine. We finally found the word at Sahidica.org but could not find out its meaning. We then contacted J. Warren Wells who informed us that the meaning of the word in both verses that we cited (1 Corinthians 2:7 and Revelation 2:17) is “having been hidden”. We thank Joseph very much for the information provided. With this we were able to put together the pieces of the last 18 character puzzle. Continue to Comments and Conclusions.