Q Docs file: Project 3301
Cicada 3301: A Castle built upon Sand December 16, 2024
On the 4th of January, 2012, the internet saw the birth of one of the most elaborate, complex, and intriguing puzzles to date. An anonymous user going by 3301 sought intelligent individuals. For what purpose? Nobody knew. Who was behind it? Nobody knew that either. Until now.
I am confident that, as of today, we are extremely close to figuring out who Cicada 3301 actually is. After calling in a good friend of mine and analyzing the data, we came up with the following theory:

Cicada 3301 is a single person, and probably immature also. The main point of reference for the first point are the timings and dates, which do not span the entire day/week respectively. We also think that realistic places of residency for Cicada are either coast (east/west) of the United States or Canada, the United Kingdom, or mainland Europe. Our second point, that Cicada is probably immature, then comes from the fact that we were able to figure out that Cicada is very likely to be a single person, as any sophisticated individual would've thought through how to make it seem like one person is actually multiple.


I personally think that Cicada lives on the west coast, more specifically in the Pacific Northwest. However, due to certain mistakes Cicada made in their posts (mostly grammar and spelling mistakes), I think that they are not actually Amercian/Candadian, but from Central Europe, e.g. Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, etc., as the mistakes mostly lines up with what would be correct in those countries' languages. I'm not 100% sure about this, however. I can speak German, and the mistakes present in some of Cicada's text would be correct if the text were German.
The GitHub repository
In the video, I briefly mention a GitHub repository. However, that does not work as of right now. This is why I have moved all of that investigative material to here.
  1. Nov. 24, 2021 Near & Q

    This was originally in a GitHub repository but that doesn't work, so it was moved.

  2. May 19, 2024 LEMMiNO
  3. May 27, 2020 Matt Brassil
  4. Sep. 05, 2021 S. Flannagan
  5. Fandom

    This wiki documents the puzzles quite well.

  6. Reddit
  7. GitHub
  8. Twitter
  9. #9 Cicada 3301 is accused of hacking

    A Chilean news oganization accused Cicada of hacking, to which Cicada promptly issued a response.

  10. #10 Cicada 3301 is accused of cyberterrorism
  11. #11 The leaked email
    • #a Untitled
      Pastebin

      This is the first version of the email to be leaked. Notice the large amount of mistakes: This is not the actual email but merely a "depersonalized" verson; every version of the email had unique punctuation, sentence structure, etc., which this removes entirely.

    • #b Untitled
      Pastebin

      This is one of the unique emails featuring one version of the punctiation, sentence structure, etc.

    • #c Email is PGP Verified
      UCW

      This is another version of the email.

    • #d Untitled
      Pastebin

      I sadly cannot remember how I found this version, but I believe that this was sent to the 8145145127.com website.

    • #e Another recruitment message (with a different signature)
      Apr. 23, 2024 u/ymgve Reddit

      A Reddit user shared this version of the email, which they themselves received ~11 years prior. According to them, they have not received any other messages after, despite applying for a membership.

  12. Jan. 10, 2012 habitres YouTube
  13. Gutenberg
  14. This website originally featured a countdown to Jan. 09, 2012, being then replaced by coordinates, and subsequently by whitespaces.

    • #a Archive

      This is an archive of an archive of the site.