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⚠️  Note

This is an archived version of the 2026 Key Clues Challenge website. For information on the upcoming event, visit keyclueschallenge.uwaterloo.ca.

Back to the puzzle

Solution: Pedley's Cascading Crop Circles
Answer: PUZZLINGASTRONOMERSSINCE1975

At this point we have used information from the narrative, titles, and answers. The purpose of this part of the meta is to direct you to the final box on campus, and give you the code to unlock it.

A bit of googling tells you that George Pedley, a humble banana farmer from far North Queensland in Australia, found some crop circles in 1966. He dubbed these "Saucer Nests", which happens to fit perfectly into the top row of the puzzle. From there, we cascade down, moving through the alphabet as we travel towards the UFOs at the bottom of each string as shown.

The UFOs read, from left to right, COSMICGLYPH. Extracting the numbered letters in numerical order (noticing the backwards 3 corresponding to an E) gives EV3LIVEWALL. More instructions! You go to the live wall in EV3, notice a small white arrow on a Key Clues publicity poster pointing to where the box is hidden. You then use the images on the box to translate COSMICGLYPH into unlocking instructions, and open the box!



Inside the box is a single piece of paper.

Following the instructions one last time, you enter PUZZLINGASTRONOMERSSINCE1975 into the answer checker. You are taken to the victory page and have completed the 2026 Key Clues Challenge.

Author’s Notes

This Meta was inspired by the taxidermy animals found in the biology building. I have been a part of the campus community for over 25 years, and I never knew these displays existed until this past summer. I wondered what other interesting places were hiding on campus and that is how the EIT Museum and the Bio Wall entered the Meta as well.

Intersecting Crop Circles was written first, and when the idea for the puzzle just being an empty Venn diagram came up, the crop circle aesthetic was born. Could I possibly make the Meta just a bunch of empty circles??

Concentric Crop Circles was written next, and it relied heavily on constraining the puzzle titles. Not only did they need to share letters with puzzle titles both before and after them, but they all needed to be distinct lengths. This caused some stress and hair-pulling amongst puzzle writers, and is why some of the puzzles ended up with really long titles. Those of you who solved Concentric Crop Circles will be happy to know that we scrapped our first draft in which we did not provide any of the non-alphanumeric characters. Although I really longed for a Meta that was nothing but circles, without those anchoring characters the puzzle was a tedious, brute-forcing, mess.

Pedley’s Cascading Crop Circles was the last one to be finalized and it underwent the most changes. In earlier drafts the chains were spirals, and in one version the box code was ABDUCTIONS instead of COSMIC GLYPH. In the end, I wanted to have a piece of the Meta that was actually about crop circles (not just in design). I did a bit of research and came upon the phrase SAUCER NESTS which I thought was the perfect tie-in. When I saw that George Pedley and the petrified wood were both from Queensland, Australia, I felt like the connection was meant to be.