Solution: Two's Company but Three's a Crowd Answer: GIGER
In colour scheme and general layout, this puzzle resembles the New York Times “Connections” puzzle, and understanding that game will get you half the way there to solve it. In Connections, players must group sixteen one-word clues into four thematic categories. Here, players must sort the eight provided names into four thematic categories, then find a ninth name that would fit in all four categories.
To make things easier, for each of the names, the first Google result (aka the most famous person with that name) is the person to whom the puzzle refers.
We also labelled the categories to give you a hint as to how to sort the names: the film slate refers to a movie, the ID badge to a name, the flag to a nationality, and the briefcase to a profession.
After some googling, you should end up with the following people: Hans Christian Andersen, Ray Harryhausen, Carl Jung, Gerd Nefzer, Dan O’Bannon, Auguste Piccard, Sigourney Weaver, and Hans Zimmer. With the symbols as hints, we can sort the names into the following categories:
Movie: Sigourney Weaver and Dan O’Bannon were both involved with the movie Alien (Sigourney Weaver played Ripley in Alien and Dan O’Bannon wrote the screenplay)
Name: Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Zimmer share the first name Hans.
Nationality: Carl Jung and Auguste Piccard are both Swiss.
Profession: Ray Harryhausen and Gerd Nefzer are both special effects artists.
The solution to the puzzle, then, is a Swiss special effects artist named Hans who worked on the film Alien. A quick Google or perusal of the Wikipedia page will tell you that can only refer to Hans Ruedi Giger, better known as H. R. Giger.
Following the pattern of the provided clues, with the five ?s giving an additional hint as to the length, the answer is GIGER.
Author’s Notes
I (Melodie) had never written a puzzle before, and fellow enigmatologist Sammy offered to work on one with me. All I knew for sure is that I wanted to make a puzzle about the special effects business that highlighted the work of legendary Alien artist H. R. Giger. Our first version of this puzzle had nothing in common except for the answer, and involved the AFI’s Top Ten Science Fiction Movies of all time. After the first round of testing, however, we weren’t satisfied with the mechanism, and while brainstorming ways to fix it we took a break to do the Connections puzzle from NYT, which we both love. This reminded me of Hank Green’s variation on the game, “4x3,” where nine words are sorted into four groups of three, with one word repeated in each category. From there, it was a simple matter of finding four categories that could identify Giger but could also create some confusion between them. The testing process mostly consisted of switching out names until we found a good identifiable group, and in the last iteration we added the symbols to help with the categories because people still found it open-ended. We also changed the title from its first title (“A Close Encounter of the Third Kind”) because testers spent a long time looking for a connection to Close Encounters of the Third Kind that wasn’t there.
I now have an even greater respect for puzzle designers, and know more than I ever needed to about H. R. Giger (he was a pretty weird dude).