Competition Puzzle - Tricks with Time

Based on an original idea by Jason Ross

You are a world renowned bank robber, cat burglar, sneak thief and all round God of all things machiavellian. You are aided by the best backup teams, the finest, most up to date equipment and 30 years SAS training. However, on your latest job you've run into a few problems. You are in a bank trying to get into the vault but the vault has got an electronic lock on it, and a rather unusual one at that.

The lock is a time lock. It only opens when it is time to open, or when someone keys in (on a standard 1-9 keypad) the time it's supposed to open. For example, if the vault is supposed to open at 15:47 in the afternoon but the bank manager types in 15:47 at any time before that point the vault will also open. Basically the time the vault is supposed to open is also an override password to open the vault at any time if needs be.

All you have to do is figure out what time the vault is set to open so you can punch it into the keypad and override the time lock. However, there's a catch. The time changes every day. You have absolutely no idea what it will be tomorrow so therefore you have no idea what to punch in. Also, if you punch in the wrong time an alarm will go off, the bank will fill up with nerve gas, the national guard will be alerted and the whole area obliterated (the bank manager's very keen on security).

However, you do have something. You have a list of clock faces depicting the correct times/passwords for the last 8 days. They are:

1) 9:18 2) 6:07 3) 7:15 4) 7:33 5) 9:00 6) 9:35 7) 10:45 8) 9:15

It occurs to you that there might be some sort of pattern embedded in there somewhere, but can you find it? Can you figure out the combination lock? Or should you just punch any old thing in and look forward to oblivion?

Original puzzle as spoiler space

9) 6:07

Or 9) 1:30

Congratulations John, 6:07 was the answer I had intended.

SPOILER

Draw the watch hands for each time and then interpret them as letters in semaphore (see, e.g., http://www.sacdelta.com/semaphore.htm). The letters spell out 'semaphor', so the next letter must be e, and the corresponding time is 6:07.

Please reply to ilan at cedara dot com