Cat Darensbourg’s Beale Cipher 1 decryption…

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Long-time cipher-fan Catherine Darensbourg has recently been posting her decryption of Beale Cipher #1 under the name ‘BlueCricket’ to an online treasure-hunting forum called TreasureNet. She says that if you take Columns #1, #2, and part of #3 of Beale Cipher 1 (i.e. columnar transposition), you get:-

Column #1: 71, 975, 758, 401, 918, 436, 39, 18, 346, 872, 8, 102, 55, 275, 919, 81, 921, 14, 17, 121, 10, 540, 39, 230, 1300, 324, 428, 202
Column #2: 194, 14, 485, 370, 263 65, 88, 64,12, 36, 15, 120, 38, 131, 346, 861, 360, 1060, 23, 340, 67, 98, 232, 261, 460,1706, 403, 601, 35
Column #3: 38, 40, 604…

The idea is that you then take the last letter of each number as spelled in English, with the provisos:
(a) that “-Y” codes for “th”
(b) that you don’t include “and”
(c) “siX” (i.e. -X) codes for “STOP” unless it’s “60” (-Y)
(d) “0” (zero, i.e. -O) “is an option” (I’m not entirely sure what she means by this)

All of which kabbalistic longhand numeric trickery yields a raw text of:

“NEED YE NET-RDE YET RD Y(x)E ENTER(x)Y NOTE DOO YE ONE YE YE ER N-EYE-NE DR O YO DEED ED-ED ORR DY TO OO ED YRE RD-EH-YO (x) EY-T(x)E Y(x) NED YYTE DYEED Y(x) T DYEED YE D EDY YE ED ROY NE TODE O DYE RDY O D ND(x)…”

…which she reads as…

Need the net ready the Tr 500th(x)2Enter(x)Y note due the one 2 the ER 9 Dr O tho deed 2 Ed Orr 500th to 2 Ed Wire Radeo(x) 8th T(x)e-th(x) Ned Wyte died Y(x) T died the dedth the Ed Roth NE told O die ready o 500 ND(x)

Cat concludes that “There seems to be NO TREASURE in this part — just the movement of American Civil War Troops and report of their dead.”

Weeeeellll…. I’m really sorry Cat, but I think the correct description of what we have here is “a boat that’s not going to float”. It reads more or less exactly like numerous failed Voynich and Dorabella decryptions I’ve seen, and with a methodology that is interpretistic in many of the ways you’d normally hope to avoid. 🙁

She followed this up with an analysis of misspellings in Beale Cipher 2 (which also failed to convince me – most of the artefacts in Cipher 2 are more obviously down to column or row slips by the encipherer), and with an alternative anagram-based non-transposition take on Cipher 1 (which… oh, you already know what I’m going to say, goshdarnit).

Look, it’s like this. Civil War dating issues aside (1861-1865), there’s the not-at-all-small matter of the Beale Cipher 1 paradox, which I also blogged about here. Basically, I have extremely little faith that any claimed decryption that explicitly tries to sidestep the statistically improbable properties (as famously discussed by Jim Gillogly) will lead to a valid solution.

Just as “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” and “daiin daiin” are extraordinarily problematic to claimed Voynich descryptions, the Gillogly strings form a spanner that lurks ready to be thrust into the works of any Beale Cipher theory. Unless you can account for those odd properties even slightly, I’m 99% sure you’ve got it all wrong!

Beale Papers trivia update…

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I thought I’d take a brief sideways step over to the Beale Papers, a cipher mystery I haven’t mentioned in a while here. Most of you probably already know about my Big Fat List of Voynich Novels, expanding almost monthly with yet more Voynich-appropriating titles. But is there much fiction based around other well-known cipher mysteries?

Well… I recently bought a copy of Tom Harper’s (2007) “Lost Temple” solely because of the Phaistos Disk lookalike overlaying the front cover… but that was as close as it got. It’s actually quite a good read, with the first Minoan half touching on the same kind of sources as Gavin Menzies “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” (but more believable), and the second half moving onto Greek mythology, Achilles’ shield, and Harper’s version of Unobtainium. Sorry Tom, the house rule here is: no cipher, no review. 😉

Which reminds me that at some point, I really need to read Stephen King’s “The Colorado Kid”, as that gives every impression of having been inspired by the Somerton Man “Tamam Shud” case.

And here’s another novel that does count: Alexis Tappendorf and the Search for Beale’s Treasure (Volume 1), by Becca C. Smith.

[…] Upon arriving in Virginia, Alexis discovers that for the last hundred years the townspeople of Summervale and Bedford County have been searching for a lost treasure buried somewhere in the area by a man named Thomas J. Beale. More importantly, the only clues to finding the fortune are in the form of cryptograms, codes that, when properly translated, tell the exact location of the bounty. In a heart-pounding race to Beale’s Treasure, Alexis and her new friend, Olivia Boyd, join forces to solve the Beale ciphers before the dangerous family, the Woodmores, beat them to it…

So, yet another cipher mystery gets subsumed into the Young Adult Fiction cultural Borg. (No, I still haven’t managed to finish The Cadence of Gypsies, or The Book of Blood & Shadow.) What will be next, Alexis Tappendorf and the Vaguely Heretical Rohonc Codex? [*shudders in a sudden cold draft*]

However, such cultural flimflam may well all be in vain, because – according to the webcomic ‘I Can Barely Draw’, the Beale Cipher has finally been solved. Apparently, it reads: “I accidentally the rest of it“. Well, well, well – who’d have thunk it, eh? 🙂

Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s papers at the Marshall Foundation…

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Nearly all Voynich researchers (I think) will have heard of William F. Friedman: it was WFF who formed the First Study Group during the Second World War, who set computer transcription and analysis of the Voynich Manuscript in motion, and even got Brigadier John Tiltman involved.

But what of his wife Elizebeth (they married in 1917)? Actually, she was a highly accomplished code-breaker in her own right, and it was she who introduced WFF to cryptology: during the First World War, the pair of them were directors of an unofficial US Government code-breaking team. She moved on to breaking thousands of rum runners’ codes in the 1930s and the famous Velvalee Dickinson “Doll Woman” Japanese spying case in the 1940s, all the while researching, writing and even occasionally lecturing on such cipher mysteries as the Beale Papers and the Voynich Manuscript. There’s a nice summary of her life in the NSA Hall of Honor (she was posthumously inducted in 1999).

Similar to the way Chaucer dominated the relationship between John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert (here, here & here), Shakespeare was a recurrent theme for the Friedmans. The couple first met while employed by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallop to hunt for the Baconian ciphers allegedly embedded in Shakespeare’s works: while Elizebeth Friedman returned to the theme of Shakespeare in the 1950s, finally concluding that the person masquerading as Shakespeare was none other than – shock horror – William Shakespeare himself.

William Friedman’s papers were donated to the Marshall Foundation in 1969 (WFF died the same year), while Elizebeth Friedman’s papers were donated to the same foundation after her death in 1980.

Anyway, just in case anyone happens to find themselves near the Marshall Foundation in Lexington VA with an unaccountably strong urge to go through her papers relating to cipher mysteries such as the Voynich Manuscript, here’s a brief listing of things I’d be fascinated to read:-

Box 7, File 17 – Philological Quarterly article on W.F. Friedman and the Voynich Manuscript.
Box 8, File 23 – Beale Treasure Material
Box 10, File 30 – Voynich Correspondence
Box 10, File 31 – Voynich Notes
Box 10, File 32 – Voynich Material
Box 10, File 33 – Article: “The Voynich Manuscript: A Scholarly Mystery” (parts 1-3) [by Mary D’Imperio, if I remember correctly]
Box 10, File 34 – Philological Quarterly: WFF and Voynich – October 1970
Box 10, File 35 – Voynich Seminar Proceedings 1976
Box 13, File 22 – WFF – John M. Manly Correspondence
Box 18, File 34 – ESF – Voynich Manuscript Article

Brad Meltzer and the Beale Papers…

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Cipher Mysteries readers in the US may well have watched Brad Meltzer’s recent “Decoded” episode on the Declaration of Independence. Though you might well think that the description listed below doesn’t sound particularly promising…

The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of American Democracy. Could it contain hidden messages from our nation’s forefathers intended to be discovered years later? Buddy, Mac and Scott travel across America to try and uncover the mysteries behind our nation’s most prized document.

…it turns out that this episode was in fact largely about the Beale Papers, which (in my opinion, at least) is a proper cipher mystery. I’ve blogged about these a fair few times, such as here: summing up, I conclude that the statistical improbability of the Gillogly strings strongly implies that these are real ciphers (not hoaxes); that they were enciphered using a two-stage combo of codebook and monoalphabetic substitution; and that the Gillogly strings are in fact no more than the keyphrase somehow falling through the system as a set of ABCDE…-style indices.

And just for all those armchair treasure hunters out there eager to crack B1 and B3 for themselves, my predictions are (a) that the B1 key string will turn out to be painfully close to “THOMASJEFFERSONBEALE”, and (b) that though B1 (and probably B3) also used the Declaration of Independence, it had its own slightly different set of counting mistakes as compared to B2. As normal, 15% of the bounty should cover my fee, thanks. 🙂

All of which means that when the Beale Papers finally do get cracked, Jim Gillogly will probably kick himself into the next state for missing what, to a supersmart codebreaker such as him, should be utterly obvious. Unless it’s him that ultimately gets to crack it? We shall see!

Anyway, the nice thing about Brad Meltzer’s show is that it has hugely stimulated interest in the Beale Papers, even creating its own mini-traffic-spike in Google Trends. I’m guessing the linking that’s going on is happening in treasure hunter mailing lists, but to be honest there’s not a lot out there worth reading on the subject. People are finally realising that stories linking the Beale Papers to (for example) famous pirate / privateer Jean Lafitte [Jean Laffite] are probably outright fakes. As with the Voynich Manuscript, all the properly good evidence is embedded right in the text itself: it’s everything else surrounding it that is the hoax!

German cipher mystery found and solved!

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Here’s a nice story that should bring heart to researchers struggling with uncracked homophonic ciphers (e.g. Zodiac Killer Ciphers, Beale Papers, etc). Kevin Knight, who Voynich Manuscript researchers may remember from various posts here, has now co-authored a 2011 paper with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer from Uppsala University on how they cracked a hitherto unknown (to me, at least) 105-page ciphertext dated 1866 they call the Copiale Cipher.

Slightly unhelpfully, the authors refer only to the manuscript as having come “from the East Berlin Academy”: in fact, as far back as 1992/1993 the East Berlin Academy of Arts and the West Berlin Academy were merged into a single Academy of Arts, Berlin (i.e. the Akademie der Künste). I searched the Akademie’s archives to see if I could find the source but only managed to find one plausible-sounding hit:-

Record group: Döhl – Reinhard-Döhl-Archiv
Classification group: 6.1. Fremde Manuskripte
Lauf. Nummer: 3625
Dat. => Findbuch: o.O., o.D.
Titel: [ohne Verfasser]: die sentenzen verschlüsselter deutbarkeit […]

Perhaps someone with better German and more persistence than me will find the actual manuscript reference.

Anyway, Knight/Megyesi/Schaefer give a nice account of how they went about analysing the neatly-written ciphertext, the various hypotheses they came up with along the way, and how they finally managed to decrypt it (though admittedly they initially only transcribed 16 pages), apart from eight mysterious logograms (i.e. an eight-entry nomenclator “for (doubly secret) people and organizations”). Here’s their translation of the first few lines, which make it quite clear what kind of a book it is:-

First lawbook
of the [1] e [2]
Secret part.
First section
Secret teachings for apprentices.
First title.
Initiation rite.
If the safety of the [3] is guaranteed, and the [3] is
opened by the chief [4], by putting on his hat, the
candidate is fetched from another room by the
younger doorman and by the hand is led in and to the
table of the chief [4], who asks him:
First, if he desires to become [1].
Secondly, if he submits to the rules of the [2] and
without rebelliousness suffer through the time of
apprenticeship.
Thirdly, be silent about the [5] of the [2] and
furthermore be willing to offer himself to volunteer
in the most committed way.
The candidate answers yes.

The interesting thing about the date is that it predates the 1887 founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by 20 years or so: and many (if not most?) regular Cipher Mysteries readers will recall that that was founded with a (quite different) mysterious cipher document allegedly referring to a certain “Fraulein Anna Sprengler” mentioned in the enciphered text. By way of comparison, Aleister Crowley’s favourite Ordo Templi Orientis was founded only in 1895 or thereabouts.

Hence the really big question about this enciphered document is whether there is any connection (perhaps even Anna Sprengler) between it and the Golden Dawn Ciphers. The answer may well lie in the 89 pages as yet untranscribed by K/M/S… hopefully we shall see!

Update: since writing this, I found that K/M/S have put up a detailed web-page including scans, transcriptions, and English translations of the whole 105 pages. Codicologically, they say it is “beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks [and] can be dated back to 1760-1780.”

They also note that they think it is a document of an “18th century secret society, namely the “oculist order”. A parallel manuscript is located at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel.” Which of course rules Fraulein Sprengler out. 🙂

To be honest, the part in the ceremony described where they pluck a hair from the eyebrow of the initiate reminds me not a little of the Simpsons’ Stonecutters episode (“Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star? We do! We do!”), but perhaps let’s not dwell on that too much… 🙂

Beale oops…

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Please bin yesterday’s Cipher Mysteries post on the Beale Papers – a lesson in what happens when you try to write both code and a blog post in the middle of the night. Here are the corrected stats:-

Declaration of Independence: initial letter distribution

(A,12.82%) (B,3.66%) (C,4.05%) (D,2.82%) (E,2.75%) (F,4.73%) (G,1.45%)
(H,5.88%) (I,5.11%) (J,0.76%) (K,0.31%) (L,2.60%) (M,2.14%) (N,1.45%)
(O,10.92%) (P,4.50%) (Q,0.08%) (R,3.05%) (S,4.81%) (T,19.16%) (U,2.14%)
(V,0.15%) (W,4.50%) (X,0.08%) (Y,0.08%) (Z,0.00%)

Beale 1 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution

(A,14.15%) (B,5.30%) (C,5.50%) (D,3.54%) (E,4.13%) (F,4.32%) (G,1.18%)
(H,3.73%) (I,4.72%) (J,0.79%) (K,0.79%) (L,2.95%) (M,1.77%) (N,2.36%)
(O,9.23%) (P,3.73%) (Q,0.00%) (R,1.77%) (S,6.09%) (T,18.27%) (U,0.98%)
(V,0.00%) (W,4.72%) (X,0.00%) (Y,0.00%) (Z,0.00%)

Beale 2 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution

(A,5.64%) (B,1.44%) (C,2.49%) (D,6.42%) (E,13.50%) (F,2.75%) (G,1.97%)
(H,4.85%) (I,7.21%) (J,0.26%) (K,0.13%) (L,4.19%) (M,0.79%) (N,9.04%)
(O,8.26%) (P,1.57%) (Q,0.00%) (R,5.24%) (S,6.29%) (T,9.04%) (U,3.15%)
(V,2.36%) (W,1.70%) (X,0.52%) (Y,1.18%) (Z,0.00%)

Beale 3 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution

(A,12.62%) (B,4.53%) (C,5.18%) (D,3.40%) (E,5.99%) (F,2.43%) (G,2.10%)
(H,3.88%) (I,3.07%) (J,0.49%) (K,0.16%) (L,2.27%) (M,2.43%) (N,2.10%)
(O,8.25%) (P,2.27%) (Q,0.16%) (R,5.02%) (S,5.34%) (T,21.68%) (U,0.49%)
(V,0.00%) (W,6.15%) (X,0.00%) (Y,0.00%) (Z,0.00%)

Andrew S. Allen’s “The Thomas Beale Cipher” short film…

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Though technically they’re probably not in cipher (rather, they’re almost certainly three wobbly dictionary codes), they definitely form an historical mystery: and even today, the Beale Papers’ promise of 19th century treasure continues to inspire people to borrow a distant cousin’s mini-diggers and covertly dig implausible holes not too far from where Buford’s Tavern once stood. Which is, of course, both foolish and most likely illegal, so don’t expect me to condone anything like that for a microsecond.

What I’m far happier to praise is Andrew S. Allen’s animation “The Thomas Beale Cipher”, which I’ve already mentioned a few times along the way. Anyway, now that its tour of independent film festivals is (presumably) over, Allen’s very generously placed a copy of his film on the web right here for all to see (but expand it to full screen for best effect). You should be pleased to hear it doesn’t offer a faux solution (how gauche that would be) or even the pretense of a clunky explanation, but just the lightest touch of 1940s G-man cryptological paranoia amidst a glorious barrage of vintage textiles. Oh, and a nice brass-section soundtrack too. Go and have a look: I think you’ll like it a lot! 🙂

Julius Petersen’s signature cryptogram…

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Here’s a nice little thing that might possibly earn a Cipher Mysteries reader 100 US$!

Once upon a time in Copenhagen, a bright mathematics professor called Julius Petersen briefly stepped into the world of codes and ciphers. He wrote and published a pamphlet on cryptography called Système cryptographique, as well as a series of eight fortnightly articles on the subject for the weekly magazine NÆR OG FJERN (‘NEAR AND FAR AWAY’) – these ran from issue 150 (16 May 1875) to issue 164 (22 August 1875).

Though the articles did not actually say Petersen had written them, they are very much à la main de Petersen: and according to Professor Bjarne Toft, “we know from other sources that [Petersen] was the author (or one of the authors)“.

The point of interest for us is that the author(s) signed his / their name(s) in this unusual encrypted fashion:-

By 46, 9, 4-57, 3, 5.

This has left Bjarne Toft so mystified that he has offered money to anyone who can crack it:-

Does the dash ‘-‘ indicate that there are two authors? If so, the other could be Frederik Bing, who was an extremely good mathematician and a close friend of Petersen. Bing was mathematical director in the state life insurance company. And are the numbers dates? Or what??

I have offered a prize of 100 US$ to anyone who can give a convincing solution (convincing for me that means!).

Here are some things that might possibly help you crack such a tiny cryptogram (even smaller than the Dorabella Cipher!):

  • Petersen’s full name was “Julius Peter Christian Petersen”, so his initials were presumably JPCP;
  • Petersen’s friend’s full name was “Frederik Moritz Bing”, so his initials were FMB;
  • The cryptogram looks an awful lot like a tiny book cipher (along the lines of the Beale Papers);
  • If it is a book code, no obvious attempt has been made to use high numbers;
  • If it is a book code, common letters would presumably tend to appear as smaller numbers, less common letters slightly larger numbers, with extremely rare letters potentially very large numbers: so the pattern here would seem to be “rare common common dash rare common common“;
  • Surely the number one candidate book for testing the “book code” hypothesis would be Petersen’s Système cryptographique. Yet Worldcat lists no copies in the UK, so it would be down to someone to have a look at one of the scant few copies owned elsewhere…

Over to you, armchair cryptogram detectives…

Updated Cipher Mysteries home page…

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Just a quick note to say that I’ve been working behind the scenes for a few weeks on a revised Cipher Mysteries home page, incorporating a nice clickable list of what I think are the top unsolved cipher mysteries of all time, some of which you may not have heard of:-

  1. (–Top secret, yet to be announced–)
  2. The Voynich Manuscript
  3. The Anthon Transcript
  4. The Beale Papers
  5. The Rohonc Codex
  6. The HMAS Sydney Ciphers
  7. The Tamam Shud Cipher
  8. The D’Agapeyeff Cipher
  9. The Codex Seraphinianus
  10. The Dorabella Cipher
  11. The Phaistos Disk

Note that the HMAS Sydney Ciphers part isn’t yet live, because I haven’t written the post yet (probably later this week). 🙂  I may update the list later to insert the Vinland Map at #7, but that’s another story entirely…

Incidentally, the reason I ranked the Voynich Manuscript at #2 is because the top spot will be filled (hopefully fairly soon) with an awesome centuries-old cipher mystery I’ve been chipping away at for a while, one that will be eerily familiar to many CM readers. Don’t hold your breath, but I do think you’re going to like it a lot… 🙂