Emmanuel Mezino’s “La Buse” cipher treasure book…

by ⋅ 14 Comments

Last year, I was contacted by a young French guy called Emmanuel Mezino: he was writing a book about the famous “La Buse” cryptogram and treasure, and asked if my publishing house Compelling Press might publish it. From my experience with “The Curse of the Voynich”, I told him that if he structured it in two distinct halves – the front half summarizing facts and historical research (giving sources), and the second half comprising his inferences and speculation – then yes, I would be very interested.

My rationale for this was simple: even if readers happen to disagree with every single aspect of the reasoning (which, let’s face it, is often the default position with cipher mysteries), the book would still stand a good chance of being hugely interesting, entertaining, and useful in its own right – the story of La Buse is fascinating and intriguing, and I have found few properly historical accounts that do justice to any phase of the pirate’s life.

However well-intentioned that was, it was perhaps too tightly-fitting an editorial straitjacket for a young writer to want to wear; and so Emmanuel ended up editing and publishing his book himself, giving it a romantic-looking cover:-

1ere_couverture-213x300

For its title, Mezino used the phrase allegedly called out by Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) en route to the gallows, as he (so the story goes) threw a piece of paper containing his cryptogram to the crowd – “Mon Trésor à qui saura le prendre” (i.e. “My [fabulous] treasure [will go] to he who will take it”). Buying it will cost you rather less than the bejewelled gold cross of Goa: 18,00 euros (plus postage) for a physical copy, or (perhaps more likely if you happen to live outside France) 11,99 euros for the ebook.

Without much doubt, I think the best bit about the book is that it includes some close-up photographs of parts of a new cipher document – what could very possibly be a second copy of La Buse’s cryptogram. It’s not a perfect scoop (a low resolution colour version of this was included on page 8 of Liz Englert’s (2013) treasure-hunting omnishambles book “My Adventures of the Famous La Buse Treasure“), but the quality of the scans Mezino includes is on the whole extremely good.

Having said that, armchair treasure hunters will be perhaps less than fully impressed that Mezino somehow fails to include a close-up of the lines of cipher that only appear in this second version of the cryptogram, settling on giving merely his interpretation of what those extra letters say (which may or may not be correct).

Another less than satisfactory section was Mezino’s imaginative rendition of the “La Buse” legend, which for all its liveliness was plainly derived from a variety of unreliable sources (apparently including his interpretation of the drawings around the second cryptogram). Though this wasn’t as bad as Pauline B. Innis’ (1973) “Gold in the Blue Ridge” (a teeth-grindingly dreadful imaginative historical reconstruction of the Beale Papers story, which I wearily read recently), I’m not planning to return to either any time soon.

And it should be no surprise that, for all Mezino’s claims that he has (by collecting together an assortment of markings on rocks scattered across the northern half of Réunion; interpreting them as a star map written on land; reconciling that with sacred-geometry-style details overlaid on the cryptogram itself; and then back-linking everything to the astronomer Hevelius) logically deduced the only possible answer to the cryptogram… I’m more than just a bit skeptical. In fact, I don’t think there’s even a single detail in his reasoning that I’d ‘fess to agreeing with.

But as you’d expect, Mezino brooks no disagreement with his Grand Plan: and as writer and editor, that’s ultimately his right. You buy his book or you don’t, and you agree with him or you don’t. It’s all fine.

For me, though, his account is all a bit of a missed opportunity: pictures aside, he’s included all the stuff I’d have left out, and omitted all the stuff I’d have put in. There’s no critical appraisal of the second cryptogram as a source document (or even, dare I say it, as a possible modern forgery made to impress treasure hunters), nor any critical appraisal of La Buse’s own history and the quality of the sources.

Nor is there any kind of critical assessment of La Buse’s earlier life in the Caribbean, nor Le Butin’s trustworthiness as the (alleged) source for the first cryptogram, nor a critical assessment of Charles de la Roncière’s (1934) “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”, which first brought the cryptogram to the world’s attention.

Many Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless link all this with my recent grouchy post about The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies, where I moaned about how people tend to fixate on the mythology of cipher mysteries, and seem to have no time for looking at the basic historical dimensions of the claimed evidence – transparency, reliability, agenda, bla bla bla. Well, yes: and it would be hard to deny that Emmanuel’s book has ended up somewhat hollow in this respect, which is a big shame.

But even so, I do appreciate that writing an evidence-centred cipher mystery book that manages to keep a properly analytical cutting edge but without destroying the underlying mystique is a really tough writing brief – perhaps almost impossible for a writer’s first book. Ultimately, though, perhaps Mezino’s book will – for all its many shortcomings – prove to be a useful first step in the right direction. Hopefully: and yet from where I’m standing, we’ve got a very long way to go on that road just yet…

Browne’s Master Key, (mostly) deciphered…

by ⋅ 25 Comments

Browne’s Master Key is another piece of encrypted Freemasonry, once again uncovered by Klaus Schmeh… and once again, here’s my partial decryption of it.

This time, though, all it took was a quick web search that revealed a page describing broadly how Browne’s Master Key works, and the rest was just a load of head-scratching to prise the bones from their cryptographic coffin:-

In Browne’s Master Key, the cypher was as follows: Substitute the vowels a e i o u y with the letters of Browne’s name; precede most words by meaningless capital letters, and then substitute letters including c for e, and then substitute the words Brethren or Masons with exclamation marks and then run the words together indiscriminately and do not use punctuation.

So, it’s an ambiguous cipher, very much along the lines of the medieval “magical cipher” (where you replace each vowel with the letter immediately after it in the alphabet, thpvgh jt’s npt fxbctlz vfrz sfcvrf), so arguably a little closer to steganography than to cryptography. Let’s look at the first page:-

Browne-Masterkey1

After the “SIT LUX, ET LUX FUIT” heading (“There is light and there was light”, apparently the magical motto of Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), the ciphertext begins like this:-

Splrbsrtwbs Sostmronwprnongthrlwdgr – Brwthr Rsrn owrwbidrn vhb Tosthrfo Rstcbr Rbrfwr Rthrmbstr RowcrRdstw wprnhoslwdgr – Brwth Rrjnnowrwidrnplrbsrtwsr Rthbtdntedwnr – WwisHo Pfnlsrnowrwbrdrnwhrnewnwbsmbdrb rhr Rrstw wd thrmbstrr – – Hosbnsonrssthr Rr – Brwthr Rsonthinbmrwfthrgrbnd – Brwthr Rspllrbst Wbchbrgrd – Brwthr Rsplrbsrtwat Trndth rchbrgr – Tlrko Ngbndthrc Rbftwoth ***

…which I (partially) decrypt as…

[Mason]s please to assist me in opening the lodge – brother senior (wbidrn) what is the first call before the master (ow) needs to open his lodge – brother junior (widrn) please to see that duty done – (ooishopfNl) senior warden when you was made at here stood the master – his business there – brothers in the name of the grand – brothers (pllrbst Wbchbrgad) – brothers please to attend the charge – (tlrkO ng bUdthEN Ebftwoth ***)

Perhaps a kind reader with a stronger stomach than me for this kind of faffy Freemasonic folderol will feel inspired to decrypt some more – frankly, a paragraph is pretty much my limit. 🙁

The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies…?

by ⋅ 138 Comments

What would a “Voynich Manuscript for Dummies” look like? It’s easy to poke fun at the foolish mess Wikipedia editors have made of the subject, but it’s not so easy to do it properly.

For me, the first big step would be finding sufficient writing courage to discard all Voynich theories. Yes, all of them. Every single one. Come on, is there a single Voynich theory out there that genuinely adds anything significant to what we know about the manuscript itself?

(Even my Antonio Averlino hypothesis is a bit guilty in that respect, because it was so painstakingly built on top of best-in-class historical evidence that it ended up a bit too precise and monochromatic for most people’s tastes. And the stuff it did predict [e.g. the concealed machine drawings] nobody yet feels comfortable with. Oh well!)

I also really don’t care for the kind of who-might-have-done-it-and-why speculation that fills the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page: that’s another whole category of stuff that should get the +10 Blue Pencil of Death wielded at it.

In addition, the whole what-flower-is-that-drawing-similar-to cult that seems to have monopolized many Voynich researchers’ attentions in the last few years is a thing that for me warrants only the briefest of mentions. It is such a hazard-rich and information-poor approach to history: and the whole supposed point of the activity (to find cribs for code-breakers to work with) is destroyed by the complexity of Voynichese . If we can’t even tell vowels from consonants, numbers from letters, or even what ‘the’ or ‘and’ is across hundreds of pages of text, how much help could a crib give us? [“Not much” is the sad answer.]

But once you’ve stripped out all the rubbish, what is left? Well… the internal evidence (the codicology and palaeography, i.e. the construction, the writing and the pre-1600 history), the external evidence (mainly provenance from 1600 onwards), and the Art History (techniques employed, similarities with other documents and drawings, etc). And… errrm… that’s about it.

At this point, you’d have to point out that I’d obviously be writing for some fairly sophisticated Dummies. And I suspect that this is ultimately the problem, because almost everything written to date on the subject isn’t about the Voynich Manuscript itself, but about the Foolish Mythology of the Voynich Manuscript. And what a waste of everyone’s time that exercise has proved to be, huh?

I suppose that this is what I despair about: not only that the unfortunate legacy of Victorian historians (and their search for moral tales for the edification and instruction of the young) was a portfolio of polished pants myths that have taken over a century to dismantle, but also that the mythological-and-as-yet-largely-undeconstructed Voynich Manuscript remains very much in that disappointingly shiny vein. I mean, Roger Bacon and John Dee… is that honestly the best people can do after a hundred years? *sigh*

All this rant boils down to is this: that I’ve become heartily sick and tired of re-reading the same basic “Voynich Mystery Mythology for Dummies” account that bloggers, journalists, novelists, meeja luvvies, computer scientists and even (gasp!) historians seem so keen to regurgitate ad nauseam; and that I think the discourse around the Voynich Manuscript has become so worn-through that many people would struggle to recognize a genuinely informative and accurate account of the object itself.

Remove all the lurid speculation and the mad theories from the next Voynich article you read, and is anything much left?

Somerton Man’s clothes – Thomas Kean, deceased?

by ⋅ 82 Comments

A couple of months back, Byron Deveson left an intriguing comment on a (now somewhat over-run by spy talk and unkempt-looking) Somerton Man post here. He wrote:-

I think some of SM’s clothing came from Tom Kean, MD of Kean Oil after Kean’s death. This would explain the masonic (?) tie.

Recorder (Port Pirie) 20th January 1947 Page 1

Death Of Mr. Tom Kean
ADELAIDE, Sunday.
Mr. Tom Kean (managing director of Kean Oil Proprietary Limited) died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, on Friday night. He was a staunch worker for Legacy Club, a prominent Freemason, and a former State president of Commercial Travellers’ Association.

There was a second obit in the ‘Tizer (OK, the Adelaide Advertiser, if you insist):-

Mr. Tom Kean. who died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, was managing director of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd. and a foundation member of the Legacy Club. Born at Dean, Victoria. Mr. Kean joined the Vacuum Oil Co. when 21 and served in Victoria, the Riverina. Tasmania and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. He was SA president of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, when he joined the first AIF and served for three years. After the war he had two more terms as president and for one term served as the united president. Later Mr. Kean formed the SA firm of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd., and was managing director when he died. As a foundation member of the Legacy Club he was an enthusiastic supporter in their appeals. A son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon survive.

And even more from the Adelaide Mail:-

Reject Who Served In First A.I.F.
A foundation member of the Legacy Club, and for 43 years a member of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, Mr. Tom Kean, died last night at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, after a long illness.
Mr. Kean, who was 72, served overseas with the First A.I.F. after having been rejected four times. Although never passed for service, he was sworn in by mistake, and served in France for three years as a motor driver in an ammunition column. Mr. Kean was South Australian president of the C.T.A. when he went overseas. After his return he had two other terms as president. He was united president for one term, and was the first returned soldier to hold that office. Born at Dean, Victoria, Mr. Kean was 21 when he joined the staff of the Vacuum. Oil Co. He worked in Victoria, the Riverina, Tasmania, and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. After a year in the motor business, Mr. Kean formed Kean Oil Pty., Ltd., of which he was managing director at his death. He was a noted worker for the Legacy Club and charity carnivals, and was a prominent Free mason. He was buried at the Centennial Park Cemetery this afternoon. Mrs. Kean, a son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon, survive him.

Oh, and it’s in the Melbourne Argus too, so it has to be true, eh?

Byron continued in a further comment:-

If SM’s clothing marked “Kean” and “Keane” came from the deceased Tom Kean of Kean Oil, then SM must have visited, or lived in Adelaide prior to 30th November 1948. I expect Kean’s clothing would have been disposed of soon after his death in January 1947 so SM was probably in Adelaide soon after this.

Commenter Misca then quickly noted:-

BD – I’m not sure if it’s relevant but Tom’s daughter Elon killed herself in December of 1947 by jumping off of the seventh floor of the Savings Bank Building. (She is buried with her father in Centennial Park Cemetery.) Cleland reviewed her death and did not open inquiry into her death. Sutherland investigated.

There’s more description here, and a picture of the building here. Incidentally, Elon Vivienne Kean had only just got engaged to Ernest Griffin, as announced in the ‘Tizer of 6th December 1947:

KEAN — RICHARDS. — The engagement is announced of Elon, only daughter of Mrs. R. Kean and the late Tom Kean, of Kensington Gardens, to Ernest only son of Mrs. C. Griffin, of Colonel Light Gardens.

But all that aside, who was Tom Kean? It turns out he was not only the president of the Commercial Travellers’ and Warehousemen’s Association, he was also the King of Commercial Travellers (i.e. the Charity king in the CTA carnival float, is my best guess). He married in 1923.

There’s a fairly gushing description of him in the Adelaide Register of 13th September 1927 (with a picture):

tom-kean-1927

Mr Tom Kean, the new President of the South Australian Commercial Travellers and Warehousemen’s Association, was born in Dean (V.), a farming district between Ballarat and Daylesford. Mr. Kean, who is 52 years of age, on leaving school went on the land, but subsequently gave it up to enter the services of the Vacuum Oil Company. He represented the organization in New Zealand, Tasmania, Riverina, and South Australia. He came to this State in 1903, and evinced so much interest in the Commercial Travellers’ Association, which he joined the following year, that he was eventually elected President in 1915. Then he enlisted and went to the front, serving with the 2nd Australian Siege Battery. He was three years at the war, and on returning to Australia again resumed work with the Vacuum Oil Company. After a time he joined Adelaide Motors Limited, but in 1924 entered into business on his own account. Last year Harrisons Ramsay, Proprietary, Limited, purchased his business, and Mr. Kean took charge of their petrol, kerosine, oil, and belting department, a position he still holds. Mr. Kean is exceedingly popular in commercial circles, and especially among the men on the road, and his election is a tribute to his ability and geniality.

So… I suppose the question here is simply: what do I make of all this?

From a Somerton Man research perspective, the dead man’s clothes-as-worn and the clothes in the suitcase come across to me as fairly… random. Expensive things juxtaposed with hand-me-down stuff, along with shoes and slippers that don’t seem to fit the same feet. Pete Bowes is fond of looking at the omissions in the belongings (the famously missing socks!), but for me the overall pattern of what is present is one of give-me-downs, of charity. Did the Somerton Man have a secretly prosperous life, one that his clothes cunningly concealed? Really, I’d find it hard to believe such a thing. Regardless of anything else, his clothes seem to me to tell a tale of a marginal life, a life lived on the fringes or edges.

If, as per Byron Deveson, the story behind this all was that (the real) Tom Kean specified in his Will that his clothes be given to an Adelaide charity (he surely spent long enough competing for Charity Kingship in Adelaide to know every single local charity), and that this was where the Somerton Man got the dead man’s clothes, then I wouldn’t be surprised one little jot.

So… how can we find Tom Kean’s Will? Over to you all… perhaps?

Impromptu Voynich pub meet, Friday 13th June 2014…

by ⋅ 40 Comments

This coming Friday, well-known Voynich Manuscript researcher Rene Zandbergen will (briefly) be in London, hence this impromptu Voynich pub meet announcement. 🙂

ReneZandbergen

If you’d like to come along, Rene, Philip Neal and I will be – from 5.30pm to 6pm onwards – at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic London pub with its own riverside gallows especially for pirates. So if you do happen to have a wooden leg, an eye-patch and a bag bulging with pieces of eight, be aware of the potential for mishap. 🙂

If it’s a nice-ish day (i.e. not raining torrentially), the chances are that we’ll be in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left after the main bar, and continue forward to an outside area. Good for dogs, too (particularly if you’re John Kozak, *hint*).

But if it’s a wet day (and let’s face it, that’s the English summer to a ‘T’), be aware that we could end up anywhere in the pub’s two floors. If so, mooch around looking for a table with a slightly tattered copy of “Le Code Voynich” on, and you’re almost certainly in the right place. Hope to see some of you there!

Partial decryption of the Action Line Cryptogram…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

Readers of Klaus Schmeh’s crypto-blog may have come across the Action Line Cryptogram, a nine-page acrostic-like cryptogram from Detroit in 1926. Interestingly, another (slightly different) version of the same cryptogram (but dated 1st July 1908) was unearthed in 2006… not a lot of people know that. 🙂

Anyway, here’s my partial decryption of the last two pages of the 1926 copy (though the other copy’s version of these pages is extremely similar). There are large sections I haven’t scratched the surface of, so feel free to break those yourself. 🙂

T D, O T D O T.

Third Degree, Or The Degree Of Truth

I t D t i a A a t i d , a P , a C , a A t t C , a W S a A , a E o t W S a A , a P S , a G , t V S , a t H o t O .

In this Degree there is an Alarm at the inner door, a Password, a Countersign, an Answer to the Countersign, a Warden Sign and Answer, an Explanation of the Warden Sign and Answer, a Priest Sign, a Grip, t– V– S–, and the H– of the Order.

T A a t i d i t r .

The Alarm at the inner door is three raps.

T P i A . . . . ; t b l a a t , w u f w p ; w i a L , o i e p t o . I c t w , e t t I G , o t t W , t b m g t l , . . , a , i r b t I G , o W , h m g t r o t w , . . . , l a b . T I G a W m b s .

The Password is A– […the rest is unknown, though “T I G o W m b s” is probably “The Inside Guardian and Warden must be sure”]

T C a A a m t s a i t p D .

The Countersign and Answer [the rest is unknown]

W S – T S i m a f : C t r h , e t i f , w i e ( t o f ) ; p t c o t f w t p o t i f .

Warden Sign – The Sign is made as follows : Clasp the right hand, extend the index finger, [the rest is unknown]

A t t S . P t r h o t m , t f t c t t f ( t e n ) , l t b a e i t f .

Answer to the Sign. Place the right hand on the [the rest is unknown]

E . T E o t S a A i , ” T , b y s . “

The Explanation of the Sign and Answer is [the rest is unknown]

P S . T P S i m a f : P t t o t r h o t r n , a , u i a a p , m a s d , w t l f , t m a s a t b w t i , o f .

The Priest Sign is made as follows : [the rest is unknown].

G – C t r h ; w t t , p h o t t o k j o t t f .

Grip – Clasp the right hand ; with the thumb[?], place half[?] of the thumb[?] [the rest is unknown]

N s h i m t G .

[Unknown]

T V S – T r h u .

[Unknown]

T H o t O a g a f : O a b s ; t W s i f o t c o t N G ; t m l t a f h m , w a : P t o r h a t l h , p t ; c t h t t ( f b ) ; p a m a r ; p a a r .

The H– of the Order [the rest is unknown].

“A Highly Unlikely Scenario”, reviewed…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Having been exposed to what might reasonably be termed a ‘surfeit’ of unhealthily imaginative Voynich theories since nineteen-clickety-duck [*], I’d like to think that I’ve seen quite a lot of ‘highly unlikely scenarios’: and so pretty much anything involving Roger Bacon, time travel, and the Voynich Manuscript I should have covered, right?

Wrong! In her 2013 novel “A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide To Saving The World” Rachel Cantor straps an extra ten feet to her conceptual pole and vaults far higher than just about anyone else would try. (In fact, I’d say she tries her level best to vault out of the whole darn arena.)

Yet there’s a spark, verve and swerve to her jambalaya of story ingredients: future fast food corporations at war, a heady mix of mismatched philosophies, time-travelling conversations (with Marco Polo and family members), magical songs (“who is the king of the [clap] third ether?“, stop me if you’ve heard it before), anarchist book club members (sort of), and clothes so vividly jangling they make your inner eye hurt (toreador pants and red afros? Yes, really). And then the story properly begins…

There will be those who glibly snark that such a book is not a ‘novel’, it is simply a creative writing experiment that somehow managed to escape the labs: and that the correct cultural response to such over-hybridized monsters is a tranquilizer dart in the thigh and a discreetly dark van to clear the Frankenbody from the streets. But pshaw to such reactionary knee-jerking, I say: for all its angularity, such writing keeps language fresh and (dare I say it) exciting. Read this and enjoy it! 🙂

[*] Which is, of course, the punch-line to the wonderful old joke: “Two little old ladies playing bingo. One says to the other, ‘You know, I’ve been coming here since nineteen clickety-duck’.“

Analysis of Scorpion Cipher S5…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

Following my recent Scorpion Ciphers post, I’ve put up a permanent reference page on the Scorpion Ciphers and have also tried to contact John Walsh about the as-yet-unreleased other ciphers… so we’ll see how that goes.

Since then, I’ve been working a little more with S5, which has 155 unique symbols out of 180 letters. Because repeated symbols in S5 are always multiples of 16 letters apart, it seems likely to me that this ciphertext was constructed from 16 independent alphabets cycled through in strict sequence. My hope was that this regularity might give us a better chance of cracking S5 than if it were a randomly chosen homophonic cipher.

All the same, this was just a guess: so the first thing I did was come up with a way to test this hypothesis, by writing a short C program to encipher 180-long subsections of the Scorpion’s own plaintext using various numbers of sequential alphabets, to see if this would produce roughly 155 unique symbols.

For each number of alphabets (e.g. 2), I tried (notionally) enciphering every 180-long stretch of the Scorpion’s text, and kept a tally of the minimum number of symbols required (e.g. 37), the maximum number of symbols required (e.g. 44), and the average number of symbols required (e.g. 40).

Interestingly, the results weren’t what I expected:-

alphabets = 1, uniques = (19..24) 21
alphabets = 2, uniques = (37..44) 40
alphabets = 3, uniques = (50..61) 55
alphabets = 4, uniques = (60..74) 68
alphabets = 5, uniques = (72..86) 79
alphabets = 6, uniques = (77..97) 87
alphabets = 7, uniques = (88..105) 97
alphabets = 8, uniques = (91..110) 101
alphabets = 9, uniques = (92..116) 106
alphabets = 10, uniques = (104..122) 113
alphabets = 11, uniques = (107..127) 117
alphabets = 12, uniques = (113..136) 122
alphabets = 13, uniques = (113..134) 123
alphabets = 14, uniques = (115..138) 129
alphabets = 15, uniques = (123..146) 132
alphabets = 16, uniques = (120..147) 133
alphabets = 17, uniques = (128..146) 136
alphabets = 18, uniques = (126..151) 137
alphabets = 19, uniques = (128..150) 139
alphabets = 20, uniques = (132..153) 143
alphabets = 21, uniques = (133..159) 144
alphabets = 22, uniques = (131..155) 145
alphabets = 23, uniques = (137..154) 145
alphabets = 24, uniques = (137..157) 147
alphabets = 25, uniques = (139..160) 149
alphabets = 26, uniques = (141..158) 149
alphabets = 27, uniques = (143..163) 152
alphabets = 28, uniques = (143..164) 152
alphabets = 29, uniques = (139..164) 153
alphabets = 30, uniques = (145..164) 154
alphabets = 31, uniques = (143..164) 153
alphabets = 32, uniques = (146..167) 156

That is to say, even though S5 looks as though it is strictly cycling through 16 ciphers, this isn’t consistent with the stats of the Scorpion’s other plaintext (because that is so verbose and repetitive that it would require on average 32 alphabets to typically yield 155 symbols).

What I think this is implying is either (a) that the Scorpion’s plaintext is significantly less repetitive than the text of his/her messages, or (b) that the cipher system the Scorpion used also employs an extra layer of compression (e.g. a nomenclatura, using extra tokens for common words such as [THE] and [AND], or even common syllable pairs).

I don’t know… I’ll have to have a further think about this, it isn’t at all obvious what’s going on here.

Update: having scratched my head about this for a few more hours, I don’t feel comfortable with the suggestion that some kind of nomenclatura is involved. Rather, what I suspect now is that what we’re looking at here is not a 16 x 26-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z) but a 16 x 36-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z plus 0-9), coupled with a slightly less verbose plaintext. Hence my very rough (and admittedly as yet unmodelled) estimate is that roughly 25-35 of the tokens in the plaintext will turn out to be digits.

Unfortunately, I also think that this may have left the text undecryptable, unless there is some additional kind of meta-consistency between shapes across the 16 alphabets (e.g. if all the circle-plus-upright-cross shapes encode the same underlying plaintext token). Oh well!

Claudette Cohen and a Voynich Finno-Baltic Birth Registry…?

by ⋅ 65 Comments

Might the Voynich Manuscript be a Finno-Baltic birth registry? Might the names of some of the nymphs really be “Ellda, Sellai, Saisa, Saillar, Sia, Ella, Sara, Saisa, Rllai, and Eillkka”?

On the positive side, Claudette Cohen already has more words decrypted than Stephen Bax (she has a plucky ten to his stodgy nine), so she should clearly take some comfort that her brave-hearted Finno-Baltic decryption is numerically more of a success than his plainly inferior effort. And she also thinks that she has found thirteen points of similarity with a 1910 map of Sortavala, though with more than a passing nod towards “Karelian embroidery” (it says here).

Cipher Mysteries readers surely don’t need an advanced diploma in telepathy to know what I’m thinking here.

“Good for you, Claudette Cohen – even though you’re wrong for about a thousand different reasons, I’m happy for you that this is how you’ve come to the Voynich Manuscript. Enjoy your stay, and try to have some fun with it!”

Cracking the Scorpion Ciphers…

by ⋅ 9 Comments

Back in 2007, John Walsh (the host of “America’s Most Wanted”) announced that he had, since 1991, received a string of disturbing-sounding letters from an individual calling himself / herself “The Scorpion”: many of them had sections or pages that were apparently in cipher. Two of these ciphers were released to the public: these became known as “S1” and “S5”.

In the same year, Christopher Farmer (“President of OPORD Analytical”) announced that he had cracked S1 (which was apparently built on a 10×7 grid):-

scorpion3

Farmer’s claimed solution reads like this:-

baelprovid
edthemwith
newstories
butwhatifi
askjwdoiwa
xrtwbonesa
gezjefxkon

Unfortunately, all the diagrams illustrating Farmer’s ingenious reasoning have withered on the Internetty vine in the years since then (they’re not even in the Wayback Machine, nor anywhere else as far as I can see), which is a bit of a shame.

Even so, this turns out to be an entirely surmountable problem: Farmer’s claimed solution is clearly incorrect, for the simple reason that letters in the ciphertext aren’t consistent in the plaintext. For example, the cipher “K” maps to both ‘a’ and ‘g’, the “backwards-L” maps to ‘w’, ‘w’, and ‘x’, the “backwards-F” maps to both ‘u’ and ‘v’, and so on. At the same time, his claimed plaintext doesn’t really make a lot of sense (“BAEL”… really? I’m not so sure).

It seems likely to me that Farmer guessed that “PROVID” was steganographically hidden in plain sight at the end of the topmost line (and if you squint a bit, you can see why that would be), and then built the rest of his decryption attempt around this hopeful starting point. Moreover, he seems to have guessed that “O” maps to ‘o’, and “backwards-E” maps to ‘e’, which are both pretty peachy assignments. But I don’t buy any of this for a minute: there are way too many degrees of freedom in this S1 cryptogram (roughly half of the individual cipher shapes occur exactly once), and quite a few extra ones in his claimed solution too.

It’s a brave attempt, for sure: but it’s still wrong, whichever way you turn it round.

Other people have tried their hand with S1, though both AlanBenjy in 2009 and Glurk on Dave Oranchak’s site in 2010 pessimistically pointed out that 53 of S1’s 70 symbols are unique, yielding a ‘multiplicity’ a fair way beyond the range of what homophonic cryptograms can practically be solved. Hence I would tend to agree with their assessment that there’s no obvious way that we will solve S1 with what we currently have to hand: in fact, there seems no way to tell whether S1 is a real cipher or a hoax – the only repeating cipher pair is “S A” (i.e. “S Λ”), which could well have happened by pure chance.

The only other Scorpion ciphertext released to the public to date is the 180-character cryptogram known as “S5”:-

scorpion4

Once again, 155 of these 180 symbols are unique, which at first glance would seem to make S5 even less likely to be solved than S1.

But wait! In May 2007, user “Teddy” on the OPORD Analytical forum pointed out that if you transpose S5 from a 12-column arrangement to a 16-column layout, shape repeats only ever occur within a single vertical column. In fact, every single 16-way column except one (column #5) includes one or more repeated shapes.

Radically, this suggests to me that S5 was constructed in a completely different way from conventional homophonic ciphers: specifically, I think that each 16-way column of S5 may well have its own unique cipher alphabet. This would mean that S5 would need to be solved in a completely different manner to the way, say, zkdecrypto works. (I don’t believe S5 was constructed with eight columns, but I thought I ought to mention that that’s a possibility as well, however borderline). Maybe that small insight will be enough to help someone make some headway with S5, who can tell?

The huge shame here is that it may well be that the other Scorpion ciphers (which to this day have not been released) might well give us additional clues about the inner workings of both S1 and S5. Specifically, if one of the other ciphers happened to have used precisely the same 16-alphabet systemas S5, it might well give us enough raw data to crack them both.

Has anyone apart from John Walsh ever seen S2, S3, S4, and S6? Just askin’, just askin’…

Update: Looking again at S1 (while bearing in mind the way S5 seems to have been constructed), I find it hard not to notice that the distances between instance repetitions seem strongly clustered around multiples of 5 (with the only instance not fitting the pattern being the “backwards-L” on row #5):-

+60, +20, +50, +36, +24, +20, +40, +20, +40, +25, +35, +10, +25, +6, +45, +9, +6.

I suspect that this means that the encipherer probably enciphered S1 by cycling through five independent cipher alphabets (largely speaking). This wasn’t a mechanically precise encipherment (whether by accident or by design), but something close enough to one such that almost all the time he/she was no more than a single alphabet ‘off’, one way or the other.

This offers a quite different kind of constraint from normal homophonic cipher searches, and possibly even enough to crack the S1 cipher. After all, we have a fair amount of the Scorpion’s meandering plaintext to use as a statistical model to aim for… 🙂