Review of Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” (Tamam Shud) book…

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Though I’ve blogged about the Tamam Shud / Taman Shud case before, it’s still very far from closed. The man found on South Australia’s Somerton Beach in December 1948 remains unidentified, the nature of his death continues to be unresolved, his relationship with the nurse “Jestyn” is still not fully locked down, while as for the curious note tucked into his pocket…

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

…it’s as mysterious as ever.

Arguably the best starting point for people intrigued by this whole story is to watch a 1978 documentary on the subject from Australia’s ABC channel. Handily, it has been posted in three 10-minute sections on YouTube: 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3. Because so much of the police evidence has been destroyed over the years, the great thing about this film is that you get to actually see things in The Unknown Man’s suitcase (right at the start of part 2), which I for one found particularly interesting.

What I suspect you’d really want to leaf through next would be a dossier on the case, carefully laid out by a former policeman who had been assigned to it, and who went to some lengths to be factual, not judgmental. If my guess is even remotely close, then I’d say you simply have to get yourself a copy of G. M. Feltus’ (2010) book “The Unknown Man: A suspicious death at Somerton Beach“.

Yes, Gerry Feltus was indeed a policeman assigned between 2002 and 2004 (when he retired) to the Somerton Man cold case: and I think he does an admirable job of bringing together both the numerous strands of (often painfully thin) evidence and the various claims and theories as to the dead man’s identity.

It’s entirely true that his lengthy roll call of dud theories in the middle of the book can get very slightly wearing: but he’s clearly trying to give armchair mystery solvers everything they could reasonably need to get under the skin of this peculiar case, and so arguably couldn’t present it in any other way. Recommended!

Of course, there’s an extensive Wikipedia page for you to go through too (frankly, I’d recommend pouring yourself a nice glass of lightly-oaked Australian Chardonnay and watching the ABC documentary before you do anything so completist), though it’s not really a patch on Gerry’s 200+-page book.

Incidentally, there’s a lot of recent speculation that the Unknown Man may well have been the father of Jestyn’s son (there’s now even talk of exhuming bodies and performing DNA tests). Though my own belief is that this is – for entirely separate reasons – most likely true, I also think that this is missing the point. The right first step would be to do much more to explore the Somerton’s Man’s life before his death: thanks to Gerry Feltus, I think we can tell a great deal about him, and make some well-educated hunches.

In a few days’ time, I’ll post about what I think the odd cipher message contains, as well as my thoughts on the Unknown Man’s life, his travels in Australia after the Second World War, and his premature death (yes, I’m quite sure he was poisoned). But that’s by the by: for now all that’s important is that I think anyone with an interest in this enduring cipher mystery should buy themselves a copy of Gerry’s book from his Australian website and try to make up their own mind!

Copiale Cipher update…

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Today’s New York Times has a short article by John Markoff on the Copiale Cipher, the oculist secret society initiatory document recently cracked by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer. I discussed it in reasonable depth on this blog a few days ago, click there if you want to know more.

I do suspect that there must be hundreds of uncracked ciphers like the Copiale Cipher (though typically much smaller) languishing in <cliche>dusty European archives</cliche>, so it would be excellent to give people a chance to crack them (not just Kevin Knight & his student cadre 🙂 ).

So, archivists of the world, email me scans of your uncracked ciphers, let’s see what cipher mysteries we can crack together!

PS: before I forget, The Curse of the Voynich should finally be back on sale next week, so when it’s in I’ll email a reminder to those people who have asked to buy a copy. At £9.95, it’s far cheaper than the £32.79, £171.98, and £270.46 quoted on Amazon Marketplace! =:-o

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!

This week’s Zodiac Killer cipher thoughts…

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One of the nice things about the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher is that we have a previous solved cipher by the same encipherer (i.e. the Z408 cipher), which appears to exhibit many of the same properties as the Z340. Hence, if we could forensically reconstruct how Z408 was constructed (i.e. its cryptographic methodology), we might also gain valuable insights into how the later Z340 was constructed.

One interesting feature of the (solved) Z408 is that even though it is a homophonic substitution cipher (which is to say that several different shapes are used for various plaintext letters), the shape selection is often far from random. In fact, in quite a few instances Z408 shapes appear in a strict cycle, which has led to some recent attempts to crack Z340 by trying (unsuccessfully) to infer homophone cycles.

Curiously, one of the shapes (filled triangle) appears to encipher both A and S: and if you extract all these out, a homophone-cycle-like ASASASAS sequence appears. This intrigued me, so I decided to look at it a little closer: might this somehow be a second layer of cycling?

The answer (I’m now pretty sure) turns out to be no, though it’s still interesting in its own right. Basically, the Zodiac seems to have got confused between dotted triangle (for S) and filled triangle (for A), which caused his cycles to break down. He also miscopied an F-shape as an E-shape: perhaps his working draft wasn’t quite as neat as his final copy, and/or written in felt tip, causing letter shapes to soak into the paper and become slightly less distinct.

If we correct these mistakes and reconstruct what he seems to have intended, we see that he was following a fairly strict cycle most of the time, though getting less ordered towards the end (perhaps from enciphering nausea?):-

A: length-4 homophone cycle = (1) F – (2) dotted square – (3) K – (4) dotted triangle
–> 12341234123413234124211
—-> 16 decisions out of 22 follow the cycle pattern

S: length-4 homophone cycle = (1) 6 – (2) S – (3) reversed L – (4) filled triangle
–> 1241234123412341231412
—-> 18 decisions out of 21 follow the cycle pattern

L is interesting because though that seems to start out as a length-2 homophone cycle [diagonal square – B], the diagonal square then seems to morph into a filled square and then back again to a diagonal square. Hence there’s no obvious sign of an actual length-3 homophone cycle as such, only a miscopied length-2 cycle (which then breaks down halfway through, with four diagonal squares in a row).

Yet even though the Zodiac loves words containing LL (kill, thrill, will, all, etc), he only actually seems to be using a length-2 homophone cycle for L (if slightly miscopied). That is, he is probably using a generalized model of English letter frequency distribution rather than a particular model of his own English letter frequency distribution.

The odd thing is that if you go through Dave Oranchak’s list of Z408 homophone sequences, you’ll see that it doesn’t quite match the traditional “ETAOINSHRDLU” frequency ordering (I count L as length-2):
* Length-7: E
* Length-4: TAOINS
* Length-3: R
* Length-2: LHFD

Was there an American amateur cryptography book of the 1950s or 1960s that espoused this frequency distribution?

Oops, that was a nice conference I just missed… :-(

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The NSA’s 2011 Cryptologic History Symposium (held in Johns Hopkins) ran yesterday and today, and had plenty of names long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless recognize in a flash:-

* Dr. Jim Reeds, Institute for Defense Analyses: “Editing the ‘General Report on TUNNY’”
* Dr. Benedek Lang, Budapest University of Technology and Economics: “Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography”
* Elonka Dunin, Independent Scholar: “Kryptos–The Decades-Old Enigma at Langley”

(Personally, I’d also love to have heard this presentation:-
* Erin Higgins, Department of Defense: “Humanism, Magic, and Cryptology in the Renaissance”)

However, arguably the big cipher mystery story of the conference was the fact that Panel session 4B, moderated by David C. Cooley from the NSA/CSS Center for Cryptologic History, was devoted to “Investigating the Voynich Manuscript” and with two Voynich speakers well-known from recent talks and results (respectively):-
* Klaus Schmeh, Independent Scholar: “New Research on the Voynich Manuscript”
* Dr. Greg Hodgins, University of Arizona: “Radiocarbon Dating and the Voynich Manuscript”

Could I perhaps tempt any attendee to email me a short description of the conference that I can put up here as a guest post? Cheers!

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… 🙂

Apologies for three missing posts!

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A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I’m very sorry to say that you’ve missed out on three recent updates to the site.

They were (in chronological order):
(1) Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp… – discusses an upcoming lecture at Cambridge University on various Slavic mystery documents and John Stojko’s Voynich theory.
(2) Voynich fruitiness back in season… – discusses two recent fruity Voynich theories that popped up on the Internet, one linking the VMs with Jewish pharmaceutical conspiracies, the other with the coelacanth (yes, really!).
(3) Decent 2010 paper on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers – discusses a paper by two Norwegian academics searching for homophone cycles in the uncracked Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher.

Feel free to click through and have a look at them, they were all good posts, well worth a read. Enjoy! 🙂

Decent 2010 paper on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers…

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Here’s some more on the Zodiac Killer ciphers, specifically the interesting uncracked one (“Z340”). Though most of the images of this on the Internet are both monochrome and somewhat overexposed, here’s a link to a nice image of Z340 at a high-enough resolution to be useful. Thanks to this, I think you can see that the correction on row 6 is from a ‘right-facing K’ to a ‘left-facing K’, which could well be a copying error from an intermediate draft.

What’s more, it allows us to transcribe the ciphertext with a high degree of confidence that we’ve got it right: so here’s the transcription that Dave Oranchak and glurk use, which should be more than good enough for non-Zodiac experts wanting to play with it too:-

HER>pl^VPk|1LTG2d
Np+B(#O%DWY.<*Kf)
By:cM+UZGW()L#zHJ
Spp7^l8*V3pO++RK2
_9M+ztjd|5FP+&4k/
p8R^FlO-*dCkF>2D(
#5+Kq%;2UcXGV.zL|
(G2Jfj#O+_NYz+@L9
d<M+b+ZR2FBcyA64K
-zlUV+^J+Op7<FBy-
U+R/5tE|DYBpbTMKO
2<clRJ|*5T4M.+&BF
z69Sy#+N|5FBc(;8R
lGFN^f524b.cV4t++
yBX1*:49CE>VUZ5-+
|c.3zBK(Op^.fMqG2
RcT+L16C<+FlWB|)L
++)WCzWcPOSHT/()p
|FkdW<7tB_YOB*-Cc
>MDHNpkSzZO8A|K;+

OK, today’s thought follows on from my most recent Zodiac Killer post, which wondered to what degree cryptologists could make use of the likely presence in Z340 of broadly the same kind of homophone cycles present in the earlier Z408 ciphertext. Well blow me down if I didn’t just run into exactly that today, a paper by Håvard Raddum, Marek Sýs called “The zodiac killer ciphers” published in Tatra Mountains Maths Publ. 45 (2010), pp.75–91: the fulltext is freely downloadable here. There’s an earlier (slightly less formal) 2009 presentation here.

The two authors found evidence of low-level (i.e. length = 2 or 3) homophone cycle structure in the Z340 but not in its transposed version, which is a good indication that the cipher itself isn’t (diagonally) transposed. However, having myself written codes to look for homophone cycles in Z340, I think their assumption that it is a single homogenous cipher is not really justified: they would have got much more striking values had they divided it into two.

Really, the challenge with searching for homophone cycles in Z340 that they failed to address is that the statistical significance of the length 2 or length 3 homophone cycles they found is relatively low compared with the Z408 cipher. How many standard deviations are these actually away from the centre of the distribution? The biggest statistical problem with searching for best homophone cycles is that you have a lot to choose from, which I believe reduces the statistical significance of any you do happen to find. It’s a kind of statistical “darts paradox”: hitting the bullseye once in a million throws doesn’t suddenly make you a great darts player.

Still, they build up a lot of theoretical machinery (though I somehow doubt that you can reliably build n-cycles out of (n-1)-cycles given the many deviations from the cycle scheme the Zodiac Killer makes), which may well prove useful. Definitely something to ponder on.

Voynich fruitiness back in season…

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Go on, admit it: for all your research rationality and historical smarts, you secretly love nutty Voynich theories – the fruitier they are, the more in control of your own thoughts you feel. Of course, that feeling of superiority is merely the most fleeting of illusions: the only real difference is that you’re smart enough to keep your mouth shut. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool etc.

So here are some low-hanging Voynich fruits to help you feel better about yourself. Think of it as therapy you can actually afford!

(1) “Flanders”, a 50-post veteran on theforbiddentruth.net, shared his thoughts on “probable jew” Wilfrid Voynich’s conspiracy-fuelling pharmacological manuscript:-

These documents are called the Voynich Manuscripts, as they came into the possession and the estate of a probable jew, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, allegedly from the jesuits in Villa Mondragone.

Because of the jesuit, Vatican, jewish-communist connections as well as the mystery surrounding the documents, they may be of interest to those whose interests lie in those areas. Some of the information in the links ties in with activists in the pre-jewish/communist takeover of Russia. […]

One has to wonder is whether the documents have not actually been already translated while our present “wonderful jewish drug companies” are benefitting from “their research” into the “modern” pharmaceticals. Maybe someone else will have the key to knowledge which would remove some of their mystery.

Marvellous stuff, simply marvellous.

(2) Mark Russell added a comment to a Voynich-related post on the Government Book Talk website (which was, sensibly enough, actually discussing how to download Mary D’Imperio’s book “Elegant Enigma”)… but his thoughts memorably led off into the little-known world of the “fish/mammal”:-

4) In one of the [Voynich Manuscript’s] pictures they have a picture of a Pre Historic Fish/Mammal in the Middle of the page.
5) Recently they have found Two of these Fish/Manuals in the ocean—Must be over 100,000,000 years old in evolution.
6) They say that this species of fish/mammals was the evolution of Man going to Land.
[…]
17) The Scales on many of these pictures look like the scales from the Pre-Historic Fish/Mammal.
[…]
It is very interesting that this book has a Picture of a Fish/Mammal—We have only found (2) of these Fish/Mammals in the last 100 years. There is no way anyone should of been able to see one of these Fish/Mammals back in the 1400′s or the 1500′s.

Just in case you’re not quite connecting with Mark here, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to reach towards linking the fish-eating-a-nymph drawing in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (the water / balneological quire) with the famous ‘Lazarus taxon’ – i.e. a species formerly thought to be extinct, but which subsequently turned out to be still alive – the coelacanth. So here’s the Voynich fish…

…and here’s a coelacanth caught in 1974 (courtesy of Wikipedia, bless ’em)…

Spooky, eh? 🙂

Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp…

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Here’s an upcoming talk at Cambridge’s Sidney Sainsbury’s Sussex College on 12th October 2011 at 5pm which might be of interest to Voynich researchers. Harvard Professor George Grabowicz promises an interesting couple of hours with his lecture “The Eternal Return of National Mystifications: the Voynich Manuscript, the Book of Vles and the Igor Tale“. (It seems to be a follow-on to a talk he gave to the ASEES 42nd Annual National Convention in November 2010called Code and Message in Slavic Mystifications: the Book of Vles, the Voynich Manuscript and the Igor Tale.)

You’d be forgiven for not having heard about the other two named manuscripts: I’d only heard of the first one – the Book of V[e]les because it is generally believed (from its faked-up use of modern Slavic language) to be a literary forgery, and not the ancient Slavic battlefest written on mysterious planks as was originally claimed. Unless Grabowicz has some surprising new angle on this, I guess this part will be pretty straightforward.

But you’ll probably be unshocked to hear that there is a long-running debate over the authenticity of the final manuscript of the trio, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (which, incidentally, Borodin used as the basis for his opera “Prince Igor”, historical trivia buffs). While Wikipedia would have us believe that the “current scholarly consensus” on the Ms is that it’s a genuine 12th century manuscript, there’s a vocal cadre of Harvard historians (led by [former?] Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus Edward L. Keenan) who actually think it’s a goddamn fake. I can only presume, ummm, Harvard Professor Grabowicz has his own opinion on this matter. 🙂

“The Eternal Return” part of Grabowicz’s talk’s title, then, would seem to be about how some people would love these stories to be true almost in a religious way, so as to return to some mythically / nationalistically pure primordial state (following Mircea Eliade’s use of the term). But… what has all that got to do with the Voynich Manuscript?

Directly with the VMs itself, not a lot, I’d say: the claims that the Voynich is a fake or hoax remain extremely lightweight, and fail to sit comfortably with the radiocarbon dating, codicology, palaeography, and art history (all of which point fairly unequivocally to the 15th century). But then again, there is also a rich loam of faux historical retrospective storytelling that various people have projected back onto the VMs, most notably (in my opinion) John Stojko’s hilariously fruity “Letter to God’s Eye”.

It turns out that Grabowicz covered Stojko’s nonsense (admittedly tangentially on p.21, but it’s there none the less) way back when in a nice little article from 2001. What he also mentions – somewhat scarily – is that Stojko’s Voynich theory also appeared to be inching its way into nationalist accounts of Ukrainian history. It’s probably this that “Michael the friend of D” was talking about in 2007, that I mentioned somewhat cursorily here.

OK, it’s true that I tend to talk about these hallucinatory nationalist back-projections as if they’re high comedy, but the reality is that they’re desperately low tragedy, weapons of mass mystification used to trigger slow-motion car crashes between nations and factions. So, if Grabowicz can stoutly resist the postmodernist temptation to trashtalk the VMs’ authenticity (a swamp every sensible academic should actively avoid) and focus instead on the quasi-militant use of stupid theories in troubled times, it should be a great talk. 😉