The news of the moment is that Australian Attorney-General John Rau has refused Professor Derek Abbott’s request that the Somerton man’s body be exhumed for DNA / autosome testing, commenting that Abbott’s application wasn’t “compelling”. Well, I guess that means we’re going to have to do it the hard way, then… 🙂

So here (as long-promised) is Part One of my thoughts on the Unknown Man and his mysterious cipher note, perhaps they’ll open up some new research avenues. Overall, while I’m pretty sure my reasoning is basically sound, please feel free to disagree! (PS: I’ve included a few page references to Gerry Feltus’ book for Klaus Schmeh and other hardcore cipher mystery buffs).

[For background on the Somerton Man / Unknown Man / Taman Shud / Tamam Shud case, here’s a pair of links that should get you started]

(1) Why was the Unknown Man in Somerton? As with pretty much all historical mysteries, it is ‘within the realms of possibility’ that all the evidence that the police were (eventually) able to assemble had been consciously constructed and arranged to give a certain impression, and that the real story behind them all was entirely different. Yet while we should acknowledge that each individual piece of evidence might well have been influenced, finessed, modified or even faked, we should be trying to look through them to the overall narrative. So, I view as basically reliable the link between the Unknown Man and the copy of Taman Shud subsequently found nearby – and hence between the Unknown Man and the nurse ‘Jestyn’, whose private phone number was written in the back, and who lived close to Somerton Beach in Glenelg.

Given that a man was seen knocking at Jestyn’s door during the day before the Unknown Man’s appearance on the beach, it seems to me a wholly unremarkable conclusion that the Unknown Man almost certainly came to Glenelg specifically to visit her. Moreover, Jestyn had not long lived in Glenelg, so had had that phone number for only a short time: and must therefore have given the Unknown Man her phone number relatively recently.

(2) Where did the Unknown Man die? I think the answer – without a shadow of a doubt – is “not on the beach“. He was found propped up on Somerton beach yet with “lividity above the neck and ears” [p.204] – i.e blood pooled at the back of his head after death. If he had quietly died in the position in which he was subsequently found, gravity would have pushed his blood to his feet: hence I conclude that he died somewhere else entirely, where in fact his body was left for a while with his head below the rest of his body, before being carried to the beach and arranged in that oddly casual pose.

Moreover, Somerton Beach is sandy – so if the Unknown Man had lain on that beach for any period of time with his head at its lowest point before being physically rearranged by a random passer-by, there would surely have been sand in his hair… but there was none. As such, I disagree with the Coroner T.E.Erskine who concluded that “He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1st December, 1948.” [p.205] – rather, though the man was found dead there, I find it highly unlikely that it was the scene of his death.

No: to my mind, the only realistic scenario is the Unknown Man died somewhere else entirely and was carried to the beach – probably, from his weight, by a man. The report mentioned by Gerry Feltus [pp.143-144] of someone seen apparently doing exactly this around 10pm on the previous evening would seem to be entirely consistent with this scenario.

(3) How did the Unknown Man die? The first pathologist noted that the man was in good physical shape, and that his “heart was of normal size, and normal in every way”. There was blood in his stomach along with the remains of a pasty eaten roughly three hours before his death.

Though his spleen was significantly enlarged (3x times normal size) AKA splenomegaly, note that this is most likely a symptom of a different problem rather than the problem itself. As I understand it, your spleen can’t suddenly enlarge in a matter of a day: and given that the Unknown Man was apparently only in Somerton for less than a day, he must have arrived there with his spleen already enlarged. The lack of any obvious signs of another problem points to a problem that had just receded, quite probably a recent viral infection. So to me, the presence of an enlarged spleen implies that the Unknown Man had only just recovered from an significant illness, and that he was perhaps still in quite a fragile state. He would very probably have also had some lingering discomfort or back pain from his enlarged spleen.

(4) What was the cause of the Unknown Man’s death? It’s important to remember that coroners and pathologists repeatedly examined his body and screened his blood, looking for any faint clue that might help to narrow down the cause of his death, but with no success. Given the healthy state of his heart, the two best theories left standing (in my opinion) are (a) a deviously hard-to-pin-down poison deliberately administered either by himself or by someone else but which quickly disappeared from his system after death; or (b) an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something he had ingested, with the most notable candidate being excess sulphur dioxide used as a preservative in the pasty, which in 1948 was yet to be controlled [pp.202-203].

For me, I have to say that there is only one likely scenario I’m at all comfortable with: that while at Jestyn’s house late that afternoon, he had an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something in the pasty he had had for lunch (for why else would there be blood in his stomach?) In my mind, he must have laid down on a bed suffering from acute stomach cramps; but because he was so weakened by his recent illness, he unfortunately died as a result of his reaction, slumping with his head falling backwards over the edge of the bed – not upside down, but with his neck supported at an angle by the edge of the bed, leading to the distinctive lividity observed by the pathologist.

Even though Jestyn had worked as a nurse (and more on that later), I suspect she was not physically strong enough to move him from that position, so left him just as he was until her husband arrived home in the evening. I believe the Unknown Man remained on the bed until later that evening, when they carried him to the beach to pose him there, to be found in the morning.

(5) What was the Unknown Man’s personal situation? In his modest suitcase, there were stencilling tools for making signs such as Third Officers use on ships to mark baggage and crates, along with the princely sum of sixpence. It was December (the middle of the Australian summer), and his body had the remains of the kind of outdoor tan you’d expect from someone who had worked outside the previous summer, but not that summer. His clothes came from a variety of places, and in a variety of sizes (his slippers were smaller than his shoes), and most had their labels removed. The items that did have a label were marked “T. Kean” or “T. Keane”.

This has led to a lot of spy theories (“an international man of mystery who didn’t want to be identified“, etc) and conspiracy theories (“his killers removed the labels from his clothes in order to conceal his identity“, etc), none of which rings true at all to me. For me, however, the simplest explanation by a mile was simply that he was poor (if not actually destitute), and had been given these clothes by a charity. The original owners’ name tags would have been removed by the charity before being given to the needy.

Furthermore, given the probable connection with sea-faring implied by the stencilling tools in his case, my prediction is that he was given these clothes by a local Mission to Seafarers or Stella Maris branch.

So: as far as I can see, the most likely overall scenario is that the Unknown Man had recently had a serious viral infection, travelled to see Jestyn in Glenelg, had a pasty for lunch, was taken ill with an allergic reaction, died on her bed, but was posed on Somerton beach that night. But… why was he there at all, and what of his mysterious enciphered note? More on that in Part Two…

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!

Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 – Klaus’ VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich Manuscript. This was prompted by his Voynich talk at the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest earlier this year (2010).

In fact, it’s quite revealing to see how far he has come from a 2008 German skeptic conference he also talked at (discussed here) [where he fell in behind the mainstream 16th century hoax position] and a 2008 article he wrote (which I reviewed here): it’s nice to see that he’s moved from seeing pretty much everything Voynichese as a combination of pseudoscience and pseudohistory to a rather more nuanced (and realistic) position.

But all the same, looking forward, to where should Voynich skepticism go from here? From what we now know, I’d say there are no obvious grounds for a hardcore skeptical position any more – the vellum seems genuinely old, with the ink freshly written on it, and the radiocarbon dating broadly meshing with the kind of evidence I’ve been working on for the last 5+ years, vis-à-vis:

  • The ‘4o’ verbose pair’s brief appearance in various Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1456 (see The Curse Of The Voynich pp.175-179)
  • The parallel hatching which I suspect pretty much forces a post-1440 date if it was made in Italy, or post-1410 if Germany
  • The two 15th century hands in the marginalia which pretty much force a pre-1500 date for the VMs
  • Sergio Toresella’s very specific dating claim, based on his lifetime with herbal manuscripts – that it was made in Northern Italy (probably Milan or the Venice region) around 1460

The swallow-tail merlons on the two castle walls (on the nine-rosette page) that Klaus mentioned in the podcast have actually been debated for at least a decade: although these don’t prove that the Voynich Manuscript was constructed in Northern Italy (where they were an unmissable feature of many castles), they clearly do help to shift the balance of probability that way away from Germany (the #2 candidate region).

And I suppose this is where all this is going: by carefully combining all these pieces together, we can now try to think about the Voynich in terms of probabilities. Even if you discount my Antonio Averlino hypothesis, I don’t honestly mind being what I call “the right kind of wrong” – i.e. looking in the right culture, place, and time, but perhaps finding a false positive to match a very specific forensic profile. Just so you know, I’d currently rate the likelihood of the VMs’s origin’s being Northern Italy at ~80%, Savoy ~10%, Germany ~5%, and anywhere else ~5%.

Hence, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that they’d just uncovered a fifteenth century letter clearly describing the Voynich Manuscript as having been written by Giovanni Fontana, Cicco Simonetta, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, or any one of the hundreds of other desperately clever Northern Italian polymaths who were right there at the birth of the Renaissance, I’d be utterly delighted: for I think that is the cultural milieu linking pretty much all the strands of tangible (as opposed to merely suggestive) evidence to date.

The notions that we know nothing about the VMs and/or that it is somehow destined to be proven a meaningless hoax are not ‘skeptical’ in the true sense of the word: rather, they are postmodernist non-positions, uncritical ‘meh‘s in the face of the interconnected mass of subtle – but nonetheless tangible – historical evidence VMs researchers have carefully accumulated. In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I think the real “beliefs that are taken for granted by most of the population” at which skeptics should be pointing their weapons of mass deconstruction are not this kind of painstakingly-assembled gear-train, but the widely-disseminated (and utterly fallacious) claim that the VMs is a 16th century hoax for financial gain.

In a way, this would turn Klaus’ own skeptical research chain back on itself – and in so doing would hopefully set him free. “More Schmeh, less meh“, eh? 🙂

The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days’ time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript.

Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don’t think this is particularly fair. Compared to the frankly fantasmagorical literature on the Phaistos Disk or even the wistfully nationalistic fancies floating around the Rohoncz Codex, I’d actually say that the majority of VMs theories do tend to rest on a far less rumpled bed of historical evidence and tortuous historical reasoning (if you put the alien Nazi Atlantean end-times theories to one side).

Yet it is also true that VMs theories also often share the same historical methodological flaw (some people would call it an “antipattern”). What I call the “Big Man” fallacy is the conviction that the only way of constructing a convincing explanation for the VMs would be to weave it into the narrative of a well-known historical (but occult- or cryptography-tinged) personality. As examples of this, you could quickly point to theories name-checking Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Trithemius,  John Dee, Edward Kelley, Francis Bacon and perhaps even (I’ll say it so that Klaus doesn’t have to) Antonio Averlino.

Of course, the awkward truth about the Renaissance is that for every one half-decent such historical candidate, there were probably a hundred better qualified ones long lost in the fog of time: so the odds are always strongly against anyone succeeding in taking on the Voynich in the absence of proper scientific / codicological data to build upon.

Perhaps this marks the line between cynicism and skepticism I mentioned a few weeks ago: whereas a cynic dismisses any such speculative exercise as a unsupportable waste of effort, a skeptic realizes that the challenge of acquiring proper, revealing historical information is always going to be significant, and so struggles to retain a core of optimism. Is getting to such an extraordinary end line worth precariously balancing optimism and pessimism for? I think so, but… opinions differ! 🙂

A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.