A piece in the Adelaide ‘Tiser a few days ago lays out retired policeman Gordon Cramer’s sensational-sounding Somerton Man claims – that the mysterious cipher-like Rubaiyat note linked to the Somerton Man contains “Prosigns” (a set of abbreviations when using Morse Code); that it also contains microwriting; and that some of this microwriting in fact refers to a top secret post-war British plane – the de Havilland Venom.
Gordon has been doggedly pursuing the Somerton Man’s trail for several years now… so might his diligent nose have sniffed out a whole set of truffles that everyone else has been walking past in the rotting forest of evidence?
The immediate thing to note is that there are so very many cipher history / mystery elements in play here that it’s going to take me more than a single blog post to cover them all. But I’ll start briskly with what I think is the fundamental forensic question – What happened to the Rubaiyat note to leave it the way we see it in the scans? – because Gordon’s take on this has both interesting similarities to and differences from my own.
A smooth writing surface?
First things first: Gordon and I agree (I think) that what we’re looking at is quite different from the state the page was in when it was passed to the SA police. Looking close-up at the letters (as Gordon has spent so much time doing), it is very clear (I think) that there is a ‘slide’ to the way many of them were formed, as if they had been written on a shiny / smooth / glossy surface… and hence not on the roughly-textured post-war paper of the Rubaiyat.
In particular, I think it is hard to see the “A” of the “PANETP” (above) as having been written on anything but a slippery surface: and if this holds true for the ‘A’, then it must also be true of all the other letters written in the same codicological ‘layer’.
A laundry pen?
Secondly, he and I also agree (I think) that in 1949 these marks must almost certainly have been made by an early indelible marker pen, such as a laundry pen. I’m not a laundry pen historian (there can’t be that many of them in the world, surely?), but I am reasonably sure that they would have had fairly stiff wicks / tips drawing ink from their ink reservoir. I also don’t think they would have been much fun to write with: by way of contrast, the (later) felt tip pins had tips that were much more pliable.
I further suspect that we have enough evidence to make a reasonable estimate of the physical size of the pen’s tip. Given that the size of the Whitcomb and Tombs Rubaiyat edition upon which the writing was found is 110mm x 140mm, (which Gordon describes (fairly reasonably) as a “pocket version”) and that the width of the downstroke on the A is about 13 pixels on the 1802×1440 image, I believe we can infer a line width of between 0.75mm and 0.80mm. All of which is pretty much consistent with the pen being something similar to a laundry pen of the time (note that the first Sharpie was launched fifteen years later in 1964).
Furthermore, if you look at the ‘feet’ of many of the vertical lines (as above), you can – I think – see ‘pooling’ where the ink has collected at the end of a downstroke: so my suspicion here is that the ink would seem to have been made to a ‘wetter’ formulation than the kind used in modern marker pens.
The Jestyn ‘R’?
Gordon has also recently pointed out a similarity between the (only) R in the Rubaiyat note and the first R in Jestyn’s note in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.
I agree that it’s an intriguing suggestion, but I’d caution that Jestyn’s overall ‘hand’ is slightly forward slanting and curved, while all the ‘laundry pen letters’ are distinctly upright and linear. All in all, if there is a match there, I’d say it’s a pretty thin one… but I thought I ought to say.
The first letter.
So far, so good. But it is broadly at this point that our paths diverge, so I’ll go on to consider a number of possible scenarios in the next post.
Yet there is another issue here: the “M” that is apparently visible beneath the first letter. (And yes, I know that the first letter is also an “M”: I’m talking about something that looks like a pencil “M” beneath a laundry pen “M”). A picture is well worth a thousand words here:-
If you can’t see what I’m talking about, here’s another version with the M-like lines roughly highlighted in green:-
What was used to mark out this single under-letter? Not laundry pen, nor iodine vapour, nor even UV light: to my eye, it resembles faint pencil, or perhaps pencil marks that have been partially erased and then contrast enhanced in the photographer’s dark room. Might it be that these faint lines were what all the text originally looked like, before having the marker pen layer added on top?
What I find most interesting is that this ‘under-M’ doesn’t yet square well with anybody’s ideas about this page (not even my own): and is therefore perhaps a sign that we’re all misreading this in one or more significant ways. We don’t yet know the real history of how this page was made – every account seems to be closer to hearsay than to evidence – so it’s all up for grabs. Anyway, scenarios next…
1) where is the original now?
2)anyone lookeed for more faint pencil under/near the ink?
3)is there a way to see if there are compressed fibers (pencil) under the smooth ink if the original were available?
4) who did the emphasizing?
If that faint marking was indeed an M, it would have been a very distinctive one. Perhaps it could be compared to Jestyn’s writing.
I see a W turned into a M with the two near vertical strokes .. And I smell a rat, somebody being clever perhaps, back in the day.
Nice job Nick, Good overview and whilst we may not agree on all things, I do think that your work in this post is quality.
On the letter R Nick, my thoughts were that on the code page and in my view, each of the letters were done in outline and caps. In the Verse 70 example, the letters were all in cursive and therefore there would be a forward slant.
I see a different set of prosigns .. and I disagree with what Nick is putting up here – that the “M” that is apparently visible beneath the first letter.”
I have a theory … and it don’t mean no one no good (thank you Bob Dylan)
Pete: I haven’t got to Prosigns yet! I suspect that the first letter was initially (laundry pen) overwritten as “W”, before it was (laundry pen) corrected to be a “M”…
I’m off mate, see you at the finish line ..
Pete: ah, that’s really thoughtful of you – it’s always nice when people wave you on. 😉
Nick, is it possible for you to ‘flip’ the page (bottom edge upward) and enhance the writing which appears to be ‘bleed-through’ on the left margin?
bdid1dr: I’ve had a careful look and I can’t see anything reliable. But I’ll be moving on to the topic of microwriting very shortly, which covers that kind of thing much more closely.
So…If one were writing all of this micro-writing within a secret (larger) code, how would one know how to read the micro-code. Writing normally reads left to right (or right to left) but if a code is hidden in letters that run 360 degrees/up-down etc…Where is the beginning and the end? Is there an indication of which direction to follow in the micro-writen code as well?
Sorry about the sics.
They built a freekin’ cast of this man six months after he died but they didn’t finger print anything but his dead fingers? What a bunch of “yahoos”! We have 4,5 maybe 6 photographs of this dead man with exceptionally large hands and strange feet but not a single photograph of either the hands or feet? Respectable or not, they failed miserably in every aspect of investigation. I’m a little more than angry tonight – geez; what were all of these “experts” and “respectable” people doing? They did NOTHING that was most obviously required to investigate this man’s death but they were “stealth” deciphering micro-writing within a code that was found in a book of a chemist/doctor/pharmacist’s car by the brother-in-law, children of such person? Ummm…Getting down to brass tacks, I don’t think that anyone involved was remotely capable of finding anything remotely close to micro-writing.
Given the way the whole case was (not) handled, I’m starting to doubt what “they” even tried to prescribe to originally ascertained code.
misca: fingerprinting is something I’ve also been looking into recently with regard to Gordon Cramer’s research, and – all being well – it should feature in the next “scenarios” Tamam Shud post here. 🙂
misca: just so you know, the post after that is planned to cover prosigns, and then microwriting. Who’d be me, eh? 😐
spreading yeself a little thin are ye dome ..
Hi Nick, The first letter “M”-is that really another faint letter “M” underneath? The letter underneath looks like a “P”?
Pete: at a thousand words a post, I’d say I’m doing the precise opposite. 🙂
Clive: could be, could be – I only said what it looked like to me, your mileage may vary. 🙂
A thousand words isn’t difficult, finding something is …
Pete: writing even a hundred good words is hard, but writing a thousand good words is more than 10x harder… 🙂
Nick: look at that image .. Is it a W, or M ? … Or is it a W turned into a M ?
How else would you explain the shape … It’s your image, what is it?
Misca, Whoever wrote the microwriting/code appears to have used the letter ‘X’ as a separator between strings, in this way you can follow the direction of the writing. For example 2 consecutive strings would look like this:
X36758X4914 and so on.
Micro wiriting around curves is a little more complex and requires more experience/skill to achieve. If you compare the micro writing in Jestyns poem to Alf, there are few examples of curved writing whilst the opposite applies to the code page with numerous examples of curves. You might want to follow up on James W Zaharee who in the 1930s wrote Lincolns Gettysburg Address on a 3 inch strand of human hair. Amazing stuff.
How about this for a scenario, the code writer, prior to exercising his skills as a miniaturist, writes guiding lines / letters. Not unlike a sign writer who marks up his available space before he commits to paint.
Nick, With regard to the laundry pen issue, you will notice that some letters have a stippled effect, much smaller markings and in my view that was an attempt to cover individual letters and numbers. The letter R in line 1 is one prime example of that effect. It wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibilities that SOCO or whoever else may have been involved in the task may have had specific tools to do this kind of work.
Worth also bearing in mind that the Police, Intelligence agencies and security services would have been well versed and experienced in matters pertaining to espionage/spying having just emerged from WW2. The job of conducting a search of the body and belongings would have been a specialist task not just for Mr.Plod on the beat to conduct.
“I suspect that the first letter was initially (laundry pen) overwritten as “W”, before it was (laundry pen) corrected to be a “M”…”
Nick: If you accept this, and examine the page again, then you must accept that the first letter of another two lines was similarly corrected.
Because three have been changed.
Pete, I think that marking up was the way it was done, look to the marked up version of Jestyn’s poem to Alf Boxall on the blog. All aligned and with some unusually straight edges.
GC: Why just those three?
Pete, It could be down to procedure. Leo Marks had noticed that some agents messages coming from Holland, I think, were perfect, no mistakes; in reality agents were generally always under severe pressure and they would make mistakes. He suspected that the Germans had captured the agents and were using their call signs.
Amusingly he decided to test his theory and responded to one Abwehr generated message by signing it of HH. This was common practice by German signals people, it stood for ‘Heil Hitler’. A reply came back from the ‘agent’ similarly signed and point proven.
The point is that sometimes agents were taught to make deliberate mistakes so that the message looked authentic. Now would be a good time to go back and look again at Jestyn’s poem to Alf, her handritten letters that I’ve seen are word perfect but Verse 70 has a number of ‘mistakes’.
I think I’ll stick with this GC, three accidents on the one page, in the one place, is two too many … you and Nick carry on.
Furphy – Where did you go with your interconnectivity-chart? Come back!
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It looks like a transparency was used to trace over the original.
Nick – What may have caused the step-ladder effect visible under the ink on the letter P – and what might be the reason for the different technique in tracing the letters N and E ?
peteb: you can see the same (what you call) “step-ladder effect” on lots of the other letters, including the (in)famous Q, so the answer here is surely most likely to be something pretty physical and basic. To my eyes, I see someone slowly dragging a old-fashioned laundry pen across a writing surface (perhaps an IR photograph), where the judders get translated into what you call “steps”. The N and E look wobbly in the same way a fair few other letters look wobbly: so perhaps the more testing case is the A, which seems not only smoother (no steps), but also as though the writer has gone over it at least twice. (Maybe the first pass was too soft, and so needed doing again?)
You also ask (on your blog) “looking at the (above) images of the letters R and PANE, could you indicate where the quantizing artefacts can be seen?”
Quantizing artefacts appear at a very low level (i.e. around clusters of pixels) where some of the high-frequency component (i.e. fine detail) signal gets removed out by the JPEG compression, leaving behind proportionately more of the low-frequency component. When images are enhanced (e.g. contrast-enhanced), a range of frequencies get artificially added to the image as part of the visual ‘boost’: which means that when contrast-enhanced images are compressed, you end up with new low-frequency stuff but not so much high-frequency stuff. These new low-frequency artifacts are basically the quantizing artifacts left behind by JPEG compression.
NickP – thanks for that. When you suggest in your reply that the first pass in the letter A was (maybe) too soft, and so needed doing again – what, in your mind, was he doing, again?
NickP: I was talking about the first pass in the letter ‘A’ overwritten using (what seems to be) a black laundry marker by the police, not in the original beneath it that had previously been photographed. The black lettering is just the police’s best contemporaneous attempt at making visible what were just faint marks or indentations on the original Rubaiyat.
As an aside, it’s entirely possible that the police might have been writing in white on the negative of a photograph, this was also a very common practice at the time.
Leane looked at an ultra-light enhancement of the code, it being so faint: could that have been the first photograph taken of the code?
peteb: as I recall, it was an ultra-violet image of the code – and yes, that was quite probably the first photograph taken where the code was made visible. It’s also why I spent so much time trying to track down Jimmy Durham’s family, to see if they still have any of his photo albums. Maybe one day…
In summary then: an ultra-violet enhanced view of the code was photographed, printed, photographed again in negative, that negative traced over and the result photographed for all to see … is that how the process might have gone?
Nick & Stripes: Maybeisms, possibilties, or might have beens are all purely speculative terms and as such, hardly worth contemplating, unless we have something more substantive, like factual realities to go on. If we can somehow be done with historically uncontestable, tit for tat, ego scoring theories, then perhaps we might stand some chance for real discovery. Intransigence is probably not the answer at this point in time!….
Peteb: as I see it, there are two main possibilities –
1) the Rubaiyat page was photographed under UV light, and developed onto a glass plate yielding a negative, which was then written on with some kind of white pen. This was then printed (reversing it again), yielding what we see.
2) the Rubaiyat page was photographed under UV light, and developed onto a glass plate yielding a negative, which was then printed as a photograph. This photograph was then written on with a back laundry pen, and it was this modified photograph that was then shown to the newspapers (for them to photograph themselves).
On balance, I think 2) is a little more probable, but there’s probably not a lot in it.
A little slightly humorous Somerton story to perhaps brake the impass….Three mates in the racing game left their digs in Currie St. City Tuesday for a pub crawl in beachside Glenelg. There was Bill Burns the horse carrier, Charlie Weasel, a jockey and unspecified associate Herb Frost; to be refered to herein & after as the deceased. The trio started out at St. Leonards hotel, moved to Kerr’s pub further down Jetty Rd. towards the pier for a shout, then on to the Jetty saloon bar for another round or two and finally ending up at the old Broadway snake pit, where they managed to put away a few for the road until last drinks and Bill’s lone departure back to the city at 1am… Herb, who had begged off to meet a lady friend, was found flatout on the beach next morning dead as a maggot. The subsequent inquest, conveniently convened at the Pier Hotel’s club bar the next day, heard evidence from the usual witnesses re body discovery, medical examination and results of police inquiries. Acting Coroner Doc. Rogers, concluded that the aforesaid Herbert Harold Frost had expired as a consequence of having fallen flat on his face, due to the effects of a gut full of ale, not henceforth having the physical means to prevent terminal suffocation. The determination had earlier been supported, most assuredly by a simple bladder incision conducted by the attending Doc. Davies without need of a full autopsy..Deceased was thus found to have died by his own misadventure and after adjournment, all those present more than likely to a man, adjourned to the hotel club bar for the usual three times three out of respect for the recently departed, with a long stiff one on the house to celebrate a life cut short by the mean hand of fate…..Check out the story as you wish and excuse some overview of several related news stories. The names are as reported and the year is 1910…If only SM’s ending three hundred yards further south could be explained away that simply, we’d be left with nothing to argue over.
Nick: I’d be happy to go with your No. 2 glass overlay, double monochrome exposure tecnique myself, providing the 1948 era Sapol lab had the knowhow and equipment to facilitate the process…As Gordon has just reminded us, this photo lesson discussion is not new and I’ve noted going through the earlier posts, some little gem upon which I can adlib. Discussion for instance on the relative merits of this jpeg compression, that pixel overload culminating in compunded unatural angular irregularities or worse still, possible post original, digitally composed paralex distortion interference, being viewed as a ligitimate contention to some illogical, perhaps deliberate proposition on whether white or black overwriting was the culprit for overun on the letter ‘A’ of the code page….As for the letters Q on said code, along with others concerned with ships passing in the night like poor sunken Indianapolis CA32 or half sunk New Orleans CA35, also the ‘added’ figures 70 over with Alf’s pretty ROK, I’ll take a rain check if’n y’all don’t mind. Suffice to say, yes of couse they can be clearly seen for what that might be worth to regarding our SM inquiries. Bearing in mind that such tiny details were most likely added in more recent times, whether accidently in a lab, perhaps as part of a university experiment or else by others who had access to the original copy, just to complicate matters…And by the way Flash, you have permission to use my much loved old ‘Dorothy Dix’ expression when and where you see fit, as with your case in point.
Stripes: I’m pretty sure that one term for the type of concealment you are looking for is ‘immaculate deception’. Born out of police belief that cover-up tactics are their God given right in order to maintain the initiative. At that very early stage of the investigation, with press hounds converging like wobbegongs at a feeding frenzy off Malabar, ensuring control, would have been foremost in Leane’s order of priorities……… Flash: Elementry stuff to old suits like us, can’t hardly forget the old job eh pal? and speaking of old initiatives, detective; In your long familiarity with exposure and the like, Is that dark smudge on the top right of our code page reproduction, the image of a fixer (peg) used to hang drying sheets fresh out of the developer bath; Or could it simply be one of Len Brown’s tiny fingers getting in the way pre exposure.
Gordon: I think that as part of my post on Len Brown’s 100th Birthday, apart from wishing the old gentleman many happy returns, I did in closing, suggest that Clive or some S.A. supporter might like to make a home visit and give him a memory test. I’m thinking that if he were to be prompted a tad on the code page analysis with trick pics and the like, his responses might well serve to resolve the stalemate between Nick & Stripes. One can only try, whilst being mindful of being accused of “er-um-ah” hindering an ongoing criminal investigation. PS: If Len won’t come around, see if he remembers anything about a certain screwdriver and sixpence (in coin) that went missing from a brown Globite suitcase.
Is GC the same GC that is a small business consultant? I seem to recall him suggesting his is a rare name, so must assume there’s only one of him on the Sunshine Coast.
Dusty – I have an impeccable source for all things photographic: a balding pox-faced Yugoslav working his trade out of a city garage whose working papers in this country are proving suspect. Word about the local is that he wears a tattoo of a tiger’s head on his chest and has family in Serbia – nevertheless he is more than willing to grant a friend from the old days a favour for a favour and have a quiet look at the images ….
Stripes: Get Tiger on the job by all means. I’m starting to feel that our constant bickering re tiny writing could be working to make our understanding of police methodology for processing the code page more complex than that actually undertaken. Let’s not forget that the Leane team came onto the case with the express view that they were dealing with a suicide, allbeit one with a few small complications as it progressed. They would have been rather pleased when the ROK was handed over, in that it merely gave added weight to its accompanying Tamam Shud slip and self destruction as believed most likely….Why then go to all that fancy scientific processing, when the clandestine theory could not have been further from their minds. OK of course they were intrigued by the writing and so it could not cause any harm to write it up, make it look fancy and send it off to old Eric Nave for his take….I could see Leane asking for the photo lab boys to bring the indentations up with fuming, taking pics for the file, then doing a more ledgible version with marker pen on acetate for Frank Kennedy as agreed. I would not be surprised that who ever did the tracing may have had a few problems following the rapidly fading iodine impressions and merely did the best they could in a hurry before the letters disappeared completely. I won’t feel too bad if I’m taken to the cleaners for my technical ineptitude, which I don’t mind saying, was never my forte. My handwriting comparisons were fortunately much more acceptable if I may be so bold in saying.
I still don’t like the la k of similarity in different characters on the RoK page. Either the original is written in multiple hands, or the tracer is simply guesstimating his way through (“I thinki I can sort of turn this into an A….”).
The C looks suspiciously like half an S for mine, too…
Flash: Right you are and well said. Apart from Paskesh whom it is claimed applied for a patent on his sponge tipped applicater, at least two others, Lee Newman way back in 1910 and De Croft, did take out patents for their felt tipped models. One might well imagine that not too much nouse would have been required to put a such a marker together from available materials. So you can bet police lab boys would have been improvising such handy tools well before 1949.
Flash: Please don’t be too harsh with Stripes for re introducing that old stuff in his D. Dix interrogatories with Nick. Same goes with ever helpful Byron; How’s he to know that people like you and me, are simply going to consult ‘History of marker pens’ on google for all the good oil …You’ll note that The Advertiser appears to have got dibs on the code page makeover for first release on 29th August ’49, five weeks after Leane spotted it and about when the navy hung aft on it. Interesting too that no other newspapers or columnists used it, includung Max Burgess in his expose twenty years on, or Sapol’s ‘Hue & Cry’ in ’97, nor several other dedicated TShud publications that come to mind. Why not?….
Dusty … the committee met today and in light of your last fifty-five entertaining comments on all and sundry here on gentleman NickP’s accommodating site, a motion was raised and wholeheartedly seconded that you be re-named Havachat forthwith.
Stripes: (4) How would you feel about infinitesimal tremors on the part of the tracer, either due to a lack of confidence in the task or a mild nervous impediment?
Stripes: Any chance of lightening the load a tad to ease the passage. A more fluid abreviation would work fine with me, so long as the committee can stand the strain of a second motion.
JS (re tremors): Or perhaps substance abuse? What was in the NAA files about the Littlemore doc – “Coopers Beer for Leane” (that’s on top of the $50 he got for appearing)
Milongal: Was thinking along the same lines; and yes I can just imagine the old fellow having to have a ‘Redmill” chaser in order to get a good run along the next line of characters. The unaffected ‘A’ could have come up following a heart starter for getting rid of the shakes….While I think of it. Most of us would have it that Jess Thomson’s phone number was X3239 and this probably came about because of the Adelaide small ads, for Gerry never brought it up. I’ve been in the habit of using X3639 in my related posts, for the very good reason that in the Adelaide Avertiser of 29th August, 1949, the latter appears fairly clearly beside the ‘P’ on the code page. I don’t recall that this has been discussed in the past but I feel that the discrepency needs clarifying!……
milongal: Well, come to think of it, the other number x3639 is right alongside the ‘P’ of the code and perhaps for a similar acrostic reason . Prosper Thomson, who was not necessarilly domiciled with Jess at 90A Mosely St. (×3239), might have been anywhere closeby and connected with the number. Also we have Mrs. E.E. Freeman’s boarding house at 57, next to Doc Hendrickson place at 13 Pier, also not far from the Freeman family pad in Queen? St. are all in the vicinty. So any of those places could have been allocated such a close local number, even 44? Mosely St. where Dr. Dwyer was known to have lived at one time…I’m thinking that when Scan Sutherland fed the worked code page over to the press, after the Navy returned it in late August, ’49, neither he nor police columnist Frank Kennedy would have been cognizant as to the presence of a second much tinyer (Len’s writing?) phone number on the page. It’s one off appearance on page one of the Advertiser on 29th instant seems to support such a case, and so if the code page ever appeared again in print, it was most certainly in the fully doctored state of recent times. As to if and where x3239 may have been set elsewhere on the page, we won’t likely find out unless Clive can weedle it out of our old ‘Centenary Kid’. Of course if any of my associated ramblings were to make sense, then we may need to consult Gerry’s about those numbered scraps and old phone books etc….
Stripes : Wrong ‘P’ mate sorry. The one I’m on about is over a bit to the right at the end without those tell-tale arrow heads. Perhaps strange as they’d no doubt be pointing to a very neat little post August ’49 cover plate for x3639 beside it….
Stripes: Toro! Toro! Toro! according to the Feltus book. Forget what page but all about the Nips, and CA 32 or CA 35, after Pearl from memory. Clive’ll know.
@JS: For some reason, I kept thinking x3236 (not sure whether someone was using that somewhere). Kinda goes back to one of my earlier posts, about whether anyone has found a phone directory at the time and checked what was listed….
NB: I assume the x3239 comes into play when people start looking up Prosper in the classifieds – although he uses some other numbers too, related to one of the car parts peddlers (Whitfield, maybe? I forget)
@JS: The idea they weren’t living together might explain why she was of interest not he. Although somewhere (have to check whether it’s from ’48 or sometime more recent) she’s referred to as ‘the Lady of the House’ (which I thought implied she was co-habiting (not sure why, now I think about it….), but I suppose it doesn’t have to)
And while we’re on phone numbers….
People seem to happily accept that just because the code relates to SM, doesn’t mean it relates to SM that day, or even that year (e.g. if we entertain shipping movements in the early 1940s). I’ll admit I know very little about telephone numbers in the 1940/1950s (or even now for that matter, other than since we’ve had longer numbers the prefix identifies the exchange they go through – although with VoIP and the ability to port numbers, that’s going out the window too (for about a year I lived in one state, but had a phone number from another state because my ISP forgot to change it – and with VoIP area codes and prefixes are irrelevant (although a Network Engineer told me it causes them headaches elsewhere to have the phone in a different state to the number) – but that’s another story), but I assume they tend to relate to premise rather than to person (i.e. that it wasn’t so easy to take numbers with you back then).
So, IF the ‘code page’ was written BEFORE Thomson and Thompson were at Moseley St, then what if the number didn’t relate to either of them?
milongal: this would be a reasonable point, were it not for the fact that Jo Thomson told her daughter that she knew who the Somerton Man was etc. So I think we can rule out other phone number scenarios.
NP; I wouldn’t put to much stock in what Kate Thomson says her mother allegedly told her.
Nick: It is on record that Jo told Sapol she didn’t know who Somerton Man was, based on photos and the bust. That’s what we call evidence and what you’re talking about with bullshitting Kate is mere hear say and piss poor at that. I’m surprised that a bloke as fussy about facts as your good self could be so willing to take a load of cobblers and turn it into a dead cert.
milongal: Tel. x3632 seems to have been an inadvertent error of some persistance on my part and possibly repeated by others.
Bumpkin: given that SAPOL found Jo Thomson’s phone number on the Rubaiyat and immediately came a-knocking at her door, and that Paul Lawson reported her strong reaction to the bust of the dead man, I don’t think it’s the most fanciful piece of evidence I’ve ever encountered.
It was Brown wasn’t it, who said the phone number was written in tiny writing underneath the code?
Let’s have a discussion on semantics.
Nick: Do you really believe, based on Jo Thomson being quickly run to ground as a consequence of X3239 being found on the code page, that “we can rule out other phone number scenarios”? Can you not find any sound reason in for querying details on X3639 (Advertiser 29/8/49), baring in mind some reliable claims of there having been another number noticed thereupon?….
john sanders: trolling me is boring, please don’t do it.
Peteb: trolling me is boring, please don’t do it.
Let’s have a discussion on having a thin skin then.
peteb: trolling me is still boring, please don’t do it.
Nick: Boring I’m happy to own, after all who’d know better than the proposing boree . The other snide claim has me miffed quite frankly, though I’m nontheless quite delighted to become the brunt of a standard NP troll? accusation at last…Are you prepared to allow discussion between those interested in the subject of my affrontery, namely X 3639, for I’m amost certain that I hear a busy line brrring over the way.
john sanders: to be fair, I’ve rarely stopped you from going off on your evidential musing tangents in comments here, but I’m not sure I’m up for being trolled as well.
Pete, John et.al.
Having always considered myself to be not at all a novice when it comes to competition in the boring stakes, I do wish the two of you could stop now – such virtuosity is likely to make me feel envious and envy isn’t so boring.
Perhaps we could talk about barometers or shovels or something?
Stripes: I just roll with blows mate; Haven’t had a good shoulder howl since Gough got robbed in ’75…
D.N. O‘Donovan: Got it!..I can go with shovels now that Bumkin is back on line. I think that we‘ve given the new S.A. Attorney General a decent interval for a decision to be made in favour of exhumation; So perhaps now is as good a time as any for a discussion thereupon. Gerry hasn‘t gotten back as promised, so I guess we must go without his input. Thanks for the cautionary suggestion ‘D‘.
Nick: “Rarely” is a fair assessment of your tollerance to my ramblings and I‘m most humbly indebted. Enough said!.
@NP: While her reaction to the bust is interesting, (and with no disrespect intended to any party involved) anything her descendants claim was told them by her has to be taken with a grain of salt – not least because we don’t know exactly what was said, how it was interpreted, and how much gets exaggerated and/or extrapolated once current affair interviewers (ie 60 minutes) get involved.
In the CA space, I think stories often evolve because interviewers press for a particular version of events, to the point it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even reading some of the out takes from Littlemore’s doco, it occasionally seems Littlemore is trying to drive in a particular direction, and the interviewee is finding it difficult to shut down the direction the interview is taking (with Littlemore cleverly probing in a way that makes any disagreement appear evasive).
While it’s entirely possible that Jo’s daughter was told that she’d known who SM was, it’s entirely possible:
1) It never happened (and may have evolved from an interview rather than a deliberate deception)
2) What was said was misinterpreted
3) Probably a whole heap of other things I haven’t thought of
Apparently people frequently admit to crimes they didn’t commit because of tough interview techniques, and there’s been many a documentary made on how a cross between bad memory and a slight twisting of facts from one direction can have people remembering all sorts of stuff that isn’t true.
There’s a newspaper article here today about a fisherman (and his crew) who saw MH370 crash and knows exactly where it is (in the Sumatran Sea, apparently). While it’s possible that the story is true, I’m not going to believe it simply on the fishermen’s say-so…
milongal: as always, lots of scenarios remain possible, that’s the nature of History. But keeping track of all the wholly unlikely things that persist in the fringes of possibility is a task that would be masochistic and Herculean in equal measure.
Furthermore, though it’s good practice to question everything, it’s also quite self-defeating to believe nothing. Though I never met Jo Thomson, I do believe that she not only knew at least some of the truth behind the Somerton Man, but also consciously avoided telling it to Gerry Feltus – beliefs that I share with Gerry himself.
As you know, I suspect that others still alive may very well know the Somerton Man’s identity and/or the names of the people he was associated with, whether in a Broken Hill mine or a Melbourne baccarat school: but that some kind of omertà stills their aged tongues. Perhaps it would be more use sending an interesting flyer to all the nursing homes in Melbourne than digging up his grave, who can say?
hello, I belive i have a genuine copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Matt B Hall @ Somerton Man Wish List 24/10/18. A Cramer clone with a one thread wonder web page and the expected single fawning comment from GC. Subject was Jessica’s phone number, from memory.
I’d imagine all copies are “genuine” (for some definition of “genuine”).
Do you mean you believe you have a copy of the exact version/edition of the one involved in SM?
Gordon Cramer: Your facination with Nihilist code formulations used effectively by Sorge’s pecker head Max Clausen against the nips is a bridge too far and far too complex for this mere Somertonian muppet. Just so long as you keep up the pressure on Derek Abbott and his now self defeating Carl Webb DNA delusional claptrap that has waning support amongst his merry band of Dorothy admirers I’ll lay off pooh poohing your own over the top hypotheses.
GC: Sorry for having to correct you on your latest attempt to crack the Tamam Shud (Danetta) code using substitution. Menzies wasn’t Prime Minister in 1948 as is inferred in your BS/TS translation of key word MINZIES; MOUNTIES might have been better choice as RCMP debriefed Igor Gouzenco (George Brown) in September of 1945, well before chemis Freeman went to work on the W & T Rubaiyat on behalf of his friend Det. Leane of Angas St. CIB.