I’ve previously posted a few times about the Ohio Cipher (e.g. here in 2013, here in 2013, here in 2013, and here in 2014). Having determined what I think the (likely) most reliable version of the ciphertext is, I noted that it seemed to be made up of two substitution alphabets, one for odd-word-position letters and one for even-word-position letters. If you render these letters as upper case and lower case respectively, the ciphertext looks like this (with the apparent English words near the end removed):
WaS NvLvAfT By AaKaT TxPxScK UpBk TxPhN OhAy YbTx CpT MxHg WaE SxFp ZaVfZ AcK TxLk WaYx ZaSome patterns emerge here, which you can see if you load this into zkdecrypto:
On the one hand, this seems a dreadfully short cryptogram to solve with two whole cipher alphabets to find. On the other, I’d point out that it feels like an improvised “folk cipher” (i.e. devised in the wild, rather than by hotshot cipher academics). Hence it could very easily be “aristocratic”, by which I mean that ciphertext word boundaries are also genuine word boundaries in the plaintext, which should (in theory) be millions of times easier to break.
For fun, I put some of the words in the Ohio ciphertext into Quipqiup, and the one that immediately caught my attention was TxPxScK -> “STATION”, which seems hugely plausible. This makes me think that someone with a good idea for how to go about solving this specific kind of cipher might well be able to crack it.
So… what are you waiting for? Go for it!
Gemini 2.5 says it is a QWERTY shift-left cipher – where the typist gets the wrong key deliberately to the left.
It didn’t decode the letter code that resulted.
DM: OK by me if Gemini 2.5 says so. Had some early doubts that QWERTY would have dominated typing pools of a hick town like Lima Ohio in 1916. Or am getting things confused with Lima Peru?
@JS,
It still didn’t decode it. But perhaps ‘it’s in the Ohio ballpark’. It just needs a good pitcher.
If we had a teeth analysis of SM I could get ye old NotebookLM to knock up another masterpiece like this. It has persuaded a lot of people to change their mind about the Isdal Woman being a war-time refugee from Nuremberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bwv8HHNLLg
My own analysis of the isotopes says:
Provided Values (Sr/O – interpetation of Hoogewerff data)
⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr: 0.709–0.711
δ¹⁸O: –9‰ to –7‰
and Karolinska data:
δ¹³C: –14.27‰
Expected Values for Scenario (26 year-old American from Minnesota when young):
⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr: ~0.708–0.711 (matches)
δ¹⁸O: ~–9‰ to –7‰ (matches)
δ¹³C: ~–15‰ to –14‰ (close, but slightly lower than –14.27‰)
If you look at each tooth tested you see the track of the American woman from Iowa city to Elmore (Minnesota) to Augsburg college (minneapolis). Most isotope experts would say a mismatch because of corn belt diet – but her dad had a scando farm in Elmore.
Yet she’s alive in Seattle. Schrodinger’s Isdal Woman (in the box and not).