In 1992, the American Congress ruled that all documents related to President Kennedy’s death should be released within 25 years: and when President Trump raised no objection last October, that is essentially what happened. Except, of course, that there were still numerous redactions. (Did you really believe it would be otherwise? *sigh*)

Arguably one of the most interesting set of documents released has a specifically crypto angle. Flight Sergeant David F. Christensen claimed that in the run up to Kennedy’s death, he had intercepted an encrypted communication between certain individuals in the Cuban Government and an individual well known in the organized crime world, plotting the assassination. His attempts to get the intercept to NSA were thwarted, causing him (he claimed) to have a mental breakdown, a divorce, etc etc.

Conversely, others say that this never happened; that searches of the files revealed nothing (“recognizing that most records from this period no longer exist“); that Christensen suffered from alcoholism and family problems, etc etc.

I can’t judge either way: but I thought it would be good (a) to include links to the various NSA scans and (b) to properly transcribe the letter Christensen wrote. Which is what I did here. 🙂

Links to the Various NSA Scans

jfk00205.pdf
jfk00232.pdf
jfk00244.pdf
jfk00234.pdf

Mr. Blakey stated that he did not know who the crime figure is: Christensen’s
supervisor, Sgt Praeter (actually “Prater”) refused to send this
traffic to NSA and this, he alleges, eventually caused him to have
a mental breakdown.

jfk00257.pdf
jfk00258.pdf
jfk00259.pdf
jfk00262.pdf

(Please let me know if I’ve missed any out, thanks!)

The Letter Itself

The letter from Christensen to his former colleague Sgt Michael B. Stevensen at “Corry” Field, Florida is included here:

jfk00235.pdf (redacted), and
docid-32270296.pdf (unredacted) [thanks to Byron Deveson for this link!]

David F. Christensen
V.A. Hospital
Sheridan, WY 82801

Nick,

Well after 13 1/ 2 years I finally found out your whereabouts. Dam, its
been a long time since Kirknewton, Scotland, and the beer we drank on the
beach and the club. Had to get your address from the outfit in Texas.

Nick, whatever happened to Sgt Prater. If you know his whereabouts please.
send me his address. How in the hell have you been doing?

Nick, I had a nervous breakdown. Plus in 74 my leg shattered in over a
hundred places. Things have really gone to hell for me. I’m working with
the vets benefits counseler, who is a ex 203. Speaking of 203’s where the hell
is Frenchy? You know the little guy. What I’m going to say is no longer
classified, so don’t get all shit shook. I’ve done checked it out.

Christ, you remember the position I worked at, in Sgt Praters section, don’t
you? You remember about a month or 6 weeks before I left Scotland, when I picked
up a link mentioning the assassination of President Kennedy. How hard I tried
to get it sent out, and because of that fuckin Forney and Delaughter they wouldn’t
send it to NSA. Since I have learned that the man’s name; most mentioned was
number 4 in a certain branch of organized crime at the time. Was number 2 last
year. I will send you a form for proof of claim. This guy here “the 203” says
I should be getting a service connected disability for my nerves. The “link was”
Lisbon to Tangiers you remember. How I got my ass chewed for not dropping the
link. Have learned that this branch of crime often will put out a feeler of
forthcoming things. By sending it as a practice message.

Nick it really broke me up after Nov. 22, 63. Especially when I had it all
before hand. It was first like the 202’s said, Ha. I was nuts when the Russians
first came out with the ITI & B’s. Later proved them wrong didn’t I. That was
another first for us as I recall. Duane Bruntz from Baker trick put up a good
support of my claim. I’m sending you this certified so to make sure you get it.
As I recall you should be able to B.S. them good enough to help me. I know it
cost me a divorce and every thing from my wife. Christ, you remember Marlene,
don’t you? That good looking little 1/2 Indian girl from N. Dak. Nick when
you get this form send it back to me and I’ll let the vets benefit guy to send
it in. Being a M.Sgt I think you know how to bull shit pretty good . Also do
you know Sgt Harley and Sgt Willy Hendrickson’s address. I guess old Garnett K.
Tatum
retired. Wonder what gehto, he is living in, Ha!

What in the hell are you doing in Florida, any how? Be sure to put
emphasis on my nerves going to hell and not giving a shit about my work after
the interception of the message.

Y Y Prosign

Your old buddy from the Berkely Bar

Suggestions for filling in the redacted gaps (and there are certainly many gaps here) will be gratefully received, thanks!

As to the “Prosign” line (Prosigns were groups of Morse code letters run together without any pauses between them), I know that VY = very, YF = wife, YL = young lady, but what does YY mean?

What happened to David F. Christensen?

Apart from knowing (from his letter) that he married Marlene from North Dakota and was in a V.A. Hospital in Sheridan WY, I have little biographical information on David Frederick Christensen. The only grave I found for that name was in Arlington National Cemetery for an infant (born 22 Nov 1957, died 23 Nov 1957, son of O. E. Christensen), and who was therefore not the same person at all.

Perhaps Cipher Mysteries readers with access to proper databases will be able to find out more about former USAF Flight Sergeant David F. Christensen, who was listed here as working at the USAF listening station at RAF Kirknewton in Scotland. As normal, feel free to leave comments below. 🙂

*** UPDATE ***

Here is a link to an online memorial to David Frederick Christensen (he died in 2008):

David passed away Monday, December 22, 2008 at his home in Killdeer, ND. David Frederick Christensen was born January 26, 1942 to Ole and Hazel (Lodnell) Christensen in Dickinson, ND. He grew up on a ranch near Halliday and attended schools, graduating from Halliday High School in 1960. David and Marlene Burr were married in 1960 and to this union two sons were born, Michael and David. David enlisted in the US Air Force and served with the Radio Intelligence in the Scotland Unit. He was honorably discharged in 1963. He then returned to the home ranch in the Halliday area. David began working in the oilfields, which took him to various places in the western United States. He enjoyed rodeos, playing pinochle and time spent with his family. David is survived by his two sons; Michael (Bobbie) Christensen, Rapid City, SD and David (Georgette) Christensen, Apple Valley, MN; a first cousin, Patricia (Pat)( Phil) Braeger, Watertown, SD; six grandchildren, Haley Christensen, Tyler Christensen, Jordan Christensen, Justin Christensen, Benjamin Christensen and Kendra Christensen. He is preceded in death by both parents.

An open question to the house, really: even though I have all manner of books and papers relating to other cipher mysteries, it struck me as odd a few days ago that I have next to nothing on the Zodiac Killer that I’d consider any sort of capsule library on the subject.

Despite his love of Americana, the section on the Zodiac Killer in Craig Bauer’s Unsolved is no more than a starting point (and that whole strand didn’t really end too well, in my cryptological opinion).

Conversely, I’m not sure I have enough pinches of salt to consume Robert Graysmith’s meisterwerken on the subject. Or is that just par for the whole Crazy Golf course, a necessary initiation of pain so you have been through the same awfulness as everyone else?

What I want is a Zodiac Killer book that sensibly describes each of the confirmed murders, the messages he definitely sent and all of the extant evidence (e.g. stamps, hairs, saliva, fingerprints, palmprints, DNA): and also discusses the murders that Zodiac claimed but didn’t carry out himself, and the messages attributed to him but which very probably weren’t by him.

But is this just too dreamily rational and sensible to hope for?

In the somewhat 2d world of anime fandom, fans (whether Weeaboo or Wapanese) express their like / preference / undying love for a specific female character within a given anime / show / political party / whatever by describing them as their ‘best girl‘, e.g. “Kim Pine = Totally. Best. Girl. Ever.”, or “Angela Merkel ist meine Best Girl” (possibly, though perhaps only if you happen to think German politics is a bit two-dimensional).

Are Voynich researchers as shallow as this? I wouldn’t like to say. But if you asked me for my personal vote for Voynich best girl (ok, “best nymph”), it would have to go to one of the three crowned zodiac nymphs.

There’s Miss Cancer (where I think the crown is clearly a later addition)…

voynich-crown-in-cancer

…Miss Leo (where the crown seems original)…

voynich-crown-in-leo

…and Miss Libra (where I think the crown is also a later addition)…

voynich-crown-in-libra

Of the three, Miss Leo would appear to be the real deal, a specific ‘red letter’ day within the zodiac calendar that the author was so strongly attached to that he/she felt compelled to mark its date with a crown while composing the page (as if to prove my point, you can even see the red paint within the crown). And who, later, then also felt compelled to try to visually conceal its presence (to a certain degree, admittedly) by adding two spurious crowns to other non-red-letter day zodiac nymphs.

Hence Miss Leo is my Voynich best girl, original crown and all. And why ever would anyone think a different nymph could be better than that? I mean, what kind of Voyanese loser would say that one of those poxy balneo nymphs was his/her Voynich best girl? Now that would be completely insane, right? :-p

To summarize, we have a 1716 treasure map from Philadelphia that leads to a particular small brick building in Cherry Garden, leading downwards from the southeastern corner of Society Hill to the Delaware River.

In the early 18th century, Cherry Garden was (as its name suggests) gardens, apart from a single building: while in the 21st century, the whole area East of South Front Street is now empty, save car parks and grass verges that were cleared during the construction of the Interstate I-95. All of which might possibly trick you into thinking that this land has always been empty of buildings.

But if you did, you’d (of course) be wrong. And here’s why…

The 601 Block

In the previous post, we saw how Commodore Stephen Decatur (1779-1820) grew up on what is now South Front Street’s 600 block. According to this 1935 source, Stephen Decatur’s “father’s home in 1801 was No. 261, now No. 611 South Front Street”. (p.137)

More recently, there was also the (now long-demolished) John Hart House at 601 South Front Street:

The same source also has a nice picture of 603 South Front Street:

The 701 block

As late as the 1840 map of Philadelphia, Shippen Street only went as far East as Front Street:

But by the time the area block appears in Ernest Hexamer’s 1860 map of Philadelphia, the long block has been divided into the 601 block and the 701 block. Here, the 701 block is – just like the 601 block a few feet to the North – full of tightly packed houses:

Hence we can see that this is not a nice Roman villa under an undisturbed field scenario: rather, there is already a nice load of archaeology to potentially be contended with here.

The Franklin Sugar Refinery

When a sea-change in business hit Philadelphia in the second half of the 19th century, this part of the city was transformed: and the incoming tide was one of white sugar, or (rather) the need to build a refinery to produce white sugar. This was the Franklin Steam Sugar Refinery (later the Franklin Sugar Refinery): there’s a nice 2013 article on the company courtesy of The Inquirer (philly.com), which includes details of how the company kept its refining tricks secret:

[…] in order to mystify New York refiners eager to learn its trade secrets, it was equipped with a Willy Wonkalike room crammed with pipes and valves that was entirely a sham; the valves would regularly be opened and closed to no actual purpose, their job simply to throw industrial spies off the scent.

In the 1872 map, we can see the changes to the building on Front Street, together with the Widow Maloby’s Tavern on the opposite corner (700 South Front Street):

We can also see clearly the relative offset between Widow Maloby’s Tavern (at 700 South Front Street) and the northwestern corner of the Franklin Sugar Refinery building complex:

By 1886, we can see (again, thanks to Ernest Hexamer) the sugar refinery’s building sprawl:

Here’s the matching ground plan, which includes lots of cellarage because the site was built upon a slope going down to the Delaware:

And here’s a closeup of the 701 block in 1886, with South Front Street on the left:

When The Molasses Run Dry…

Of course, despite the sugar rush, all good things must come to an end: and so the buildings on South Front Street became warehouses in the 20th century:

The building itself was demolished in 1967, and the by-now-more-than-somewhat-run-down area was flattened and cleared to make way for Interstate I-95: which is the state in which we find it now.

So, Where Do We Start The Geophys?

From my perspective, it seems as though the 701 (top left) corner of the site goes right over the site of the building facing Shippen Street in the early maps. So it looks to me as though the 701 block was built right on top of the cottage we’re looking for. There may just be a small piece of the original sticking out to the North, but this is perhaps a little unlikely.

So there doesn’t seem to be much hope of finding the cottage. However, locating the top-left corner of the factory building would be a nice confirmation of where things were (though note that we also know that South Front Street was 50′ wide at this point).

As a reminder of the original letter:

9 – Measure exactly 45 foot from that Porch along the lane due South
10 – there you will find a Stone post in the ground if not moved which may
11 – be easily done by accident or perhaps by makeing a Neu fence : 3 foot
12 – or perhaps 4 foot west from the s[ai]d stone is a Chist 4 and a half foot long 2 foot
13 – broad and half foot and the same depth accordingly being about 6 foot from the
14 – bottom of the Chist to the surface of the Ground.

As described here, it seems to me that the “Stone post” / “Neu fence” is almost certainly a boundary marker: and it also seems likely to me that the 50′ width of South Front Street is something that was measured out right in the earliest days of the town. As a result, all the building work to the East of South Front Street would have been carried out strictly behind that boundary marker.

Hence I think there is a good chance that the “Chist” described in the letter was buried beneath South Front Street itself, in the days long before tarmac and modern road construction. And who’s to say that it isn’t still there? 😉

Thanks to the help of commenter Thomas, we now have an excellent online source for the brick-built Cherry Garden cottage, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Museum and the Ghost Gardens, Lost Landscapes? exhibition put together by Erin McLeary.

The cottage in Cherry Garden

This contained not only John Fanning Watson’s drawing of the cottage from about the 1820s (“courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia”)…

…but also its location, 39° 56′ 24.6474″ N, 75° 8′ 37.86″ W : “Now 313 S Front St, vis-a-vis Shippen St”.

Note that modern Philadelphia’s Bainbridge Street was old Philadelphia’s Shippen Street: and that Shippen Street originally stopped at Front Street. Hence the (now archaic) use of vis-a-vis, “in a position facing a specified or implied subject“, i.e. ‘on South Front Street facing Shippen Street’.

So we can see that by 1796, the Cherry Garden plot had been divided into lots and sold (as per the 1756 advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette I mentioned before). This was presumably broadly the same state in which John Fanning Watson saw the remains of the site.

As a sidenote, the only online record I found relating to 313 S Front St is from an 1859 letter written by a John McKay in Michigan, who gives the address (presumably) of where one of his sons (also called John McKay) is living in Philadelphia (all courtesy of the Irish Emigration Database). (Oddly, Google seems to find this page only occasionally.). The modern block numbering would be 613 South Front Street.

But before we move on, let’s briefly look a little closer at the (unannotated) 1796 map:

It seems highly likely, then, that John Fanning Watson was talking about the remains of the single house we can see on the 1796 map immediately facing Shippen Street, whose south wall (appears to have) lined up with the north wall of the house on the southwestern corner opposite it.

Google Streetview

In modern-day Philly, Bainbridge Street cuts a little across Front Street, before abruptly screeching to a halt in front of the Interstate I-95.

There are no houses of any sort East of South Front Street, just a small car park, with grassy verges on both sides:

The three houses on the west side south of the crossroads are all from the eighteenth century (all built by Nathaniel Irish), and so weren’t there in 1716 when the letter was written:

700 South Front Street – 1764 – Widow Maloby’s Tavern (on the right)

702 South Front Street – 1767 – Capt. Thomas Moore House (in the middle)

704 South Front Street – 1763-1769 – Nathaniel Irish House (on the left)

A (now long-gone) house on the same block as (old block numbering) 313 S Front St was (new block numbering) 611 South Front Street, which according to the 1909 “Publication No. 5” of the City Historical Society of Philadelphia (it says here) was “the home of early U.S. naval hero [Commodore] Stephen Decatur” (1779-1820), famed for his attacks on Barbary pirates:

Decatur was widely believed to have been the greatest, bravest President the US never quite had (he died in a duel at 41). Here’s the Philadelphia historical marker put up in his honour:

In one of those awful coincidences historians like to both notice and note, Shippen Street was renamed Bainbridge Street in honour of Commodore William Bainbridge (1774-1833), who was also Stephen Decatur’s second in his fatal duel. According to naval historian Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Bainbridge was so jealous of Decatur’s success that he rigged the rules of the duel (only eight paces!) in order that both duellists were likely to be killed.

Anyway, now you know that here we (virtually) are on Bainbridge Street, within a few feet of where Decatur grew up.

So… Why Don’t We Just Go Dig, Then?

Slow down! I’ve only managed to cover the history of the site around the area. I’ve got lots to write up about the site itself yet (coming up next), which should help inform the whole industrial archaeology thing. Once that’s all in place, perhaps a bit of geophys would indeed be nice. 😉

I know, I know: this is the same Mental Floss that also publishes articles like 10 Things You Might Not Know About Jeff Goldblum (sample fact: “My first wife and I would bring our juicer on planes, and we’d do a carrot cleanse for a week, until I’d turn orange and all my poop would be orange”).

But bear with me on this, because the long-form article by Lucas Reilly on the Beale Ciphers / Papers / Treasure that just came out is really good. No, it’s really good.

And I’m not just saying that because Reilly quotes me a few times: he covers all the important ground at a nice even pace without getting overly technical. As part of his research, he even tried to walk the Beale walk a bit (though without actually hiring a backhoe), and even got the desk-full-of-documents Beale treatment when he visited the Bedford County Museum and Genealogical Library in Montvale. Which is nice.

Reilly also managed to dig up a couple of Beale decryptions I can’t remember seeing before, including this one mentioned in a Washington Post article from 1984, attributed to an “M.C.D.”:

ONE RAN TO COVER THE TOP / HIT THE
RAM NUB ON THE TOP OF THE NEST /
BEST I TRY HEAT / SEE CALL TO FIT
TOY SO HAT NOD IF FULL / I WILL BE
IN THE CUT FIND AND DIG IT … GO WIN
YOUR SLICE AND BE LONG IN LOVE

…as well as this one:

LEND AN EAR / I LEARNED A
TRADE TO READ FINE ART OF ROTE
… / I FEEL GREAT / I FIND TEN
TON ORE IT IS STORED ON NORA,
NORMAN, BROWN FARM / ROAD RUN
AROUND RED BARN.

Incidentally, the Washington Post article (“Legendary Treasure Quests” by Hank Burchard, 5th October 1984) also give this decryption:

CEMETERY OFF GAP / TOOK RIDGE / PINEWOOD 4 M /
NORTH TOP OF HOLCOMBS ROCK / RIGGED A BOOM OF LOGS /
GOLD ORE HID / BARGE HOLDING TUBS /
CABOCHONS FACE LIDS / BUFORD VA /
VAULT CACHE OF GOLD / TB.

Is there no end to the fun people can have staring at a blank wall? Apparently not, it would seem.

But all the same, you can now tell all your friends the important life lesson you learned from the Beale Ciphers: Go Win Your Slice And Be Long In Love. Enjoy! 😉

Hot off the Cryptologia presses comes news of Levente Zoltán Király & Gábor Tokai’s (2018) paper “Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex” (Cryptologia, 42:4, 285-315, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2018.1449147). This is part of a long series of papers and articles the two authors have been putting out that try to explain different technical aspects of the Rohonc Codex decryption they have been developing (though they initially started independently), and which Hungarian uber-crypto-guy Benedek Láng has favourably mentioned a number of times.

I now have a copy of the paper (which Lev Király kindly passed me) and have spent the last few days combing over it. Even though what they have done is thoroughly fascinating, I have to say that what emerges for me overall is a very mixed picture. I’ll try to explain…

Rohonc Codex codicology

Though at least half of the account of the history of research into the Rohonc Codex they present (pp.286-288) somewhat immodestly discusses their own findings and conclusions, Király and Tokai have clearly put a lot of effort into trying to understand the physical object itself (pp.288-293). Though a few of their codicological inferences are based on their interpretations of the pictures and text (and a number of their decryptions are inserted directly into the text as fact), most are based on exactly the kind of careful observation and physical insight you would hope to see.

Codicologically, what emerges more or less exactly mirrors what we see in the Voynich Manuscript:
* bifolios missing, swapped, and moved around arbitrarily, coupled with other sections that seem to have stayed intact.
* misleading foliation that was added long after bifolios had been shuffled
* misleading marginalia and notes added by owners who did not know what the text said
* some places where the picture was drawn first, others where the text was written first
* rebuttals of unjustified claims that there are no corrections
* rebuttals of unjustified claims that it must surely be a hoax
* and so forth.

As a result, I think that Király and Tokai’s codicological analyses imply that the Rohonc Codex has almost all the same physical and historical structures that the Voynich Manuscript has (niceties relating to textual analysis aside).

Cracking the Rohonc Codex’s numbers?

Király & Tokai point (pp.296-297) approvingly to Ottó Gyürk’s (1970) paper “Megfejthető-e a Rohonci-kódex?” [Can the Rohonc Codex Be Solved?]. Élet és Tudomány 25:1923–28, and extend the set of (what looks like) number instances that Gyürk found:

The underlying number pattern they infer from this sequence is as follows:

While their proposal that this is a number system that works like Roman numerals but where the ‘6’ has a shape instead of the ‘5’ (“V”) is possible, I have to say that to me it seems unbelievably unlikely (e.g. there’s nothing remotely like it in Flegg’s “Numbers Through the Ages”). It also seems likely to me that the text we see includes copying errors, and it may well therefore be that the specific sequence they highlight should have begun “III”, “IIII” (or probably the more idiosyncratically medieval “iij”, “iiij”) rather than “IIII”, “IIIII” as written. Instead postulating a 1-6-10 numbering system to explain this away seems too implausible to me.

What seems far more likely is that this is a kind of very slightly bastardized Roman numerals where you can write 5 both as “IIIII” and as “V”, in the same way that you can validly write 4 (additively) as “IIII” and (subtractively) as “IV”. Hence I’m currently far from convinced, based on what they have presented so far, that they have managed to nail down this basic part of the number system as well as they think they have.

They then proceed to construct an even more arcane number system which they assert encodes dates as if they were in Arabic numerals, but where the thousands digit and hundreds digit are reversed (i.e. what is written as “5160” actually means “1560”, where 1560 is a magic number “which is dated by old Christian tradition to the year 33 CE”):

When Gábor Tokai [discovered] the number 5166 next to the drawing of the three kings (21r) and 5199 (058r09 − 10) in the vicinity of drawings of the resurrection of Christ (56v, 59r), he affirmed that the numbers denote years.

OK, I can see how the logic arguing for this is so going to be so complex that it would need to be written up in a separate paper. But I can also see how I don’t believe what they have presented here at all: so I’m going to say that I’m sorry, but even though a good part of the underlying codicology and analysis is very likely highlighting some good stuff that needs working with and developing, I don’t believe the reconstructed number system claimed here is yet correct. 🙁

Cracking the Rohonc Codex’s code?

The paper tries to explain (p.293) what the authors have found (i.e. that ‘Rohoncese’ is a code, though one so complex that’s clearly not easy for them to explain why or how, which is why it is going to take several papers and several years of their effort) and what they are aspiring towards with their decryption efforts:

The principles of our criteria and method of codebreaking may seem banal to the reader, but we must emphasize them because of the bad reputation gained by the amateur researchers of the codex. Furthermore, as many examples in our next paper on the “wobbliness” of the code will show, the writing system is far from being simple and clean. We must affirm that these results are not due to methodically deficient research but to the writing itself, which was analyzed with painstaking care and strictness.

We demand that one symbol signify one thing, and whenever there is any digression from this principle — either by more symbols signifying one thing or one symbol signifying more things — it must be sufficiently supported by argument. Our case is difficult because the codex has codes signifying words of a language, and words behave less regularly than letters. In every natural language the presence of homonyms and synonyms creates ambiguity. Yet we demand that even this amount of ambivalence in our proposed solution be supported by evidence.

OK. So how does Király and Tokai’s actual decryption measure up to the lofty ideals they set for themselves here? Well… after a long series of caveats, concessions and defensive clauses, the whole section concludes (p.295):

Thus the plausibility of our proposed solution is difficult to specify. The core of our reading has such strong inner and outer evidence that we may affirm that it stands beyond doubt. The rest is of various degrees of certainty, which is indicated wherever necessary.

Their text then includes long readings of sections taken from the Rohonc Codex where tiny groups of letters are read as individual codes, which are in turn interpreted as individual words, all supporting each other. As a single line example, here’s the first part of the section that they believe is the Lord’s Prayer (p.303):

At the same time, the decryption never goes below the level of individual words. Are these pronounceable? What language are they derived from? How does this fit into the tree of European languages? These are all parceled off to be answered in future papers.

Probably the Best Part of the Paper

For me, the most persuasive-looking of all the authors’ codebreaking details relates to the Parable of the Talents:

Here’s the same section in the Rohonc Codex (bearing in mind that the real text runs from right to left, whereas the transcription they present runs left to right), where I have highlighted the first line blue, the second line red, and the third line purple:

Despite having an O-Level in Religious Studies, I’d be the first to admit that my knowledge of the Bible is patchy. But even I knew that the above wasn’t quite how it was told in Matthew 25:14-30. Rather, the three servants got 5, 2, and 1 talents respectively, which is why they write up the “3” (actually 2) talents as [sic] on p.300:

14 For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.
15 To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.
16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more.
17 So also he who had the two talents made two talents more.
18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.

Or, if you prefer, here’s the same section in the Latin Vulgate:

14 sicut enim homo proficiscens vocavit servos suos et tradidit illis bona sua
15 et uni dedit quinque talenta alii autem duo alii vero unum unicuique secundum propriam virtutem et profectus est statim
16 abiit autem qui quinque talenta acceperat et operatus est in eis et lucratus est alia quinque
17 similiter qui duo acceperat lucratus est alia duo
18 qui autem unum acceperat abiens fodit in terra et abscondit pecuniam domini sui

So: if their claimed block equivalence to the first half of Matthew 25:15 is indeed correct (and there are arguments both for and against this), perhaps the right question to be asking is whether there is there some odd Mitteleuropa tradition whereby the number of talents in this parable is not 5/2/1 but 1/3/5?

So, What Does Nick Think About All This?

In the best footballing tradition, Király and Tokai’s paper is (as the above should have made abundantly clear) a game of two very different halves.

By which I mean:
* the first 45 minutes stand as testament to the authors’ codicological hard work, almost all of which I’m convinced will stand as really strong, freestanding research (but which would have been further strengthened by unpicking various assertions that derive from their decryption). I would further include here the grounds from which they inferred the existence of a numbering system (though not the actual numbering system they describe itself)
* the second 45 minutes revolve around an attempt at a decryption that occasionally seems to work at a word level, but without ever getting to the bottom of what is actually going on (i.e. in terms of letters / grammar / structure etc).

The authors approvingly summarize (p.287) Benedek Láng’s view of the Rohonc Codex:

Láng’s greatest achievement was his attempt to identify the type of the cipher or code. He saw three options as equally possible: a monoalphabetic cipher with homophones, nullities, and nomenclators; stenography; or an artificial (“perfect”) language.

And yet, just as with the Voynich Manuscript, reducing the question of a writing system to precisely three mutually exclusive pigeonholes is an intellectually barren starting point, one which the astute Láng himself would surely be uncomfortable with. There are many more overlapping possibilities to consider, such as abbreviating shorthand (i.e. where words are contracted or truncated), alphabets based on pronunciation, and so forth.

Personally, I would be entirely unsurprised if the codicological analysis Király and Tokai carried out that led to their finding even half a line of a block equivalent (i.e. the the first half of Matthew 25:15) will turn out to be the first glimmer of a Rohonc “Rosetta Stone”: and for that all credit should be due to them. However, I don’t yet believe that the rest of their analysis has born the tasty fruit they think it has: and so there will likely be many more twists and turns for them to go through in their quest to decrypt the “Hungarian Voynich”.

I recently had a nice day out in Whitstable (marred only by a little light rain and a touch overhoneyed squid tempura dipping sauce, upstairs at the otherwise excellent Crab & Winkle Restaurant). I only mention this because Whitstable’s Wetherspoons – The Peter Cushing – is named after the famous British horror actor (who had a house in the town for many years), famous for playing Grand Moff Tarkin and vampire hunter Van Helsing. And so some people might suspect Cushing’s Syndrome to be a condition involving, say, irrational fear of vampires.

Alas no! In 1912, the same year that Wilfrid Voynich was (supposedly) buying his now eponymous manuscript, it was American brain surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing (1869-1939) who described his patient Minnie as suffering from hypercorticism, though he originally assumed that this was some kind of polyglandular disorder. By 1943, this was known to be “an endocrinological syndrome caused by malfunction of the pituitary gland”, and was named Cushing’s Syndrome in H. W. Cushing’s honour.

So: all distracting mentions of sanguivoriphobia aside, how does Cushing’s Syndrome present? “Symptoms include rapid weight gain, particularly of the trunk and face with sparing of the limbs (central obesity). Common signs include the growth of fat pads along the collarbone, on the back of the neck (“buffalo hump” or lipodystrophy), and on the face (“moon face”).” It is also far more common in adult women than in adult men.

This should be just about enough of a trigger for long-suffering Voynich researchers to work out precisely where this is all leading…

Alexander N. Gabrovsky, Ph.D

It is a certain Alexander N. Gabrovsky, who styles himself as a “Medieval Consultant“, who is about to have a paper published in the Spring 2018 issue of “Source: Notes in the History of Art” (Vol. 37 No. 3). This paper – “Galenic Humoral Theory and Amenorrhea: Cushingoid Phenotype in a Fifteenth Century Illustrated Cipher Manuscript,” – which he asserts will be “one of the first peer-reviewed art historical perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript” will surely link the Voynich Manuscript (specifically its preponderance of Voynich nymphs, almost certainly) to the way Cushing’s Syndrome typically presents.

With my Art History hat on, I’ll be interested to see whether or not the whole “Cushingoid Phenotype” was ever depicted in a recognisable way in the centuries before 1912: it would be a strange paper were it not to even pose that question.

Gabrovsky describes himself as…

“[…]an American medievalist and hold a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (England), specializing in medieval literature, alchemical manuscripts, paleopathology (study of ancient diseases), history of art, Chaucer, and history of the occult sciences from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.”

A few days ago, German cryptoblogger Klaus Schmeh mentioned a recent paper by Tom Juzek on the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher. This first appeared in March/April 2018, but I was not aware of it before Klaus flagged it.

Juzek’s MSD metric

The metric Juzek uses to drive much of his argumentation is what he calls ‘MSD’ (“Mean Squared Distance”), which is simply the sum of the squares of the instance frequencies of bigrams (or trigrams), but then divided by the number of individual bigrams (or trigrams).

As an example, the 14-letter text “AAAAAAAAAABCD” is made up of thirteen bigram instances AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AB, BC, and CD. Hence it contains 9 x AA, 1 x AB, 1 x BC, and 1 x CD: and so would have a bigram MSD of (9*9 + 1*1 + 1*1 + 1*1) / 13 = (84 / 13) = 6.46.

The same text contains twelve trigram instances AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAB, ABC, and BCD. Hence it contains 8 x AAA, 1 x AAB, 1 x ABC, and 1 x BCD: and so would have a trigram MSD of (8*8 + 1*1 + 1*1 + 1*1) / 12 = 5.58.

However, Juzek quickly flags that this raw metric is not really good enough on its own:

The problem with the msd is that there are difficulties with comparing msd’s across data sets. This is because the length of a text influences the msd, as well as the length of a text’s character set. A 400 character cipher using 10 characters will see a different ngram distribution to a 100 character cipher using 40 characters.

Hence Juzek instead generates a “delta MSD”, which he defines as the difference between the ngram MSD of each ciphertext read horizontally (i.e. the generally presumed ‘correct’ symbol ordering) and the ngram MSD of its vertical transposition (i.e. every 17th character). This is to try to ‘normalize’ the raw MSD against a kind of statistically flattened version of the same.

Juzek then applies these two final metrics (bigram delta MSD and trigram delta MSD) to a number of real and fake ciphers, before concluding that the Z340 is quite unlike the Z408, and that it in fact presents more like fake ciphers than real ciphers.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Clearly, Juzek’s motivation for squaring ngram instance counts at all is to try to somehow ‘reward’ ngrams that are repeated in a given text being tested. Unfortunately, I think this is no more than a rather clunky and misleading way of looking at entropy / negentropy, which has a long-established and rigorous calculation procedure (and an enormous theoretical literature ranging across Computer Science and indeed Physics).

As a result, I think he may well have reinvented a perfectly round wheel in a somewhat square format: sorry, but I don’t think this is going to roll very far or very fast.

If the same calculations were repeated with different order ngram entropies, I think we might have something more interesting to work with here: but that’s already been done to death in the Zodiac Killer research world.

Moreover, the long-standing suggestion (which I think has a fair amount of evidential support) that the Z340 may well have been constructed in two distinct halves (Z170A and Z170B) would also mess with just about all of his arguments and conclusions. I’d much rather have seen that tested than Vigenere (it’s not a Vig, not even close).

Forward Context vs Backward Context?

As I was reading through Juzek’s paper, I was struck by a quite different question. If we are looking at an encrypted homophonic English ciphertext (a fairly reasonable assumption here), is there a notable difference between the left-context entropy (i.e. the information content of the text using the preceding letter as a context for predicting the next letter) with the right-context entropy?

That is, might encrypted homophonic English ciphertexts have a distinctly asymmetrical statistical “fingerprint” that would give us confidence that this is indeed what we are looking at in the Z340? Perhaps this has already been calculated: if so, it’s not work that I’m aware of, so please leave a comment here to help broaden my mind. 🙂

Just a short note to let you know that Cipher Mysteries’ website’ comment facility is (hopefully) now working again. I had configured it to use an anti-spam WordPress plugin called Mollom, which had its support withdrawn on 2nd April 2018: and so since then all comments to the site had been mysteriously rejected. Thanks to Mark, Rene and others for flagging this issue to me.

More generally, since early least month I’ve been tied up trying to resolve a number of non-crypto (i.e. real-life) issues, so please accept my apologies if you have found both the website and me to have been less responsive than normal. =:-o

Pameo Pose’s Voynich apparel

In the meantime, here is a selection of Voynich apparel from Japanese company Pameo Pose.

Firstly, a Voynich EVA ‘P’ themed beret, which comes in cream and tan (though both variants are sold out). Note that they have chosen the crossed-through single leg gallows from the EVA alphabet, which (of course) means that the ‘c’ and ‘h’ either side are missing:

Secondly, a Voynich lace collar, though I guess you would only be able to tell that it is EVA close-up. It also comes in two colours, and is sold out (I prefer the funky ear-rings, myself):

Thirdly, a Voynich lace dress, a snip at 33480 yen:

Finally (and my favourite of the lot) is the Voynich dance team top, which uses the well-formed EVA ‘cPh’ as its logo: