Partial decryption of the Action Line Cryptogram…

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Readers of Klaus Schmeh’s crypto-blog may have come across the Action Line Cryptogram, a nine-page acrostic-like cryptogram from Detroit in 1926. Interestingly, another (slightly different) version of the same cryptogram (but dated 1st July 1908) was unearthed in 2006… not a lot of people know that. 🙂

Anyway, here’s my partial decryption of the last two pages of the 1926 copy (though the other copy’s version of these pages is extremely similar). There are large sections I haven’t scratched the surface of, so feel free to break those yourself. 🙂

T D, O T D O T.

Third Degree, Or The Degree Of Truth

I t D t i a A a t i d , a P , a C , a A t t C , a W S a A , a E o t W S a A , a P S , a G , t V S , a t H o t O .

In this Degree there is an Alarm at the inner door, a Password, a Countersign, an Answer to the Countersign, a Warden Sign and Answer, an Explanation of the Warden Sign and Answer, a Priest Sign, a Grip, t– V– S–, and the H– of the Order.

T A a t i d i t r .

The Alarm at the inner door is three raps.

T P i A . . . . ; t b l a a t , w u f w p ; w i a L , o i e p t o . I c t w , e t t I G , o t t W , t b m g t l , . . , a , i r b t I G , o W , h m g t r o t w , . . . , l a b . T I G a W m b s .

The Password is A– […the rest is unknown, though “T I G o W m b s” is probably “The Inside Guardian and Warden must be sure”]

T C a A a m t s a i t p D .

The Countersign and Answer [the rest is unknown]

W S – T S i m a f : C t r h , e t i f , w i e ( t o f ) ; p t c o t f w t p o t i f .

Warden Sign – The Sign is made as follows : Clasp the right hand, extend the index finger, [the rest is unknown]

A t t S . P t r h o t m , t f t c t t f ( t e n ) , l t b a e i t f .

Answer to the Sign. Place the right hand on the [the rest is unknown]

E . T E o t S a A i , ” T , b y s . “

The Explanation of the Sign and Answer is [the rest is unknown]

P S . T P S i m a f : P t t o t r h o t r n , a , u i a a p , m a s d , w t l f , t m a s a t b w t i , o f .

The Priest Sign is made as follows : [the rest is unknown].

G – C t r h ; w t t , p h o t t o k j o t t f .

Grip – Clasp the right hand ; with the thumb[?], place half[?] of the thumb[?] [the rest is unknown]

N s h i m t G .

[Unknown]

T V S – T r h u .

[Unknown]

T H o t O a g a f : O a b s ; t W s i f o t c o t N G ; t m l t a f h m , w a : P t o r h a t l h , p t ; c t h t t ( f b ) ; p a m a r ; p a a r .

The H– of the Order [the rest is unknown].

“A Highly Unlikely Scenario”, reviewed…

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Having been exposed to what might reasonably be termed a ‘surfeit’ of unhealthily imaginative Voynich theories since nineteen-clickety-duck [*], I’d like to think that I’ve seen quite a lot of ‘highly unlikely scenarios’: and so pretty much anything involving Roger Bacon, time travel, and the Voynich Manuscript I should have covered, right?

Wrong! In her 2013 novel “A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide To Saving The World” Rachel Cantor straps an extra ten feet to her conceptual pole and vaults far higher than just about anyone else would try. (In fact, I’d say she tries her level best to vault out of the whole darn arena.)

Yet there’s a spark, verve and swerve to her jambalaya of story ingredients: future fast food corporations at war, a heady mix of mismatched philosophies, time-travelling conversations (with Marco Polo and family members), magical songs (“who is the king of the [clap] third ether?“, stop me if you’ve heard it before), anarchist book club members (sort of), and clothes so vividly jangling they make your inner eye hurt (toreador pants and red afros? Yes, really). And then the story properly begins…

There will be those who glibly snark that such a book is not a ‘novel’, it is simply a creative writing experiment that somehow managed to escape the labs: and that the correct cultural response to such over-hybridized monsters is a tranquilizer dart in the thigh and a discreetly dark van to clear the Frankenbody from the streets. But pshaw to such reactionary knee-jerking, I say: for all its angularity, such writing keeps language fresh and (dare I say it) exciting. Read this and enjoy it! 🙂

[*] Which is, of course, the punch-line to the wonderful old joke: “Two little old ladies playing bingo. One says to the other, ‘You know, I’ve been coming here since nineteen clickety-duck’.“

Analysis of Scorpion Cipher S5…

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Following my recent Scorpion Ciphers post, I’ve put up a permanent reference page on the Scorpion Ciphers and have also tried to contact John Walsh about the as-yet-unreleased other ciphers… so we’ll see how that goes.

Since then, I’ve been working a little more with S5, which has 155 unique symbols out of 180 letters. Because repeated symbols in S5 are always multiples of 16 letters apart, it seems likely to me that this ciphertext was constructed from 16 independent alphabets cycled through in strict sequence. My hope was that this regularity might give us a better chance of cracking S5 than if it were a randomly chosen homophonic cipher.

All the same, this was just a guess: so the first thing I did was come up with a way to test this hypothesis, by writing a short C program to encipher 180-long subsections of the Scorpion’s own plaintext using various numbers of sequential alphabets, to see if this would produce roughly 155 unique symbols.

For each number of alphabets (e.g. 2), I tried (notionally) enciphering every 180-long stretch of the Scorpion’s text, and kept a tally of the minimum number of symbols required (e.g. 37), the maximum number of symbols required (e.g. 44), and the average number of symbols required (e.g. 40).

Interestingly, the results weren’t what I expected:-

alphabets = 1, uniques = (19..24) 21
alphabets = 2, uniques = (37..44) 40
alphabets = 3, uniques = (50..61) 55
alphabets = 4, uniques = (60..74) 68
alphabets = 5, uniques = (72..86) 79
alphabets = 6, uniques = (77..97) 87
alphabets = 7, uniques = (88..105) 97
alphabets = 8, uniques = (91..110) 101
alphabets = 9, uniques = (92..116) 106
alphabets = 10, uniques = (104..122) 113
alphabets = 11, uniques = (107..127) 117
alphabets = 12, uniques = (113..136) 122
alphabets = 13, uniques = (113..134) 123
alphabets = 14, uniques = (115..138) 129
alphabets = 15, uniques = (123..146) 132
alphabets = 16, uniques = (120..147) 133
alphabets = 17, uniques = (128..146) 136
alphabets = 18, uniques = (126..151) 137
alphabets = 19, uniques = (128..150) 139
alphabets = 20, uniques = (132..153) 143
alphabets = 21, uniques = (133..159) 144
alphabets = 22, uniques = (131..155) 145
alphabets = 23, uniques = (137..154) 145
alphabets = 24, uniques = (137..157) 147
alphabets = 25, uniques = (139..160) 149
alphabets = 26, uniques = (141..158) 149
alphabets = 27, uniques = (143..163) 152
alphabets = 28, uniques = (143..164) 152
alphabets = 29, uniques = (139..164) 153
alphabets = 30, uniques = (145..164) 154
alphabets = 31, uniques = (143..164) 153
alphabets = 32, uniques = (146..167) 156

That is to say, even though S5 looks as though it is strictly cycling through 16 ciphers, this isn’t consistent with the stats of the Scorpion’s other plaintext (because that is so verbose and repetitive that it would require on average 32 alphabets to typically yield 155 symbols).

What I think this is implying is either (a) that the Scorpion’s plaintext is significantly less repetitive than the text of his/her messages, or (b) that the cipher system the Scorpion used also employs an extra layer of compression (e.g. a nomenclatura, using extra tokens for common words such as [THE] and [AND], or even common syllable pairs).

I don’t know… I’ll have to have a further think about this, it isn’t at all obvious what’s going on here.

Update: having scratched my head about this for a few more hours, I don’t feel comfortable with the suggestion that some kind of nomenclatura is involved. Rather, what I suspect now is that what we’re looking at here is not a 16 x 26-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z) but a 16 x 36-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z plus 0-9), coupled with a slightly less verbose plaintext. Hence my very rough (and admittedly as yet unmodelled) estimate is that roughly 25-35 of the tokens in the plaintext will turn out to be digits.

Unfortunately, I also think that this may have left the text undecryptable, unless there is some additional kind of meta-consistency between shapes across the 16 alphabets (e.g. if all the circle-plus-upright-cross shapes encode the same underlying plaintext token). Oh well!

Claudette Cohen and a Voynich Finno-Baltic Birth Registry…?

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Might the Voynich Manuscript be a Finno-Baltic birth registry? Might the names of some of the nymphs really be “Ellda, Sellai, Saisa, Saillar, Sia, Ella, Sara, Saisa, Rllai, and Eillkka”?

On the positive side, Claudette Cohen already has more words decrypted than Stephen Bax (she has a plucky ten to his stodgy nine), so she should clearly take some comfort that her brave-hearted Finno-Baltic decryption is numerically more of a success than his plainly inferior effort. And she also thinks that she has found thirteen points of similarity with a 1910 map of Sortavala, though with more than a passing nod towards “Karelian embroidery” (it says here).

Cipher Mysteries readers surely don’t need an advanced diploma in telepathy to know what I’m thinking here.

“Good for you, Claudette Cohen – even though you’re wrong for about a thousand different reasons, I’m happy for you that this is how you’ve come to the Voynich Manuscript. Enjoy your stay, and try to have some fun with it!”

Cracking the Scorpion Ciphers…

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Back in 2007, John Walsh (the host of “America’s Most Wanted”) announced that he had, since 1991, received a string of disturbing-sounding letters from an individual calling himself / herself “The Scorpion”: many of them had sections or pages that were apparently in cipher. Two of these ciphers were released to the public: these became known as “S1” and “S5”.

In the same year, Christopher Farmer (“President of OPORD Analytical”) announced that he had cracked S1 (which was apparently built on a 10×7 grid):-

scorpion3

Farmer’s claimed solution reads like this:-

baelprovid
edthemwith
newstories
butwhatifi
askjwdoiwa
xrtwbonesa
gezjefxkon

Unfortunately, all the diagrams illustrating Farmer’s ingenious reasoning have withered on the Internetty vine in the years since then (they’re not even in the Wayback Machine, nor anywhere else as far as I can see), which is a bit of a shame.

Even so, this turns out to be an entirely surmountable problem: Farmer’s claimed solution is clearly incorrect, for the simple reason that letters in the ciphertext aren’t consistent in the plaintext. For example, the cipher “K” maps to both ‘a’ and ‘g’, the “backwards-L” maps to ‘w’, ‘w’, and ‘x’, the “backwards-F” maps to both ‘u’ and ‘v’, and so on. At the same time, his claimed plaintext doesn’t really make a lot of sense (“BAEL”… really? I’m not so sure).

It seems likely to me that Farmer guessed that “PROVID” was steganographically hidden in plain sight at the end of the topmost line (and if you squint a bit, you can see why that would be), and then built the rest of his decryption attempt around this hopeful starting point. Moreover, he seems to have guessed that “O” maps to ‘o’, and “backwards-E” maps to ‘e’, which are both pretty peachy assignments. But I don’t buy any of this for a minute: there are way too many degrees of freedom in this S1 cryptogram (roughly half of the individual cipher shapes occur exactly once), and quite a few extra ones in his claimed solution too.

It’s a brave attempt, for sure: but it’s still wrong, whichever way you turn it round.

Other people have tried their hand with S1, though both AlanBenjy in 2009 and Glurk on Dave Oranchak’s site in 2010 pessimistically pointed out that 53 of S1’s 70 symbols are unique, yielding a ‘multiplicity’ a fair way beyond the range of what homophonic cryptograms can practically be solved. Hence I would tend to agree with their assessment that there’s no obvious way that we will solve S1 with what we currently have to hand: in fact, there seems no way to tell whether S1 is a real cipher or a hoax – the only repeating cipher pair is “S A” (i.e. “S Λ”), which could well have happened by pure chance.

The only other Scorpion ciphertext released to the public to date is the 180-character cryptogram known as “S5”:-

scorpion4

Once again, 155 of these 180 symbols are unique, which at first glance would seem to make S5 even less likely to be solved than S1.

But wait! In May 2007, user “Teddy” on the OPORD Analytical forum pointed out that if you transpose S5 from a 12-column arrangement to a 16-column layout, shape repeats only ever occur within a single vertical column. In fact, every single 16-way column except one (column #5) includes one or more repeated shapes.

Radically, this suggests to me that S5 was constructed in a completely different way from conventional homophonic ciphers: specifically, I think that each 16-way column of S5 may well have its own unique cipher alphabet. This would mean that S5 would need to be solved in a completely different manner to the way, say, zkdecrypto works. (I don’t believe S5 was constructed with eight columns, but I thought I ought to mention that that’s a possibility as well, however borderline). Maybe that small insight will be enough to help someone make some headway with S5, who can tell?

The huge shame here is that it may well be that the other Scorpion ciphers (which to this day have not been released) might well give us additional clues about the inner workings of both S1 and S5. Specifically, if one of the other ciphers happened to have used precisely the same 16-alphabet systemas S5, it might well give us enough raw data to crack them both.

Has anyone apart from John Walsh ever seen S2, S3, S4, and S6? Just askin’, just askin’…

Update: Looking again at S1 (while bearing in mind the way S5 seems to have been constructed), I find it hard not to notice that the distances between instance repetitions seem strongly clustered around multiples of 5 (with the only instance not fitting the pattern being the “backwards-L” on row #5):-

+60, +20, +50, +36, +24, +20, +40, +20, +40, +25, +35, +10, +25, +6, +45, +9, +6.

I suspect that this means that the encipherer probably enciphered S1 by cycling through five independent cipher alphabets (largely speaking). This wasn’t a mechanically precise encipherment (whether by accident or by design), but something close enough to one such that almost all the time he/she was no more than a single alphabet ‘off’, one way or the other.

This offers a quite different kind of constraint from normal homophonic cipher searches, and possibly even enough to crack the S1 cipher. After all, we have a fair amount of the Scorpion’s meandering plaintext to use as a statistical model to aim for… 🙂

Getting to the story behind the Somerton Man…

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There’s a curious paradox about the Somerton Man / Tamam Shud case: we seem to know a lot more about the Unknown Man (found dead on Somerton Beach in December 1948) than about the nurse Jessie Harkness (who died in 2007). Yet we now have apparently good evidence that the two were connected in some way.

So, today’s question is simply this: how were they connected? She was firmly on the map, while he was (and still is) completely off the map – what gossamer thread of historical happenstance linked these two individuals?

I’ve been thinking about this for some years: and despite the many stories I’ve heard proposed (spies, car criminals, loner sheep shearers, etc), right now only one back-story stands out as being particularly likely to me. Feel free to disagree with any (or indeed all) of it, but it goes something like this…

Late 1943: Jessie Harkness is a trainee nurse working at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH), having started there the previous year. One particular patient catches her eye, a merchant seaman called Styn or Stijn: a 3rd Officer, perhaps he’s Dutch or South African, in hospital with some kind of tropical fever. Yet as he recovers, he shows himself to be strong, fit, intelligent, poetic, charming, persuasive: they start a relationship.

1944: their relationship grows, to the point that she even starts signing her name “Jessie Styn”. But there are problems: he’s possessive and perhaps a bit too ready to fight for what he wants. When he’s fully discharged from RNSH, the war is still on and he (an alien) has to leave the country. He promises to return: Harkness gives him a copy of the Rubaiyat to remember her by, though silently her heart has perhaps already moved on.

How does it all end? The evidence seems to want to tell its own sad story:-
* 1948: a train ride, probably overnight from Melbourne;
* an unexpected visit to an empty Somerton house;
* a long wait on the beach;
* a return to the house;
* a fist-fight, fierce but brief;
* an unwell Styn vomiting, perhaps even losing a dental plate;
* Styn dead, laid on his back on a small bed with his head arching backwards over the edge;
* someone (perhaps Harkness) meticulously cleaning the dead man’s shoes;
* someone else (perhaps George) carrying Styn back to Somerton Beach in the dark of night;
* a vow of silence: We Shall Not Speak Of This Again.

Once again (as with poor old Horace Charles Reynolds), all we really have to rely on is Australian shipping records. If the back-story is correct, what ship was Styn on when he arrived so unwell in Sydney in late 1943? And did he arrive in Melbourne on a ship in the days just before 30th November 1948?

Travel Channel

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Sorry for the short notice, but über-cipher-mystery The Voynich Manuscript is featuring prominently on an episode of “Castle Secrets & Legends” on the Travel Channel UK (Freeview channel 42) at 9pm tomorrow, i.e. 16th May 2014. It’s also playing on The Travel Channel Europe about now as well, if you happen to be elsewhere in our beloved United States of Europe EU. The blurb goes like this:-

“Behind the gates of the world’s most impressive castles, manor houses and mansions, many secrets are waiting to be revealed. Marvel at these amazing structures in all their glory and hear of the remarkable, mysterious and bizarre tales tied to the rich and powerful who once resided there.”

Yada yada yada. *sigh* All the same, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll have taken some nice footage of Villa Mondragone, which genuinely is an astonishing place in a wonderful location. If so, it’ll definitely be worth recording. Cryptography Schmyptography, eye candy wins out every time, right?

Marius-Adrian Oancea and the Rohonc Codex

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I’ve had a nice email from Marius-Adrian Oancea, asking me if I would look at his interesting Rohonc Codex site. While working for the EU in Fiji between 2009 and 2011 (it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, I suppose), Marius-Adrian filled his spare time making notes on the Rohonc Codex, and has now written them up in a series of web-pages.

For example, he sets out some persuasive arguments that the text is written from right-to-left (along each line), from top-to-bottom (for lines within each page) and from back-to-front (from page to page).

What is interesting about this is that because I don’t currently believe that the folios (folded pairs of pages) have ended up in the correct order (simply because the chronology of the Biblical pictures seems strangely out of order), it may be possible to identify some candidate facing pages based on matching incomplete half-phrases on the bottom of the right-hand page with incomplete half-phrases on the top of the left-hand page. (I’m not sure that anyone has done this yet.)

He has also found a pair of intriguing repetitive word-skipping sequences on 162L and 162R, where the two instances are each padded out with a different filler “letter” / “word”.

However, I think there is a far simpler explanation for this problematic text than his conclusion that “existing paragraphs were repeated or repeated with insertions […] to create a larger book without making the effort to produce original, non-repetitive text“. What if these inserted filler shapes are both cryptographic nulls? They certainly don’t seem likely to be meaningful, so perhaps they are purely meaningless (nulls): and the fact that the phrase without the nulls also appears on 162L also seems to point that way. It would be interesting to revisit the stats if those two (possibly) null characters were excised from the text stream.

Alternatively, the apparent presence of nulls in the Rohonc Codex’s text might instead mean that the author was trying to duplicate the page structure of an existing manuscript, and that those pages didn’t originally have much text on (and hence needed padding). We’re still not necessarily looking at an enciphered document: we still have no definitive proof of that, but the presence of nulls would seem to be a very strong indication of the presence of encipherment (to my eyes, at least).

Similarly, on the same facing page pair (162L/162R), the author seems to repeat a block of text: though I should also point out that a straightforward explanation for this could be that the encipherer lost their position in the text and ended up enciphering the same block twice in a row. It’s certainly easy to do if you’re not hugely experienced at enciphering.

All in all, I’m not (yet) convinced that “The Codex is written in Hungarian, or at least transliterates words in Hungarian, using a version of the rovásírás (Old Hungarian Alphabet) also known as székely rovásírás or székely-magyar rovás.”. Up to that point in his pages I was feeling quite comfortable with his overall argument, but decomposing symbols into pieces and then anagramming them to get transliterated old Hungarian is a bit more than I was personally able to chew on without choking. Even so, there are plenty of tasty things on Marius-Adrian’s site to get your teeth into. 🙂

New Voynich-Nibiru-dinosaur-Time theory…

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Modern life plainly has me stumped: I now can’t even tell email spam and Voynich theories apart. Both seem to be generated from long lists of largely comprehensible phrases, before being dumped in my inbox as self-evident truths: both make my head hurt.

So with that gushing introduction over, here’s this week’s Voynich theory, courtesy of Jimmy Craig on starseeds.net (don’t ask what that is, you can guess enough to tell from its URL that you probably don’t want to know), who believes “that the Voynich Manuscript is describing “Food”, as in the “Mana from Heaven”, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat.” Moreover,…

The Characters in the Voynich Manuscript, are a description of the process that removes time. All the language in the Voynich Manuscript is apart of this algorithm based description, because of the complexity of the argument itself, the algorithm is parsed. This is probably the correct way, or more correct way of addressing the algorithm itself. The Process that Removes Time is Nibiru the Star Wormwood, Star of David. It is the great flood at the end of time, that brings mankind into Forever Night. The characters of the Voynich Manuscript are this Ocean, that is Nibiru the mechanism that removes time.

Craig then refers to the dragon picture on f25v, where the little dragon seems to be vacuuming up a giant plant into its snout:-

The Green Flower is Nibiru, the dinosaur in white below it is “Time”, the Star Nibiru is consuming “Time”, consuming the Dinosaur that is vomiting out the Flood Waters. Time is being destroyed by Nibiru we see the food or mana from heaven being produced thus some have concluded the Voynich Manuscript was a recipe book, when in fact it is a description of the translation of the universe. Therefore, it is a difference in the description of potential for the portion of man inheriting the new universe.

My own meta-theory is that there is a Voynich theorybot out there on a cunning, distant server, busy cranking out Voynich theories. You may think that this is a lousy hypothesis to explain the current near-Biblical flood of Voynich theories but… where’s your disproof?

Delia Huegel and the Rohonc Codex

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I’ve looked at the Rohonc Codex numerous times in the past, though my conclusions so far haven’t exactly amounted to what I’d consider headline news:-
* its drawings are plainly Judeo-Christian, though often viewed through a distorting lens;
* the presence in its text of both pictograms and ridiculously repetitive sequences points to some kind of hacky nomenclator cipher;
* frankly, it’s a bit of a mess, with many folios stitched together out of order.

Being brutally honest, I’ve been waiting for Benedek Lang’s book on it to get translated into English (and I’d be delighted to publish such a splendid thing myself) before throwing myself off the Rohonc Codex’s cliff-top with only my cipher mystery experience to bungee back to the top. For if you were planning on exploring a bear cave, wouldn’t you want a torch to help steer you past previous adventurers’ rotting bones, hmmm?

All the same, I was recently delighted to find a genuinely sane Rohonc Codex website courtesy of Delia Huegel from Arad in Western Romania. She has – much to her own surprise, it would seem – spent several years trying to find and understand the religious dimension of the Rohonc Codex’s drawings. I’ve gone through (and enjoyed) every webpage: she writes with wit and verve, and – unlike much of the Rohoncology out there – she is happy to fess up to the issues her approach faces. It’s a tricky old thing, fer sher, and such honesty helps a great deal.

For me, the two highlights of her site were (a) her comparison of Albrecht Dürer’s hellmouth with the Rohonc Codex’s hellmouth, which I agree is a solid indication that North-Western European religious iconography was a specific influence on the Rohonc Codex’s author: and (b) her identification of King David praying to God and the back-to-front rendering of YHWH in Hebrew. Both are pretty much historical slam-dunks, but both raise more questions than they set out answer. Which is what the best answers nearly always do, IMO.

But most magnificently of all, her site is brought to life by the direct inclusion of a significant amount of imagery she has collected along the way while developing her ideas: I can imagine that the site sits very much as a kind of visual / iconic complement to Lang’s more obviously textual approach. Recommended! 🙂

As an afterthought, a question struck me: what if the pages were written in a back-to-front order, but a later owner then tried to rebind them so that the drawings instead appeared in a more conventional-looking front-to-back order? Just a thought!