Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

The 60 Minutes video segment on the Somerton Man has just gone live, but you’ll have to navigate down the thumbnails on the right hand side of that page to find it – alternatively, this direct link to the video might possibly work for you.

Though it’s always nice to see Gerry Feltus and Derek Abbott on screen 🙂 , the whole point of the programme was that it also included a series of on-screen interviews with Jestyn’s direct family members (daughter Kate Thomson, daughter-in-law Roma Egan, granddaughter Rachel Egan) that revealed some new titbits of information – though (as is normally the case with cipher mysteries) only really enough to tantalize rather than definitively prove or disprove.

As a result, the things we now know are:-
* That Jessica Thomson lied to the police (as just about everyone suspected), i.e. that she did indeed know who the Somerton Man was;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that the whole mystery wasn’t “at a State Police level”;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that she “was teaching English to migrants”, and could speak Russian (if a bit rustily);
* That Jessica Thomson’s daughter now believes that her mother was linked in some way to Soviet spying; and
* That Jessica Thomson’s granddaughter now suspects that the Unknown Man might well have been her actual grandfather.

The first bit of good news is that if (as claimed) Jessica did know the Somerton Man, then we can’t really call him the “Unknown Man” any more, because he was manifestly “The Known Man”. Having said that, I somehow doubt that Gerry Feltus will be changing his book’s title any time soon, though. 😉

As far as the whole Soviet spy scenario goes: ASIO (Australian Secret Intelligence Organization) had an office in Adelaide, and I expect that there is a huge amount of stuff in the archives relating to Russian spies in Australia during that edgy post-WW2 period. Of course, it may be many years yet before anything in such grey archives get declassified… but if this side of the story is even partially right, then that could – much to my surprise – well be where any kind of genuine historical answer will lie.

But all the same… if Jessica Thomson was indeed a Soviet spy, it still makes no sense that she would silently poison another Soviet spy visiting her, even if she were a double agent (other countries’ spies were often far more useful alive-and-known-about than dead-and-buried). Personally, I still think it far more likely that the Somerton Man died by accident or by someone else’s hand than by Jessica’s hand – though I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was she who meticulously cleaned and polished his shoes after his demise. Shame the hat was too far gone, though. 😐

Moreover, the notion that the Somerton Man was Robin Thomson’s father (and Rachel Egan’s grandfather) is still a little bit hard for me to digest. Before anything so radical as an exhumation could take place, the simplest explanation of all – that Prosper McTaggart Thomson was the biological parent of both Robin Thomson and Kate Thomson, as you’d basically expect – would surely need to be eliminated first.

Even though Y-DNA testing is not possible here (because it only works for two direct male descendants of a single male ancestor), I would be pretty sure that there must be some other DNA test that could look for some kind of shared allele pattern between Kate Thomson and Rachel Egan that would indicate whether or not they were related (or very probably related) via a shared male ancestor. (I’m not an expert on genetics, though, so please tell me if this is just plain wrong.)

Only if it could be shown beyond reasonable doubt that the two did not share such a male ancestor would it make any obvious sense to push for exhumation – so, has this kind of testing already been done? The programme was silent… but maybe such tests have already been done, who knows?

Thanks to Diane O’D for flagging that long-running Australian current affairs TV programme “60 Minutes” will be covering the Somerton Man this coming Sunday, with reporter Charles Wooley. The team were snapped filming in West Terrace Cemetery (where the Unknown Man’s body lies) last month.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that the fact that their interest and the Tamam Troll attacks on Cipher Mysteries all happened at basically the same time is not entirely coincidental. Perhaps that’s simply what happens when people stick their hot hands into historical hornets’ nests: someone’s gonna get stung.

But this is, of course, exactly how TV film-makers the world over make their programmes: their only concern is with the shining televisual jewel that finally emerges from the edit suite, not the wreckage that’s left behind by their underpaid & overstretched researchers trampling cavalierly over the cultural flowerbeds. It’s rare these days that this process yields even genuine reportage, let alone anything approaching (capital-H) History.

All the same, the programme makers have a moral responsibility to check their facts, to get their basic story straight: so let’s read their initial press release, to see what we should expect of them:-

We all know that fact is stranger than fiction and that’s very much the case with this story.

It’s the true tale of espionage, a love affair and murder – that wouldn’t be out of place in the movies.

Not a great start. Unless 60 Minutes have found a huge cache of evidence everyone else has missed completely (very unlikely), I think it’s important to say that we have:-

* no evidence of “espionage” at all – the “cipher” seems to be a list of initials of a set of phrases, nothing to do with spying
* no evidence of “a love affair” at all – all we have is a phone number in a book that seems to have been connected to the dead man
* no evidence of “murder” at all – the pathologists, lab analysts and coroners found no trace of poison, despite looking really hard

The year was 1948. Communism and democracy were wrestling for world supremacy. The nuclear arms race was in high gear. And there were spies everywhere, even in Australia.

All true (if a tad self-important and grandiose). But the probability that any of this is even remotely to do with a middle-aged bloke found dead on Somerton beach still seems extraordinarily low. I repeat: we still have not one jot of evidence that supports any of this speculation.

Against this sinister backdrop, an unidentified body was found on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach – the so-called Somerton Man.

TV loves sinister backdrops… but that doesn’t make the two things connected, or even likely to be connected.

Now, 65 years after he was buried there are moves to exhume him in an attempt to finally solve this lingering Cold War Mystery.

Professor Derek Abbott has indeed been trying to get the body exhumed. But – contrary to nearly every crime scene TV drama ever shown on television – the courts are respectful of the dead, and don’t allow them to be exhumed on a whim or on a fishing trip for physical evidence. Right now, we simply have insufficient tangible evidence to convince the courts that exhumation is a good idea, and – unless people actually do better quality research and find better quality evidence – that’s how it’s going to stay for the foreseeable future.

This Sunday, 60 Minutes will reveal for the first time the identity of the mysterious nurse who was romantically linked to the Somerton man, and talk to the woman who claims she’s the Somerton Man’s granddaughter.

Well… apart from the awkward fact that the identities of the nurse and her husband have been known by hundreds of researchers for many years now, perhaps we can be generous and say that “60 Minutes” will probably be the first to reveal it on TV.

All the same, the interview with “the woman who claims” (etc) will doubtless be interesting, if perhaps a bit speculative: though if they’ve hooked themselves a gee-new-wine Tamam Troll, that would turn the entire programme into a Tamam Train Wreck of spectacular proportions.

Let’s hope for some fast and furious fact-checking before Sunday! 🙂

I’ve started to amass the raw data for an open source time of death calculation for the Somerton Man.

* The Adelaide Advertiser, 30th November 1948, p.8.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 1st December 1948, p.10.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 2nd December 1948, p.6.

30th November 1948
Sunset 7.14pm
Moon set 6.51pm – New Moon
High tide 4.52pm (6.0ft), low tide 10.10pm (2.4ft)
Temperature min 52.1°, max 76.3° [i.e. 11.2°C to 24.6°C]
Barometer 30.05 (3am), 30.09 (9am), 29.99 (3pm), 30.03 (9pm)
Relative humidity 58% (9am), 43% (3pm), 57% (9pm)

1st December 1948
Sunrise 4.56am
Moon rise 4.51am – New Moon.
High tide 4.34am (9.0ft), low tide 11.11am (1.0ft).
Temperature min 65.7°, max 96.0° [i.e. 18.7°C to 35.5°C]
Barometer 29.87 (3am), 29.86 (9am), 29.70 (3pm), 29.71 (9pm)
Relative humidity 20% (9am), 18% (3pm), 39% (9pm)

The initial surprise was that this was a short but extremely dark night – the sun and (new) moon both set around 7pm and rose just before 5am. As a result, anyone observing any event after sunset that evening / night would have had to have been relying almost entirely on street lights.

The second surprise that the high tide at 4.34am was a spring tide (i.e. a very strong tide, and nothing to do with the season ‘Spring’). That is, at the time of a New Moon, what can happen is that one of the two normal tides a day can be exaggerated by the gravitational force of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun all lining up in what is called a “syzygy“, from the Greek ζυγον meaning “yoke”. (I used to play Scrabble with my Grandma after school, and I’m sure she’d have thoroughly appreciated that word: this was the first time I’ve managed to use it in its proper context).

However, I haven’t yet found good enough information to be sure what the temperature was during the night, and I also can’t make out the wind direction or speed from Trove’s scans of the Adelaide Advertiser’s weather maps. If anyone has access to better information for these, please say!

Also, I don’t know how far up Somerton Beach the 9ft high tide would have come at 4.34am. The man’s body would surely have to have been fairly close to the sea wall, simply to have avoided been washed over by the waves. Just a thought!

While responding to Cipher Mysteries comments from the ever-interesting Byron Deveson and others today, it struck me that what we are broadly iterating towards is a kind of “open source autopsy” of the Tamam Shud / Unknown / Somerton Man. And so, my reasoning went, why not take this basic idea and really do it properly?

In short, I propose that we carry out an open source autopsy on the Unknown Man. The point of the exercise would not be to do with whether you think, believe or suspect he was a spy, a paramour, a horse doper, a car thief or whatever, but with the unassailable basic factuality his physical body tells us about what happened to him (pre- and post-mortem) in the period up to the morning of 1st December 1948.

For me, a grain of fact outweighs a ton of speculation: and I believe that by collaborating to dig out all the grains of fact we can here, we will be able to reach a position where we can build up a powerful and convincing story about what happened. Not only that, but by collecting, exposing, and validating all the physical evidence, any conclusions or inferences will be openly accessible and verifiable by all manner of modern forensic professionals.

The first step in this journey of a thousand miles, though, is evidence collection. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of re-reading abbreviated summaries in 60-year-old Australian newspapers about the various autopsies, coronial inquests, and pathology reports. For example, Kerry Greenwood’s recent book (I’m waiting for my copy to arrive, any day now, *sigh*) quotes John Dwyer’s pathology notes, but having direct access to these notes is surely a better place to start.

I surely can’t be the only researcher who wants to go through these reports first-hand!

So, my current list of evidence sources we would need to begin with would look something like this:-

* Dr John Berkely Bennett’s autopsy report [examined the body at 9.30am on 1st December 1948]
* Dr John Matthew Dwyer’s pathology report [carried out the post-mortem at 7:30am on 2nd December 1948]
* Dr Robert Cowan’s report [stomach, stomach contents, a liver section, a muscle section, blood and urine]
* Dr Kenneth A. Brown’s forensic odontology report [he surely wrote and submitted a report, right?]
* The coronial inquest transcript / report [“Inquest Into the Death of a Body Located at Somerton on 1st December 1948, State Records of South Australia, GX/0A/0000/1016/0B, 17th & 21st June 1949”]
* The raw data collected from what is believed to be the Unknown Man’s hair by Professor Derek Abbott’s group.

Note that I’m not interested in the police reports or in any individual claims or narratives at this stage, but only in raw physical evidence. Is there anything missing from this list? Please leave a comment if there is!

Of course, there may be particular reasons why some or all of these can’t be openly published on the Internet. But all the same, I think we should be able to publish detailed summaries of all of the physical evidence and conclusions, not just the edited highlights that prove useful to reinforce some speculative or moral narrative.

To stand any chance of making any headway, I think we need to start with the whole physical story in all its confusing, contradictory detail – because the body itself can’t speculate or lie. Is that too much to ask for?