Darrell Huff, Voynich theories, and “How to Lie [to yourself] with Statistics”…

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Darrell Huff’s (1954) “How to Lie With Statistics” is a twentieth century classic that’s well worth reading (I have a well-thumbed copy on my bookshelf that I bought back in the 1980s). It’s basically a breezy introduction to statistics, that concentrates largely on how people get things wrong in order to get across the general idea of how you might (possibly, hopefully) try to get things right in your own work.

A journalist rather than an academic statistician, Huff’s book ended up selling more than 1.5 million copies. You can hear echoes of his reversed-expectations presentation in numerous other book titles, such as Bill Hartston’s “How to Cheat at Chess”.

Sadly, The Truth Is Much, Much Worse

When later I did statistics modules at University, the awful truth slowly dawned on me: even though tools (such as Excel) make it easy to perform statistical procedures, stats really isn’t just a matter of “running the numbers”, cranking out an answer, and drawing some persuasive-looking graphs.

Even just conceiving a statistical experiment (e.g. something that’s based on good data, and that stands a chance of yielding meaningful results) is extraordinarily hard. Designing statistical experiments (e.g. understanding the sampling biases that are inevitably embedded in the data, and then working out how to work around them) is also hugely tricky. Executing them is no mean feat either: and then – finally – interpreting them is fraught with difficulty.

In general, my own experience of statistical experiments is that at least half are fatally misconceived; of the remainder, half are horribly misdesigned; of the remainder of that, at least half are sadly misexecuted; and of the remainder of that, at last half of the results are tragically misinterpreted. Note that the overall success rate (<5%) is for people who broadly know what they’re doing, never mind idiots playing with Excel.

A Story About Stats

Back when I was doing my MBA, one of the final marked pieces was for the statistics module. When I took a look at the data, it quickly became clear that while most of the columns were real, one in particular had been faked up. And so I wrote up my answer saying – in a meta kind of way – that because that (fake) column was basically synthetic, you couldn’t draw reliable conclusions from it. And so the best you could do in practice was to draw conclusions from the other non-synthetic columns.

I failed the module.

So, I made an appointment with the lecturer who marked it, who also happened to be the Dean of the Business School.

  • I said: Why did you fail this piece?
  • He said: Because you didn’t get the right answer.
  • I said: But the column for the ‘right’ answer is fake.
  • He said: I don’t think so.
  • I said: Well, look at this [and showed him exactly how it had been faked]
  • He said: Oh… OK. I didn’t know that. But… it doesn’t matter.
  • I said: errrm… sorry?
  • He said: you’ve got a Distinction anyway, so there’s no point me changing this mark

And so I still failed the statistics module.

The Voynich Manuscript and Stats

If you think Voynich Manuscript researchers who run statistical tests on Voynichese are somehow immune to these fundamental hazards, I don’t really think you’re paying enough attention.

Until you accept that the core problems inherent in Voynichese transcriptions – there are many, and they run deep – will inevitably permeate all your analyses, you really are just running the numbers for fun.

The main things that bother me (though doubtless there are others that I can’t think of right now):

  • Transcription assumptions
  • Transcription error rates
  • Running tests on the whole Voynich Manuscript, rather than on sections (e.g. Q13, Q20, Herbal-A)
  • How Voynichese should be parsed into tokens (this has bugged me for 20 years!)
  • Copying errors and Voynichese “weirdoes”
  • The bifolios being out of order
  • Whether there is a uniform ‘system’ underlying both Currier A and Currier B
  • The problems with top-line text
  • The problems with line-initial letters
  • The problems with line-final letters
  • etc

With so many parallel things to consider, I honestly think it should be no surprise that most attempts at Voynich analysis fail to achieve anything of value.

Voynich Theories

I have no doubt that researchers do their best to be rational and sensible, but many Voynich theories – or, perhaps more accurately, Voynich ‘approaches’ – are built upon a fundamentally flawed statistical ‘take’, e.g. that Voynichese is just a simple (but highly obscure) text.

Unpopularly, this seems to be true of just about all ‘Baxian’ Voynich linguistic analyses. Statistically, nothing supports the basic assumption of a ‘flat’ (but obscure) language. In fact, Voynichese is full of confounding, arbitrary, difficult, unlanguagelike behaviours (see the incomplete list above), all of which you have to compensate for to get your data to a point where you even begin to have something remotely language-like to work with. But hardly anybody ever does that, because it’s too tricky, and they’re not genuinely invested enough to do the ‘hard yards’.

It’s also true of Gordon Rugg’s table ‘take’; and of just about all simple ciphers; and – also unpopularly – of hoax theories (why should meaningless text be so confounded?) And so forth.

The sad reality is that most researchers seem to approach Voynichese with a pre-existing emotional answer in mind, which they then true to justify using imperfect statistical experiments. More broadly, this is how a lot of flawed statistical studies also work, particularly in economics.

In fact, statistics has become a tool that a lot of people use to try to support the lies they tell themselves, as well as the lies their paymasters want to be told. This is every bit as true of Big Oil and alt.right politics as of Voynichology. Perhaps it’s time for an even more ironic 21st century update to Darrell Huff’s book – “How To Lie To Yourself With Statistics”?

Indian Ocean ships 1747-1748 and French marine archives…

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As the many journaux de bord listed in my previous post attest, the Marine JJ series of documents is where lots of good stuff is to be found. An appendix in a 974-page historical slavery report I found online includes a handy list of such journaux from this period at CARAN in Paris.

4 JJ

4 JJ is described as “nombreux journaux de bord (ou extraits) de la Compagnie des Indes ou voyages dans l’océan Indien en général”, a sentence which helpfully auto-translates itself. The ones listed for 1747 to early 1748 are:

  • 4 JJ 77 38 – 1747 Journal du vaisseau le Triton commandant du Tertre de Saint-Malo aux iles de France et Bourbon retour à Lorient
  • 4 JJ 77 39 – 1747 Journal du Vaisseau le Fulvy commandant de la Palisade de Lorient aux iles de France et Bourbon retour à Brest
  • 4 JJ 77 40 – 1747 Journal du Vaisseau l’Argonaute commandant de la Londe de l’île de France à Lorient
  • 4 JJ 77 41 – 1747 Journal du Vaisseau le Content commandant Joannisse de Lorient à l’île de France
  • 4 JJ 77 42 – 1748 Journal de la frégate l’Anglesea commandant de Selle de Brest à l’île de France, Bourbon et retour
  • 4 JJ 77 43 – 1748 Journal du Vaisseau l’Auguste commandant de Saint-Médard de l’île de France à Lorient

Similarly, 2 JJ 58 contains documents that relate to “voyages à Madagascar et à l’Île de France (1709-1753)”.

Pierre David

I also wondered whether there might be any archival sources for the Mascareignes Governor Pierre David: and so was pleased to see that archive COL C4‐5 for the years 1746‐1748 contains “Correspondances générales M. David, Gouverneur”. The specific letters listed for the period I’m interested in are:

  • 1747 Affaire de M. Meygnier, chirurgien‐major, propriétaire d’un marais à sel à l’Isle de France
    • Lettre au Conseil Supérieur de l’Île de France
  • Emploi des noirs, formés à faire le sel et à cultiver la saline
  • 1748 M. de Rostaing, commandant la Frégate La Favorite
    • Lettre du 25 Mars 1748 au Conseil
  • corvées des noirs pour les fortifications de l’Île et dédommagement

There’s also an article “Pierre David et la Compagnie des Indes, de 1729 à 1752” by Pierre Margry in in Revue maritime et coloniale, tome XVIII, 71e livraison, Octobre 1866, which includes a transcription of Pierre David’s own memoirs, “Réflexions sur l’Ile-de-France” (which I am about to read).

In search of a January 1748 French prize ship…

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Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang claimed to have been shipwrecked (very probably in Mauritius), which surely means that he was a crew member on board a French-controlled ship. Since my last post, I’ve changed my mind about the type of source for the “richesses de l’Indus” (in Bernardin’s testament).

Specifically, I’m now wondering if this was this a prize ship (probably, though not necessarily, called the Indus) captured by a French ship in the Indian Ocean, sent back to Mauritius with a skeleton crew, but which was then shipwrecked on Mauritius by the hurricane of January 1748.

However, any prize ship captured around that time of year would have wanted (with the start of monsoon season) to depart immediately for Mauritius. Hence I suspect that this means any such capture would have to have happened in the narrow window between early December 1747 and early January 1748.

So, this post attempts to work out the historical context for this one-month window, and hopefully tries to draw up a list of French ships that were close by during December 1747. It also tries to see what historical sources might be available for pursuing this search further (in future posts).

The First Carnatic War (1740-1748)

Notwithstanding its origins in the War of Austrian Succession, the First Carnatic War largely played out as a protracted fight between Britain and France for control over the (hugely lucrative) Indian coastal trading ports of Madras, Pondicherry, and Cuddalore.

By the end of 1747, however, France was (literally) in retreat. Previously, La Bourdonnais had sailed back from Madras (where things had got too, errrm, hot for him) to France, which all ended very badly for him. In India, this left the Compagnie des Indes traders under Dupleix with no maritime support.

Georges Lacour-Gayet’s “La marine militaire de France sous le règne de Louis XVI” (1910, 2nd edition) covers much of this in his chapter 13, though the precise period we’re interested in starts on p.215.

Precis-ing at speed: La Bourdonnais’ successor was former Antarctic explorer Bouvet de Lozier (discoverer of the unbelievably remote Bouvet Island), who reached Mauritius on 12 October 1848 with the Lys and four other ships. What had happened in the intervening period is that a new British admiral (Admiral Griffin) had gained almost complete control of the Coromandel Coast. Dupleix, faced with the possibility of losing control of Madras and ending up under siege in Pondicherry, sent a message to Port-Louis (then the capital of Mauritius), asking for help. Capitaine d’Ordelin reached Port Louis with Dupleix’s message in December 1747.

The governor of Mauritius (Pierre David) was already aware of a problem: he had heard that the British Admiral Boscawen was preparing a squadron of ships heading for the Indies (Boscawen’s squadron left on 28 November 1747). In response, Pierre David had armed all the suitable ships in Port-Louis, and ordered them to rendezvous at Foule Pointe in Madagascar (between Tamatave and Sainte-Marie). Yet despite all the governor’s activity, Bouvet de Lozier only actually left Foule Pointe on 23rd May 1748 with seven vessels – the Lys, the Apollon, the Anglesey, the Mars, the Brillant, the Centaure, and the Cybèle. (Capitaine de Kersaint’s Alcide wouldn’t reach Ile de France until June 1748.)

Jean-Marie Chelin’s “Histoire Maritime de l‘Ile Maurice”

As I previously reported, when the hurricane of 21 Jan 1748 struck Mauritius, the Brillant, the Renommée, and the Mars all ended up beached in Port-Louis harbour, while three other (unnamed) boats were lost. Daniel Krieg very kindly gave me updated information on the same time period from a more recent book, Jean-Marie Chelin’s “Histoire Maritime de l’Ile Maurice” (Volume 1):

  • 16 Feb 1747: death of Pierre Boideau, a volontaire on the Phenix
  • 02 Mar 1747: announcement of the death of Jean Tardivel, pilot of the Argonaute
  • 14 Jun 1747: death of Etienne Laterre, second captain of the frigate Anglesey (720 tonnes, 48 cannons)
  • 12 Oct 1747: arrival of Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier on the Lys (64 cannons).
  • Dec 1747: arrival from Pondicherry of a squadron under the command of d’Ordelin, comprising the Centaure, the Brillant, the Mars and the Saint-Louis. All four were in a pitiful state, and took several months to repair.
  • 20 Dec 1747: the departure of the Apollon (Capitaine Baudran de la Metterie) and the Anglesey (Capitaine Gervais de la Mabonnays) for a cruise to the Cape of Good Hope.
  • 22 Jan 1748: Jean Francois Fortier (volontaire on the Centaure) died, aged 21
  • 3 Feb 1748: the Aimable, Capitaine de Surville, arrived from Foule Point having lost a cargo of 350 cows and “140 milliers” of rice in the hurricane at sea. He also had to throw his cannons overboard and cut down his masts to survive.
  • 11 Feb 1748: arrival of the Princesse Amelie, an English prize from Pondicherry, commanded by Capitaine Julien Louis Litoust de La Berteche.
  • 25 Feb 1748: the Lyon, Capitaine Rouille, arrived in a terrible state, having spent six months at sea: he advised that the rest of the squadron coming from France that his ship had been part of (under the Chevalier de Saint-Georges) had been lost.
  • 28 Feb 1748: the departure of the Apollon (under Capitaine de La Porte Barre) and the Anglesey for another cruise to the Cape of Good Hope.
  • 20 Mar 1748: death of Thomas Durant, first lieutenant on the Apollon.
  • 21 Apr 1748: Governor David sent a squadron to the Indies, led by Bouvert de Lozier, made up of the Lys, the Apollon, and the Anglesey (all French Navy ships), plus the Centaure, the Moras, the Brillant, the Cybele, and the Princess Amelie (all Compagnie des Indes ships)

Memoires de Hommes

You can get a lot of information about Compagnie des Indes ships from this period by searching the Compagnie des Indes section of the Memoires des Hommes website. So what has this got to say about the ships named above?

  • LYS – 1747-1749 – vessel, 850 tonnes, 64 cannons
    • Captain: Jean-Baptiste-Charles de Lozier Bouvet
    • Crew list
    • Journal de bord: 4JJ 102-98 and 4JJ 102-98 bis (in A.N.Mar)
    • 1747:
      • arrivée 12/10/1747 – île de France
      • départ 03/05/1748 – île Bourbon
    • See: Estienne 1423, 1445, 1580 ; Demerliac XV 2303 ; Roche I p. 290
  • APOLLON – 1748-1750 – vessel, 44 cannons
    • Captain: Thomas-Herbert de La Porte Barré
    • Crew list
    • Journal de bord: 4JJ 144B-4 (extract)
    • 1748:
      • armement 28/02/1748 – île de France
      • départ vers le 29/04/1748 – île de France
    • See: Estienne 1497, 1594 ; Demerliac XV 2313 ; Roche I p. 44
  • ANGLESEY / ANGLESEA – 1747-1749 – frigate, 720 tonnes, 48 cannons
    • Captain: Marc-Antoine Selle
    • Crew List
    • Journaux de bord: 4JJ 77-42, 4JJ 77-46, 4JJ 144B-4 (in A.N.Mar.)
    • 1747:
      • armement 28/02/1748 – île de France
    • See: Estienne 1496, 1576 ; Demerliac XV 2314 ; Roche I p. 42
  • MARS – 1746-1751 – vessel, 700 tonnes, 32 cannons
    • Captain: Joseph-Jean-Baptiste Gardin Du Brossay
    • Crew list
    • 1747:
      • départ vers le 30/09/1747 – Mahé, Inde
      • arrivée avant 01/02/1748 – île de France
    • See: Estienne 1367, 1523, 1639 ; Demerliac XV 1852
  • BRILLANT – 1746-1750 – vessel, 550 tonnes, 34 cannons
    • Captain: Jean-Théophile de Boisquesnay
    • Crew list
    • Journaux de bord are 4JJ 102-98 (“journal de l’escadre”), 4JJ 117-63, 4JJ 144B-4, 4JJ 144C-8
    • See: Estienne 1365, 1612 ; Demerliac XV 1855
    • Also: Estienne 1502 ; Demerliac XV 2316
    • Note: there was also a British ship “Brillant” captured close to Madras in 1746, that was subsequently recaptured back from the French in February 1747.
  • CENTAURE – 1746-1750 – vessel, 1200 tonnes, 76 cannons
    • Captain: Alain Dordelin (deceased), and then Guillaume de La Butte Frérot
    • Crew list
    • 1747:
      • départ vers le 10/04/1747 – Mahé, Inde
      • /05/1747 – Mourmougon, Inde
      • /06/1747 – Goa, Inde
      • départ vers le 28/09/1747 – Mahé, Inde
      • /12/1747 – île de France
      • armement 20/04/1748 – île de France
    • See: Estienne 1366, 1505, 1528, 1589 ; Demerliac XV 1772
  • CYBÈLE – 1747-1749 – frigate, 170 tonnes, 22 cannons
    • Captain: Thomas Rapion de La Placelière
    • Crew list
    • Journaux de bord are in 4JJ 102-99 and 4JJ 144B-4 (in A.N.Mar.)
    • 1P 302-60.6 (in S.H.D.L.) is “Cahier des expéditions des vaisseaux de 1746 à 1747”
    • See: Estienne 1426, 1566 ; Demerliac XV 2121
  • SAINT-LOUIS – 1745-1748 – 600 tonnes, 32 cannons
    • Captain: Thomas Prigent de Penlan
    • Crew list
    • Journaux de bord: 4JJ 92-22, 4JJ 144B-4 (extract)
    • Estienne 1333, 1344, 1517 ; Demerliac XV 1861
  • PHOENIX – 1745-1747 – vessel, 790 tonnes, 44 cannons
    • Captain: Jean-Jacques de La Chaise
    • Crew list
    • Condemned 15 Jan 1747
    • See: Estienne 1332, 1343, 1420 ; Demerliac XV 1838
  • ARGONAUTE – 1746-1748 – vessel, 600 tonnes, 30 cannons
    • Captain: François Le Fol de La Londe
    • Crew list
    • Journaux de bord: 4JJ 71-38 (1747), 4JJ 77-40, 4JJ 102-98, 4JJ 144B-4
    • Estienne 1363, 1395, 1530 ; Demerliac XV 1847
  • RENOMMEE – 1741-1748 – frigate, 400 tonnes, 40 cannons
    • Captain: Charles Gravé de Coligny
    • Crew list
    • Arrived at Ile de France, 12/1746 (having been disarmed on 28/03/1742?)
    • See: Estienne 1139, 1188 ; Demerliac XV 2028
  • MORAS (not known) (there was a later Moras 1756-1761)
  • AIMABLE – 1747-1750 – vessel, 550 tonnes, 30 cannons
    • Captain: René-Louis de Surville
    • Crew list
    • See: Estienne 1435, 1506, 1633 ; Demerliac XV 1854

The archives have many other incidental documents associated with these ships: one such document lists all the people from Ile de Bourbon (modern-day Reunion) boarding Bouvet de Lozier’s squadron in 1748: these were largely stone masons from Portuguese Malabar (the southwestern coast of modern India) going to Pondicherry. Also: B4 62 f°314 contains letters from Bouvet de Lozier about the state of the vessels in his squadron (in 1748), which sounds interesting.

However, the obvious first place to look for specific detail is in the journaux de bord.

Conclusions

I suspect we can disregard the Centaure, Mars, Brillant and Saint-Louis (because all were being repaired during December 1747 to January 1748). The Renommee too was in Port-Louis harbour (but disarmed and docked), so that seems unlikely too: and there’s no sign the Lys left the island at all (though its journal de l’escadre might well turn out to be an interesting read for this period.)

The most likely prize-takers would therefore seem to be the Apollon and the Anglesey, who both went on a cruise to the Cape of Good Hope in December 1747 (in exactly the time window I’m interested in). Both have journaux de bord in the archives (though the Anglesey‘s seems more substantial than the Apollon‘s).

As an aside, arguably the most historically interesting ship mentioned above is the Princesse Amelie, a British prize sent from Pondicherry. It turns out that there is an entire chapter (pp.126-184) in Louis Mannory’s “Plaidoyers Et Mémoires: Contenant Des questions intéressantes” about how the Princesse Amelie was taken “by ruse” from Madras harbour at the start of March 1747 (with a hugely valuable cargo), and all the legal to-ings and fro-ings associated with that whole incident. But that’s a story for another day!

PS: there’s a very long list of lost East India Company ships here, that mentions (as well as the Princess Amelia):

  • Anson (479 tons) – Captured off Bombay on 2 Sep 1747 by French frigates Apollo and Anglesea.
  • Heathcote (498 tons, 29 cannons) – Lost 7 June 1747, in the Strait of Bab el Mandeb.

Daniel Krieg on the (1782) “Indus”…

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I’ve recently had some interesting back-and-forth email correspondence about the Nageon de l’Estang treasure documents with independent Swiss researcher Daniel Krieg. In recent years, Daniel has made his own fresh attack on this long-standing historical mystery, and his particular interpretation of many key aspects of those documents has led him to draw his own conclusions.

Even though I (personally) think these conclusions are probably wrong, I thought it would be good to work through some of his argument’s component pieces, because – whether he’s right or wrong – they all cast an interesting light on the whole subject, as well as available historical sources for the period.

So today let’s look at Daniel’s (1782) “Indus”…

The “Indus”

In the first of the three “Butin” treasure documents, we read (in Loys Masson’s version, but the other variants aren’t too far off) the following part-sentence:

LM:                        j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois et
LM: j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé  dans un caveau   les richesses de l'Indus
LM: et marqué B.N. mon nom.

Because of this text, Daniel Krieg has spent (as many other researchers have done) a lot of time looking for the specific ship called the Indus from which B.N.’s “richesses” came. Crucially, he thinks that this was in fact the British ship Indus that was captured by the French frigates Bellone and Fine on 24th July 1782.

It would seem to be a historically-grounded claim, but does the evidence actually support it? Let’s have a look…

Suffren’s journal de bord

The Bellone and Fine were French frigates in the Bailli de Suffren’s squadron: this had been sent to control the Indian coastline during the Anglo-Dutch War in India that had started in December 1780. A brief description of the Bellone returning on 26th July 1782 appeared in Suffren’s journal de bord:

Dans la matinée, la Bellone a mouillé et a rendu compte que la Fine avait pris un brick, parti de Madras il y avait près de deux mois, portant le colonel Horn à Négapatnam, destiné à commander l’armée du Sud. Le capitaine du brick appelé l’Indou ayant eu ordre de gagner Négapatnam par le large pour nous éviter, n’avait jamais pu remonter.

In the morning, the Bellone anchored and reported that the Fine had captured a brig, which had left Madras nearly two months previously to try to carry Colonel Horn to Negapatam for him to take command of the Army of the South. Even though the captain of the brig (called the Indou) had received orders to reach Negapatam by sea to avoid us [Suffren’s fleet], he had never been able to get [past the sea blockade] to its destination.

In Suffren’s journal de bord entry for the following day (27th July 1782), we then see the Fine itself turn up with the aforementioned brig:

La Fine a rallié l’escadre avec la prise l’Indou.

The Fine rejoined the squadron with the prize ship Indou.

There is no further direct mention of the Indou in the journal de bord, which is – I presume – why Daniel thinks that this could have been the Indus of the letter. However, reading the next few entries forward from there, what happens next is that Suffren’s entire squadron sails away on 1st August 1782:

Au jour, signal de désaffourcher. Nous laissons au mouillage la Fortitude, qui doit aller au Pégou, et deux prises pour être vendues. A 11 heures, toute l’escadre a mis sous voile.

At daylight, signal to weigh anchor and leave. We leave behind at anchor the Fortitude, which must go onwards to Pégou [Bago in modern Myanmar], plus two prize ships to be sold. At 11 o’clock the whole squadron was under sail.

Obviously, I’m going to point out that I don’t think a prize brig would have sailed onwards with Suffren’s mighty French squadron: and also that I don’t think it would sailed onwards to the Ile de France.

Charles Cunat’s account

On p.192 of Charles Cunat’s (1852) book on the Bailli de Suffren, we read a couple of additional details (Cunat had access to many more maritime sources than merely de Suffren’s journal de bord):

En même temps, la Fine ralliait l’escadre avec un brick anglais, chargé de riz pour Négapatnam, qui avait à bord le colonel Horn, nommé au commandement de l’armée de Tanjaour, […]

At the same time, the Fine joined the squadron with an English brig, loaded with rice for Negapatam, which had on board Colonel Horn, appointed to take command of the army of Tanjaour, […]

The most important feature to note here is that, somewhat like a Spanish pepper, the brig Indou was stuffed not with treasure but with rice.

I should also perhaps add here that the capture of the brig Indou wasn’t a significant enough naval action to warrant a mention in H. C. M. Austen’s “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean”.

But… was the Indus even British?

I suppose the biggest problem I have with this is the whole presumption that the Indus was some kind of British East India Company treasure ship. The letter writer tells us right at the start:

j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois

That is, the writer himself was saying that he “was shipwrecked in a creek near to Vacoas” – he didn’t find a shipwreck, he was himself shipwrecked.

Given that the (so-called) Golden Age of Piracy had fizzled out nearly twenty years previously, it is an uncomfortably long hop, step and jump forward from “j’ai naufragé” to conclude that the (French) letter writer can only have been a pirate who had taken control of a British treasure ship, which had then been shipwrecked on the (presumably Mauritian) coast.

From my perspective, it is therefore vastly more likely that the ship to which the letter writer refers was actually a French ship upon which the letter writer was working: more specifically, it was (given its name) probably from the Compagnie des Indes heading back from the East Indies towards Lorient.

In fact, I’d suggest that the right place to be looking for the real Indus / Indou would be in the Compagnie des Indes archives in Lorient, for ships that were expected back from the East around February 1748 (but that were instead lost in Indian Ocean during the Mauritian hurricane of January 1748).

[Update: I think I was too hasty in dismissing the idea of a prize brig. 1748 was just before the end of the 1st Carnatic War, and news of the peace didn’t reach the Indian Ocean until very late in that year. So an English ship could very easily have been captured by French warships just before the Mauritian hurricane of January 1748, a research lead I’ll explore in my next post on the subject.]

On inserts and Google search…

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In the last few days, looking at the whole Isaac / Chad ‘alien alphabet’ mystery has made me think more broadly about cipher mysteries. What I’m trying to do is to work out what the relationship between the different pieces of evidence are – but not just in terms of “A preceded B”.

Inserts

Generally, the practical problem with cipher mysteries is that the relationship between “layers” isn’t just ‘archaeological’, i.e. they aren’t just laid down one on top of the other. Very often we find ourselves looking at annoying evidence where one layer pretends (or, more charitably, ends up appearing) to be out of order. The term I typically use for this is “insert” (but please let me know if there’s a better word or phrase!), to denote something that someone has attempted to insert into the timeline.

In the case of Isaac / Chad, I can’t help but wonder if Isaac saw the strange diagrammatic detailing on the large cropped image released by Ty B and built his entire account out backwards from there, to try to insert his own (fake) account into the pre-drone-sighting timeline?

Remember, Isaac wrote (having disclaimed any connection with the drone observation people):

More importantly though, I’m very familiar with the “language” on their undersides seen clearly in photos by Chad and Rajman, and in another form in the Big Basin photos.

Yet Isaac also wrote:

It’s no surprise that these sightings are all taking place in California, and especially the Saratoga/South Bay area. Not far from Saratoga is Mountain View/Sunnyvale, home to Moffett Field and the NASA Ames Research center.

As far as I know, Saratoga was only properly identified as the location for some of the photos a long time after Isaac wrote this, so this section does conversely suggest that there was cooperation / coordination. It’s hard to read how these things all fit together.

Missing evidence, Google problems?

The presence of the higher-resolution dragonfly drone image in the Project Avalon set suggests to me that I’m in fact dealing with scaled-down versions of larger images, but where the EXIF data has been preserved across the scaling-down. And so I’m now hungry to find even earlier (and larger, and unscaled-down) versions of all these images.

However, I have to flag that I’m a bit concerned about Google. In the past, I’d be really confident that Google Images would find a whole load of images: but now it feels as though this whole part of Google’s search engine has been gamed by Pinterest and others (Japanese blogs seem to be good at this, oddly). Basically, I’m not even getting 10% of the results I used to get, and the quality of the results I do get has dropped right down too.

I’ve had similar experiences with Google’s main text search recently, where queries that I have previously used to find things now don’t work at all. Whereas I used to save query strings in my notes to help me find groups of related things, that strategy seems to be working less and less well over time. More generally, I’m finding it harder and harder to find things online, and for the kind of research I do, that feels like it is growing into a huge problem.

People may post endlessly about the death-spiral that Elmo’s Twitter has apparently entered, but I can’t help but wonder whether Google too is now entering some kind of mysterious end-of-life phase? Perhaps you’ve noticed this too.

Before Isaac, there was Chad (etc)…

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When “Isaac” posted his alien alphabet / antigravity stuff in June 2007, it was (he claimed) in response to recent reports of strange ‘dragonfly’-shaped drones, some of which had the same ‘alien’ writing on them:

  • 10 May 2007, Bakersfield, California – “Chad” (April 2007 + 06 May 2007)
  • 12 May 2007, Lake Tahoe, Nevada – “Deborah McKinley” (05 May 2007)
  • 20 May 2007, Capitola, California – “Raj / Rajman / Rajinder Satyanarayana” (16 May 2007)
  • 06 Jun 2007, Big Basin, California – “Stephen” (05 Jun 2007)
  • 11 Jun 2007, Big Basin, California – “Ty Branigan” (05 Jun 2007)

Those sightings are well documented in a “One Year Later” article in MUFON Ufo Journal April 2008 (pp. 3-11): the TL;DR version of that is simply that none of the claimed witnesses is credible, sorry. [If you don’t know about MUFON, it describes itself as an independent follow-on to Project Blue Book, and that it always starts by assessing the credibility of witnesses.]

Regardless, I decided (as I did with Isaac’s JPEGs) to take a digital forensic look at the various drone images, to see if there was anything interesting there: and I began with “Chad”.

Chad’s drone images

Chad’s drone story first appeared on Coast to Coast AM, and starts as follows:

Last month (April 2007), my wife and I were on a walk when we noticed a very large, very strange “craft” in the sky. My wife took a picture with her cell phone camera (second photo). A few days later a friend (and neighbor) lent me his camera and came with me to take photos of this “craft”. We found it and took a number of very clear photos. Picture #1 is taken from right below this thing and I must give my friend credit as I was not brave enough to get close enough to take this picture myself!

I started by downloading numerous variations of Chad’s images, but (viewed through a JPEGsnoop microscope) none of them seemed to me to be an original image. However, once I found Chad’s images from the Coast to Coast AM website itself, JPEGsnoop had an absolute field day.

The first image I looked at in depth was “Craft050607b.jpg”:

There’s an absolute riot of EXIF metadata going on here. For a start, we can see that the image creator used Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is sold as a cut-down version of Adobe Photoshop:

[Software                            ] = "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0"
[DateTime                            ] = "2007:05:06 17:20:08"

We can also see that it was saved out in Adobe Photoshop with quality setting 5:

  8BIM: [0x0406] Name="" Len=[0x0007] DefinedName="JPEG quality"
    Photoshop Save As Quality                          = 5 
    Photoshop Save Format                              = "Standard"
    Photoshop Save Progressive Scans                   = "3 Scans"

Similarly, the creator used Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Converter, which is typically used to import raw (unprocessed) photo data from (generally high-end) digital cameras:

 SW :[Adobe DNG Converter      ]                                [                ]                  
 SW :[Adobe Photoshop          ]                                [Save As 05      ]

Oddly, though, there was a slice name that seems to imply that this was from a scanned image:

      Name of group of slices                            = "ScannedImage-2"
      Number of slices                                   = 1

UUIDs and Melissa

Finally: also embedded in many of the file metadata is a version 1 format UUID. Historically amusingly, its strategy for constructing a universally unique id is by combining a device’s six-byte MAC address with the number of 100-nanosecond ‘ticks’ since midnight 15 October 1582 UTC, which was (as I’m sure you’ll all recall) the precise date when the Gregorian calendar was first adopted.

Decoding Chad’s UUIDs using an online UUID Decoder gives us:

  • “Craft050607a.jpg” has UUID 013dfdd9-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:15:04.703125.7 UTC
  • “Craft050607b.jpg” has UUID 013dfdd9-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:15:04.703125.9 UTC
  • “Craft050607c.jpg” has UUID c822a9ca-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:20:38.390625.0 UTC.
  • “Craft050607e.jpg” has no embedded UUID
  • “Craft050607x1.jpg” has UUID 8e3de69f-fd14-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:31:06.515625.5 UTC
  • “Craft050607x2.jpg” has UUID 8e3de6a2-fd14-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:31:06.515625.8 UTC
    • This didn’t seem to use Adobe DNG).
  • “Craft050607x5.jpg” has UUID 74fb1a10-fd17-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:51:52.625000.0 UTC
    • This too didn’t seem to use Adobe DNG.

At first glance, it might seem we have identified Chad’s two PCs! Except… we haven’t: the OUIs (the top three bytes) of the two MAC addresses are not recognised, so it is almost certain that Adobe’s software picked a random MAC address at the start of each of the two sessions. This is almost certainly because of privacy concerns: what famously happened in 1999 was that the creator of the Melissa computer virus was tracked down via his MAC address embedded in a UUID embedded inside his virus. And so people started randomising the MAC address portion of UUIDs, which eventually led to UUID format v4 and v5.

Hence: unless “Chad” happened to write out any other JPEGs during those two specific sessions, I think we are unlikely to be able to use the MAC address portion of Adobe UUIDs generated in 2007 (and afterwards) to track down anything else linked to this person, alas.

Finally: note that each of these JPEG files contains two UUIDs formed from timestamps that differ by:

  • Craft050607a – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607b – 900 nsec
  • Craft050607c – 333 msec
  • Craft050607x1 – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607x2 – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607x5 – 2.95 sec – this seems to be because the base UUID is that of Craft050607x2 (it was apparently cropped from that image and saved three seconds later)

I don’t really know what this means, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Lake Tahoe images

I also found copies of the Lake Tahoe images on a (very helpful) Avalon Library page. The two files were called “7013_submitter_file1__070505_02.jpg” and “7013_submitter_file2__070505_03.jpg” (which I presume are partly MUFON case file references).

7013_submitter_file1__070505_02.jpg included some interesting metadata. Overall, JPEGsnoop’s assessment was this:

SW :[Apple ImageIO.framework ] [075 (High) ]

The sensor was annotated as “MSM6500” (which I presume is the Qualcomm chip), and there’s Adobe Photoshop XMP metadata in there too. For once, the EXIF data is consistent with a digital camera:

[ExposureTime                        ] = 1/21 s
[ExifVersion                         ] = 02.20
[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:11"
[DateTimeDigitized                   ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:11"
[ComponentsConfiguration             ] = [Y Cb Cr .]
[Flash                               ] = Flash did not fire
[FlashPixVersion                     ] = 01.00
[ColorSpace                          ] = sRGB
[ExifImageWidth                      ] = 0x[00000200] / 512
[ExifImageHeight                     ] = 0x[00000180] / 384
[CustomRendered                      ] = Normal process
[ExposureMode                        ] = Auto exposure
[WhiteBalance                        ] = Auto white balance
[DigitalZoomRatio                    ] = 2/1
[SceneCaptureType                    ] = Standard
[SubjectDistanceRange                ] = 0

The second image was captured five seconds later (also without flash):

[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:16"

Stephen images

Here, the EXIF data (in “IMG_1060”) is definitive about the camera used (the Rebel XT is a good camera, I have one myself):

[Make                                ] = "Canon"
[Model                               ] = "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT"

The other camera EXIF data is very much what you’d expect for a daytime shot:

[ExposureTime                        ] = 1/4000 s
[FNumber                             ] = F5.6
[ExposureProgram                     ] = Aperture priority
[ISOSpeedRatings                     ] = 1600
[ExifVersion                         ] = 02.21
[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:49"
[DateTimeDigitized                   ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:49"
[ComponentsConfiguration             ] = [Y Cb Cr .]
[ShutterSpeedValue                   ] = 7694/643
[ApertureValue                       ] = 7163/1441
[ExposureBiasValue                   ] = 0.00 eV
[MeteringMode                        ] = Pattern
[Flash                               ] = Flash did not fire
[FocalLength                         ] = 50 mm
[FlashPixVersion                     ] = 01.00
[ColorSpace                          ] = sRGB
[ExifImageWidth                      ] = 0x[000009C0] / 2496
[ExifImageHeight                     ] = 0x[00000680] / 1664
[ExposureMode                        ] = Auto exposure
[WhiteBalance                        ] = Auto white balance
[SceneCaptureType                    ] = Standard

This too had an Adobe XAP block, but without any UUIDs.

IMG_1061 was taken two seconds later (properly focusing on the distance):

[DateTime                            ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:51"

IMG_1062 was taken four seconds later again:

[DateTime                            ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:55"

The Ty photos

Interestingly (and this wasn’t lost on forum commenters at the time), these photos were handled by Adobe Photoshop CS2 (“Creative Suite” version 2) Macintosh, as is abundantly clear from the metadata. These annotate an image being loaded (at 22:32:53 on 2007-06-16), modified, and then saved out 5.5 minutes later (at 22:38:20). The time zone was -06:00.

      |         <xap:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xap:CreatorTool>
      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:32:53-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:38:20-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:38:20-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>

The first image I looked at (DroneBigBasinTy060507aa.jpg) had a UUID of 22702A38-1DB6-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C, which decodes to:

  • Date/time = 2007-06-18 16:08:21.330181.6 UTC
  • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c (which, once again, is almost certainly randomised per session)

i.e. 2 days after the CS2 date. JPEGsnoop’s overall verdict:

EXIF Software: OK [Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh]
 SW :[Adobe DNG Converter      ]                                 [                ]                  
 SW :[Adobe Photoshop          ]                                 [Save As 05      ]

60507bb.jpg had XMP but no UUID:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:45:28</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:47:47</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507cc.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:50:49-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:52:33-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:52:33-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • 5BADA44A-1DEE-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:50:49.180065.0 UTC
    • MAC Address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c 

60507ee.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:41:33</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:43:14</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507ff.jpg had only XMP:
          |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:53:02</xmp:CreateDate> 
          |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool> 
          |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:54:34</xmp:ModifyDate> 

60507gg.jpg had only XMP
          |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:38:36</xmp:CreateDate>
          |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
          |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:40:57</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507hh.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:43:29</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:44:44</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507ii.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T23:03:21</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:05:26</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507jj.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T23:01:06-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:03-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T23:03-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID 668A3FCB-1DEF-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:58:16.899783.5 UTC
    • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c

60507kk.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:58:42-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:00:30-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T23:00:30-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID = 668A3FC7-1DEF-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:58:16.899783.1 UTC
    • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c

Finally, 60507ll.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:55:22-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:58:17-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:58:17-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID = 5BADA452-1DEE-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:50:49.180065.8 UTC
    • MAC Address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c 

From this, it seems as though these images were initially processed on 2007-06-16 between 22:32 and 23:03, before being saved out two days later (as a batch?) between around 22:50 and 22:58.

The Drone Research Team Forum

According to MUFON, Raj’s 12 drone pictures were sent to Linda Moulton Howe who scanned them in and posted them. So any digital forensic analysis of these should only lead back to her, not to him.

In terms of content analysis, I should note that one group of 2007-drone researchers (the now-defunct Drone Research Team, though their pages live on in the Wayback Machine) believed that they had identified the precise telegraph pole in Capitola, CA that appeared in Raj’s pictures. They even printed out 400 flyers and posted them to all the pole’s neighbours to see if anybody had seen anything. (I believe the answer was a resounding no.)

Incidentally, the Drone Research Team’s main members were (according to this site):

  • Tomi01uk (UK)
  • Onthefence (Canada)
  • 10538 (USA)
  • Nemo492 (France)
  • Raska (France)
  • Elevenaugust (France)

To identify the site, they hired private investigators Frankie Dixon and T.K. Davis, but also asked them to try to identify the other drone sites. (A story covering their search ended up in the Los Angeles Times in 2008.) Here’s an animation created by arkhangels overlaying one 2007 drone image with an image taken by the private investigators:

Even though “Chad” claimed to have taken his photos in Bakersfield, it turned out that the actual location was a little distance away. Similarly, the “Stephen” drone picture turned out to be not Big Basin State Park, but (thanks to Pacific Gas and Electric meter reader Tom) Bohlman Road Ridge in Saratoga.

The Silpho Moor UFO cipher mystery…

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Today, I have a curious story of a 1957 cipher mystery from Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a flying saucer spin. And – best of all – its secret history has (as far as I know) never been fully revealed.

The first press write-up dates to the 9th December 1957, when the Yorkshire Post ran an article (which I haven’t seen) “Mystery object found on Scarborough moors”, “Has ‘Unusual Hieroglyphics’”.

However, most of the contemporary accounts appeared in that august publication Flying Saucer Review…

Three Men in a Car

According to the Flying Saucer Review 1958 Mar-Apr (Vol 4 No 2) p.4:

“[…] three men, Messrs. Frank Hutton [a property dealer], Charles Thomas [a butcher] and Fred Taylor [a tailor], were driving up a steep hill on Silpho Moor at night when the engine of the car cut out. They then saw a glowing object in the sky above some trees and it seemed to go right down into the ground.

“Mr Hutton went alone with a torch and found the object in some bracken and then went back to tell the others. On the way he passed a man and a woman on a little used path. When he got back with his friends to the spot where he had found the object in the bracken it was no longer there. After apparently making enquiries they got in touch with the man […]. There was quite a little bargaining and eventually the object was passed over to them for £10. […]

The story continues in Flying Saucer Review 1958 Jul-Aug (Vol 4 No 4) p.19, which helpfully included images of the object (top left, top right) as well as the mysterious hieroglyphics on the outside (bottom left) and some of the 17 sheets of strange imprinted writing (bottom right) that were found inside. These photos were “reproduce[d] through the courtesy of both Dr. James B. Williamson, of Middleton, Manchester, and of the Manchester Flying Saucer Research Society“, and were presumably taken by its President, John Dale:

Though the reproduction isn’t, ummm, out of this world, the first two pieces look like this:

Philip Longbottom and “Ullo”

This object quickly found its way into the hands of an “Anthony Avenel[l]” (actually Anthony Parker, Mr Hutton’s solicitor), who examined the object in the company of a reporter from the local newspaper and Scarborough cafe owner (and ex-electrical and mechanical engineer) Philip Longbottom. Before they drilled into the saucer object to open it up, Avenell had already looked at the imprinted markings on the outside enough to think that it formed some kind of message.

Once it had been pried open, inside they found 17 small copper sheets “joined at one edge”, containing roughly 2000 words of hieroglyphics, in some kind of a cuneiform language. Each letter was formed from two stamped lines, so gave a superficial impression of T, L and V.

Despite knowing nothing about ciphers, Longbottom spent 100 hours decrypting the mystery message: his decryption appeared in the Flying Saucer Review 1958, Nov-Dec (pp.15-17). He wrote:

I took a copy, symbol by symbol, of the key on the outside of the object, and also of the first few lines of the first page of the book, worked through most of the night on this, and finally ended up with a reasonable translation and also, which was more important, was able to evolve a sort of code card, or more elaborate key, to the whole of the heiroglyphics.

[…] It was soon found that each symbol had several alternative meanings and sounds, depending upon its position under, over or across the line or, in some cases, its proximity to the line. Some of the symbols are abbreviations, and several of them are phonetic spellings of familiar words. The whole thing is not just a simple substitution code, but is a very complicated effort. [pp.15-16]

Longbottom added that “the scrolls are now in the hands of a cypher expert, so that we may expect a more accurate translation in the near future, although I expect the gist of the message to remain unchanged“.

He also noted that he had been shown “a paper with heiroglyphics on” by a man called George King (a psychic), “and asked if they resembled those on the scrolls. I replied that one or two were something like them and that is all.” King’s article on this appeared in the April 1957 issue of Cosmic Voice (which I haven’t really summoned the enthusiasm to search for, I must confess).

Longbottom’s “Text of the Scrolls”

My name is ULO and I write this message to you my Friends on the Planet of the sun you call Earth. Where I live I will not say. You are a fierce race and prepare travel. No one from any other planet ever has landed on earth, and your reports to the contrary are faulty. Men cannot travel far in space vehicles owing to sudden changes in speed direction and many other reasons. They are machines, part at out “control”, part “auto-control to avoid objects in way. It is impossible to receive radio over far distances owing to natural waves in space unless key of several frequencies is used, but we can receive single frequencies from near transmitter recorder in space vehicles.

From here to end of message is written by me, Tarngee. I am since three earth years secretary for Ulo who has injured his arm while repairing space vehicle. He lost swimming race with me and I made him tell me reason. Now I write for Ulo. It is friendly if I write about our women. I am of average height. We can’t tell quite your size to compare but I am of height four times across.”

I could transcribe more but personally that’s as much as I can handle before it starts getting really quite silly – but don’t take my word for that, feel free to read Flying Saucer Review for the remainder.

As to whether this decryption was correct, an article by Dr David Clarke (a Sheffield Hallam University lecturer) reports that “Dr [John] Dale also got a language expert at the University to translate the symbols. It was very easy as the code was simple.  Based only on a simple L shape in various clock face orientations. Not exactly the product of an extra-terrestrial Einstein.“

Well… OK. But I’d prefer to see the ciphertext and form my own opinion.

The prehistory of the Silpho Moor saucer

When I was researching this a couple of months ago, I found a webpage by someone who claimed that they had seen the same lettering on a fake alien artifact a few months before the Silpho Moor flying saucer incident. Moreover, that preceding artifact had been produced not on Betelgeuse but in Birmingham.

Unfortunately, when preparing to write this page, I haven’t been able to find my way back to that website. If anyone happens to find out where that claim came from, please leave a comment below, thanks!

An epilogue from Paul Grantham?

According to Paul Grantham’s entertaining (and more than a tad skeptical) online account of the above (sadly now only available via the Wayback Machine), an allegedly reliable source told him:

The saucer was in fact one of a batch of secret surveillance objects code named PF228. Three of those launched went astray, two falling into the Atlantic, the other being lost somewhere over northern Britain. He recognised my description of the object as he was working at the base at the time of their launch. They were (he claimed) deliberately disguised as UFOs for the very reason that we discovered. If one were to be found, no-one would believe anyone about it.

It was secretly purchased back from the finders for an undisclosed amount of ‘hush-money’.

Well… I’m not exactly convinced by this, but I couldn’t leave it out, now, could I?

Silpho Moor Bibliography

Isaac Koi’s web page on Silpho Moor helpfully includes a list of book references that discuss the incident.

Moor Questions Than Answers

  • If the saucer was in a restaurant for years, where was that?
  • Where is the saucer now? (A few fragments turned up in the Science Museum)
  • Has anyone got photographs of the message?
  • Has anyone got a transcription of the message?
  • Who was the languages expert that John Dale passed it to?

In search of “Isaac”…

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Who was the mysterious “Isaac“, who claimed to have been working on an alien language in a Palo Alto research institute (“CARET”) in 1984-1987? In 2007, this Isaac posted a page on the free hosting website Fortune City (which has now been archived) with a load of scanned ‘alien’ documents; then answered various follow-up questions (I found what seems to be a complete archive of these on the “Metallicman” website); and then completely disappeared. Everything online since then relating to Isaac’s actual identity appears to be 50% speculation, 50% noise, and 0% fact.

Might a white hat hacker be able to find more details about Isaac, e.g. his IP address, email address etc? I think probably not, because I believe that Fortune City’s account details or server logs were never leaked or exploited (though please tell me if I’m wrong). After a heavily-oversubscribed IPO at the peak of dotcom mania, Fortune City crashed in 2012, and became Dotster (had you ever heard of Dotster? No, me neither). Now, not unlike Ozymandias, “nothing beside remains” of this “king of kings”, and only “the lone and level sands stretch far away”.

All the same, my question today is this: might digital forensics be able to identify “Isaac”?

Under A Digital Microscope

I started by examining Isaac’s JPEGs: these had no metadata or even comments, and their raw data (using HxD) revealed nothing of interest. JPEGSnoop, however, revealed that all the images appeared (according to its database of JPEG header signatures) to have been saved out from Adobe Photoshop. The range of different quality options used suggest to me that the user was (at least) a fairly experienced Photoshop user.

The JPEGs divided into two obvious groups:

Document scans:

  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p119- Adobe Photoshop – Save as 07
  • 2550 x 3199 quality 90 – p120 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3234 quality 90 – p121 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3203 quality 90 – p122 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3247 quality 90 – p123 – Adobe Photoshop – Save For Web 015
  • 2550 x 3298 quality 53 – cover – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3313 quality 87 – p2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3266 quality 87 – p3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3290 quality 76 – p4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3294 quality 82 – p5 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 06
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 86 – p6 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p7 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 04
  • 2550 x 3278 quality 76 – p8 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 82 – p9 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05

The dimensions suggest to me that the scanner’s native resolution was 2550×3300 (or an integer multiple of that, e.g. 1200dpi rather than 300dpi). So I would expect that Isaac used something like an HP Scanjet 3570c, which was a popular choice of scanner at the time (and has a 1200dpi native resolution).

Photographs:

  • 1768 x 1203 quality 95 – photo 1 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1762 x 1151 quality 95 – photo 4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11

Superficially, you might think that the dimensions of these images suggest that they were taken with a digital camera whose native sensor width was 1768 (roughly 2.2MP). However, a web search yielded no obvious technical matches.

Hence it’s far more likely that these were in fact scanned in from 35mm negatives and digitally inverted. What we call “35mm film” is actually made up of a 36mm x 24mm rectangle per individual frame (with a 2mm gap between frames). Hence 36mm = 1.41732 inches, and 1.41732 inches x 1200dpi would yield 1700 pixels, which is tolerably close to 1768 pixels. Note further that 37mm would yield 1748 pixels, so we seem to be very much in the right neighbourhood here.

Finally: I should perhaps also mention that Amped Authenticate offers a set of commercial JPEG analysis tools that seems to be even more turbo-charged than JPEGSnoop, but you (alas) pay handsomely for that privilege.

A Scanner Darkly

What can we tell from the images themselves?

For fun, the first thing I tried was to contrast enhance the areas of the scans that had been redacted, just in case the redaction had been inexpertly done (and the text beneath was still recoverable).

As expected, this produced nothing of interest: but while doing this, I did notice something a little unusual. Even though the source material being scanned was monochrome, a faint streaky blue vertical line artifact appeared about 30% of the way in from the left edge in the scans.

After a little thought, I then realised that this artifact was most likely caused by a flaw in the scanner head itself (which might possibly have been damaged during its manufacture). And I also realised that this could essentially be used as a digital fingerprint for Isaac’s scanner.

Here’s what a raw image looks like in Gimp (at 18.2% of original size):

In Gimp (though you could also use ImageMagick etc), to make Isaac’s scanner’s blue-flaw column visible (it’s between x = 752 and x = 760 in the original 2550-wide images) use the menu option Colors –> Value Invert :

Because of the way JPEG down-samples blocks of colours, the blue column isn’t easily visible in normal images: but once the values have been (numerically) inverted, it becomes clear to see. The redacted text blocks make it particularly easy to see (i.e. it’s visible on black text, but not on white background).

JPEGSnoop helpfully offers the ability to look at individual JPEG planes (the other forensic toolboxes I tried didn’t), so here’s a JPEGSnoop screengrab of the Cb plane for part of the same image, with a patchy vertical white streak where the scanner’s blue artifact is:

This is where the digital forensics chase starts to become interesting…

Once again, “the game is afoot!”

The idea now is simple: even though there may be no direct trace of “Isaac” anywhere on the Internet, might we be able to find any other scans made with his same subtly damaged scanner head and posted online? That is, might we be able to find other scans made with Isaac’s scanner?

Given that Isaac posted his alien writing scans on Fortune City, it seems a reasonable guess that he may well have posted other scans to other free Fortune City accounts.

Furthermore, Isaac’s way of working seems to have been be to leave the width of each scan intact (at 2550 pixels) and to trim its length. So I would initially only be interested in images where the width is exactly 2550 pixels.

Finally, the whole point of Fortune City was that it was a place to host stuff that was completely free (it made its money from banner ads). So we would probably only be interested in 2550-pixel-wide images with this specific blue colour flaw that were also hosted by Fortune City.

Step 1 could be to webcrawl the fortunecity.ws archive (there must surely be a list of accounts?) and compile a list of 2550-pixel-wide JPEGs/JPGs. Step 2 would be to grab them (into an AWS bucket?) and run an image filter on them. Step 3 would be visual inspection, or an automated sort based on a metric.

So… who wants to help give this a go? Will this reveal Isaac’s identity?

In search of Mauritian shipwrecks 1740-1750…

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If the Last Will and Testament written by Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang is genuine (or, at least, perhaps only modestly embellished in the copying) and – as part of that – was indeed written by him, it can only have been written prior to his death in 1750.

I previously also wrote about the intrigue and politicking around La Bourdonnais’ fleet that he hustled together in 1745-1746 in Mauritius, and speculated that Bernardin – himself a lifelong sailor in the Compagnie des Indes – might well have got caught up with that whole operation. But all the same, that was just my guess: the fact that Bernardin died in Port Louis in 1750 provides a solid terminus ante quem regardless.

It further seems likely (to me) that even five years would be an eternity to wait before returning to cached treasure, so the decade 1740-1750 seems a good basic search period to start with. So we might ask: can we find a historical source for Mauritian shipwrecks during the period 1740 to 1750? And if so, can we use that to steer us any closer to a likely source for Bernardin’s treasure?

“Maurice : Une Ile et Son Passé” (1989), by Antoine Chelin

I found a digitised copy of this book online: this runs from 1500 to 1750, and chronologically lists many (though of course not all) events in Mauritius’ history.

The author (who wrote in Mauritian newspapers for many years under the anagrammatic byline “HELNIC”) first published this book in 1973, then released a chunky supplement to it in 1982, before finally merging the two into a single larger book in 1989.

Here, we’re specifically interested in shipwrecks (“naufrages“) and hurricanes (“ouragans“) in the period 1740-1750 on Mauritius. In the following, I’ve used Chelin’s numbering system to make it easy to look up individual events in the original book.

298: 11 Jan 1740: hurricane which caused considerable damage in the bay of Port Louis

325a: 13 Dec 1743: violent hurricane which caused considerable damage to the whole island

337: 17-18 Aug 1744: the shipwreck of the Saint-Géran off the Ile d’Ambre, close to Poudre d’Or, subsequently made famous by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre by his fictionalised version of the event in his novel Paul et Virginie. The ship had a cargo of 54000 Spanish piastres plus machinery for a sugar factory that was being built.

354: 10 Dec 1746: return of Mahé de La Bourdonnais from Madras.

361: 21 Jan 1748: hurricane which caused great damage to boats in the harbour of Port Louis – the Brillant, the Renommée, and the Mars were all beached, and three other boats were lost. “The kilns of Isle aux Tonneliers were destroyed, houses in Port Louis were thrown down; Pamplemousses Hospital
was flattened, the wings of the Monplaisir building in Les Pamplemousses lost their roofs, bridges were washed away, shops in Port Sud-Est were knocked down, the newly-built battery at Trou-aux-Biches was flattened by the waves.“

377: 7 Nov 1748: “departure for India of part of the squadron under the orders of Capitaine de Kersaint. It is composed of the Arc-en-Ciel, Capitaine de Belle Isle, 54 cannons, crew of 400; the Duc de Cumberland, enseigne Mézidern, 20 cannons, crew of 179; and L’Auguste, enseigne de Saint-Médard, 26 cannons, crew of 130.”

378: 9 Nov 1748: “Departure of the rest of de Kersaint’s squadron, consisting of Alcide, captained by de Kersaint, 64 cannons, crew of 500; Lys, frigate captain Lozier Bouvet, 64 cannons, crew of 476; the Apollon, enseigne de La Porte Barrée, 54 guns, crew of 383; and of the Centaure, ensign de La Butte, 72 guns, crew of 522.”

379a: 26 Nov 1748: arrival of the frigate Cybèle from Pondicherry, announcing the news that the siege of that place by the British had been lifted.

389: 10 Jul 1750: shipwreck of the Sumatra at l’Ile Plate, which had left Port Sud-Est carrying a cargo of wood headed for Pondicherry (14 crew drowned).

A new Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang timeline?

Previously, I had speculated that Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang might have been part of La Bourdonnais’ cobbled-together fleet that sailed to Madras in May 1745. It was certainly true that many Mauritians, rattled by the loss of the Saint-Géran in January 1744, didn’t want to take part: though as a former sailor in the Compagnie des Indes, I suspect Bernardin was unlikely to have been in that group.

In March 1748, (British) Admiral Boscawen arrived at the island with 28 boats en route to Pondicherry, angling for a fight: however, the only French ship he encountered was Capitaine de Kersaint’s Alcide at Port Louis. When Boscawen subsequently arrived off the Coromandel coast in August 1748 in his flagship the Monteran (after a detour to Bourbon in July 1748), his fleet was (according to H. C. M. Austen, p. 21) “the greatest European fleet ever seen in the East“.

Later in 1748, a small French/Mauritian fleet assembled itself under Capitaine de Kersaint. Maybe Bernardin could not say no to joining that small squadron that left Mauritius in November 1848 to try to relieve the siege of Pondicherry. However, they were not to know that the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had already been signed on 30th April 1748, making their journey pointless.

And so I can’t help but wonder: might the “treasures saved from the Indus” hidden by Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang have been from a ship wrecked by the huge cyclone that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748? And might the enlistment Bernardin talks about in his Last Will and Testament have been the (actually unnecessary) squadron under Capitaine de Kersaint that left Mauritius on 7-9 November 1748?

“I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France, plus my treasures saved from the Indus.”

Note: full letter here

It’s an interesting possible timeline, that (if true) would answer some of the questions I’ve had about timing that have long seemed very slightly off. Even so, the account does remain fairly hypothetical: though on the positive side, it does perhaps suggest some ideas about where to look next.

So… where next for this?

The first thing I’d like to see are contemporary accounts of the hurricane that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748. The information Chelin reports must (surely) have come from somewhere, but from where? Mauritian newspapers only go back (very incompletely) to 1777 – Le Cernéen and Le Mauricien only started in 1832 and 1833 respectively.

I should perhaps add that the Wikipedia page on tropical storms in the Mascarenes only mentions two from the period 1740-1750 (though note that Grant’s book includes a long section on hurricanes on Bourbon compiled by the Abbé de Caille?):

  • March 8, 1743 – A strong cyclone passed near Mauritius.
  • February 1748 – A strong storm

Note that a letter discussing the 1743 cyclone is quoted in Garnier and Desarthe (2013):

Letter of the governor of the Ile-de-France (Mauritius) of March 8th, 1743:

We had a hurricane on March 8th. The big rashness of the wind lasted only from ten o’clock in the evening till two o’clock at night. Several vessels ran aground in the port because of very high waves which reached the store of the port. The harvest was almost completely destroyed, in particular the corn, the potatoes and the sugar canes. On the other hand, the rice and the manioc were protected. As soon as our port (Port Louis) will be repaired, I shall send to you by boat of the peas of the Cape (South Africa) and the beans which you can distribute in the poorest and to the blacks.

As far as the Jan/Feb 1748 Mauritian hurricane goes, I did find a (fairly miserable) letter from Baron Charles Grant de Vaux dated 10 March 1748 (pp. 293-294):

We have been informed that fifteen ships have been dispatched from the East, laden with provisions for our islands ; but unfortunately the English fell in with them, and, being superior in point of force, have taken them all, except a small vessel, which escaped to make us acquainted with our misfortunes. We live at present in a most wretched state of incertitude, in want of every thing ; and, to complete our misery, afflicted with a continued drought, which has known no interval throughout the year, but from an hurricane that visited us during the last month. It ravaged every thing, and occasioned many fatal accidents. Several persons were killed and wounded during its continuance ; and, to complete our distresses, it was succeeded by a cloud of locusts, which devoured whatever the hurricane had not laid waste. Such is our present situation, &c. &c.

For other sources, I haven’t yet found any journaux de bord covering 1748 (the Achilles’ only goes up to 1747), nor any prize papers, and the Log of Logs starts from 1788, alas. I’ve also asked Professeur Garnier if his researchers found any sources on the 1748 hurricane. Myself, I haven’t yet found anything relevant in gallica.fr, though the chances that something useful is there are surely quite high. The French maritime archives are similarly daunting and huge.

But at least I’m looking for something now. 🙂

Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard…

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Perhaps you well-informed people already knew, but recently I was surprised to discover that during WWII, these three luminary SF writers all worked at the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. Because this overlaps some of the other history I’ve been working my way through of late, I thought I’d tell this story again (but from my own angle).

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, 1944

(Image from Asimov’s 1979 autobiography “In Memory Less Green”)

“Astounding Science Fiction”

When the United States joined WWII in 1941, Robert Heinlein (who had previously served in the US Navy, but had been discharged in 1934 because of ill-health following tuberculosis) immediately asked to be re-enlisted. Though he was (eventually) turned down (because of poor eyesight), he was then asked (by Commander A. B. Scoles, his old classmate and fellow Naval Academy graduate) to write an article for Astounding magazine about the Aeronautical Materials Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia (that Scoles ran). When Scoles also asked if he would like to work there, Heinlein agreed. As an aside, one of his superior officers there was Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, who Heinlein later married (after his second divorce in 1947).

While working as a civilian employee (his military clearance took a while to come through), he recommended they hire his fellow writer L. Sprague de Camp, who had a similar background in engineering. As with Heinlein, Sprague de Camp then encountered a delay before he could attend a suitable course at the Naval Training School at Dartmouth. Hence he also initially worked as a civilian engineer there before completing his course and gaining a commission as a full Lieutenant (much to his surprise, because he had only expected to become a Lt J-G).

Heinlein’s other personal personnel recommendation to the factory was Isaac Asimov, who had a Master’s in chemistry. Yet again, it took six weeks for Asimov to get clearance, his “first experience with government red tape”. This was his first time he had lived away from his family, and quickly discovered that he “wished to live soberly and reasonably – exactly as my parents had expected me to live. It was a dreadful disappointment.” Asimov subsequently thought of his time working there as a failure – that if he had been employed to do the same work during peacetime, he would have been fired. And so he returned to writing in 1943.

All the same, that’s how come the three (now very famous) SF writers all ended up working in the same Navy Yard during WWII – not exactly coincidental, but an interesting historical adjacency nonetheless.

What did they each work on?

This is actually the part I’m most interested in, because their memories of what they did there all help cast a bit of light on the innermost workings of the US Navy’s generally secretive R&D.

According to this page, Heinlein supervised a pressure chamber for testing the high-altitude suits (e.g. for stratospheric ballooning) that would later become space suits. In a 1986 foreword he wrote for Theodore Sturgeon’s novel “Godbody”, Heinlein heavy-handedly hinted at his top secret work there, including an (unnamed) radar project plus a brainstorming job on “antikamikaze measures” for “OpNav-23” (whatever that was). Though for balance, I should add that many of the Heinlein biographical sites I’ve looked at are more than a little skeptical that he actually did much top secret stuff at all.

Similarly, de Camp ran a separate engineering section, which “perform[ed] tests on parts, materials and accessories for naval aircraft; and when called upon, to do original design and development work.” Part of his worked involved running a “Cold Room” for low-temperature equipment tests. This is described in his 1996 autobiography “Time and Chance” (available for £1.99 on the Kindle). [Did you know de Camp’s first name was “Lyon”?] The contractor’s freon cooling circuit never worked, so in the end they used dry ice cubes to brute-force the Cold Room to -96F. De Camp also worked on “trim-tab controls, windshield de-icers, oxygen regulators, low-temperature protective equipment, hydraulic valves, corrosion controls, and piezoelectric materials“. Though I should add that he poured scorn on a story about ‘three pulp writers designing a space suit’ that appeared in print: “the nearest any of us got to space suits was when I saw a suit, designed by a private contractor, being tested by Larry Meakin, one of the civilian engineers, in the Altitude Chamber“. The last noteworthy thing de Camp did while at the Naval Air Experimental Station was “to put on an Exhibition Day, with flying demonstrations“, as a piece of general public outreach. However, his memoirs give no further details of what that involved.

Asimov’s memories in his 1979 autobiography “In Memory Yet Green“ appear in Chapter IV “The War and the Army – in That Order“. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard rarely took him out the chemistry laboratory: “its purpose […] was to maintain the quality and performance of hundreds of different materials used by the naval air forces“. His work “consisted largely of testing different products intended for use on naval aircraft – soaps, cleaners, seam sealers, everything – according to specifications. […] I was testing various plastics and other substances for waterproofness by placing weighed amounts of water-absorbing calcium chloride in aluminum pans, covering them with the film to be tested, and sealing those films with wax around the edges. I then weighed them, placed them in a humidifer for twenty-four hours, took them out, dried them and weighed them again.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a scream.

Finally, “The Philadelphia Experiment”

L. Sprague de Camp was once asked by a fan about “The Philadelphia Experiment”, as described by Berlitz and Moore in their 1979 book. “Aha!“, said the fan, “Now I know what you, Heinlein and Asimov were up to in that Naval laboratory” – i.e. popping the destroyer escort USS Eldridge and its crew through some kind of crazy dimensional portal to the Norfolk Navy Yard (which was 200 miles away), and then popping it back again.

Of course, de Camp thought the entire thing was complete nonsense (“a book of marvels for the gullible”) that none of the three writers had even heard of during their time there. Having said that, he did concede that “an invisibility project would have been more fun than running endless tests on hydraulic valves“. I’m sure Asimov, at least, would have agreed.