Over the last couple of years, Australian researcher Gordon Cramer has been promoting (and indeed gaining a little media attention for) his various theories about the Somerton Man that he has patiently built up over the last four years: for example, that the dead man was a Cold War spy and that the Rubaiyat note contains microwriting.

Specifically, Gordon asserts that he can discern microwriting inside a number of the letters that were found on the back of the Rubaiyat, most notably the letter “Q”.

As I understand it, his claim is that even though the contrasty writing in the image (looks like it) was written in a laundry pen on a shiny surface (say, a print of a photograph), that overwriting process still managed to preserve the fine detail of the original microwriting additively within it: and that by using a carefully chosen sequence of image enhancement steps, he thinks he has been able to reconstruct that original microwriting.

I was sceptical of this claim for many reasons. For instance, it seems hugely likely to me that we can see a small part of the original writing that (one would hope) lies beneath the laundry pen marks…

…yet as far as I can see, there is no sign there of any microwriting. And if microwriting isn’t there, why should microwriting be anywhere else? But I digress. 🙂

More recently Gordon has, in response to questions from me, elucidated the experimental process he followed by which he believes he was able to make that microwriting visible. As a result, I have gone through the process of trying to understand and reproduce his results, and I’m posting here to explain what I found.

Here’s the original Q, cropped and rotated counterclockwise by 90 degrees but otherwise completely unchanged from the original scans:

We can, without much difficulty, directly pick out the set of grey levels in the image that make up the curve of the Q (that Gordon claims contains the microwriting): and if we adjust the image’s levels so that this range (12.5% to 50%) fills the entire 8-bit dynamic range, this is what we get:

Let’s now blur this (which is essentially what happens when you resize an image to be slightly smaller than 100%):

And then let’s sharpen it up again to try to bring out the detail that Gordon thinks is there:

Amazingly, we can now apparently see the word “SEGA” starting to coalesce out of the digital mists. Of course, the video games company SEGA (which started out as “Service Games”) only became known as “SEGA” in 1965 or so (it’s the first two letters of each word), so the actual chances of the Somerton Man having been a secret Sonic The Hedgehog fan are basically zero. Possibly even less.

Yet a number of other image processing experiments I carried out on the Q produced different results. All in all, while I can see how Gordon extracted some kind of microwriting from inside the Q, I also believe that he could have extracted any number of different messages from the same source image (with only slightly different image enhancement sequences), and that he could very likely have extracted plausible-looking microwriting from any sufficiently noisy source image.

In the Voynich Manuscript world, we have an extraordinarily close precedent for this whole thing: in the 1920s, Professor William Romaine Newbold used large prints of rotograph images, strong lighting and large magnification to extract what he believed to be microwriting – specifically Latin shorthand strokes. The intense effort of doing this seems to have sent Newbold to an early grave, followed by posthumous debunking to the point that he is now often cited as the worst possible way of doing cipher research: which is not a good end to any historical story.

Here, though, we have something that Newbold didn’t have: the possibility of better images. So rather than institute yet another dreary bout of back-and-forth comment tennis, why don’t we just see if we can get a higher-resolution (and higher bit-depth) scan of the photograph in the newspaper archive and see if we can work with that instead? If there is microwriting there, it should come out clearly. If there isn’t, it should vanish completely.

When dealing with the Somerton Man case, many people have a tendency to try to reduce it all to a story wrapped around an emotion (love, passion, jealousy, hurt, anger, loss, betrayal, etc) and/or a crime (plotting, deception, murder, suicide, etc).

But actually, these are mindsets that not only don’t help, but also get in the way: looking at the evidence with a clear head is a hard enough challenge on its own. In fact, I find getting to the point where I’m ready even to ask the right question to be a genuinely tough process, never mind reaching towards an answer.

So here’s today’s question…

Why was the “Tamam Shud” scrap of paper in the Somerton Man’s pocket at all?

After a lot of consideration, my starting points for answering this question are:
* I believe the Somerton Man placed it there himself (i.e. it was not planted there by someone after his death)
* I believe it was not random, accidental or coincidental (i.e. it seems to have been consciously and deliberately put in a hard to find place)
* I believe it was placed there for a rational reason (whatever that reason happens to be)
* I believe it had a specific extrinsic function – that is, it had value or meaning or use only in relation to someone or something else

So… why was it there, then?

Putting all this together, my current working hypothesis is that the “Tamam Shud” fragment was the Somerton Man’s physical proof that the Rubaiyat was linked to him, even though he had (apparently) not previously met the person who was in possession of that Rubaiyat.

So the two items when combined together form a paired identification proof mechanism: the Tamam Shud scrap was a token to prove his identity to someone he had not previously met, while the Rubaiyat was a token to prove the other party’s identification to him.

If this is right, we have a fairly small number of token-based mutual identification scenarios to consider, such as:

(1) Seller – Intermediary – Buyer
* The Seller tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat.
* The Seller gives the “Tamam Shud” to the Intermediary (the Somerton Man) and the Rubaiyat to the Buyer.
* The Intermediary meets the Buyer to collect money – possession of “Tamam Shud” token proves he was sent by the Seller.
* The Intermediary takes the money back to the Buyer.

(2) Seller – Messenger – Buyer
* The Seller (the Somerton Man in this scenario) tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat.
* The Seller gives the Rubaiyat to the Messenger to give to the Buyer (but keeps the “Tamam Shud”).
* The Seller meets the Buyer to collect money – possession of the two halves mutually prove each party’s identity.

(3) Buyer – Messenger – Seller
* The Buyer tears the “Tamam Shud” out of the Rubaiyat
* The Buyer passes the “Tamam Shud” to the Seller via a Messenger
* The Buyer meets the Seller to collect money – possession of the two halves mutually prove each party’s identity.

Pete Bowes and Gordon Cramer seem to insist that this kind of behaviour is merely ‘tradecraft’, but I really don’t know if that’s a position that can yet be justified. All the same, there’s certainly a strong whiff of distrust and proof at play here: personally, I don’t yet know what to make of it all. But it is what it is.

Who was the 17-year-old boy from Broken Hill who dumped the suitcase with clothes and a rifle stock on Somerton Beach the weekend before the Somerton Man died there?

Commenter ‘Clive’ had had no luck with the Adelaide Court archives (in fact, Janey found out a few weeks ago that “all [Adelaide] Youth Court files prior to 1984 have been destroyed”), so decided to trawl through the Police Gazette. Luckily, what Clive found there was that “the youth, aged 17, was named as Frederick William Pruszinksi. He was fined 4 pounds and 10 pence for unlawful use of a car”.

Actually, it seems very likely to me that the youth’s name was Richard Frederick (“Freddie”) Arthur Pruszinski, of 247 Williams Street, Broken Hill: and we can trace many aspects of his (unfortunately) short life through Trove.

10 December 1945: Fred Pruszinski was in Class 2CP, and got “1st English (aeq.), 1st Technical Drawing (aeq.)”

29th November 1947: a relative (presumably?) was working on the mines but fell ill: “C. Pruszinski was taken to the Hospital and admitted after he had become ill at the Zinc Corporation. His condition last night was stated to be quite comfortable.” (He seems to have flown back from Melbourne on 4th January 1949.)

Despite his young age, Fred Pruszinski was a keen member of the Silver City Miniature Rifle Club: his first newspaper mention is from 8th March 1948, and by 20th August 1949 he was Honorary Secretary.

29th November 1949: his sister Eileen Patricia Pruszinski announced her engagement to “Harold, only son of Mr. and Mrs H. Payne, 608 Beryl Street”. They were married on 11th March 1950 at 9am:

Fine needlerun lace and misty tulle was chosen for the bride’s picturesque period gown, which she had made herself. Underlined with rich satin, the frock was made with a high round neckline and circular tulle yoke piped with satin and outlined with a soft frill, and the slender satin-piped waist line was met by a hooped crinoline skirt. The centre panel of soft tulle frills was edged each side with satin piped scallops caught with sprigs of orange blossom, and the skirt swept out into a graceful flowing train flnished with a deep tulle trill all around. A trail of orange blossom was caught across the back waistline above a shirred bustle of satin-lined lace, and her long peaked sleeves were buttoned to the elbow. A coronet of orange blossom backed with a frilled lace halo surmounted her frothy veil of six tiers of scalloped tulle, and she wore a double strand pearl necklace. […]

By 14th May 1951, Fred Pruszinski was shooting for West Broken Hill Rifle Club.

12th July 1951: “Failure to observe a halt sign at the intersection of Argent and Kaolin Streets cost Richard Pruszinski a fine of £2 and 10/ costs.” (Might have been Freddie or his father Dick, I don’t know).

8th January 1952: in an apparent change of direction, Fred Pruszinski passed an Engineman Driver’s Examination (“AC and DC”). By 1st July 1952, he had passed his Diesel examination too.

Yet sadly, he died suddenly at Morton Boolka creek on 7th March 1953, having shot a bird and tried to swim to get it, before falling into difficulties and drowning. (The Coroner subsequently ruled that his death was an accident, e.g. Barrier Miner, 31 Mar 1953.)

There were plenty of funeral notices: a typical description of Pruszinski’s funeral appeared in the Barrier Miner, 11th March 1953 edition:

The funeral of Mr. Richard Frederick Arthur Pruszinski took place yesterday afternoon. The cortege left his residence, 247 Williams Street, for the general cemetery. Envoy J. Crocker conducted a service at the grave. The bearers were: Messrs. D. Hargraves, K. Cook, P. Fitzgerald, D. Carlin, J. Heslop, and J. Hamilton. The following representatives were present: Mr. J. P. Fitzgerald <W.I.U. of A> Mr. L. Farrugia (Zinc Corporation Sickness Fund); Messrs. F. Anderson and J. Brownett (West Rifle Club).

He was buried in grave #214 at Broken Hill Cemetery, the same one as Richard Walter Pruszinski (1928-1934, presumably an older brother).

According to this, Pruszinski was born and educated in Broken Hill, and “was employed at the N.B.H.C. as a miner. He was a member of the W.I.U. of A., Zinc Sickness Fund, and the West Rifle Club”. This funeral notice lists his close friends: “DON PURCELL, DON HARGREAVES, DON CARLIN, KEVIN COOK, JOHN WINKLER and PAT FITZPATRICK”. (They were also his pallbearers). At the West Broken Hill Rifle Club, “the flags were flown at half-mast and members stood in silence in respect for late member F. Pruszinski.”