Cipher Mysteries

02Oct 2014

Danish brewery releases beer inspired by the Somerton Man!

Amager Bryghus (that’s the brewery) has just announced “Somerton Man’s Last Drink” which, as an 8.2% ABV wheat lager, may well be enough to make anyone with an enlarged spleen drop dead on the spot, whether or not their clothes have labels. They say (tongue firmly in cheek):-

56 years after he was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, no one knows who the Somerton Man was or what he died of. A case wrapped in so many layers of mystery that no one has yet been able to penetrate to its core.

However, a thorough post-mortem examination was performed. In fact, SO thorough that it could be inferred that, just hours before his death, the Somerton Man had eaten a meat pie and drank at least two schooners of beer. Via several questionable detours, we here at Amager Bryghus got hold of his autopsy report, from which our master brewers managed to reconstruct the last beer that the Somerton Man drank on this earth. Our hope is that when drinking this rich and powerful wheat beer, you will also be possible to achieve a high level of creative intoxication – and who knows, maybe solve this 56 year-old murder mystery.

Ingredients: Water. Malt: Pilsner, Wheat. Hops: Amarillo, Centennial, Chinook. Yeast: Warehouse.

Of course, all of this is what they would like to be true, rather than what was actually true. The Somerton Man would have had to knock back far more than two schooners of beer before 6pm closing time for them still to be noticeable, given that his estimated time of death was more than six hours later. And it was lumps of potato that was noticed in his stomach (so a pastie rather than a meat pie).

But honestly, none of that bothers me one jot. The Amager people get a double thumbs-up from Cipher Mysteries for even considering the idea, let alone faking up a back story. You’re totally rock and roll, you funky drunk Danes, you!

Incidentally, my favourite barley-wine-ish strong UK beer is Robinson’s “Old Tom”: which I only mention because Robinsons also released a 4.3% golden bitter called “Enigma”, which is about as close to marrying beer and ciphers as I’d seen before.

But now I’ve seen Amager Bryghus’s effort, I’ve gone looking for other cipher-related beers, and found the Telegraph Brewing Company’s 4.0% “Cipher Key Session Ale”, about which they say “Our Cipher Key Session Ale cracks that code with hefty additions of Cascade hops (etc)”… but they would, wouldn’t they?

Yet so far I’ve only found one cipher beer with an actual cipher, and that is from the Half Acre Beer Company of Chicago, IL. It’s called “Cipher” (well, duh), and here is its label:-

Can you solve this? More importantly, can you solve it without printing it out and cutting it up into pieces? Enjoy!

PS: are there any other cipher-related beers I should know about? %^,

27Sep 2014

Voynich pub meet reminder…

by nickpelling ⋅ 7 Comments

I thought I’d just give a gentle Cipher Mysteries tap to all your virtual elbows: that there’s a Voynich pub meet this evening (i.e. Sunday 28th September 2014 from 7pm onwards) in a splendidly historic London tavern, and that it would be great to see all or any of you there. As always, if you have a particular interest in one or more other historical ciphers (i.e. not just the Voynich Manuscritp), you’re more than welcome too.

Oh, and if you are planning to come along, please free to say hello beforehand via a comment here or an email, particularly if there’s any cipher-related book from my overstuffed bookshelves that you’d like to borrow.

Alas, I can’t promise that Rupert Allason will turn up with a copy of Arnold Deutsch’s fingerprints in his hand and that we’ll all be drinking champagne to toast the newly-identified Somerton Man (now wouldn’t that be good). But cheers and hope to see you there all the same! 😉

23Sep 2014

Might Arnold Deutsch be the Somerton Man?

by nickpelling ⋅ 92 Comments

(I’m claiming neither plaudits nor brickbats for this suggestion, it’s Pete Bowes’ bonny baby: but funnily enough, I rather like it.)

Born in 1903 in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Vienna or somewhere else completely (nobody knows), Arnold Deutsch was a brilliant young academic (with a PhD in chemistry at just 24) with an interest in Wilhelm Reich’s sex stuff who then moved to London to become, while a psychology graduate, a devastatingly well-connected Soviet spy. In fact, the Cambridge Five (including Lil’ Kim Philby) were his boys, and it was Deutsch who came up with the strategy of embedding them deep within the Establishment.

But then in 1937 Stalin got super-edgy and paranoid, and pulled all his wildcard agents back to Moscow, to be executed and replaced by a new cadre of even more hard-core home-bred Communist crazies. However, Deutsch managed to escape that fate: and was kept on “as an expert on forgery and handwriting”, says Wikipedia (with a straight face).

However, when he finally got abroad again in the 1940s, Deutsch is believed to have died, though – as you’d expect – nobody is sure quite how, where or even when.

Might he be the Somerton Man, found dead on an Australian beach in 1948?

Facially, the photos do look quite similar: they were of similar age, and they seem to share the same propensity for mystery. And dying so publicly and yet at the same time so privately has a curious rightness to it.

Up until now, I’ve hated every single speculative spy story floated to explain the Somerton Man that crossed my path: and yet I find myself smiling with delighted intrigue at this particular one. You know, “wouldn’t it be nice if…?”

And surely the best part of it all is that Arnold Deutsch’s fingerprints must surely be somewhere – Nigel West would know, wouldn’t he? Rupert, my man, have you still got a copy of Deutsch’s file upstairs? We have a nice set of fingerprints to compare it with… 🙂

20Sep 2014

This is how we find out who the Somerton Man man was (fingers crossed)…

by nickpelling ⋅ 38 Comments

Right now, I think there is a ~35% chance that the Somerton Man was a Russian merchant seaman who had worked on a WWII Lend-Lease ship bringing goods from America to Vladivostok on the Pacific Route. We know his physical appearance, height, fingerprints, and his rough date of birth: and that he was found dead on a South Australian beach on 1st December 1948.

What struck me last night was that this might well be all we need to work with.

So at long last, I’ve finally formed a Somerton Man plan. Here’s what I’ll do (though it won’t happen in a day or even a week):-

(1) Find the Soviet crew lists for Lend-Lease ships landing on the West Coast of America during 1941-1945 (e.g. via Ancestry.com or elsewhere), and merge them into a single list.

Once this is filtered for merchant seamen of the right age (and I’ll happily take your suggestions as to what age range to filter against), my estimate is that I should have ~250 names to work with.

(2) Find out if any of these were alive in 1949 and beyond.

As I recall, there is a Maritime Cemetery in Vladivostok. My guess is that a fair few of these merchant seamen will be buried there: hopefully I’ll be able to find a nice administrative list or database to work with.

I estimate that this should reduce the list to something closer to 100 names. If other usable secondary databases exist, they might help get the list down to ~50 names.

Once I get to this point, it seems that there are four parallel strategies to follow, each of which might independently work:-

(3a) Trace these 50 names further using other Soviet databases. (Though because this was the era of Stalin’s Russia, there might well be rather less to go on than one would normally hope for).

(3b) Find crew-lists of Soviet ships arriving in or leaving from Australian ports 1943-1948 (and/or Australian alien seamen registration forms), and cross-reference against these.

(3c) Network through to retired Russian merchant seamen who worked on Lend-Lease ships and see what / who they remember. (There are, as I also recall, Homes for Retired Seamen in Vladivostok, which would seem to be a good place to start).

(3d) See if I can get a Vladivostok journalist interested enough in the story to try to run it in a paper. Who knows what might come out of it.

Perhaps one of these will work, perhaps it won’t. But it certainly beats sitting around trying to guess what “MLIABO” might conceivably stand for (“Making Love Is A Bad Option”, etc). 😉

18Sep 2014

Somerton Man and WWII Lend-Lease…?

by nickpelling ⋅ 1 Comment

From almost the start of the 1948 investigation into the Somerton Man, South Australian police suspected that he (a) might have worked as a Third Officer on a merchant ship, and (b) might originally have come from Eastern Europe. Add to this his connection with a nurse living in Glenelg who later claimed to have spoken Russian when she was younger, and you get what I think is a reasonably meaty hypothesis to work with – that he was a Russian merchant seaman.

But because he had an American comb, some clothes with American stitching, and a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, it also seems that he had visited America (or perhaps have some long-standing fascination with it). So how might all these pieces link together?

One fascinating maritime connection between the USA and USSR from around this time is the Lend-Lease program, which was launched by the Lend-Lease Act of 11th March 1941: note that the USA was still (theoretically) neutral then, because it did not officially join the war until 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Though Lend-Lease started a lot slower than had been intended (and there are plenty of theories about why this should have been so), it lasted until 1945 and covered all manner of items… on a truly epic scale, as per the following alphabetic list (which I found here):-

Airplanes 22,150 units; Anti-submarine ships 105 ships; Army shoes 15,417,000 pairs;
Building equipment in total cost US Dollars 10,910,000; Blankets 1,541,590 pieces; Buttons 257,723,498 pieces;
Cars 51,503 units; Chemicals 842,000 tons; Cotton 106,893,000 tons;
Detonators 903,000 units;
Explosives 295,600 tons;
Foodstuffs 4,478,000 tons;
Gasoil 2,670,000 tons;
Locomotives 1,981 units; Leather 49,860 tons;
Motorcycles 35,170 units; Machinery in total amount US Dollars 1,078,965,000;
Non-ferrous metals total 802,000 tons;
Pistols 12,997 pieces;
Rifles 8,218 pieces; Railways cars 11,155 units; Radar 445 units;
Sub-machine guns 131,633 pieces; Ship’s Engine 7,784 units; Spirits 331,066 liters; Cargo Ships – 123 units;
Tanks 12,700 units; Trucks 375,883 units; Tractors 8,071 units; Torpedo 197 units; Tires 3,786,000 pieces;

(In fact, Russia finally settled its Lend-Lease debt only in August 2006, but that’s another story entirely.)

This vast array of items travelled on at least 123 Lend-Lease ships, and by a variety of sea routes:-

Pacific 8,244,000 tons (47.1% of total volume);
Caspian via Iran 4,160,000 tons (23.8%);
Arctic 3,964,000 tons (22.6%);
Black Sea 681 tons (3.9%);
Soviet Arctic Route 452,000 tons (2.6%);
Grand Total 17,501,000 tons (i.e. 100.0%).

For the Pacific Route (which I suspect is what we’re most interested in), ships departed ports on the USA’s west coast (“principally Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Columbia River ports”). The Japanese would often intercept and examine ships on this route, because as part of the USSR-Japan Neutrality Pact, it could not be used for military cargo. These ships usually docked in the heavily-congested port of Vladivostok, before having their cargo carried 5,000 miles West by the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Also as part of this agreement, Japan only allowed the USA-supplied ships used on the Pacific route to be crewed with Russians. Crew was typically a mix of USSR merchant seamen and poorly paid USSR Navy armed guards.

Unlike the Atlantic crossing, Pacific Lend-Lease ships usually sailed individually rather than in convoy: but they were in greatest danger from submarines – German, Japanese, and American submarines all sank some Russian ships (sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally).

Incidentally, one of the most famous Lend-Lease Pacific sea captains was Anna Shchetinina, who wrote a book about her experience called “On the Seas and Beyond the Seas” («На морях и за морями») (though after WW2 she worked in the Baltic).

Might the Somerton Man have been a Soviet seaman from a merchant ship that was lost in WW2? I found a list of Soviet ships that were lost in the Pacific: but the only one with unaccounted seamen seemed to be the Uzbekistan (though this ship is marked as “Redelivered” in a different list):-

01.04.1943 – Uzbekistan (Узбекистан – one of USSR republics); Cargo ship / Far East State Shipping Company / 3400 BRT / North Western Coast USA / Wrecked / No information about losses.

Or possibly the Ilich (which doesn’t appear on the list of Lend-Lease ships, so probably wasn’t one):-

4.06.1944 – Ilich (Ильич – Second name of Lenin); Cargo passenger ship / 4166 BRT / Far East State Shipping Company / Capt.I.S.Sergeev / Port of Portland, USA / She sank alongside of berth due to unknown reasons / 1 crew (A.Arekhpaeva) was lost and 66 crew were rescued.

Or perhaps even Soviet submarine L-16, which was torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-25 on October 11, 1942 “on the approach to San Francisco while sailing in surface position, and sank.” More detail on this very interesting (and well-illustrated) page.

I really don’t know: at this stage, I’m just starting to find my way around this little slice of 20th century history, so this is more of a research log than a cipher history post. But I thought you’d like to see what’s going on here. 🙂

* * * * *

Voynich pub meet, 28th September 2014…

by nickpelling ⋅ 6 Comments

Every once in a while I set up an open-to-all Voynich pub meet in an historic London pub: and, prompted by the imminent visit of a German print journalist, the time has swung around for another one.

It’ll be on 28th September 2014 at 7pm onwards, and once again at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic Thameside London pub with its own handy pirate gallows outside. (I’m told this is also useful for rapacious bankers, though sadly still rather underutilized in this respect.)

In case of reasonable weather, the chances are that we’ll be sitting in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left just after the main bar, and continue through to an outside area. But in case of not-so-good weather, troll around the various floors of the pub until you find a table with a well-used copy of “Le Code Voynich” on it, that’ll almost certainly be the one. 🙂

Incidentally, another date for your diary this coming week is International Talk Like A Pirate Day (19th September). This is mainly useful for telling bad pirate jokes, e.g. what is a pirate’s favourite Star Wars character? Arrrgh2-D2. Or Jarrrgh Jarrrgh Binks. Or Queen Arrrghmidala. Or possibly even Darrrghth Vader. You choose!

13Sep 2014

The Somerton Man’s grave…

by nickpelling ⋅ 193 Comments

Gordon Cramer was recently looking at Paul Lawson’s 8th June 1949 work diary entry relating to the plaster cast that he was making of the Somerton Man, and noted this interesting-looking page:

Police Job
Interview with Detectives (Brown + 1)
Ring from Constable Dinham re disposal of original body

Gordon quickly builds his own theories on top of why the word “disposal” was used, but it turns out that if we follow the timeline of what happened, it all makes sense.

According to a 30th May 1949 Adelaide News story, “The SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association secretary (Mr. Alan Saunders) said today his association would pay burial costs, to prevent the victim being buried as a pauper.“. This is the first mention I’ve found of an actual burial.

Then, according to the 14th June 1949 Adelaide News, the burial itself took place at 9.30am of that morning. The service was carried out by Captain E. J. Webb of the Salvation Army, who said at the end (according to Gerry Feltus’ book, p.85) “Yes, this man has someone to love him. He is known only to God.”

Originally, only a simple wooden stake saying “UNKNOWN SOMERTON BODY” was placed there, but the headstone we see today was added a few days after the funeral by Mr. A. Collins, a Keswick monumental mason.

So it all makes sense. As far as Paul Lawson knew on the 8th June 1949, the original body (i.e. not the plaster cast he was making!) was to have been disposed of in a pauper’s burial: but a last-minute donation by the SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association at around the same time secured a proper burial, while an after-the-event donation by a local monumental mason turned the grave into something that would last.

According to the (1978) “Somerton Beach Mystery” documentary by Stuart Littlemore, flowers were left on the grave in the spring (though not every year) by an unidentified person. So perhaps Captain Webb might just have been wrong.

04Sep 2014

Mini-update on Feynman Cipher #2 (F2)…

by nickpelling ⋅ 2 Comments

If there’s a reasonable chance Feynman Cipher #2 (“F2”) is an exotic transposition cipher, it struck me that it might be a good idea to apply a whole load of exotic transpositions, and then use a really simple test to try to order them according to some minimized metric.

The metric I chose was the number of unique letter pairs appearing in the transposed cipher, simply because even a Vigenere should respond to that (for a reasonable-sized cipher). So… here is the bit of C code I wrote:-

#include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <memory.h>


const char F2[] =	/* Note: 261 = 9 * 29 */

"XUKEXWSLZJUAXUNKIGWFSOZRAWURO"

"RKXAOSLHROBXBTKCMUWDVPTFBLMKE"

"FVWMUXTVTWUIDDJVZKBRMCWOIWYDX"

"MLUFPVSHAGSVWUFWORCWUIDUJCNVT"

"TBERTUNOJUZHVTWKORSVRZSVVFSQX"

"OCMUWPYTRLGBMCYPOJCLRIYTVFCCM"

"UWUFPOXCNMCIWMSKPXEDLYIQKDJWI"

"WCJUMVRCJUMVRKXWURKPSEEIWZVXU"

"LEIOETOOFWKBIUXPXUGOWLFPWUSCH";
#define WIDTH	29

#define HEIGHT	9
int count_unique_pairs(const char *cipher, const int * order)

{

	int i, j, n;

	int curr, last;

	int count[26][26];
	memset(count, 0, sizeof(count));
	n = 0;

	curr = -1;

	for (i = 0; i < WIDTH; i++)

	{

		for (j = 0; j < HEIGHT; j++)

		{

			last = curr;

			curr = cipher[order[j]*WIDTH+i] - 'A';

			if ((last >= 0) && (count[last][curr]++ == 0))

				n++;

		}

	}

	return n;

}
int best_pair_count = 10000000;

void find_order_with_least_unique_pairs(const int * old_order, int index) { if (index < HEIGHT) { int new_order[HEIGHT]; int i; for (i = index; i < HEIGHT; i++) { memcpy(new_order, old_order, sizeof(new_order)); new_order[index] = old_order[i]; new_order[i] = old_order[index]; find_order_with_least_unique_pairs(new_order, index + 1); } } else { int count = count_unique_pairs(F2, old_order); #if 0 if (count > 188) return; #else if (count > best_pair_count) return; #endif best_pair_count = count; printf("pairs = %d, order = { %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d }\n", count, old_order[0], old_order[1], old_order[2], old_order[3], old_order[4], old_order[5], old_order[6], old_order[7], old_order[8]); } } const int default_order[9] = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 }; int main(int argc, char argv[]) { find_order_with_least_unique_pairs(default_order, 0); return 0; }

It didn't reveal a great deal (and pasting it into WordPress lost all the formatting, *sigh*), but I thought I'd post it here anyway. :-)

02Sep 2014

The Voynich Manuscript at the Folger Shakespeare Library!

by nickpelling ⋅ 128 Comments

Ever since Hans P. Kraus donated the Voynich Manuscript to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969, it has been on an exceedingly short leash. (Has it even left New Haven? I don’t believe so.)

Well, that’s about to change. As part of a special “Decoding the Renaissance” exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library from 11th November 2014 to 1st March 2015, the Voynich Manuscript will be on show in Washington (free admittance, too!). The Folger people haven’t yet said how they plan to display it or illustrate it, but I’m sure they will be eager to make the most of this hens’-teethingly rare opportunity.

The overall exhibition is curated by Renaissance historian Bill Sherman (his excellent “John Dee: the Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance” sits on the shelf next to me as I type), who will be giving a ‘public panel’ discussion with Rene Zandbergen at 7.30pm on 11th November 2014 to open the exhibition (tickets to the talk at $10/$15 are already on sale).

But… why the Folger, why Washington, why the Voynich Manuscript? The answer is simple: what links all the parts of the exhibition is the famous Washington-based code-breaker William F. Friedman. From his early days working on Baconian claims at Colonel George Fabyan’s “Riverbank” complex, to his Index of Coincidence, to his work breaking the Japanese “Purple” code, and right through to his long-standing interest in the Voynich Manuscript, Friedman was a fascinating and complex character.

Hence anyone wanting to get the most out of the exhibition should probably prepare themselves with a second-hand copy of Ronald W. Clark’s (1977) “The Man Who Broke Purple”, a biography of William Friedman. It’s not the whole story (government codebreaker stories rarely are), and it skirts unsubtly around Friedman’s depression and related problems during WW2: but even so, it’s far from a bare-bones sketch, with plenty of meat for interested readers to sink their teeth into.

Do I wish I had got the public panel gig with Bill and Rene? Of course I do, I’m only human. But it turns out that even though this is all fascinating news in its own right, there’s much, much more afoot to do with the Voynich Manuscript that is planned to be played out during the remainder of 2014. So, much as I applaud the Folger’s exhibition’s honouring and celebrating the man who (very probably) was the greatest code-breaker of all time, this is in many ways merely the antipasto for a very much larger cryptological feast that is approaching…

…but more on that as it happens. Don’t say I don’t spoil you. 🙂

30Aug 2014

And the Somerton Man’s surname was…

by nickpelling ⋅ 138 Comments

As normal, the answer turns out to be so painfully, staring-us-all-in-the-face obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to type.

From what I can see, the most likely scenario is that the Somerton Man’s surname was surely…

Штейн

i.e., that he was a Russian merchant seaman called Stein, who I believe died from natural causes (possibly, as Byron Deveson suggests, of neurosyphilis) in the Glenelg house of Jessica Harkness during the evening of 30th November 1948.

The reason is that I suspect “JEStyn” = “J(essica) E(llen) Штейн”, and that the two met in Royal North Shore Hospital Sydney, where she was a trainee nurse and he was a patient (where, pace Byron Deveson, he was perhaps having his syphilis treated with penicillin? Who can tell?). Whether or not they were actually married, it seems that in 1944 she felt confident enough of their relationship to take the Russian seaman’s surname when signing her name in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.

It’s a pretty specific claim, so how can it be disproved?

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