Cipher Mysteries

24Jan 2014

Somerton Man thread round-up…

Researchers and commenters have been asking me lots of questions about the Somerton Man over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d round up a load of stray threads in a single post. Hence the following may be a bit bitty, but it is what it is, I hope it’s helpful!

1. Pakies

I asked Derek Abbott why he included the only-sporadically used Pakies guest book in his Somerton Man primary source material page. Was it simply the presence of the Nosovs and Hellmuth Hendon? His reply:-

[Hellmuth] Hendon is there who was linked to [Joseph Saul Haim] Marshall. Also Xavier Herbert is there who is linked to [Alf] Boxall. Also a Russian ballet troupe is there. […] Of course, there is zero hard evidence that [Jestyn] was connected to Marshall….but it seems plausible. […] The bottom line is [that] the Pakies guestbook could be useful for drawing up an interconnectivity map.

2. Jestyn Handwriting

Derek Abbott has closely compared the Jestyn handwriting and signature on Alf Boxall’s book with Jessie Thomson’s handwriting and signature and says “it is a definite match. No doubt about that.” He has also shown me a 1940s autograph book where Jessie Harkness copied (most of) a stanza from Omar Khayyam (“[…]Fill the cup that clears / today of past regrets and future fears / Tomorrow? Why tomorrow I may be / Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.“). It looks to be the same hand (though slightly more free-flowing than in Boxall’s copy).

3. The Jestyn “E”

I asked Derek Abbott about the “E”. He replied:-

You will notice the signature is in a fountain pen and the ink of the E is darker. This says to me that she was trying to write an ‘e’, but the ink splodged at bit, so she reworked it into an ‘E’ to make it clearer. […] And she does do her capital E’s in a way that would make it read JEstyn.

I also asked Gerry Feltus what he thought had happened with the “E”:-

I noticed the lighter writing on the name JEstyn just after I first saw it and I was going to refer to it in my book. I tried to find a suitable explanation and I thought maybe she had previously written the poem in the book and handed it to Alf. Alf then may have asked/suggested she sign it and it was done with a different pen. Maybe! It was too confusing so I left it out.

Was the “E” original? Yes, according to Derek Abbott:-

As for Boxall adding the E himself later, I don’t think so: 1. He didn’t know how she wrote her capital E’s and 2. The fountain pen ink matches (I’ve seen the original).

3. The Jestyn Drawing

I asked Gerry Feltus about the drawing at the front of Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat: he was sure it was printed, not drawn. But I’ve looked at a few other Rubaiyat editions, and none seems to have anything quite like that. So, Gerry is sure it’s part of the book, but I’m still somewhat unsure quite what to make of it. Here’s the top part of it from near the end of the ABC documentary:-

4. The Jestyn Pronunciation

The 1978 ABC documentary voice-over pronounced “Jestyn” to rhyme with “Test In”, which is how John Ruffles (who heard Alf Boxall pronounce it, according to Derek Abbott), Gerry Feltus, and indeed online commenter “daughter of Jestyn” all say it was pronounced. Right now, my suspicion remains that Jessie – for whatever reason – may well have first introduced herself to Alf Boxall as “Jess Styn”, which he heard as a single word. Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t (don’t shoot me, that’s how hypotheses work): hopefully we will find out one way or the other before very long…

5. NAA

The Willen Styn WW1 document I mentioned the other day has now been scanned and posted to me by the NAA. It’s apparently quite small: we’ll have to wait for the mail pixies to wing it halfway around the world, see what it says…

6. Adam Yulch’s Laundry Mark Index

This wandering librarian blogger wondered (in 2011) whether someone had tried comparing the Somerton Man’s laundry tag to Adam Yulch’s index of 100,000 American laundry marks. Haven’t followed this up myself, but it might be interesting, thought you’d like to know. 🙂

7. Ronald Francis’ Copy In The Car

According to Gerry Feltus, “Ronald Francis” and his wife specifically requested that his real name not be published. He is a very elderly gentleman, and may even have passed away by now.

23Jan 2014

Some nice WW2 pigeon pictures…

by nickpelling ⋅ 5 Comments

It’s been a bit quiet on the WW2 pigeon cipher front (the GCHQ Historian has been working hard to try to find some Typex rotor wiring diagrams for us, but so far without any luck, *sigh*), but I thought you might like to see some nice action shots of pigeons and pigeon handlers from WW2 archives.

H98.100/4278 Shows two of the crew of an Australian Lancaster Squadron with their pigeons before leaving for a raid on Berlin – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

(The remainder of the photos were taken by Army photographer H. J. Nott.)

H2000.200/418 A.T.S. woman being shown how to release a pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/419 Attaching a message to a bird for dispatch – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/420 Officer in the field writing a message for dispatch by pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/421 Releasing the pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/422 Last flight of B.L.A. war pigeons – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/423 Releasing pigeons in the field – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/424 Attaching message cylinder to pigeon’s leg – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/424 Attaching message cylinder to pigeons leg (closeup) – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/425 “Premier” the pigeon arriving home with a message – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/426 Showing A.T.S. woman how to attach a message – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/427 Birds arriving back in lofts after training flight – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/428 Message transferred from pigeon to dispatch rider – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/430 Loading pigeon into special container for dropping over occupied territory – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/431 Pigeon dispatch riders on the road – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/432 “Tommy” the pigeon (NURP.41.DHZ56) being awarded the Dicken medal for distinguished war service – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/432 “Tommy” the pigeon being awarded the Dicken medal for distinguished war service (closeup) – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

And finally, a couple of photos by H. J. Nott that appeared in a story reported in the Ottawa Journal, 12 January 1945, p.2:-

Canadian corvette, H.M.C.S. “Mayflower”, was given an unexpected chance to help speed the victory. The tired pigeon carried important information from a French patriot regarding gun emplacements and flying bomb platforms. It was sent aboard the “Mayflower” which broke wireless silence to send the information in code to shore authorities. The picture at the left shows the pigeon being passed in a bag from the tug to the Canadian corvette, and the one on the right shows the well-bred and mannerly visitor taking its ease by a porthole of the wardroom on board the “Mayflower”. Lieut Douglas Marlen, Halifax, was senior officer of the convoy, and the message written in French was translated by Sigmn. Andre Belland, Montreal.

H2000.200/434 Pigeon being passed from British tug to Canadian corvette – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/433 Weary pigeon resting on board the H.M.C.S. Mayflower, the ship sent its message on in code – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

21Jan 2014

A Brand New New World / Nahuatl Voynich Manuscript Theory…

by nickpelling ⋅ 72 Comments

The American Botanical Council (who neither I nor many of you had heard of before this week) are celebrating their 100th issue of their quarterly peer-reviewed journal “HerbalGram” (it says in this press release here) by publishing an article revealing the hitherto undecrypted herbal secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.

The two authors, Arthur O. Tucker Ph.D (“botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbarium at Delaware State University“) and Rexford H. Talbert (“a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA“) found themselves so inspired by the similarity between the plant drawn on the Voynich Manuscript’s f1v and xiuhamolli / xiuhhamolli “the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico [on f9r]” that they concluded that the Voynich Manuscript must not only be post-Columbus, but also post-Conquest Nueva España (i.e. after 1519-1521).

Voynichese, they believe, is therefore nothing more than a New World polyglot studded with “loan-words […] from Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Mixtec“, but which is overwhelmingly in an “extinct dialect, keeping much of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets intact… for now.”

So… does this all reduce to nothing more than an “ethnobotanical cold case”; and if it does, have these two plucky independent authors actually cracked it? In the interests of open-mindedness and fair debate, you might want to flick through their paper for yourself here before you read the rest of my article dismissing their historical naivety and overhopeful botano-centricity.

What, you already think I’m being unfair to their abductive logic? For a start, if “abductive logic” isn’t a sixty-dollar term that means nothing much more than “generating hypotheses sufficient to explain observations” (and normally only a carefully-selected subset of observations to boot), I wasted my time studying logic at University.

I hate to start out by pointing out the ridiculously obvious here, but here in Voynich Research Land, we’re already up to our necks (and gasping for anguished breath) in plausible-sounding hypotheses that similarly seek to explain other carefully-selected observations. Selective abductivity is the disease, not the cure, and what they’ve done is terrifically selective.

The proper Intellectual History methodology (of which their methodology is the palest of shadows) is to take on board the sum-total of all the evidence across all the different analytical historical domains, and only then try to construct abductive hypotheses that explain the whole lot simultaneously. Here, the two authors found themselves driven towards a post-New Spain New World origin by a single apparently persuasive piece of evidence, and then rippled through the consequences of what that would have to mean for that portion of the rest of the evidence they allowed themselves to consider.

What they didn’t consider: the demonstrably 15th century vellum in play (radiocarbon dating), 15th century digit shapes (in the quiration), 15th century number forms (in the quiration), 15th century contractions (on the zodiac roundel hand) and 15th century parallel hatching (in several drawings). So, that’s evidence from the domains of codicology, palaeography, and Art History immediately consigned to their great big wastepaper basket of Not Examined Here Stuff.

However, the way that they bracket these multiple classes of evidence is to say “but such spurious claims [of pre-Rudolfine origins] have channelized scholars’ thinking and have not been particularly fruitful“. In fact, what has held back Voynich research most over recent decades is the set of spurious claims of post-Columbine origins (e.g. John Dee, Edward Kelley, Cardan grille hoaxes, sunflowers, etc), of which these authors’ paper is merely the most recent example. For when you bracket out evidence from multiple parallel research domains, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Another thing that annoyed me was that even though they tentatively identified Voynichese as Nahuatl, they nowhere mentioned John D. Comegys (twin brother of Cipher Mysteries regular James Comegys), who for years has championed a Nahuatl Voynich link. Even Kircher & Becker’s ridiculous book identified Voynich as a polyglot ~~mess~~ mix of “l’allemand, le suédois, le néerlandais, le latin, l’anglais, avec quelque notions de gaélique et de nahuatl“, and hence dated the object to “entre 1570 et 1610”. Hence it doesn’t seem to me that Tucker and Talbot even attempted any kind of literature review beyond a grudging scrollthrough of Wikipedia (ha!) and voynich.nu.

They also seem unaware of the light painter / heavy painter debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that all the paints the manuscript presents are original, despite the evidence to the contrary), and the bifolio reordering debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that the foliation is original, despite the evidence to the contrary). Oh, and they seem completely unaware of the post-1990 debate over the Voynich “sunflowers”, with their account starting and stopping with Hugh O’Neill in 1944.

They also bracket out the “medieval German script” on f116v (which they consistently mis-spell as “Michiton Olababas”) as a freestanding mystery, apparently unaware that Voynichese letters are embedded within both this and the marginalia at the top of f17r (which I found in 2006 with a UV blacklamp, but which were later photographed by the Austrian documentary makers in 2009).

Many other things annoyed me (their treatment of the Codex Osuna, the “maiorica”, etc, etc), but I’ve got to 850 words already and that’s more than enough annoyance for one post. But one last aside…

What I came to hate about the Voynich mailing list was that some time around 2006 it had subsumed the trendy-but-ghastly management meeting notion that “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” (usually said in a dippy, please-don’t-be-a-hater voice). Actually, if you have a whole array of basic physical evidence to work with, yes there definitely is such a thing as a bad idea. And the sooner people putting forward such bad ideas get to take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying la-la-la at all the thousands of pieces of ‘inconvenient evidence’ they’d rather bracket to tell their story, the sooner we’ll get to hear some good ideas instead.

In short, I would be delighted (and would indeed be the first to cheer) if Tucker and Talbot had put forward a good idea. But I think they have failed to do so in numerous different ways, all of which were easily avoidable.

15Jan 2014

Errors in the Voynich Manuscript…

by nickpelling ⋅ 29 Comments

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Voynich hoax ~~muppet~~ advocate, stop reading this right now, otherwise you’ll only get yourself all cross and bothered, and you’ll forget to take your medication or something else just as bad.

The rest of you, particularly those who have looked at Voynichese with a bit of care and close attention, should already understand that there are lots of patterns present there, all at the same time and on many different levels: and that any sensible explanation for the internal structure would need to give a reasonable account of these numerous simultaneous patterns. In short, it’s not enough to say ‘a clever table could generate them‘: there’s far more going on than just that.

At the same time, it’s well known that there are very few apparent corrections within the Voynichese text itself; while I’ve also presented a fair bit of evidence in the past that indicates that the text was copied onto the page (say, by one or more scribes copying from wax tablets), rather than composed on the page per se. What kind of account could tie all these diverse observations together?

Today’s proposed explanation is that Voynichese may well be even more heavily structured than we tend to accept, and that copying errors (of which I think there will prove to be plenty) were simply left intact on the page rather than corrected. As opposed to the Tamam Shud cipher (which appears to have an entire line crossed out!), I suspect that here the principle will turn out to be far closer to Omar Khayyám’s well-known:

“…The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it…”

Literary aside over, let’s look at the first paragraph of a typical Voynich page (I was looking at f111r the other day following an email by Torsten T, but more or less any would do just as well) and where I’m reasonably sure the copying errors are to be found on it:-

In Takahashi’s transcription:-

kcholchdar. shar. aiip. chepchedy. […]
doiin. sheeky. okeey. okeey. qeeal. […]
dsheedy. lkeedy. chckhy. lchedy. qo[…]
saiin. oteedy. qokeey. daiin. oke[…]
saiin. sheekshy. ol. shedy. chok[…]

Error #1: I don’t believe that “aiip” is correct. Rather, what I think happened here was that the downstroke of the “p” gallows overlapped the terminal upstroke of an “n”, probably on the wax tablet. Hence, I suspect this should read “aiinp”. Philip Neal has long pointed out that words ending in gallows characters are unusual and tend to be found on the top line of pages and paragraphs: I suspect that this is a typical example of that phenomenon.

Error #2: I don’t believe that “oiin” would ever be correct Voynichese, i.e. it’s just a miscopied “aiin” (of which there are many examples to be found on just about every page), hence this should probably read “daiin”. Curiously, though, the instance stats of aiin-family groups change between A pages and B pages: aiin appears 5x more often than ain in A pages, but only 1.6x more often in B pages.

Error #3: “akeey” (as it appears on the page, though Takahashi-san has autocorrected it to the more plausible “okeey”) should almost certainly be “okeey”. Basically, the (ok:ak) and (ot:at) instance ratios are both about 100:1, which brings copying errors to my mind rather than rare linguistic features.

Error #4: “qeeal” just looks wrong (it’s the only instance in the whole VMs). But then again, there are only 4 “qoal”s and there are no “qochal”s or “qoshal”s at all (which surprised me a little bit, but hand-building Markov models of Currier A and Currier B is a job I’ve been putting off for too long). There are plenty of “qokal”s (228) and “qotal”s (72), as well as a few “qopal”s (3), “qokeal”s (5), and “qoteal”s (2). Again, these last two look like potential copying errors (i.e. qokeal -> qokal, qoteal -> qotal)

Anyway, that points to (I think) a likely four copying errors out of 56 words (or 338 characters), i.e. an average of roughly one every 14 words (or, alternatively, one per line), which – I think – is probably a pretty good figure for a scribe copying a ciphertext. At some point, I ought to repeat the exercise on a bigger sample, see if the error rate holds true (and for both Hand 1 and Hand 2, etc).

13Jan 2014

Barack Obama and the Somerton Man…

by nickpelling ⋅ 6 Comments

What has Barack Obama got to do with the Somerton Man (an unidentified man found dead on a beach south of Adelaide in 1st December 1948)?

The surprising answer (as of a couple of days ago) is that people have tried adapting the same South Australian birth certificate (that of a certain David Jeffrey Bomford, born in Adelaide in 1959) to undermine or falsify both of their histories.

Obama Mama

The story about President Obama’s faked-up Kenyan birth certificate is well-known, though I don’t believe it has yet been definitely told anywhere. What happened is that a group of conspiracy theorists (known in the United States as “Birthers”) asserted before Obama’s election in 2008 that he had been born in Kenya (not Hawaii), and so was ineligible to be elected. All that was preventing their taking him to court was the lack of any supporting evidence…

So when, in mid-2009, digital photos of what appeared to be Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate appeared, Birthers (specifically Orly Taitz) were quick to rush them to court to submit appropriate motions for his disqualification etc. However, the suitably-embossed and plausibly-aged document shown in those images was (of course) a hoax.

KenyanBCPunkster

A while later, the creator of the fake document apparently surfaced as a commenter answering questions about the whole affair on the Free Republic website, under the pseudonym “KenyanBCPunkster”. So, without further ado, let’s try the obvious question first: why would he (I’m using “he” for convenience here, but I don’t actually know either way) do such a thing? His answer:-

It was after having been exposed to the whole “Birther” saga.

I watched as people would get the Birthers all worked up claiming they had finally found the smoking gun that would finally end the Obama candidacy, only for that smoking gun to never materialize. Like the Hawaiian birth certificate with Obama’s name as Barry Soetoro that some blogger claimed GOP operatives had got their hands on in Hawaii, the Michelle Obama tapes that Editor Korir claimed to have, etc.

One day I saw a “Birther” lamenting that they knew Obama was born in Kenya, but they just didn’t have the smoking gun.

I thought, what if they had one? If only for a little while. Then I thought what a smoking gun might look like. So I spent an afternoon one day and created it. Never having any idea that it would go as viral as it did. I figured it’d create a bit of a rumble in the blogosphere and then quickly die out.

(He also denied having been paid for making the fake document, or for posting on the Free Republic website.)

How he made it was also quite straightforward: “after a lengthy image search for [sensible-looking mid-20th century colonial] birth certificates” on Google Images, he found one that had been uploaded to a Bomford family tree website. Though it was from South Australia (specifically Adelaide) rather than Kenya, it was close enough to work with.

He then used the fields on that form as a starting point for creating his own Kenyan birth certificate-like document, filled the blanks out with an old typewriter (I think), added a plausible-looking embossed seal, aged it (probably with cold tea or something similar), and messed around with it for a bit until it basically looked the part. He added in another comment:-

I left some fields out that were in the original in order to make it better fit the aspect ratio of an 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. I also used some of the same information for debunking purposes. Such as the “5733,” and the book and page numbers at the bottom. I kept the names of the registrar and district registrar, changing only their first initials. I made up the entire name of the deputy registrar to make it a Kenyan name.

So, what the guy did apparently was neither hugely sophisticated nor time-consuming: and by retaining details from the original certificate (such as the registrar’s surname etc), he pretty much ensured that it would be exposed before very long (as indeed it was). But, as he pointed out, it went far more viral than he thought. Sometimes these things just do – for example, it doesn’t take much of a geek angle for a page to get randomly Slashdotted, you just can’t tell in advance.

There was only one tiny bit of historical research he did, which was to pick a date (17th February 1964) “just after the time Stanley had filed for divorce from Obama Sr“. But Google helped him figure that out at speed, so that weren’t no big thang: his other comments betray a fairly nuanced understanding of US politics and politicians, so the rest he already knew.

Did the prank all go according to plan? Well… no, not really. When asked, he replied:-

[…] the one thing that has caused me to regret having done this […is that…] there are some out there who are so completely unhinged from reality that they actually believe that David Bomford’s birth certificate, that had been sitting on the Bomford family website for years before all of this, is the “fake.” […]

I only came here to set the record straight because I couldn’t believe there were people so gullible that even at this late date they’re still trying to claim it’s real even though I intentionally made it easy to debunk by most anyone who wasn’t completely detached from reality.

Incidentally, the nicest put-down from the 3500-post thread was when he was asked “Now why don’t you do something good with your talents?” His deadpan reply:-

I do.

Just so you know, the original David Bomford birth certificate image looked like this (though when the story went viral, it had to be taken down to prevent the server overloading), which I got from here:-

I Just Met A Troll Called “Maria”

So far so TL;DR. But compared to KenyanBCPunkster’s efforts, our recent Somerton Man hoaxer was a little more… Photoshop-centric, let’s say.

“Maria” (who posted the link to the image, and whose IP address has also been used to post comments to the blog under the name “Janice”, make of that coincidence what you will) did none of the tricky things that KenyanBCPunkster did to make his fake feel like a suitable historical artefact: in fact, what we’re looking at is a fairly crude bit of digital editing without much finesse.

However, what she (I assume “she”, but again I have no idea either way) did do reasonably well was to weave together the dates and places that people (and indeed trolls) would dearly like to be true about the secret history linking the Somerton Man and Jessie Harkness.

For instance, the age (41) and place of birth (Moscow) of the unnamed father were consistent with the Somerton Man and with Jessie’s recently-revealed ability to speak Russian: while the child’s year of birth (1942) was consistent with the year Jessie Harkness started at nursing school, etc. Its details dovetailed well enough with the facts to give it the immediate buzz of a real (but lost) thing, while the redacted grey rectangles helped it feel like something suppressed and slightly dangerous.

When I received it on Saturday morning, I approved it straightaway, and then took my son to his final ice skating lesson at Hampton Court Palace. (We got there early, and ended up having a lively discussion about which statues were old and which were modern, all very apposite.) I came home, looked at the alleged birth certificate full screen and saw immediately that it was a BFF (“Big Fat Fake”). *sigh*

But the whole experience led me to a horrible realisation. The thing about trolled hoaxes is that they encourage you to see what you want to see: and to my surprise, it turned out that what I actually wanted wasn’t a solution to the Tamam Shud cipher, but to be freed from waking up every morning to an blog inbox of sweary, unhappy, fake-id, delusional, nonsensical trolled comments, most of which come from individuals who plainly know better but choose to act worse. Shame on you.

In general, my own view of history has long been that only one question – “What happened?” (by which I mean what physically happened, as opposed to “what was going on in a particular individual’s head?”) – actually demands any attention, and any evidence that brings us closer to answering that question is a good thing.

Yet having said that, if trolls are prepared to fake evidence to support their wishful or delusional agendas and narratives, perhaps we should all give up and walk away. As I sometimes say, if you see a car about to crash, why jump inside it?

10Jan 2014

New Somerton Man page…

by nickpelling ⋅ 371 Comments

I’ve started the year on a positive foot, by knuckling down to a gritty task I’ve been putting off for ages – writing a dedicated Somerton Man page for the blog. OK, it’s not going to oust Gerry Feltus’ splendidly detailed “The Unknown Man”, but it covers quite a lot of ground in a thousand words. And the pictures are all basically on the money. Which is nice.

However, the reason I had been putting this off was that I wanted it to somehow reflect the edges of our knowledge about the Somerton Man, rather than get knotted up in a whole load of Wikipedia-esque meanderings. (I’m not a committee, and I didn’t want to write like one.) And yet the big question is surely… where are the edges? And what exactly is the difference between an ‘edge’ and a ‘brick wall’, hmmm?

As of early 2014, I don’t think the text is going to help us, not unless Naval Intelligence in Melbourne had (and still has!) an unannotated photograph of the cipher page – basically, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that we’ve been starting from a codicologically broken version of the page that will never sufficiently support us in our attempts to read it. And so all we have is The Man himself, in all his unidentifiable obscurity.

But we do also have the nurse, the mysterious Jestyn / Jessie / Jessica / Jo / Tina / Tyna. These days, one question I keep coming back to is whether “Jestyn” makes sense in the way she (apparently) claimed it did. I struggle to believe that particular story wholeheartedly; and when I asked Gerry Feltus about this recently, he seemed to share more than a few of my doubts. In fact, it was a bit spooky that we had travelled substantially different paths but reached almost identical positions.

At the same time, while I (almost) always enjoy Pete Bowes’ Somerton Man musings and thoughts, there’s something about his speculative take on the Unknown Man’s underdaks that rings true for me. Really, only someone answering to the name “Keane” would have “Keane” on their underpants, so I don’t honestly see any alternative to the idea that, at least some of the time, the Unknown Man did go by the name “Keane”… and if no such person existed or was missing, then it must have been a fake identity. After all, the problem with the laundry theory is that the grundies he was actually wearing had no name on. So how do you get them clean, then? That’s a mystery all of its own, I’d have thought.

I don’t know: maybe the missing link will turn out to be a Mr Keane / Styn, who changed his name as often as his underwear, and who was sweet on tiny little Jessie Harkness. Maybe Jestyn was comfortable with being Jess Styn, but didn’t want to be Jess Keane? If this is in some way right, why was the Somerton Man’s underwear Styn-free? Maybe we’ll find out in 2014, who knows!

08Jan 2014

Quick admin post – 600K, Curse, chess, pub, etc

by nickpelling ⋅ 5 Comments

Just a quicky adminy post, lots of loose nails all needing tapping in, you know how it is.

(1) Happy New Year to you all! (…unless associating happiness with a particular Western calendar is far too politically incorrect for you, in which case I don’t really know what to say).

(2) A big Thanks! going out from me to all you Cipher Mysteries visitors and subscribers, as the blog has now had 600K visitors and more than a million page hits! I know it’s just a number, but it’s a nice number and it’s mine.

(3) Right now, I’m optimistic that 2014 will be a genuinely productive year for cracking cipher mysteries – specifically, I’m more positive about the Somerton Man and d’Agapeyeff Cipher than I have been for a long time. I’ve also got lots of interesting posts planned, though Real Life will inevitably intrude on the fantasy image of Cipher Mysteries Mansions that people seem to have, hence these will doubtless take me much longer than I expect.

(4) I’ve just yesterday sold my last copy of the most recent batch of The Curse Of The Voynich, but another box of books has already been ordered and so the price of copies on Amazon Marketplace etc should be back to a practical level (i.e. not £123, ha!) within a fortnight or so.

(5) I’ve recently published a fun interactive chess ebook some of you may like, called “Chess Superminiatures” (on Amazon UK, Amazon US, etc. It contains a hundred really super miniature chess games (all under ten moves!) and a whole load of what-happened-next mini-quizzes, which are particularly good for trains or planes. If you have a Kindle and like a little bit of chess, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy this! 🙂

(6) At the moment, I’m vaguely thinking about arranging a Cipher Mysteries pub meet some time in February, so if any of you are aiming to be visiting London around then, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can arrange it to coincide: it’s always nice when we manage to make that happen.

03Jan 2014

The Somerton Man’s cipher, revisited…

by nickpelling ⋅ 30 Comments

A nice email from Byron Deveson recently prompted me to take a fresh look at the Somerton Man’s cipher page.

I used the 1802×1440 (400 dpi) scan that Professor Derek Abbott made available on his Tamam Shud Facebook page, and which Gordon Cramer kindly forwarded to me. It originally came (I believe) from the photo library at the Adelaide Advertiser: note that a version of this is on the Wikipedia page, but that looks to me to have had its contrast tweaked in the process.

Looking at this again, it seems painfully obvious (specifically from the way the marking ink failed to bleed into the paper) that what happened here was simply this:-

(1) The original page was photographed, enlarged, and fixed onto a photographic print
(2) A policeman used a marker pen to draw over the faint markings on the print
(3) The Adelaide Advertiser’s photographer photographed the annotated print

Hence I am quite sure that the long-standing belief that the SA police drew on the object itself is simply an urban myth. Conversely, the right question to ask is whether an unannotated photograph of the page still exists in the police files, because that is the one we actually need to be working from.

So… why has nobody asked this question since 1948?

30Dec 2013

The secret history of Jestyn, and Willen Styn…?

by nickpelling ⋅ 125 Comments

Some interesting Cipher Mysteries comments arrived here today from “RT”, prodding me to take a second look at something I nosed around a while back (but then promptly forgot to blog about). Here’s what he wrote:-

RT comment #1: “I think the SM was married to Jessica.”

RT comment #2: “Has anyone thought that she could have been Mrs J E Styn. Or Van Styn? […]”

RT comment #3: “I along with others have always thought she was married to him. I think that for some reason she did a runner from him met Prosper and changed her name. He tracked her down and things went sour. That is only my opinion but you need proof. I also am very certain that Robin is the SM’s son. I think that Prosper was aware of this and accepted it. It worked well for him as his parents were very wealthy and a son would enable him to collect an increased inheritance.”

For all the ideas, notions, and speculations in there, this is a splendidly romantic secret history, albeit one woefully short of actual facts (which RT freely admits). But let’s look again at the primary evidence we do have – the “Jestyn” signature in the copy of the Rubaiyat given to Alf Boxall:-

According to Gerry Feltus: when Jessie met Boxall in 1944, she knew that he was married and had two children (his second child, a daughter called Lesley, had just been born), and she had his address in Maroubra: so I think that quite why she felt the need to sign herself with a different name “Jestyn” (or “JEstyn” as Feltus writes it) in the Rubaiyat is an open (and slightly perplexing) question. And there’s definitely a gap between the “JE” part and the “styn” part.

Another unexplained question from this time is why Jessie changed her name to Thomson several years before her husband-to-be’s divorce came through. According to RT’s (admittedly unverified) story, this was because she was ‘on the run’ from her previous partner / husband: but all we actually know for sure is that she “terminated her employment as a nurse in Sydney” in 1946, moved to Mentone near her parents, and then moved to Adelaide in early 1947, where she gave birth (to Robin) in the middle of 1947, all (again) according to the ever-reliable Gerry Feltus.

Could it be, then, that the secret history of this signature is that it is actually “J. E. Styn“, and that Jessica had taken her earlier partner’s surname? I wondered about this a while back, and so did various searches (Trove etc) for “Styn” that all turned up nothing at all promising. It all seemed to be a blank.

But today, I did another trawl over broadly the same set of archives and found a single reference I had previously missed to a Willen Styn. It’s “NAA: PP14/3 DUTCH/STYN W”, containing “STYN Willen – Nationality : Dutch – [Application Form for Registration as Alien]”, dating from 1916-1920, item barcode 5143479 in Perth. If you want to see the catalogue entry, go to the National Archives of Australia, click on RecordSearch, and then search for Willen Styn. I’ve already ordered a copy of the actual record, and will let you all know when it arrives.

Note that the PP14/3 series of archives is “the Register of aliens maintained under War Precautions (Aliens Registered) Regulations 1916”, i.e. a list of foreign nationals in Australia at the time of WW1 (presumably because Styn was Dutch). The Australian archives have plenty of related immigration files from the same period (e.g. PP14/1, which I went through the index of just in case there was some kind of misspelling of Styn in there, but to no avail).

So… I’ll say it. If “Jestyn” should properly be read as “J. E. Styn”, then might the Somerton Man be the somewhat-off-the-radar Dutchman Willen Styn? Let’s go and look for some evidence, see what we turn up.

Right now, I have a sneaking suspicion that he may turn out to be even harder to track than dear old Horace Charles Reynolds… but we shall see! So this is your cue: Cipher Mysteries research legions, please descend upon the collected Australian archives and see if you can find anything – anything at all! – about the mysterious Willen Styn. Good hunting! 🙂

23Dec 2013

The d’Agapeyeff Cipher once again…

by nickpelling ⋅ 64 Comments

As is well known, Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s 1939 challenge cipher looks like this:-

75628 28591 62916 48164 91748 58464 74748 28483 81638 18174 74826 26475 83828 49175 74658 37575 75936 36565 81638 17585 75756 46282 92857 46382 75748 38165 81848 56485 64858 56382 72628 36281 81728 16463 75828 16483 63828 58163 63630 47481 91918 46385 84656 48565 62946 26285 91859 17491 72756 46575 71658 36264 74818 28462 82649 18193 65626 48484 91838 57491 81657 27483 83858 28364 62726 26562 83759 27263 82827 27283 82858 47582 81837 28462 82837 58164 75748 58162 92000

Almost all cryptanalyses of this ciphertext start from the reasonable observation that (a) this is dominated by number-pairs of the form [6/7/8/9/0][1.2.3.4.5], and that (b) these pairs have a very strongly language-like distribution:-

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 6. _0 17 12 16 11 7. _1 _9 _0 14 17 8. 20 17 15 11 17 9. 12 _3 _2 _1 _0 0. _0 _0 _0 _1 _0

To simplify discussion (and ignoring the issue of fractionation for the moment), we can assign these structured number pairs to letters in an obvious sort of order, e.g.:-

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 6. _A _B _C _D _E 7. _F _G _H _I _J 8. _K _L _M _N _O 9. _P _Q _R _S _T 0. _U _V _W _X _Y

In which case, the rather less verbose version of the same ciphertext would look like this:-

J B L O P B P D K D P I O N D I I L N M K C K K I I L B D J M L N P J I E M J J J R C E E K C K J O J J D B L Q O I C L J I M K E K N O D O D O O C L G B M B K K G K D C J L K D M C L O K C C C X I K P P N C O N E D O E B S B B O P O P I P G J D E J F E M B D I K L N B L D P K R E B D N N P M O I P K E G I M M O L M D B G B E B M J Q G C L L G G M L O N J L K M G N B L M J K D J I O K B Q - - - -

Cryptanalytically, the problem with this as a ciphertext is that, even discounting the ’00’ filler-style characters at the end, it simply has too many doubled (and indeed tripled) letters to be simple English: 11 doublets, plus 2 additional triplets. Hence the chance of any given letter in this text being followed by itself within this text is 15/195 ~= 7.7%, while the chance of any given letter being followed by itself twice more is 2/194 ~= 1.03%.

According to my spreadsheet, if the letters were jumbled randomly, the chances of the same letter appearing twice in a row would be 7.44% (very slightly less than what we see, but still broadly the same), while the chances of the same letter appearing three times in a row would 0.594% (quite a lot less).

It struck me that these statistics might possibly be what we might expect to see for texts formed of every second or every third letter of English. So, I decided to test this notion with some brief tests on Moby Dick:-

Distance – doubles – triples
1 – 3.693% – 0.075%
2 – 4.426% – 0.275%
3 – 5.994% – 0.476%
4 – 6.289% – 0.466%
5 – 6.682% – 0.566%
6 – 6.491% – 0.546%
7 – 6.372% – 0.508%
8 – 6.536% – 0.533%
9 – 6.544% – 0.536%
n – 6.524% – 0.525% (i.e. predicted percentages based purely on frequency counts)

Indeed, what we see is that the probability of a triple letter occurring in the actual text starts very low (0.075%), but rises to close to the raw probability (from pure frequency counts) at a distance of about 5 (i.e. A….B….C….D…. etc).

So, comparing the actual triple letter count in the ciphertext with the ciphertext’s raw frequencies would seem to suggest a transposition step of about 2 is active, whereas comparing the double count in the ciphertext with the ciphertext’s raw frequencies would seem to suggest a transposition step of about 5 is active.

Yes, I know that this looks a bit paradoxical: but it is what is. Still workin’ on it…

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