A quick note on Lisa Fagin Davis’ Voynich presentation…

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I hope everyone who attended the Voynich Conference 2022 hosted online by the University of Malta enjoyed the presentations and the Q&As.

In Lisa Fagin Davis’ final presentation, she mentioned her recent theory that p/f were in fact ke/te: and mentioned that she’d thought this up, but then found it on Cipher Mysteries. If you want to see the original page I put up in September 2020 suggesting this idea (along with her comment near the bottom), it’s right here, along with the August 2020 page where I started exploring the behaviour of single-leg gallows.

There’s an additional aspect to the set of gallows/e/ch groupings I discussed in 2020, which is that you can usefully compare the (parsed) ch:chch ratio in the text as a whole (which is 10616:18 (0.17%)) both to the (parsed) ratios of strikethrough gallows preceded by ch…

  • ckh:chckh = 634:242 = 38.17%
  • cth:chcth = 766:139 = 18.15%
  • cph:chcph = 185:27 = 14.59%
  • cfh:chcfh = 58:15 = 25.86%

…as well as to the (parsed) ratios of strikethrough gallows followed by ch:

  • ckh:ckhch = 871:5 = 0.57%
  • cth:cthch = 902:3 = 0.33%
  • cph:cphch = 211:1 = 0.47%
  • cfh:cfhch = 73:0 = 0%

This, too, is a strikingly asymmetric result; and would seem to suggest that the ch:chch ratio is practically identical to the ch:c<gallows>hch ratios, yet completely unlike the ch:chc<gallows>h ratio.

I would take this as reasonably good support for the idea that c<gallows>h is actually a visual proxy (and it doesn’t really matter whether this is for scribal, cryptographic, or steganographic reasons) for <gallows>ch, because Voynichese seems to want to avoid c<gallows>hch almost exactly as much as it wants to avoid chch.

Perhaps combining this result with the pe/fe result (and other “forbidden” Voynichese combinations) might be the start of something really positive…

Voynich Conference 2022 about to begin…

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Like (hopefully a fair few) other Voynicheros, I’ve ponied up my 50 euros for the 2022 online Voynich Conference being hosted by the University of Malta in the next few days.

One of the fields in the application form asked for my university or institution: I put down “Cipher Mysteries”, on the grounds that it has ended up a bit of a cipher institution. 🤔 But mainly to make myself laugh. 😁

Will Malta reveal something incredible, awe-inspiring, unexpected, shocking, or amazing about the Voynich Manuscript, in the way academic conferences in novels and films have primed everyone to believe? Actually… maybe, sort of. But not in the way Dan Brown and his overexcited ilk like to portray.

20+ years ago, I remember trying really hard – with almost zero success, it has to be said – to persuade anyone that the Voynich Manuscript wasn’t some kooky fake cooked up by Dr John Dee (back then the fairly dominant opinion), but a genuine historical artifact worthy of close, careful study.

Well, from the 2022 conference’s participant list and programme of papers, it seems that that aspect of my struggle back then has at least borne fruit. It’s now a serious business.

But will there be The Big Breakthrough? You know, the introvert outsider’s slide that shyly reveals The Secret Cipher Key we’ve all long dreamed of? Cue clunks round the world as Voynichero jaws collectively hit the floor.

(*snort* Not a hope, sorry.) But with so many smart, insightful, observant researchers all trying to move forward in broadly the same way, who’s to say that something won’t emerge from it all?

Perhaps it won’t be something showy (or even immediately obvious), but even a tiny step forward would feel Heaven-sent. So let’s just pray a little, hein?

Dorothy Jean Webb and Geoffrey Arthur Lockyer…?

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A very intriguing Somerton Man-related email arrived here today from CM commenter & researcher Angela. In her quest to find out a bit more of what happened to Dorothy Jean Webb, she decided to pay the nice people at South Australian Genealogy & Heraldry Society to do some additional research for her, and wants to share her findings with everyone!

This is because Genealogy SA’s research coordinator Beryl Schahinger has just reported back to Angela to let her know that “she had found an entry in the marriage index for the District of Daly (which includes Kadina and Bute) for a Dorothy Jean Webb to Geoffrey A. Lockyer in 1952. This fits nicely with Dorothy’s divorce. Unfortunately, there is a 75-year embargo on marriage records for the State of South Australia.“

Angela has also managed to dig up the following information about Geoffrey Arthur Lockyer:

Also living at the 280 Welshpool Road address was a Mary Lockyer. Angela suspects either that Geoffrey and Dorothy were divorced sometime between 1952 and 1963 (i.e. he subsequently remarried), or that ~conceivably~ Dorothy Jean changed her name to “Mary”. (Findagrave.com has a likely grave for Mary Lockyer, who died 2011 in Wembley Downs aged 90, and was also buried in Karrakatta Cemetery.)

Interesting! So… what do you all think?

Voynich novels to give away…

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I’ve been busy up in the loft, having a somewhat-overdue tidying session there. But rather than give a load of books to the charity shop (my default response), I wondered if any of my Cipher Mysteries readers would like to have some?

Voynich Novels

As you may know, I maintained my big fat list of Voynich-themed novels up until about 2012, at which point I’d really had enough of reading them for one lifetime (and so basically threw in the towel).

Hence it should be no surprise that I have a ten-book-high pile of novels mentioning the Voynich Manuscript (to greater or lesser degrees) to give away, many of which I have reviewed here (e.g. Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo”, Brad Kelln’s “In Tongues of the Dead”, A.W. Hill’s “Enoch’s Portal”, Steve Berry’s “The Charlemagne Pursuit”, Christopher Harris’ “Mappamundi”, and Brett King’s “The Radix”), as well as a fair few others:

So, if anyone in the UK reading would like their very own instant Voynich-themed novel shelf, please let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll send the whole darn pile to whomsoever I think most oddly worthy. Paypal-ing something towards the postage would be a kind gesture, but the whole point of this exercise is to make space rather than money. 🙂

Oh, and if anyone would like to submit reviews of other Voynich-themed novels to be published on Cipher Mysteries, I’d be more than happy to post them up. Just don’t ask me to read the actual book, nothankyou. 😉

Historical Cipher-Themed Novels

I also have a chunky little box of nineteen historical cipher-themed novels to give away, where it’s more sensible to talk about weight (6.9kg) than the total page count:

(Strictly speaking, James Cowan’s “A Mapmaker’s Dream” isn’t quite in the pacy-cipher-airport-novella genre that most of the rest is, but it’s in the box regardless.)

So again, if anyone in the UK reading would like a whole bunch of historical cipher novels, please let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll send the whole box-load to some deserving soul or other. I don’t really have the patience to package up individual books, so it’s an all-or-nothing kind of thing, I’m afraid.

Cheers!

Somerton Man: the Webb v Webb divorce files…

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Frustrated by our collective inability to access the divorce papers that Dorothy Jean Webb attempted to serve on her (by then late) husband Carl Webb, Cipher Mysteries commenter Behrooz decided to write to the Honorable Chief Justice Anne Ferguson of Victoria. And – rather wonderfully – his polite (and quietly persuasive) request for the two documents to be released into the public domain was agreed to.

He has (just today) posted the two PDFs on his blog:

Please use the comments below to discuss what we learn from these two (I think extremely central) documents. Please also remember to thank him heartily for his efforts! 🙂

The Bare Facts

Dorothy Jean Webb says that she was a “Pharmacist and Chiropodist” prior to marrying Carl Webb. (DWA p.2)

Carl Webb “wrote many poems, most of them on the subject of death, which he claims to be his greatest desire”. (DWA p.4)

He was sullen, moody and changeable, once threatening a friend with a carving knife after losing at cards. Their marriage broke down: she described how he beat her on different occasions; forced her to move to the front room; and finally locked her out of the flat completely. (DWA p.4)

She went to stay in Lorne for 14 days, but things were no better on her return. (DWA p.5)

In March 1946, he – and I think there is no real doubt of this – tried to commit suicide by taking 40 phenobarbitol tablets. Once Dorothy had nursed him back to health, he then continued to verbally abuse her (etc) as before. (DWA. pp.5-6)

Dorothy called the St Kilda police around on several occasions, but each time Carl convinced them (she thought) that she was just imagining things. (DWA p.6)

In September 1946, not long after her father came back from Darwin, Carl offered her £60 to leave the flat: she wanted £50 plus some furniture, and they did not agree. He later said that she would get nothing from him “ever”.

She had a maintenance order (for £1/10 weekly) served on him (dated 1st May 1947) (DWA p.7). At that time, he was “working in a machine shop in Prahran” (WvW p.15), named as “Red Point Tool Co. of 66 St Johns Street Prahran” (WvW p.21).

A neighbour recalled that Webb had sold all his furniture (WvW p.17).

Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637)…

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I’ve mentioned Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc on Cipher Mysteries in the past, though mostly in connection with his extensive “Republic of Letters” correspondence, thought to contain somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 letters. This was because, around 2008, I spent some time wondering whether there might be (hitherto unnoticed) mentions of the Voynich Manuscript in European scientific correspondence networks. A recent email from Diane O’Donovan brought Peiresc back to the front of my mind.

As far as the timing of the Voynich Manuscript’s possible (but sadly not yet certain) sale to Emperor Rudolf II, I’ve long felt it must have happened after 1600 (because there was no mention in Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hayek’s letters), before 1612 (when Rudolf died), and probably before 1610 (roughly when Rudolf’s brother Matthias took control). If I had to pick a single year, I’d pick 1609, but that’s ultimately no more than an educated guess (yes, the same one that once hurled me down a Rosicrucian rabbit-hole).

Peiresc was a very early telescope owner (in 1610), and probably the first to observe the Orion Nebula (though he didn’t actually stake a claim to this discovery at the time): so was certainly active at the right sort of time. There’s an accessible description of Peiresc’s astronomical activities in Seymour L. Chapin’s “The Astronomical Activities of Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc”, Isis, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1957), pp. 13-29, (on JSTOR), through which we can see his wide scientific-minded range of astronomical interests, such as tracking the Jovian moons, producing a detailed engraving of the Moon’s surface, and in using eclipses to determine longitudinal differences.

Peiresc’s Letters

As Hatch points out, Peiresc’s letters are strongly centred on a small number of key correspondents in Paris and Rome: and so its 10,000+ corpus size is perhaps a little bit flattering as to the broader range of his correspondents. Yet he plainly did correspond with astronomers (later in life, he stood up very strongly for Galileo, for example), and so it is far from impossible that there might well be a passing mention of the Voynich Manuscript there.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find an online list of Peiresc’s correspondents (I did see a somewhat unhelpful map that vaguely implied that some were in Prague, or at least Bohemia), so unfortunately I can’t easily compile a list of Peiresc’s astronomy-related letters, as I had initially hoped to do. (Indeed, the intersection of ‘astronomy’ & ‘Prague’ would probably yield a very short list of letters to examine).

Note that Hatch’s chapter “Peiresc As Correspondent: The Republic of Letters & the “Geography of Ideas“” (in Science Unbound, Chapter 2, ed. B. Dolan, Umeå, 1998) seems like it could be promising in this regard, but I haven’t yet seen it.

Peiresc’s Papers

Yet Peiresc had another legacy: his papers. Though he published almost nothing in his lifetime, he constantly made notes on everything he heard and read: and these papers comprised around 60,000 pages at his death, which Gassendi then assiduously ground his way through for two years (to write Peiresc’s biography).

Yet it seems to me that articles on Peiresc tend to be written by people who have carefully selected an achievable thematic subset (e.g. Rubens, astronomy, etc) of his letters to work with (though I don’t believe that his letters have all been published yet) – almost none seems to be informed by his papers.

Might there be some Voynich Manuscript mention in Peiresc’s papers? I don’t know how well these have been indexed (has there ever been an index?), and this post is merely a brief research note – so please let me know if you have a good (probably French!) source describing the contents of Peiresc’s papers!

Roswell and Oak Ridge?

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Nick Redfern’s provocative and interesting Roswell book “Body Snatchers in the Desert” (2005) starts with a chapter outlining a conversation he had with a lady (born 1922): while working at Oak Ridge in 1947, she claimed to have seen the ‘aliens’ found at Roswell. However, she said, these were not extra-terrestrials, but were instead Chinese or Japanese people suffering from disabling genetic conditions (e.g. progeria) being used as US military test subjects.

It’s a great story, one that Redfern gamely grapples with throughout his book (and indeed its sequel): but did he actually manage to land any evidential punches linking Roswell to Oak Ridge? Is there any documentary evidence linking the two, even indirectly?

I decided to have a look in NARA…

“The Secret City of Oak Ridge”

The scientific history of Oak Ridge (“The City Behind The Fence”) began with the Manhattan Project, which carried out the research and engineering to build the first atomic bomb. This required the construction of three immense technical facilities:

  • “K-25” was a gaseous diffusion plant (“covering a larger area than any structure ever built up to that time”, p.2) operated by 12,000 workers.
  • “Y-12” separated Uranium-235 from Uranium-238, and had 22,000 workers.
  • “X-10” was a graphite reactor plant, located roughly 10 miles from Y-12.

Founded in 1943, this huge complex was initially called Clinton Laboratories, but was renamed in 1948 to (the now much more familiar) Oak Ridge National Laboratories, by the site’s postwar owners, the Atomic Energy Commission. (AKA “the old A.E.C.” from Tom Lehrer’s “The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be”.)

With all that as background, we can fast-forward to the (2012) NARA document, “Atomic Energy Commission and the Secret City of Oak Ridge“. This lists some of the document sets relating to Oak Ridge in Record Group 326 (mostly at or just below the box level), and mainly covers the period 1943-1946.

The bulk of the records are in the 182 boxes contained in “Series 8505 Formerly Classified Correspondence Files” (ARC number 1518690), which (annoyingly) I haven’t yet found in NARA itself. 🙁 Do any of the descriptions suggest a link with Roswell? Certainly, it would be hard not to notice that Box 104 contains (though without explanation):

List of personnel with clearance, Roswell, New Mexico, 1947

Similarly, Box 130 implies that there was some sustained correspondence between Clinton Laboratories and the Navy’s BuAer (and I’d certainly like to know who was involved at both ends):

Bureau of aeronautics correspondence, 1943-46

The monthly reports in Box 142 might be useful in looking for possible biological / biophysical projects being run at Clinton:

Monthly reports from research division, 1945-47

My understanding is that Monsanto had employees working at Clinton, so it should be no surprise that Box 62 contains:

Technical reports for Monsanto, July 1946

The Archival Limits?

Most of the records listed in the “Secret City” document seem to run no further than 1946, with just a small handful running into 1947. Hence I suspect that the files documented in “Secret City” don’t fully reflect the overall range of Oak Ridge files: perhaps it only reflects the ones held at NARA Atlanta?

More broadly, there are plenty of other record sets in RG326 that could be looked at, such as medical test records: it would take a much deeper trawl to map out these archives in an even remotely satisfactory way. So this is as far as it goes for now… 🙁

Project Mogul in NARA…

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Thanks to a response I received from Jason Atkinson at History Hub, I’ve managed to find Project Mogul R&D files at NARA – though these aren’t (yet) online, they do at least exist, which is a good starting point.

Oh, and I thought I’d include a quick log here of the other NARA files I’ve managed to find. Feel free to ignore this, it’s mainly for my own benefit. 😉

For Bureau of Aeronautics records (Record Group 72), I also found its LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) file (1916 – 1945), containing records that “were collected by a variety of individuals and organizations, including Charles P. Burgess, an expert in airship design within the Lighter Than Air Design Branch“. The downside is that it is “78 linear feet, 7 linear inches” long (comprising “63 Letter Archives Box, Standard; 70 Legal Archives Box, Standard; 2 Custom Box A1”).

I also found a file for “Balloons, Darex Sounding” – I was looking for this because David DeVorkin (p.286) mentions “the modified Dewey and Almy Darex J-2000 and Darex J-1100 balloon production samples”, which were being tested in 1947.

There’s also “Balloon Envelopes” in RG 342 (no additional information given, but it’s one of the R&D topics I’m specifically interested in).

Project Helios (which was run by NATEC at Lakehurst) has a list online of changes to project personnel from 3rd May 1947 to 2nd July 1947. This starts with Robert E. Bass, and then adds [name, id, rating]:

  • BASTEDO Raymond W – 513 24 90 – AR1
  • BLANCHARD Earl H – 206 25 96 – AERM1
  • CLARK John E Jr – 250 56 41 – AR3
  • COVELLA Robert L – 798 21 68 – AERM3
  • EWING Jerry D – 224 77 19 – AERM3
  • GLICKMAN William F – 238 80 71 – AR2
  • HART Francis J – 201 62 62 AR3
  • IAIN Sebastian (n) – 382 80 61 – AR1
  • MAC MILLIAN Henry J – 224 49 51 – CAR
  • WODZIENSKI Edward (n) – 202 56 04 – AMM1

All certified correct by W. A. Cockell, Capt, USN

Then 25 Aug 1947:

  • CHAMBLISS Herbert – P26657599 – CETM
  • BASS Robt E – 2742805 – CAERM

(Both moved to Ottumwa, Iowa)

Project Helios disestablished: Auth ChNavRes cer 12523 dated 23 May 1947 and suPers ltr.
Pers 21452-jah ser 16719 dated 25 June 1947.

Certified to be correct: W. A. Cockell, Capt. USN (11 Jul 1947)

There’s also this Project Helios record: A15-2 Project Helios SP Event. (I have no idea what this is, alas).

As far as Fort Dix goes, I found some files in RG 342 (though I don’t hold out a lot of hope for these):

Kevin Alexander D’Arcy – Bute or Boort?

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Trying to work out what happened to Dorothy Jean “Doff” Webb (nee Robertson), I was told a few weeks back that after getting divorced (in absentia) from Carl Webb, Doff’s subsequent partner was Kevin D’Arcy. However, even though I can see that a Kevin Alexander D’Arcy is included in various private family trees online, nobody has so far written down much about him.

So here’s my attempt to put that (at least partially) right.

Kevin Alexander D’Arcy Family Tree

I started with some of the information suggested by commenter Belinda here. It didn’t take too long to find William “Billy” D’Arcy (b. 1893 Ballarat, died 1987 Bacchus Marsh) and his wife Florence (“Flora”) Jane D’Arcy (nee McKay) (b. 1899 Warrion, died 1986 Bacchus Marsh) and their son Kevin Alexander D’Arcy (b. 4 May 1923 Melbourne, d. 21 May 1991, “Rtd Taxation Officer” in the probate record).

In the electoral rolls, we can see Kevin’s parents living in Bacchus Marsh (1949, 1954, 1958, 1963, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1980), with Kevin appearing on the rolls only in 1977 and 1980. There’s also a James Allen D’Arcy (“valuer”) who appears there in the 1960s. One family tree asserts that they had five children (but no names, no evidence).

Kevin Alexander D’Arcy Military Records

What I found interesting was that Private Kevin Alexander D’Arcy (clerk, single, enlisted 1943, VX142120, 37/52 Australian Infantry Battalion, discharged 27 Aug 1946, 5ft 5in, blue eyes, medium complexion, light brown hair, no marks or scars) was marked up as living in Boort, Victoria in 1943 with his father W. D’Arcy.

Note that the correspondence in the file lists various other addresses:

  • 1946, 3 Kembla St, Hawthorn
  • 1953: 62 Coppin St, Richmond
  • 1971: 49 Keith St, Alphington 3078

Could it be that the mention of “Bute” was merely ‘Chinese Whispers’, and the place we should have been looking at was actually Boort, waaaay inland in Victoria, near Lake Boort, in the vaguely Tolkienesque shire of Loddon? What on earth has ever happened in Boort? I mean, I’m every bit as big a fan of “gourmet green tomatoes” (apparently Boort’s most famous product) as the next man (…if the next man doesn’t happen to like them very much).

And indeed, if you look at the electoral rolls for Boort in 1942, you see William “Darey” (public servant) and Flora Jane “Darey” (i.e. both misspelled!), S.R.W.S. Res., Holloway St, Boort. (But they’re in neither the 1937 nor 1949 electoral rolls for Boort.) So this whole sequence does seem to be basically correct.

But what about prior to 1943? If you search Trove for “Billy D’Arcy”, you’ll find (ignoring the lightweight boxer of the same name!) a 03 Sep 1932 Bacchus Marsh Express column called “Melton As Coursing Centre”, which mentions Billy D’Arcy.

If you further search the two Bacchus Marsh papers in Trove for “D’Arcy”, you’ll see a 28 Feb 1953 engagement of Doreen Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Mr & Mrs W. D’Arcy of Maddingley, to Andrew Connell. There’s also the 1952 marriage of Joan D’Arcy (younger daughter of Mr & Mrs W. D’Arcy) to Mr Raymond Marett.

Carl Webb – Bromby Street, South Yarra…

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When in October 1951 Carl Webb’s wife filed a divorce petition (apparently not knowing of his 1948 demise on/near Somerton Beach), it listed Webb’s address as “formerly of Bromby-street, South Yarra, but now of parts unknown”. The 1942 electoral rolls then helped us narrow this to 63 Bromby Street, with small ads in The Argus narrowing it further to Flat 2, 63 Bromby Street.

So now let’s take a trip baaaack in tiiiime (cue wavy transition)…

Maps of Bromby Street

Here’s the relevant section of an 1895 Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works detail map (courtesy of the State Library of Victoria), showing the tramway engine house on the left that became Kellow House, with #63 three doors down to the East (there is no #65, or #69), with a R[ight] of W[ay] down the laneway:

In this section of Map 39 from Morgan’s 1951 Street Directory, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria, the road layout hasn’t changed at all (I couldn’t find the 897 detail map of the 1948 MMBW set, bah):

Here’s the same area in Google Maps today (the Royce Hotel on the left is the former Kellow House, the Kellow Falkiner car showroom built in 1928):

Photos of Bromby Street

A few days ago, Cipher Mysteries commenter (and Melburnian) Jo headed over to Bromby Street to have a snoop around. Jo’s first photograph was taken looking down Bromby Street, where #63 is the white building on the left hand side further down the street:

The next photo shows Melbourne Grammar School (which was taken over by American forces during WWII) as viewed from the laneway beside #63:

This photo shows #63 (and the laneway going to the back) as viewed from the Melbourne Grammar side of the road:

Finally, here’s a picture of the front of Kellow House (the former car showroom that was taken over by RAAF signals during the war):