Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
More Annotations
A complete backup of manifestplastic.tumblr.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
Foot Golf | Stag Dos, Hen Dos, Team Building Days! | Foot-Golf-UK.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
Falmászás és Boulder mászás Budapest III. kerületében - SpiderClub.hu
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
Poder Judicial del Estado de Guanajuato
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
Favourite Annotations
A complete backup of https://osyley.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://project-jk.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://soundoftext.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://essentrics.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://uicflames.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://blockzerolabs.io
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://singleplatform.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://marine-jbia.or.jp
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://instra.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://beauforthuis.nl
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
A complete backup of https://collegesoccernews.com
Are you over 18 and want to see adult content?
Text
CIPHER MYSTERIES
A copy of Benedek Lang’s nice-looking book “The Rohonc Codex: Tracing a Historical Riddle” landed on my doormat this week, courtesy of The Penn State University Press (its publisher). Its back cover blurb promises that it “surveys the fascinating theories associated with the Codex“, and that it finishes up by “pointing to a possible solution to the enigma“. THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING OK, I’m going to start this post by embedding S01E03 of the History Channel’s “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer”, because this is what started me on the road to the solution to the Donna Lass cipher: video since removed from TagTele site About half the episode is 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY After my last post proposing a possible link between the Silk Dress Cipher and Orphan Trains, I widened my search a little to take in 19th Century Baltimore orphanages.What kind of archival sources might still exist, in a town where 1,500 buildings were destroyed by fire in 1904? But rather than look directly, I decided to instead first try to find any books or studies on 19th century THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all that without silently mouthing the phrase ‘ironically enough’, you have a huge amount Read More → "MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → DAVID F. CHRISTENSEN AND KENNEDY’S In 1992, the American Congress ruled that all documents related to President Kennedy’s death should be released within 25 years: and when President Trump raised no objection last October, that is essentially what happened. Except, of course, that there were still numerous redactions. (Did you really believe it would be otherwise? *sigh*) Arguably one of Read More → THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER @ Nick : I first met John Sanderson at a USO dance. At that time I was working at Pitney-Bowes, Inc. I came back from lunch one day to find the staff members in tears and hugging themselves while listening to a radio report — President John F. Kennedy had been shot to death. KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'S The new week brings a further episode of the History Channel’s “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer”, not for the first time promising much but delivering little (Donna Lass car directions, really?) – the best part was the interview with Zodiac Historian Misty Johansen (who wasn’t playing to CARMEL’s script). GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share with you.What I thought Cipher Mysteries readers would be particularly interested in was whether he had made any changes toCIPHER MYSTERIES
A copy of Benedek Lang’s nice-looking book “The Rohonc Codex: Tracing a Historical Riddle” landed on my doormat this week, courtesy of The Penn State University Press (its publisher). Its back cover blurb promises that it “surveys the fascinating theories associated with the Codex“, and that it finishes up by “pointing to a possible solution to the enigma“. THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING OK, I’m going to start this post by embedding S01E03 of the History Channel’s “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer”, because this is what started me on the road to the solution to the Donna Lass cipher: video since removed from TagTele site About half the episode is 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY After my last post proposing a possible link between the Silk Dress Cipher and Orphan Trains, I widened my search a little to take in 19th Century Baltimore orphanages.What kind of archival sources might still exist, in a town where 1,500 buildings were destroyed by fire in 1904? But rather than look directly, I decided to instead first try to find any books or studies on 19th century THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all that without silently mouthing the phrase ‘ironically enough’, you have a huge amount Read More → "MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → DAVID F. CHRISTENSEN AND KENNEDY’S In 1992, the American Congress ruled that all documents related to President Kennedy’s death should be released within 25 years: and when President Trump raised no objection last October, that is essentially what happened. Except, of course, that there were still numerous redactions. (Did you really believe it would be otherwise? *sigh*) Arguably one of Read More → THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER @ Nick : I first met John Sanderson at a USO dance. At that time I was working at Pitney-Bowes, Inc. I came back from lunch one day to find the staff members in tears and hugging themselves while listening to a radio report — President John F. Kennedy had been shot to death. KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'S The new week brings a further episode of the History Channel’s “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer”, not for the first time promising much but delivering little (Donna Lass car directions, really?) – the best part was the interview with Zodiac Historian Misty Johansen (who wasn’t playing to CARMEL’s script). GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share with you.What I thought Cipher Mysteries readers would be particularly interested in was whether he had made any changes to SOMERTON MAN EXHUMATION: AND SO IT BEGINS... As mentioned in a fair bit of Australia’s press, the exhumation of the Somerton Man has begun in West Terrace in the last 24 hours, with all the normal shots of PPE, tents, and mini-diggers accompanying the reports. Once the FSSA have processed the body (in whatever parlous state it’s in) and extracted the man’s Read More → THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all that without silently mouthing the phrase ‘ironically enough’, you have a huge amount Read More →CIPHER MYSTERIES
Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so.. According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, it was 2008 when the details first came out inTHE BOX OF CRAZY.
Here’s something a bit unexpected you might appreciate, with a generous tip of the pasty-filled hat to the ever-mind-expanding Daily Grail.. Basically, the story goes like this: someone called ‘TramStopDan’ (actually Dan Wickham) recently posted up two galleries of scans (set #1 and set #2) of various papers inside a wooden box found abandoned on the side of the road in Asheville, N.C DOMINGO DELGADO AND THE "AMELIA MANUSCRIPT"... You might be interested to know that an interview with (relatively new) Voynich researcher Domingo Delgado was posted to YouTube a few days ago. In this, Delgado describes how he thinks the Voynich Manuscript was: made in Italy (because he thinks the handwriting is distinctively Italian); made in the 15th century (largely because ofthe Read More →
GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share with you.What I thought Cipher Mysteries readers would be particularly interested in was whether he had made any changes to "THE E. A. POE CRYPTOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE"... While looking at Elonka’s list of unsolved cipher mysteries while composing my post on the d’Agapeyeff cipher, my eye was drawn to the list of solved cipher mysteries she appended to it, and in particular to “The E. A. Poe Cryptographic Challenge“.. Edgar Allan Poe often used codes and ciphers in his stories, most famously in “The Gold-Bug” (which incidentally inspired a very young PLOUGASTEL INSCRIPTION PHOTOGRAPHS! Thanks to the kindness (and keen photographic eye) of Cipher Mysteries commenter Françoise who visited the Plougastel-Daoulas site just a few days ago, I’m delighted to pass you all her great set of photographs. As always, feel free to click on them to see a higher-resolution version. Setting the Scene The Main Carved Rocks “Anddin” Read More → THE SECRET HISTORY OF... BOVRIL?!? The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.. But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss SORRY, THE UNKNOWN MAN IS (VERY PROBABLY) NOT H. C When “X. Lamb” unexpectedly announced that the “Tamam Shud” Unknown Man was a certain “H. C. Reynolds” (whose merchant seaman’s ID card she had), I’m sure that she was utterly convinced of the truth of what she was claiming, and that she believed it was simply a matter of time before evidence properly supporting it wouldemerge.
CIPHER MYSTERIES
For attempting to escape, he was sentenced to three years in ‘double chains’. He was then unchained on 25 Jan 1873 and transferred to Nouvelle-Caledonie on the transport ship Le Rhin. There, his attempts to escape continued: 20 Oct 1873: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 22 Oct1873.
THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING Donna was the daughter of James and Frances (Kukar) Lass. During high school, her activities included F.H.A. and singing in mixed chorus. During her senior interview, she stated that her plans were “to go college or be a nurse.”. She was one the fifty-two members of the graduating class of 1962 at Beresford High School in Beresford, South 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY The two Baltimore orphanages that I examine are the Home of the Friendless of Baltimore City (HOF), which was established in 1854, and the Baltimore Orphan Asylum (BOA). The latter was known as the Female Humane Association Charity School (FHACS) at the time of its incorporation in 1801. Six years later (1807), it was reincorporatedas the
THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER The Oak Island Ciphers (Part 1): the 80-foot rock cipher. It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all thatwithout silently
"MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER The Z13 Cipher. The text just above the Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher (20th April 1970) clearly and unambiguously refers back to a ‘name’ supposedly in the Z340 cipher (8th November 1969), though as far as I can see the “Dripping Pen” note that arrived with the Z340 didn’t mention a name at all: An oft-repeated account for thisis that
THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'S Anyhoo, the Zodiac-Killer-associated cipher this week’s episode highlighted was a short ciphertext included in a letter sent to the Times Union in Albany, NY and postmarked August 1st 1973 (which Karga Seven’s handwriting expert duly affirmed was by the Zodiac Killer). So let’s do our collective codebreaking thing on the “AlbanyCipher
DAVID F. CHRISTENSEN AND KENNEDY’S David passed away Monday, December 22, 2008 at his home in Killdeer, ND. David Frederick Christensen was born January 26, 1942 to Ole and Hazel (Lodnell) Christensen in Dickinson, ND. He grew up on a ranch near Halliday and attended schools, graduating from Halliday HighSchool in 1960.
KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN Gerry Feltus’s “The Unknown Man”, now available as an ebook. A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share withCIPHER MYSTERIES
For attempting to escape, he was sentenced to three years in ‘double chains’. He was then unchained on 25 Jan 1873 and transferred to Nouvelle-Caledonie on the transport ship Le Rhin. There, his attempts to escape continued: 20 Oct 1873: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 22 Oct1873.
THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING Donna was the daughter of James and Frances (Kukar) Lass. During high school, her activities included F.H.A. and singing in mixed chorus. During her senior interview, she stated that her plans were “to go college or be a nurse.”. She was one the fifty-two members of the graduating class of 1962 at Beresford High School in Beresford, South 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY The two Baltimore orphanages that I examine are the Home of the Friendless of Baltimore City (HOF), which was established in 1854, and the Baltimore Orphan Asylum (BOA). The latter was known as the Female Humane Association Charity School (FHACS) at the time of its incorporation in 1801. Six years later (1807), it was reincorporatedas the
THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER The Oak Island Ciphers (Part 1): the 80-foot rock cipher. It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all thatwithout silently
"MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER The Z13 Cipher. The text just above the Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher (20th April 1970) clearly and unambiguously refers back to a ‘name’ supposedly in the Z340 cipher (8th November 1969), though as far as I can see the “Dripping Pen” note that arrived with the Z340 didn’t mention a name at all: An oft-repeated account for thisis that
THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'S Anyhoo, the Zodiac-Killer-associated cipher this week’s episode highlighted was a short ciphertext included in a letter sent to the Times Union in Albany, NY and postmarked August 1st 1973 (which Karga Seven’s handwriting expert duly affirmed was by the Zodiac Killer). So let’s do our collective codebreaking thing on the “AlbanyCipher
DAVID F. CHRISTENSEN AND KENNEDY’S David passed away Monday, December 22, 2008 at his home in Killdeer, ND. David Frederick Christensen was born January 26, 1942 to Ole and Hazel (Lodnell) Christensen in Dickinson, ND. He grew up on a ranch near Halliday and attended schools, graduating from Halliday HighSchool in 1960.
KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN Gerry Feltus’s “The Unknown Man”, now available as an ebook. A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share withOTHER CIPHERS
This is just a parent item in the Cipher Mysteries menu structure: all the “other ciphers” are discussed on child pages from this page. SOMERTON MAN EXHUMATION: AND SO IT BEGINS... As mentioned in a fair bit of Australia’s press, the exhumation of the Somerton Man has begun in West Terrace in the last 24 hours, with all the normal shots of PPE, tents, and mini-diggers accompanying the reports. Once the FSSA have processed the body (in whatever parlous state it’s in) and extracted the man’s Read More → THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER The Oak Island Ciphers (Part 1): the 80-foot rock cipher. It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all thatwithout silently
CIPHER MYSTERIES
Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so.. According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, it was 2008 when the details first came out inTHE BOX OF CRAZY.
The box is 29″ by 38″, and most of the drawings are large, heavily informed by a draughtsman’s eye for detail and line and with a few, errm, fairly spectacular pieces. In its brief online life, it has acquired the sort-of-catchy title “The Box of Crazy” (and also “The Ezekiel Box”), as if the person behind it was simply a nutter DOMINGO DELGADO AND THE "AMELIA MANUSCRIPT"... You might be interested to know that an interview with (relatively new) Voynich researcher Domingo Delgado was posted to YouTube a few days ago. In this, Delgado describes how he thinks the Voynich Manuscript was: made in Italy (because he thinks the handwriting is distinctively Italian); made in the 15th century (largely because ofthe Read More →
"THE E. A. POE CRYPTOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE"... While looking at Elonka’s list of unsolved cipher mysteries while composing my post on the d’Agapeyeff cipher, my eye was drawn to the list of solved cipher mysteries she appended to it, and in particular to “The E. A. Poe Cryptographic Challenge“.. Edgar Allan Poe often used codes and ciphers in his stories, most famously in “The Gold-Bug” (which incidentally inspired a very young PLOUGASTEL INSCRIPTION PHOTOGRAPHS! Plougastel Inscription Photographs! Thanks to the kindness (and keen photographic eye) of Cipher Mysteries commenter Françoise who visited the Plougastel-Daoulas site just a few days ago, I’m delighted to pass you all her great set of photographs. As always, feel free to click on them to see a higher-resolution version. GERRY FELTUS'S "THE UNKNOWN MAN", NOW AVAILABLE AS AN Gerry Feltus’s “The Unknown Man”, now available as an ebook. A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share with SORRY, THE UNKNOWN MAN IS (VERY PROBABLY) NOT H. C REYNOLDS. -Suddenly, on May 16, 1953, at a private hospital, Hobart, Horace Charles Reynolds, late of Brookvale, New South Wales, aged 53 years. Private cremation. We knew that our H. C. Reynolds was born in Hobart and got his first job in Hobart: and from this notice, it seems almost undeniable that Hobart was where he died too. I sayCIPHER MYSTERIES
For attempting to escape, he was sentenced to three years in ‘double chains’. He was then unchained on 25 Jan 1873 and transferred to Nouvelle-Caledonie on the transport ship Le Rhin. There, his attempts to escape continued: 20 Oct 1873: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 22 Oct1873.
THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING Donna was the daughter of James and Frances (Kukar) Lass. During high school, her activities included F.H.A. and singing in mixed chorus. During her senior interview, she stated that her plans were “to go college or be a nurse.”. She was one the fifty-two members of the graduating class of 1962 at Beresford High School in Beresford, South "MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → THE DEVIL'S HANDWRITING The Devil’s Handwriting. Once upon a time, a man called Ludovico Spoletano allegedly conjured up the Devil himself, and forced him to answer a question. Some unseen power, like an invisible hand, took hold of a pen and swiftly wrote this: [Click on the above for a larger image: or here’s a slightly sharpened version, if that’s any help "THE GREAT LOST TREASURE"... 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY The two Baltimore orphanages that I examine are the Home of the Friendless of Baltimore City (HOF), which was established in 1854, and the Baltimore Orphan Asylum (BOA). The latter was known as the Female Humane Association Charity School (FHACS) at the time of its incorporation in 1801. Six years later (1807), it was reincorporatedas the
THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER The Z13 Cipher. The text just above the Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher (20th April 1970) clearly and unambiguously refers back to a ‘name’ supposedly in the Z340 cipher (8th November 1969), though as far as I can see the “Dripping Pen” note that arrived with the Z340 didn’t mention a name at all: An oft-repeated account for thisis that
THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'SZODIAC KILLER 340 CIPHERZODIAC KILLER CIPHER KEYZODIAC KILLER LETTERS AND CIPHERSZODIAC KILLER NYZODIAC KILLER DECODED MESSAGEZODIAC 340 CIPHERSOLVED
Anyhoo, the Zodiac-Killer-associated cipher this week’s episode highlighted was a short ciphertext included in a letter sent to the Times Union in Albany, NY and postmarked August 1st 1973 (which Karga Seven’s handwriting expert duly affirmed was by the Zodiac Killer). So let’s do our collective codebreaking thing on the “AlbanyCipher
KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s KEITH MANGNOSON / "CARL THOMPSEN" CONTINUED... Probably the definitive starting point for any discussion about the sad affair of Keith Mangnoson is the inquest report into the death of his young son Clive. It’s on the Internet courtesy of the consistently intriguing blog The Marshall Files, though reading comments there tutting at the moderator of a certain other blog (*cough* Cipher Read More →CIPHER MYSTERIES
For attempting to escape, he was sentenced to three years in ‘double chains’. He was then unchained on 25 Jan 1873 and transferred to Nouvelle-Caledonie on the transport ship Le Rhin. There, his attempts to escape continued: 20 Oct 1873: escaped Ile Nou, recaptured 22 Oct1873.
THE DONNA LASS CIPHER, SOLVED... BUT NO HAPPY ENDING Donna was the daughter of James and Frances (Kukar) Lass. During high school, her activities included F.H.A. and singing in mixed chorus. During her senior interview, she stated that her plans were “to go college or be a nurse.”. She was one the fifty-two members of the graduating class of 1962 at Beresford High School in Beresford, South "MY LIFE IS ALL BUT OVER..." It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all? Ragged Right / Rubaiyat Because the lines are Read More → THE DEVIL'S HANDWRITING The Devil’s Handwriting. Once upon a time, a man called Ludovico Spoletano allegedly conjured up the Devil himself, and forced him to answer a question. Some unseen power, like an invisible hand, took hold of a pen and swiftly wrote this: [Click on the above for a larger image: or here’s a slightly sharpened version, if that’s any help "THE GREAT LOST TREASURE"... 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE ORPHANAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY The two Baltimore orphanages that I examine are the Home of the Friendless of Baltimore City (HOF), which was established in 1854, and the Baltimore Orphan Asylum (BOA). The latter was known as the Female Humane Association Charity School (FHACS) at the time of its incorporation in 1801. Six years later (1807), it was reincorporatedas the
THE ZODIAC KILLER'S Z13 CIPHER MEETS HIS Z340 CIPHER The Z13 Cipher. The text just above the Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher (20th April 1970) clearly and unambiguously refers back to a ‘name’ supposedly in the Z340 cipher (8th November 1969), though as far as I can see the “Dripping Pen” note that arrived with the Z340 didn’t mention a name at all: An oft-repeated account for thisis that
THE ZODIAC KILLER, THE ALBANY CIPHER, AND DAVID ORANCHAK'SZODIAC KILLER 340 CIPHERZODIAC KILLER CIPHER KEYZODIAC KILLER LETTERS AND CIPHERSZODIAC KILLER NYZODIAC KILLER DECODED MESSAGEZODIAC 340 CIPHERSOLVED
Anyhoo, the Zodiac-Killer-associated cipher this week’s episode highlighted was a short ciphertext included in a letter sent to the Times Union in Albany, NY and postmarked August 1st 1973 (which Karga Seven’s handwriting expert duly affirmed was by the Zodiac Killer). So let’s do our collective codebreaking thing on the “AlbanyCipher
KRYPTOS SCULPTURE UPDATE... Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s KEITH MANGNOSON / "CARL THOMPSEN" CONTINUED... Probably the definitive starting point for any discussion about the sad affair of Keith Mangnoson is the inquest report into the death of his young son Clive. It’s on the Internet courtesy of the consistently intriguing blog The Marshall Files, though reading comments there tutting at the moderator of a certain other blog (*cough* Cipher Read More → THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS The following is an online-only, unillustrated version of my book “The Secret History of the Rosicrucians” that I spent a fair amount of time researching back in 2012. My aim was to try to reconstruct the secret history behind the key Rosicrucian texts, and to understand what was going on "THE GREAT LOST TREASURE"... The Great Lost Treasure. Justron’s starting point is a treasure mystery associated with (the very real) Admiral Lord George Anson (1697-1762), and (apparently) described in Andrew Westcott’s (1999) book “El Tesoro de Lord Anson”. ( If I mentioned that George Anson was born in Shugborough Hall, you might be able to guess part of where THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS The Secret History of the Rosicrucians - 6. ‘Book M’ - Cipher Mysteries. The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 6. ‘Book M’. To my eyes, the biggest clue to the historical answer seems to lie in the large number of references to a mysterious ‘Book M’ scattered through the Fama and the Confessio. The Fama says that Book M is THE OAK ISLAND CIPHERS (PART 1): THE 80-FOOT ROCK CIPHER The Oak Island Ciphers (Part 1): the 80-foot rock cipher. It’s well-known that over the last two centuries, the quest for the mysterious “Money Pit” on Oak Island has yielded no sign of treasure while simultaneously consuming an inordinate quantity of diggers’ dollars – and if you can even think about all thatwithout silently
CRACKING THE PAUL RUBIN CIPHER... The Letter Ciphers. According to Cipher Mysteries commenter Thomas, “Conant and B.H. Ketelle were members of the Manhattan Project. Janossy was a Hungarian nuclear physicist at the same time. Tywood is a professor of Nuclear Physics in Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Red Queen’s Race’ from 1949.”. Indeed, Asimov describes Elmer(Pop
CIPHER MYSTERIES
Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so.. According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, it was 2008 when the details first came out in THE VOARCHADUMIA & JOHN DEE... The Voarchadumia & John Dee. Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae ). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this waslargely a
THE SECRET HISTORY OF... BOVRIL?!? The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.. But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss THOUGHTS ON VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT HANDWRITING... Thoughts on Voynich Manuscript handwriting. There are two big problems with the Voynich Manuscript handwriting: (1) it doesn’t flow like normal handwriting; and (2) there are apparently a number of different “hands” in play. The first researcher to properly foreground the idea of different “Voynich hands” was the US WWIINATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
WAGtv’s “Ancient X-Files” Voynich episode will first air at 20:40 on 10th May 2012 on the National Geographic channel in France, where the series has been retitled “De l’ombre à la lumière“. Though the episode is entitled “Sodom and Gomorrah” (“Sodome et Gomorrhe” in French), be reassured that 50% of it is the Voynichpart. 🙂
* About
* Voynich Manuscript * Big Fat List of Voynich Novels* Crossbow article
* Voynich Agriculture * Voynich Codicology * Voynich Parallel Hatching * Voynich Quire Numbers* Voynich Theories
* Tamam Shud / Somerton Man * My Somerton Man Wish List * The Somerton Man’s Secrets – Part 1* Masonic Ciphers
* Action Line Cryptogram * Robert Morris’ “Written Mnemonics”* Other Ciphers
* Beale Papers
* Bellaso Ciphers
* Blitz Ciphers
* Dorabella Cipher
* Feynman Ciphers
* Gentlemen’s Cipher* Scorpion Ciphers
* The Chaocipher
* The Devil’s Handwriting * Zodiac Killer Ciphers* Zodiac Killer Z32
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians * The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 1. Introduction * The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 2. The Three Texts * The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 3. Dating The Fama AndThe Confessio.
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 4. The Fama’s FirstDraft
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 5. So… What Was ThePoint Of It All?
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 6. ‘Book M’ * The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 7. Another MysteriousManuscript
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 8. Stories From TheMargins
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 9. Andreae’s TwoJourneys
* The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 10. The Limits OfEvidence
* Juan Roget
* Mona Lisa, but made of…* Misc Stuff
* Correspondence Projects * Rondelet, by Kingsley17Nov 2020
THE GLUT OF SOMERTON MEN… by nickpelling ⋅ 62Comments
The SOMERTON MAN, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years. Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a _whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning_ kind of guy? The list keeps on growing. But why so many theories? JOHN DOES & JANE DOES In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man. Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (_socially-distanced, mask-wearing_) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for
example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)
Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”,
I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever. > _“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, > “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. > The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that > I went into a bit of a decline.”_ So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?LIFE & DEATH
Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death: * “_mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion_” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years? * “_The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size_” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhapsmonths?
* “_Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal._” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking. * “_The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa._ _There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach._” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes); * “_The heart, if anything, was contracted_ _I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart_.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed. * “_There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down the right cheek._“ * “_The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck._” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to hisdeath.
* His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person orpersons unknown.
But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpfulconclusion.
And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh? (HUMAN) NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea
that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.) To my eyes, though, it seems that HUMAN NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations. In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: NO SMOKING GUN. Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s _mise-en-scene_ may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatricsof violence.
And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the ABSENCE OF EXPLICIT FORENSIC THEATRE. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE
But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death. Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right? So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense. Similarly, calling him “THE UNKNOWN MAN” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck). It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there. Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was verymuch known.
THE MISSING THREAD
In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectorysticks.
And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe. In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces theright way up.
But even if – _mirabile dictu_ – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side? Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.08Nov 2020
THE NAGEON DE L’ESTANGS IN 1760… by nickpelling ⋅ 45Comments
Here’s an official document from 1760 from the Mauritian Archives relating to the Nageon de l’Estang family property: (_Click on the image to get a higher resolution JPEG._) And here’s a transcription very largely provided by Ruby Novacna, with additional parallel transcriptions from Anthony Lallaizon and Thomas below – thanks very much to all three of you for thisexcellent help!
Rather than modernise the text, my preference (as per Ruby’s excellent work) is to try to stay close to the original spelling, though anyone wanting to grasp what it means might prefer Anthony’s and Thomas’ versions in the comments below: 1. Le conseil Superieur de l’Isle de France a tous Presents et 2. aVenir Salut. Scavoir faisons qu’en consequence des Ordres de 3. la compagnie inseréé dans la deliberation du deux Janvier M 4. Sept cent cinquante trois et de ladite Deliberation Nous Avons au Nom 5. De Messieurs les Sindics et Directeurs De la Compagnie Des Indes 6. Concedé et Delaissé Concedons et Delaissons Des maintenant etp toujours
7. Par ces presentes au sieur André Nagëon De l’Etang fils Dusieur
8. Bernardin Nagëon Son père De son vivant officier Des Vaisseaux 9. De Côte p la Compagnie ledit André Nagëon Demeurant chezMde
10. Sa Mere, En ce port et Paroisse Louis a ce present et acceptantP Luy
11. Ces hoirs et ayant cause la propriété D’un terrain De treizetoises
12. Deux Pied(s) Delarge Sur Vingt Six toises quatre pied(s) Deproffondeur
13. Scitué sur le Rempart De la grande Montagne nte 130.Borné D’un
14. Coté par une rue qui conduit aladte montagne Dautre CotéPar…
15. D’un bord un autrerue qui conduit Dans l’Enfoncement etd’autre bout par
(16. Une rue Entredeux)16. Le Sieur (?)
17. Le tous suivant le plan corigé par M Magon (?) Directeur etCommdt genal
18. Ledt terrain accordéé au S Nageon fils par OrdonnanceDu Conseil Du
19. Sept may Mil sept cent Soixante Pour Par ledt Nageon fils Ses enfans 20. Hoirs, ou heritiers meme ceux D’iciluy ayant cause jouir faireet Disposer
21. Dudis terrain comme la chose luy appartenant en toute propriétéroturière
22. Et néant moins reconnaitre Messieurs De la Compagnie Des Indescomme
23. Seuls Seigneurs Directs, Suzerains Hauts moyens et Bas justicierset p ce
24. est sujet atous droits de justice et Banalité quils jugerons apropos D’Etablir
25. Sera tenu ledis Sieur D’Enclore et faire Batir sur ledit terrainde faire
26. Couvrir les Batiments qu’il y fera construire En planches,Bardeaux ou
27. Arg , aux termes presents par les Reglements, s’oblige depayer par
28. annéé sur les ordres et dans les tems qui seront prescrits parle Conseil
29. Douze deniers De premier Cens reputé cens commune etimprescriptible
30. Tant p le fond que pour laquotité lequel Emportera lod(s) etventes
31. S’aizinnes et amendes, au Désir de la coutume deParis comme aussy
32. D’executer Exactement toutes les Ordonnances et reglements faitset a faire
33. Par la suite par la compage ou le Conseil de passer au domainede la
34. Compage. Declaration et reconnaissance dudit terrain et desdroits
35. Cy dessus Stipuler le tout a peine de Nullité de la presenteConcession De
36. Reunion au domaine Dudit Emplacement Sur le Simple Requisition du 37. Procureur General du Roy Sans estre par la compage tenuDaucunes
38. Indemnité. Ny formalité de justice Ny Sans que ladite peine Nyrien
39. Du contenu en la presente Concession Puisse estre reputécomminatoire mais
40. De rigueur étant la condition precise du don gratuit que lacompage
41. En fait et p(9) que ces presentes ayant leur forces et valeur oumarges
42. D’Expedition d’icelle sera apposéé le sceau de la compagniedes Indes
43. Donné au Port Louis de l’Isle de France le dix de may mil septcent soixte
44. Et a Signé
45. Nageondeleteang
46. ? Lejuge ?
47. ?
Oh, and here’s a close-up of the signature at the bottom left, which I read as “Nageondeléteang”, yet another variant spelling to addto the list *sigh*:
03Nov 2020
HIDDEN TREASURE, POINTE DE VACOAS, AND 300 DEAD DODOS… by nickpelling ⋅ 5Comments
In my last Cipher Mysteries post,
I floated the idea that when Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang famouslywrote that…
j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois … he may have been referring not to the _town_ or _inland area_ called Vacoas, but rather to POINTE DE VACOAS on Mauritius’ South-Eastern coast, which was close to the half plot of land he owned. According to his Will (BN1), what Bernardin did immediately after being “shipwrecked in a creek” was: j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau les richesses de l'Indus So: might there be a CAVE next to a CREEK not far from POINTE DE VACOAS? Generations of Mauritian treasure hunters must surely have put the same TWO and TWO together to get the same BEJEWELLED FOUR, right? But perhaps more importantly, you might be asking what on earth this post has to do with three hundred dead dodos? Has Cipher Mysteries been taken over, as my son asked, by some kind of “ARK: SURVIVALEVOLVED” meme?
_Photo
by BazzaDaRambler – Oxford University Museum of Natural History_ No, this post is genuinely about treasure and dodos. Really. Read on.THE CREEK
Having looked at a fair few historical maps of Mauritius, it seems to my eyes that there was only ever one winding little creek near Pointe de Vacoas. Rather than starting from beside the Point itself (as per the cadastral map I mentioned in the last post)… …the creek actually starts a little to the side, though it does then indeed kick sideways across towards the Mare du Tabac, which became the Union Vale Sugar Estate:_Source:
Mauritius Chamber of Agriculture_ In this 1880 map, you can see “Pte Vacoa” in the bottom right leading round to a small river (the “Ruis des Marres”) that winds its way inland, before finishing up by the Union Vale railway station (at centre left).Union
Vale, 1880 map of Mauritius OK, while I’m NOT saying that Ruisseau des Marres is ‘definitely’ the stream / creek that Bernardin was referring to, what I AM saying is that it seems (to my eyes) to be a very strong candidate indeed. For if you don’t look THERE, where else would you to go looking first, hmmm? Going over the map carefully, you should also be able to see the area around the Ruisseau des Marres is called “LES MARRES”. There are also a couple of odd-looking features on the map labelled as “Mare …”, the right of which is labelled as “Mare aux or DODO“. Unsurprisingly, we’ll be returning to that location beforevery long…
THE CAVE
I first started thinking about Mauritian lava tubes back in 2016,
and have never really stopped. This is because Bernardin’s secondletter BN2) runs:
l'entrée d'une caverne jadis formé par un bras de rivière passant sous la falaise et bouchée par les corsaires pour y mettre leur trésor et qui est le caveau désigné par mon testament …which I think sounds exactly like a description of a LAVA TUBE. Here’s a rather nice 1820s drawing by de Sainson of a Mauritian lava tube in the Grande Riviere quartier (not too far away) that I previously mentioned in a separate post:
Though the lava tube or lava blister we’re looking for must surely have been more modestly sized than this epic specimen, it’s the samebasic idea.
MARE AUX SONGES
In a rather charming 2007 New Yorker article called “Digging ForDodos
“,
we meet a gaggle of dodo experts and enthusiasts, all inspired by the MARE AUX SONGES – a (formerly) boggy pond in the South-East of Mauritius. This site was discovered in 1865 by local teacher George Clarke, after his thirty year search for dodo bones. In fact, the Mare Aux Songes ended up yielding far more dodo bones (from more than 300 separate dodo skeletons!) than everywhere else combined. Hence even the dodo skeleton at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (yes, the photo at the top of the post) was from theMare Aux Songes.
In response to a malaria epidemic a few years later, British engineers covered the whole boggy area with concrete to prevent mosquitoes breeding: the Mare Aux Songes then spent most of a century out ofreach.
The experts (in the New Yorker article) had formed a group called the 2006 MAURITIUS DODO EXPEDITION, with the idea of revisiting the Mare Aux Songes with a more modern scientific approach, to find more about dodos. Specifically, they wondered whether they might find multiple historical layers of dodo remains. But what they actually found was that all the dodo bone fragments seem to have come from a relatively short period around 4000 years ago. What exactly had happened? The report outlines the group’sconclusions:
> The geomorphology of the rock valley, in particular being bounded by > steep cliffs, suggests collapse of a pre-existing cavity in the > subsurface. In volcanic settings rock valleys generally evolve from > the collapse of lava tunnels (e.g. Peterson et al., 1994), and these > systems are common in (SW) Mauritius (Middleton, 1995; Saddul, 2002; > Janoo, 2005), suggesting that the MAS rock valley was created in a > similar way. Therefore at some point after 120 ka, large-scale roof > collapse led to the formation of a dry valley at MAS (Fig. 4A). > “Mid-Holocene vertebrate bone Concentration-Lagerstatte on oceanic> island
> Mauritius provides a window into the ecosystem of the dodo (Raphus> cucullatus)”
So, the basic narrative they reconstructed was this: * the Mare Aux Songes had started out as a lava blister (i.e. a void inside the volcanic basalt) with a diameter of ten or more meters; * the lava blister’s roof had weathered and collapsed, leaving behind an exposed hemispheric ‘bowl’; * there had been a long dry period, perhaps across a couple ofcenturies;
* during that dry period, a large number of animals (mainly turtles, but a few dodos too) had found themselves trapped inside the steep-walled bowl; and * this was where, unable to climb back up its steep walls to escape, the three hundred dodos died. And you will surely be unsurprised to find that the Mare Aux Songes mentioned on the map above is (or _was_) the boggy pond that formed in a roofless lava blister about 1km NNW of Pointe de Vacoas (as per the1880 map).
LOCAL PONDS AND CAVES IN 1838 The best historical source on the geography of the local area I have found so far is the (1838) book “Statistique de l’Ile Maurice etses dépendances
”
by M. le Baron d’Unienville. Helpfully, the Baron lists the ponds (“mares”) of most interest in this quartier (my loose translation) : The Mare la Violette, on Lahausse's land, yields a lot of water, nevertheless sometimes drying up, but only very rarely; its waters drain into le Bouchon. The Mares du Tabac spring from between the Toussaint, Avice and Buttié plots; they provide eels , shrimps , and water snails ; they drain out into the Cul du Chaland, towards le Bouchon. The Anse-Jonchais, Bambous and Albert ponds sometimes dry up, but all provide very good water. On M. Fenonillot's land, there is a natural pond three to four hundred fathoms long by one hundred wide, becoming up to 25 feet deep in the rainy season, with water springing from the earth. This pond dries up in the dry season. Interestingly, the Baron didn’t even consider the Mare Aux Songes to be worth reporting on, presumably because it was so marshy and boggy that you couldn’t get any useful water from it. But more interestingly, he goes immediately on to discuss the caverns of the quartier (again, please forgive my loose translation):
This district is very cavernous in places, especially towards the coast going round from Chasur to the point. IN SEVERAL PARTS OF THE MARES-DU-TABAC AREA, THE GROUND RESONATES HOLLOWLY UNDER THE FOOTSTEPS OF MEN. The artificial excavations present there the certainty of a great upheaval formerly caused by underground fires, since in addition to volcanic stones whose soil is covered, the layers of earth are firstly topsoil, then tuff , then earth again in unequal layers always interspersed with volcanic stones. The Pointe du Souffleur offers a rather singular phenomenon, also found in other regions; the water pushing violently into the cavities of this point, emerges in a jet of water rising to a rather great height through a hole two to three inches in diameter, with the compressed air producing a noise similar to that of a strong forge bellows. There are several excavations in this area that are believed to go through to the sea, such as the Fanchon hole and the Maignan hole. The first is located on the Chemin du Port, home of Sieur Leroux, and the second on the Maignan land. Tests have been carried out to map the underground routes and interconnections between these holes; but those tests were unsatisfactory, because the lack of air causes lights to be extinguished beyond a certain distance. Sieur Charroux, among others, spent twenty-four hours lost in the labyrinths of these caves, and considered himself very fortunate to find the opening through which he had entered and which may be twenty feet deep. All in all, I think there is ample reason to believe that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s description of (what sounds to me like) a lava blister or lava tube beneath a cliff is entirely consistent with the geology of the area around Mare la Violette. It may sound overly romantic, but it seems certain to me that there are still as yet unmapped voids under the ground; and it might well be that one of these once had a concealed entrance. Perhaps the notion that pirates used these voids is just a campfire story (it wouldn’t be the first or the last): but nonetheless, voids there were. THE CAVE NOBODY FOUND The local landscape circa even 1900 was very different on the surface to how it was circa 1750. Much of the area had been razed for growing sugar cane; estates and railways had been built; marshes had been filled and capped in response to the Epidemics of Mauritius; and so
forth.
And so by the time of the great explosion of interest in Mauritian treasure hunting in the early 20th century, the area along the Ruisseau des Mares was probably close to unrecognizable. Not that this probably did anything to stop the grimly determined treasure hunters of the era with their fake maps, rumours, hunches, dynamite and shovels. Who knows what features they blew up in their hunger forburied gold?
Now a large part of the same general zone is being redeveloped by Omnicane – a company formed from Mon Trésor & Mon Désert sugar companies, among others – into the Mon Trésor Airport City project. So perhaps the cave we’re looking for has already been unknowingly flattened and redeveloped ten times over, who can tell? If (_and I happily admit that it’s a big if_) Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure is still in the cave he left it in nearly three hundred years ago, then the way forward is surely through GPR (ground penetrating radar), tracking along the land beside the eastern bank of the Ruisseau des Mares. But it is (and probably will always be) A NEEDLE-SHAPED VOID IN A LAVA HAYSTACK. Still, even though it took George Clarke thirty years to find his cache of three hundred dead dodos, who would now say that his search wasn’t worth it? And surely that’s how Mauritian treasure hunters feel (more or less), right? Even so, rather than hiring a load of GPR equipment, I have to point out that you would (thanks to the French treasure hunting laws that Mauritius inherited) probably be better off instead walking up and down beside that river bank until you fell down a hole into a longlost treasure cave.
As they say in the theatre, BREAK A LEG. FINISHING WITH A SONG It’s rare that you can write a blog post that covers an unsolved historical mystery and yet brings in so many nice historical angles along the way: rarer still that you can do all that and END ON A SONG. So here’s my cousin Phil Alexander (AKA “Philfy Phil”, recorded at The Goat, St Albans in 2010) with “Dido Dies”, one of his… errrm… _cleaner_ parody songs. The first verse and chorus are about DEAD DODOS, and you already know the tune, so feel free to sing along, you know you want to: > The final dodo walked the earth four hundred years ago > No more flapping wings and croaking; the dodo, yes, has croaked > He’s in the doodoo > He lies extinct > No more delicious in Mauritius > Or at least that’s what I thinkt>
> Then Salvador Dali died in 1989 > With the oddest of moustaches > Like his anti-artist predecessor, Dada> Painting stuff
> Did he look back and then realize he’d painted quite enough? > And well… let’s face it, most of it was guff>
> Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died > Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died > D’oh, da dodo died01Nov 2020
“CARTE GÉNÉRALE DE L’ISLE DE FRANCE AVEC LE DÉTAIL DE SON TERRIER ET LES NOMS DES HABITANS PAR NUMÉROS”… by nickpelling ⋅ 11Comments
This “Carte générale” is a really great 18th century map ofMauritius
held at the BNF, one that Cipher Mysteries commenter Anthony Lallaizonalerted me to
.
The BNF shelfmark is “_département Cartes et plans, GE C-9307_“. Note that the BNF also has a second map of Mauritius that seems to be an updated copy of the first map, but with the owners’ names inserted directly into the map. BNF shelfmark: “_département Cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 219 DIV 2 P 24_“. (The plots in this seem to my eyes to be a little more subdivided, which is why I suspect it’sslightly later.)
What is interesting, as Anthony is clearly aware, is that these two maps offer snapshots into the world of Mauritius at around the period we’re interested in (if we’re interested in the Nageon de l’Estang family, that is). So, let’s dive deep into these maps and see what pearls we canretrieve…
THE NAGEON PLOT
As Indian Ocean treasure hunters have known for over a century, the will signed by “Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang” begins (my roughtranslation):
> I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without > much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the > reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a > half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France>
Now, as most people who have ever gone hunting for historical cadastral maps (i.e. maps that show the “extent, value, and ownership of land”, typically so that the owners can be taxed) will tell you, this can be a very hit and miss affair. (Errrm… mostlymiss.)
Personally, I’d long ago given up on the faint hope that there might be any actual cadastral map of 18th century Mauritius out there: the best I had hoped to find was a later will referring back to an earlier(long lost) will.
But… what we have in GE C-9307 is indeed a cadastral map, nicely indexed. And in that index, just as sweetly as you could wish for, is“574 Nageon”.
Ah, you may reasonably ask, so where is this Nageon plot in modern-day Mauritius? Well, carefully aligning the map so that we can see (most of) the rivers depicted above, I think we can locate this plotextremely exactly.
Yes, the plot is now part of the runway and plane parking area of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport, which is Mauritius’ main international airport. So, it turns out that pretty much everyone who has flown to Mauritius from abroad will have passed directly over the Nageon de l’Estang land before they’ve even got their bag down from the overheadlocker.
Which is nice.
OTHER NAMES ON THE MAP Anthony points to other possibly connected names that appear in GE C-9307’s index, such as 571 Pitel and 630 Clergeac. If you had (quite understandably) forgotten why, a 2016 CipherMysteries post
flagged that André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang married “Perrine Clerjean” (which was probably “Clergeac”) in Port Louis on 14th January 1766; and then (after her death) married Mathurine Louise Françoise Pitel in Grand Port on 13th June 1768. To this illustrious list I’d perhaps add quite a different name to conjure with: 467 Levasseur (there in both maps). (A piratical relation? Or no relation at all? You choose!) Finally, I also noticed an intriguing detail just along the coast: PTE DU VAQUOAS (which is still marked as “Pointe Vacoas” on modernmaps).
Could this be what Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was referring towhen he wrote:
j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois The reason I ask is that even though Mauritius has a modern town Vacoas-Phoenix (right in the middle of the island, close to Curepipe), that town does not seem to appear in these two 18th century maps atall.
So, could it be that Bernardin was simply referring to Pointe Vacoas? Sadly, because the description then goes on to describe climbing up acliff…
remonte la rivière, remonte une falaise en allant vers l'Est …and the area around Pointe Vacoas looks extremely flat, the odds that this is true seem small to me. But even so, I thought I ought tomention it.
24Oct 2020
DOMINGO DELGADO AND THE “AMELIA MANUSCRIPT”… by nickpelling ⋅ 41Comments
You might be interested to know that an interview with (relatively new) Voynich researcher Domingo Delgado was posted to YouTube a few days ago. In this, Delgado describes how he thinks the Voynich Manuscript was: * made in Italy (because he thinks the handwriting is distinctivelyItalian);
* made in the 15th century (largely because of the same ‘4o’ pattern I went on about in The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006); * written in Latin (because that’s what educated Italians used backthen); and
* enciphered using a combination of substitution and “permutation” (_I’m pretty sure he means ‘transposition’_) tricks (though he doesn’t want to give any details away just yet, his book – to be published next year – will teach everyone how to decrypt Voynichese for themselves) Having previously (in 2019)
concluded that the Voynich’s author was Leon Battista Alberti, Delgado now thinks for 100% sure that it was funded by Federico da Montefeltro (though he doesn’t have any more detail than this). He doesn’t yet know the author’s name, because the text’s combination of substitution and transposition means that it’s taking him a while to decrypt its text: so far, he has only managed to decrypt a few lines at a time. Delgado also seems a bit cross that existing Voynich Manuscript researchers don’t seem to have taken his work seriously – in other words, that he hasn’t been given the seat at the top table he sorightly deserves.
(Hot tip: there is no top table – we all sit on the floor.)F6R = GROUNDSEL?
His decryption process seems largely to have been to look at the top two lines of herbal pages to see if they contain a tell-tale Latin plant-name that has been manipulated in some way. His key example seems to be f6r, which he says discusses GROUNDSEL, and how the plant is attacked by MITES. Groundsel certainly does have a long herbal medicinal history: it was mentioned by Pliny (who called it ‘_senecio_‘) and by Dioscorides (who recommended it as a cure for kidney-stones). Nowadays, we know that even though canaries do like a nice bit of groundsel seed, humans who take too much of it may well get liver damage. My guess is that Delgado was looking specifically at the last word of the second line (EVA chotols), which he has matched with the -e-e–of ‘senecio’:
My guess is also that Delgado thought that he had seen a reference to “(minutum) reddas”, which some may know from Luke 12:59: _dico tibi non exies inde donec etiam novissimum minutum reddas_ = “I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite” (i.e. the last cent, penny, or farthing). And no, I can’t easily guess which Voynichese word of f6r Delgado thought was “reddas”. It’s true that spider mites are among the (many, many, many) things that attack _senecio vulgaris_. But honestly, were any fifteenth century gardeners really that sophisticated about what was (and is)basically a weed?
Perhaps there’s an outside chance that this f6r identification is correct, but to be honest, I’m really not seeing even that much sofar.
NINE-ROSETTE CASTLE = AMELIA? The decryption that Delgado seems most impressed with is that of the famous castle in the nine-rosette page: He was so surprised to find the name of the town with the castle – Amelia (in Umbria, formerly Ameria) on this page that he plans to title his book “The Voynich Amelia Manuscript” (i.e. with a deliberate strikethrough). As justification, he says that the text describes a “carpet of roses” (_presumably that’s what the swirl of stars in the middle of the rosette represents?_), and that even today there’s an Umbrian festival that has elaborate carpets of roses (he says this is “Spoleto”, but I’m pretty sure he means the INFIORATE DI SPELLO).
Spello does indeed have quite a splendidly beautiful festival, even if many of the designs do seem to my eyes to be a little too eager to combine 1960s psychedelia with 1980s crop circles: Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will immediately recognise this very specific point in a Voynich theory blog post: the first mention of a specific historical phenomenon. So yes, this is where I would normally point out that the first document mentioning decorating the streets of Spello with flowers (and not even with carpets of flowers) only dates back to 1831. As a result, my confidence that this is a real decryption is as close to zero as makes no difference, sorry. BTW, I suspect it is the second word of the Voynichese label just above the castle that Delgado reads as “amelia”, but it’s probably not hugely relevant:11Oct 2020
WHY A HOOPOE’S HEART? by nickpelling ⋅ 9Comments
Everyone knows Macbeth’s witch’s ingredient list: _Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg, andhowlet’s wing,_
While real medieval recipes were hardly averse to a bit of mystification, I think it’s fair to say that – _by and large_ – most seem to have been intended to be achievable. But… WHY DO SO MANY OF THEM INCLUDE A HOOPOE’S HEART? It’s a vague question that I’ve had lurking at the back of my mind for ages, that lurched abruptly forward yesterday when I saw a news story about how a hoopoe had been sighted in York for the first timein forty years
.
Here’s Jon Noble’s nice photograph of the York hoopoe: So I went on a short journey into the archives to try to answer the historical question: WHY A HOOPOE’S HEART?HOOPOE HISTORY
Perhaps the best source on everything to do with the hoopoe is John Gotthold Kunstmann’s (1938) University of Chicago dissertation “The Hoopoe : A Study in European Folklore“. Kunstmann
traces the pictorial history of the hoopoe all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Crete; notes references to it in Ovid, Pliny, Pausanias, Isidore (via Hrabanus Maurus), and even Rabelais; and discusses folk tales about ‘HOW THE HOOPOE GOT ITS CREST‘ (_though e.g. it seems a tad unlikely that Solomon gave the hoopoe its crest because of its hatred of women, etc_). Kunstmann’s chapter II is where things start to get more meaty. The (originally African) hoopoe appears in “Egyptian (Demotic), Coptic, Graeco-Egyptian medical prescriptions, in Pliny ” etc, all the way up to R. James’ (1752) _Pharmacopeia Universalis_ (2nd edition). Pretty much every part of the hoopoe was considered to have magical properties, along with its eggs, its ashes, and even a magical stone called “LAPIS QUIRINIS” (or _quiritia_, _cinreis_, _withopfenstain_) fabled to be found in its nest.HOOPOE HEARTS
The heart of the hoopoe is said (in Konrad von Megenburg’s _Buch der Natur_, which we’ve seen here a number of times of late) to be used “by magicians and by people who perform evil deeds secretly”.Kunstmann goes on:
> Hans Vintler in Pluemen der tugent informs us that the hoopoe’s > heart, placed upon a sleeper at night, will cause him to reveal > hidden things. According to a MS from Stendal, the hoopoe’s or the > treefrog’s heart, if carried on one’s person, will cause > everybody to love one. The same MS advises drying and pulverizing > the heart of the hoopoe and placing it under one’s head at night, > in order to dream about the location of hidden treasure. Johannes > Ravisius Textor mentions the heart of the hoopoe as good for > stitches in the side. (Note that Textor was just reprising Pliny) Voynich Manuscript researcher Marco Ponzi also recently mentioned ahoopoe heart
in
a post on magic rings: > Laura Mitchell (_Cultural Uses of Magic in Fifteenth-Century > England_) quotes a spell in MS Ashmole 1435 in which the heart of a > hoopoe grants prophetic dreams (_Cor ypapa supponatur sub capite > dormientis et sompniabit futuram_). EATING A HOOPOE HEART The Papyri Graecae Magicae talks about eating the honeyed heart of a hoopoe at full moon. So the idea of eating a hoopoe heart has a very long pedigree indeed. Václav Havel’s (1984) “Thriller ” begins (and, if you read it all, ends) with: > BEFORE ME LIES the famous _Occult Philosophy_ of Heinrich Cornelius > Agrippa von Nettesheim, where I read that the ingestion of the > living (and if possible still beating) heart of a hoopoe, a swallow, > a weasel, or a mole will bestow upon one the gift of prophecy. Agrippa’s ultimate source might be the one mentioned by Richard Kieckhefer in his “Magic in the Middle Ages” (p.142): > to learn all that happens on earth, the secrets of > everyone’s mind, and even heavenly things, one manuscript > recommends beheading a > hoopoe at sunrise, under a new moon, and swallowing its heart while > it is still palpitating. (_Though it might be less fuss to just get a Twitter account._) In the same footnote, Kieckhefer mentions Bodleian MS e Mus. 210 fol. 186v: “_to learn the language of the birds, take the heart of a hoopoe or the tongue of a kite and put it in honey for three days and nights, then place it under your tongue_“.DIRTY HOOPOES
Yet the hoopoe was also considered a filthy bird, and was included in the list of “birds of abomination” in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Kunstmann p.44) “whose flesh must not be eaten”. Even Aristotle passed forward various explanations for the hoopoe’s bad smell (which is genuinely the case, it’s sadly not a very hygienicbird).
Even though Kunstmann doesn’t say so, I suspect this makes the idea of consuming a (dirty) hoopoe’s heart as part of a magical recipe also (because it was a a “bird of abomination”) TRANSGRESSIVE. And yet because of the hoopoe’s magical associations and powers, people were clearly happy to do that. Even if they didn’t first store it (as per Havel’s “Thriller”) in a Thermos flask.10Oct 2020
TYPEX SEEN THROUGH CODE-BREAKING EYES… by nickpelling ⋅ 1Comment
Previous posts here have established (I believe) that the WW2 Pigeon Cipher was almost certainly encrypted using the British Typex cipher machine. So I think it would be a good idea to look at this message from a Typex code-breaker’s point of view. While Kelly Chang’s (2012) master’s project on the cryptanalysisof Typex
is a
very useful resource here, I think it’s fair to say that she confines her efforts to purely numerical, _permutational_ attacks. But because she doesn’t try to peer inside an actual ciphertext, I think it’s also fair to say that she doesn’t really look at Typex from a practical code-breaker’s perspective. So, let’s get to it: let’s (temporarily) close our mathematical eyes, and instead try to look at a Typex message (the WW2 pigeon cipher) through our CODE-BREAKING EYES.THE TYPEX KEYBOARD
Whereas Enigma was just 26 plain letters A-to-Z (no numbers, no spaces, no umlauts, and not even a special Swastika symbol), Typex had two modes: LETTER MODE and FIGURE MODE. And so the Typex keyboard (below image from Crypto Museum , or you can play with a real-looking one at Virtual Typex ) encodes lots of letters in slightly roundabout ways (akin to escape code sequences). The most notable mappings in Typex’s (default) Letter Mode are:* X –> Space
* V –> Switch to Figure Mode * Z –> Switch to Letter Mode In Typex’s Figure Mode, the top row maps to numbers (QWERTYUIOP —> 1234567890), the second row (largely) maps to punctuation symbols, while the special Letter Mode meta-letters (X/V/Z) maps to G/C/D. So, to encipher “X” on a Typex keyboard, you’d need to switch into Figure Mode (“V”), press the Figure Mode version of the letter (“G”) and then switch back into Letter Mode (“Z”), i.e.“VGZ”.
Putting this all together, you can see that before sending the classic test sequence “_The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog_” via Typex, you’d need to “escape” the letters to the Typex keyboardmapping, i.e.
THEXQUICKXBROWNXFOVGZXJUMPSXOVCZERXTHEXLAVDZYXDOG Here, I’ve highlighted the three escape sequences (for “X”, “V”, and “Z” respectively): similarly, 1234567890 would need to be Typex-escaped as “VQWERTYUIOPZ” before transmission. Was Typex’s keyboard a strength or a weakness? Certainly, it was more _sophisticated_, and gave more a concise, bureaucratic feel to messages (“£2/3/6” would have been vastly longer for Enigma). But at the same time, the added expense and physical complexity (_the number of Typex machines built was only ever a fraction of the number of Enigma machines in use_) seems fairly unwise to me. Moreover, Typex’s keyboard’s escape sequences significantly modified the way technical language was transmitted. Even though shorter messages are harder to crack than longer messages, I can’t help but wonder whether Typex’s escape sequences might have addedcrypto weaknesses.
TYPEX “X”
Any enciphering system that enciphered spaces as X would instantly make X the most common letter in (escaped) plaintexts. So it should be clear that Typex’s letter “X” (which enciphers SPACE) was onepossible weakness.
Moreover, right from the earliest part of the war, German codebreakers noted that the first three letters in a new class of intercepted messages were never “A”, “I”, and “R” (respectively), and the last letter was almost never “X”. From this they deduced(correctly) that:
* Messages were being sent using an Enigma-style rotor cipher machine (where letters never map to themselves) * The sender was almost certainly the British Air Force (“AIR”) * The last letter was probably using X as a padding character Even if Typex is (largely) randomising the output letters (via permutation and stepping), we still know that plaintext “X” can never be enciphered as ciphertext “X”. Can we use this to look inside the ciphertext? If we discard the (almost certainly disguised) rotor setting AOAKN at the start and end of the pigeon cipher message, we get the following:HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQKLDTS GQIRU
For this 25 x 5 = 125-character ciphertext, a completely random letter mapping would imply an average instance count of (125/26) = 4.8 instances. In fact, the instance counts of the letters (in decreasingcount order) are:
H K R N P D F G Q A J M O T E I X Z B C L U W Y S V 8 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 Even if X is the most common letter in the plaintext, the amount of enciphered text would need to be very long (I’d guess 20+ times longer or more) before Typex (escaped space) X’s higher frequency would show up as a measurable dip in the (Typex ciphertext) X’sstatistics.
X: ----- ----- ----- --X-- ----- ----- ----X ----- ----- ----- ----- --X-- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- --X-- ----- ----- ---------- -----
Sadly, because of the short length of the ciphertext, the only thing to note is that the third and fifth lines have no X’s in, which we’ll return to in the next section.TYPEX “Q”
From the preceding table, we can see that Q appears six times in the ciphertext. Even though Q is a relatively rare letter in English (hence 10 points in Scrabble), there are a number of different ways that Q can practically appear in an enciphered Typex messages: * As the letter Q in text (in Letter Mode) * As the digit 1 (in Figure Mode) * As part of a five-letter QQQQQ separator block (these appeared in the middle of Typex messages, and were used to help conceal messages starts e.g. coded addressees) * As a null (Typex operators were, as part of the security protocol, expected to insert a random character every few words) * As part of a Q-code Even though Q-codes were originally used for shipping transmissions, their use quickly spread through the various armed services. A few years ago, I found a Combined Operating Signals handbook in the Royal Signals Museum archives. Its first page looked like this: But though it is entirely plausible that a WW2-era message might include Q-codes such as QPZ (“Yes”) or QQZ (“No”), my understanding is that Q-codes were far more for radio operators than for cipher machine operators. Hence I’m not genuinely expecting to find any Q-codes in the plaintext here. I’ve previously posted about QQQQQ here, but the short version is that if we look at the six instances of Q that appear in the pigeon cipher message, they appear to cluster in the bottom half of the message:----- ----- -----
-Q--- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----Q ----- --Q-- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----Q ----Q----- -Q---
Of course, this might just be a sign that randomness is doing its random thing here. But there’s a pretty good chance that the lack of Q’s in the top half implies that the top half of the plaintext has more Qs than normal. Why might that be? The two most likely reasons would be (a) the presence of a QQQQQ section divider block (say, on the “PABUZ WYYNP…” line), and (b) the presence of number sequences (because in Figure Mode, Q enciphers the digit “1”). And because of Benford’s Law , we might reasonably expect “1” to appear more often than other digits, so this perhaps isn’t quite as arbitrary as you might atfirst think.
I also wonder the lack of Xs on the third line might be an indication that the block of five letters immediately before the (putative) QQQQQ ends with a block of Xs, e.g. –XXX QQQQQ. It’s certainlypossible…
OTHER LETTERS
If we look at the five Ts in the ciphertext, these too cluster at the bottom in a slightly unusual way: T: ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---T- ----- ----- T---- ----- ----T ----- ---T----T- -----
And the two Vs in the ciphertext are also (perhaps) notable for bothbeing at the top:
V: -V--- ----- ----- ----- ----- --V-- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---------- -----
Note also that even though the instance counts of V and Z in any given message will (almost certainly) be identical (_because Figure Shift will be followed by a matching Letter Shift back again_), these are small enough that they won’t show up in the instance stats. But the small number of Vs in the ciphertext might _possibly_ be a (very weak) indication that the bottom half of the text has a lot of FigureShifting going on.
But really: are these statistically significant results, or is it merely the Randomness Fairy laughing into her hand? A researcher with the persistence of Dave Oranchak would randomise millions of cases and see how often these conditions recur: but with such a small ciphertext, it’s hard to be sure. For now, though, it’s just a set of interesting observations.02Oct 2020
LOOKING FOR A BALTIMORE / WASHINGTON CRYPTO COLLABORATOR… by nickpelling ⋅ 5Comments
This website may have been quiet-ish of late, but the lights here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion have been burning into the night. Yes: once again, I find myself HOT ON THE TRAIL of one of the ‘classic’ unbroken historical ciphers. Intriguingly, what I’ve found is that there is some hugely useful information out there relating to that particular cipher that almost nobody knows about. The only (_minor, piffling, inconsequential_) practical challenge is that what I need to know about is located on the opposite side of the Atlantic from me (in the Baltimore / Washington area, in fact). To be precise, I believe that this extra information (if I’m correct) would lift up my chances of cracking this specific cipher from a miserable 0% right up to the dizzying heights of 1 IN 5040 (i.e. ~0.02% chance of success). But that’s not the point of doing it: which, rather, is to try to recategorise this whole challenge from _impossible_ to _possible_. If I can demonstrate that this is doable, then I think all manner of doors will open up… and hopefully the other 5039 chances too. So: will anyone in the Baltimore-Washington area with an interest in crypto history please kindly step forward and offer their assistance? I need someone to take a couple of hours out to have a look at this in person. Thank you so much!28Sep 2020
BRIEF NOTES ON VOYNICHESE BENCHED GALLOWS… by nickpelling ⋅ 6Comments
I mentioned in a comment on Koen G’s recent post that I thought that Voynichese benched gallows (_i.e. gallows that have a ch glyph struck through them_) may well be nothing more complex than a different way of writing gallows+ch; and that I thought this was much more likely than the alternative notion that it was a different way of writing ch+gallows. When Koen asked me what evidence I had for this, I thought that I ought to write a brief post explaining how I got there (_i.e. rather than cramming my “truly marvelous demonstration” into a Fermatian margin_). So here goes. YES, IT’S CONTACT TABLES (AGAIN) The evidence I’d point to is from (you guessed it) contact tables for glyphs following benched gallows. The notable feature of these I mentioned recently on Cipher Mysteries (though the obeservation is, of course, as old as the hills) is that benched gallows are only very rarely followed by -ch. Here’s a simple parsed count example (Takahashi transcription), showing how very rare benched gallows + -ch are as compared to both -eand -ee:
cth 712
cthe 167
cthee 23
cthch 3
ckh 629
ckhe 222
ckhee 20
ckhch 5
cph 147
cphe 56
cphee 8
cphch 1
cfh 59
cfhe 13
cfhee 1
cfhch 0
Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (che 4138), (chee 742), and (chch 18) Furthermore, as I noted in that post, almost all of the places where benched gallows are followed by ch seem to be Takahashi’s transcription errors (sorry Takahashi-san). Compare and contrast with the contact tables for the preceding glyph, where the ch- instance counts hugely outnumber the counts for e- andee-:
cth 701
ecth 59
eecth 6
chcth 139
ckh 501
eckh 124
eeckh 9
chckh 242
cph 177
ecph 7
eecph 1
chcph 27
cfh 54
ecfh 3
eecfh 1
chcfh 15
Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (ech 143), (eech 33), and (chch 18) As a sidenote, the interesting things in this particular table are (a) how rarely benched gallows are preceded by ee- (far less than by just e- or ch-), and (b) how frequently benched gallows are preceded by ch- when ch itself is very rarely preceded by ch-. SO, WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? I think it’s safe to say that there is probably a really basic reason why benched gallows preceded by ch- are found so much more often than benched gallows followed by -ch. But what might that reasonbe?
For me, the suspicion is simply that c+gallows+h is just a different way of writing gallows+ch. The contact tables I quote above certainly don’t seem to offer anything to support the alternative scenario where c+gallows+h is a different way of writing ch+gallows. To my eyes, replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would match the statistics baseline for che/chee/chch far more closely than replacing benched gallows with ch+gallows would match the statistics baseline for ech/eech/chch. That is, the benched gallows right contact tables (_i.e. the contacts that benched gallows have with glyphs immediately following them to the right_) seem to me to broadly match the ch right contact tables, but the benched gallows left contact tables don’t obviously match the ch left contact tables. The big issue here – as always, though – is one of PROOF. It’s all very well my speculating that it would be better to replace benched gallows with gallows+ch rather than ch+gallows, but how can this be made stronger? Though I’m not sure that it would be possible to turn this gallows+ch replacement hypothesis into a smoking-gun proof, I do suspect that it could be tested much more rigorously. Perhaps CM readers will have good suggestions about how to carry out a suitabletest (or three).
FINALLY: MIGHT CH BE ENCIPHERING U? To me, Voynichese’s various families of shapes and glyph behaviours look (much as John Tiltman suggested) like a grab-bag of contemporary cipher tricks. As a result, it would make a lot of sense to me if the distinctive benched gallows was simply one of the set of slightly older cipher tricks that were artfully combined to form Voynichese. Along these lines, I’ve previously floated the idea (_based mainly on the look of the benched gallows, but also on my long-held suspicion that e/ee/ch/sh might somehow be vowels_) that Voynichese ch might in fact encipher plaintext U/V. This is because I can easily imagine that c+gallows+h may have begun its life as an early 15th century steganographic trick used to disguise or visually disrupt QU patterns before being absorbed into the Voynichese Borg mind. Replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would be entirely consistent with this idea (though note that the gallows need not necessarily be enciphering Q, even if the trick started that way), so it’s possible that both ideas might turn out to be true simultaneously. Incidentally: in “The Curse of the Voynich” (p.177), I mentioned a strikethrough trick that appeared in an “otherwise unremarkable” 1455 cipher (Ludovico Petronio Senen) to encipher the Tironian-style ‘subscriptio’ shorthand sign (e.g. that turns “p” into “p”). My speculation here is therefore that the strikethrough trick may have first emerged in this general era, though instead used to visually disguise plaintext U’s. Hence one thing I have been meaning to do recently is to trawl carefully through Mark Knowles’ fascinating haul of 1400–1450 Northern Italian ciphers to see if there is any indication there that a strikethrough trick was ever used in one of those ciphers to disguise the U in QU pairs. You might have thought that encipherers would have added a special token for “QU”, or might have simply chosen to omit the U after Q: but neither of these options typically seems to have happened in this general timeframe (outside of the most complicated syllabic ciphers).20Sep 2020
COMPARING VOYNICHESE WORD-INITIAL L- WITH OL- AND AL-… by nickpelling ⋅ 5Comments
I recently mentioned in a comment that my working hypothesis was word-initial EVA l- was a different token to EVA l elsewhere: and Emma May Smith asked me what evidence I had for that statement. So I thought I’d post a few stats to throw onto the fire.THE EVIDENCE
Just to be clear, though: because I’d rather not mess up my stats with line-initial EVA l- stats, all the following figures relate to word-initial (but not line-initial) stats. And to keep everything as clear as practical, the comparisons are solely between words beginningl-, ol-, and al-.
So, here are the raw instance counts according to the Takahashi transcription for word-initial (but not line-initial) l-, ol-, and al-. For example, there are 1267 word-initial (but not line-initial) l- words, of which 58 are just EVA l (on its own), along with 433 word-initial (but not line-initial) words beginning with lk-. (_Note that the “(-)” line is an estimate, my app unfortunately couldn’t calculate it._).l
.ol
.al
1267
1416
477
(-)
58
538
256
k
433
326
42
t
34
35
1
f
10
12
3
P
17
13
2
ch
293
138
20
sh
105
53
8
o
171
85
55
a
41
97
32
d
48
52
26
y
13
58
32
To compare these three columns, we now need to turn their values into percentages. What this following table is saying, then, is that word-initial (but not line-initial) l- is followed by k 34.18% of the time, t 2.68% of the time, etc. (_Note that I didn’t try to capture all of the values._).l
.ol
.al
100%
100%
100%
(-)
4.58%
37.99%
53.67%
k
34.18%
23.02%
8.81%
t
2.68%
2.47%
0.21%
f
0.79%
0.85%
0.63%
p
1.34%
0.92%
0.42%
ch
23.13%
9.75%
4.19%
sh
8.29%
3.74%
1.68%
d
13.50%
6.00%
11.53%
a
3.24%
6.85%
6.71%
o
3.79%
3.67%
5.45%
y
1.03%
4.10%
6.71%
In short, this table is trying to compare the contact tables for three word-initial (but not line-initial) contexts: l-, ol-, and al-. So…what does it say?
Though the +f and +p rows are broadly the same for all three contexts, I think just about every row presents significant differences. Forexample:
* Only one word in the VMs begins with EVA alt (on f72v2, Virgo) * Comparisons between the ch and sh lines seem to imply that tehre is vastly more similarity between ch and sh (ch seems to occur 3x more often than sh) than between l-, ol-, and al-. * l- is typically followed by k (34.18%) and ch (23.13%), but this is quite unlike ol- and al-. However, the biggest difference in all these counts is where l, ol, and al form the whole word (the “(-)” row). So here’s the last table of the day, which is where the whole word counts are removed from the totals, i.e. word-initial but not line-initial and also notword-complete:
.l
.ol
.al
k
35.81%
37.13%
19.00%
t
2.81%
3.99%
0.45%
f
0.83%
1.37%
1.36%
p
1.41%
1.48%
0.90%
ch
24.23%
15.72%
9.05%
sh
8.68%
6.04%
3.62%
d
14.14%
9.68%
24.89%
a
3.39%
11.05%
14.48%
o
3.97%
5.92%
11.76%
y
1.08%
6.61%
14.48%
Even though taking out all the word-total instances has damped down some of the larger ratios, there are still plenty of big ratios to beseen.
Perhaps the most surprising is the comparison between ly- (1.08%) and aly- (14.48%). (_Interestingly, all but one of all the places where the ly and aly instances occur in the text are at the end of a line or butted up against a mid-line illustration. Which I think points strongly to ly and aly being abbreviated in some way, but that’s an argument for another day_.)THE CONCLUSION
For me, I simply can’t see anything systematic or language-like about the comparisons between any of the three columns. When their contact tables are so different, what actual evidence is there that l-, ol-, and al- are all presenting the same (right-facing) linguistic context? Personally, I simply can’t see any. My conclusion from the above is therefore that l-, ol- and al- are (without any real doubt at all) three different tokens, i.e. they are standing in for three different underlying entities.POST NAVIGATION
1 2 3
… 146
Next »
SITE STATISTICS
visitors, 542 subscribers. FOR UPDATES BY EMAIL: ...enter your email address here:SEARCH SITE
Search for:
RECENT COMMENTS
* john sanders on Misc Stuff * john sanders on The Glut of Somerton Men… * Tamara Bunke on The Glut of Somerton Men… * john sanders on Misc Stuff * john sanders on Misc Stuff * Simon on The Glut of Somerton Men… * john sanders on The Glut of Somerton Men… * milongal on Misc Stuff * Peteb on The Glut of Somerton Men… * john sanders on The Glut of Somerton Men… * john sanders on The Glut of Somerton Men… * anni8al_lctr on Stephen Bax and the Voynich Manuscript… * Tamara Bunke on The Glut of Somerton Men… * Tamara Bunke on Misc Stuff * nickpelling on Misc StuffCATEGORIES
* Archives of Interest(69)
* Cipher Fiction
(129)
* Cipher Non-Fiction(43)
* Historical Ciphers(1187)
* Historical Research(241)
* Places Of Interest(63)
* Telescope History
(28)
ARCHIVES
Archives Select Month November 2020 (4) October 2020 (4) September 2020 (4) August 2020 (3) June 2020 (2) May 2020 (1) April 2020 (4) March 2020 (6) February 2020 (5) January 2020 (4) December 2019 (2) November 2019 (6) October 2019 (6) September 2019 (2) August 2019 (3) July 2019 (4) June 2019 (5) May 2019 (6) April 2019 (1) March 2019 (5) February 2019 (5) January 2019 (1) December 2018 (6) November 2018 (8) October 2018 (6) September 2018 (6) August 2018 (4) July 2018 (8) June 2018 (8) May 2018 (3) April 2018 (2) March 2018 (6) February 2018 (6) January 2018 (6) December 2017 (9) November 2017 (13) October 2017 (9) September 2017 (11) August 2017 (8) July 2017 (11) June 2017 (7) May 2017 (7) April 2017 (7) March 2017 (7) February 2017 (7) January 2017 (7) December 2016 (6) November 2016 (7) October 2016 (17) September 2016 (9) August 2016 (11) July 2016 (12) June 2016 (8) May 2016 (3) April 2016 (5) March 2016 (8) February 2016 (6) January 2016 (8) December 2015 (10) November 2015 (6) October 2015 (3) September 2015 (8) August 2015 (3) July 2015 (2) June 2015 (11) May 2015 (13) April 2015 (5) March 2015 (12) February 2015 (8) January 2015 (8) December 2014 (6) November 2014 (8) October 2014 (10) September 2014 (8) August 2014 (9) July 2014 (8) June 2014 (12) May 2014 (8) April 2014 (6) March 2014 (10) February 2014 (8) January 2014 (12) December 2013 (9) November 2013 (13) October 2013 (15) September 2013 (4) August 2013 (4) July 2013 (12) June 2013 (4) May 2013 (6) April 2013 (17) March 2013 (11) February 2013 (8) January 2013 (10) December 2012 (17) November 2012 (7) October 2012 (2) September 2012 (4) August 2012 (1) July 2012 (5) June 2012 (4) May 2012 (8) April 2012 (9) March 2012 (5) February 2012 (10) January 2012 (10) December 2011 (16) November 2011 (11) October 2011 (7) September 2011 (9) August 2011 (5) July 2011 (3) June 2011 (3) April 2011 (1) March 2011 (3) February 2011 (8) January 2011 (7) December 2010 (6) November 2010 (5) October 2010 (8) September 2010 (11) August 2010 (15) July 2010 (13) June 2010 (7) May 2010 (15) April 2010 (10) March 2010 (20) February 2010 (16) January 2010 (17) December 2009 (16) November 2009 (17) October 2009 (17) September 2009 (19) August 2009 (14) July 2009 (7) June 2009 (23) May 2009 (22) April 2009 (22) March 2009 (24) February 2009 (20) January 2009 (24) December 2008 (17) November 2008 (21) October 2008 (24) September 2008 (14) August 2008 (12) July 2008 (31) June 2008 (30) May 2008 (27) April 2008 (14) March 2008 (17) February 2008 (22) January 2008 (26) December 2007 (12) November 2007 (8) Copyright 2020 - Cipher Mysteries Contango Theme ⋅ Powered byWordPress
This site uses cookies: Find out more.Okay,
thank you
Details
Copyright © 2024 ArchiveBay.com. All rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | DMCA | 2021 | Feedback | Advertising | RSS 2.0