2017-01-07 16:25
I was mooching round the British Academy’s website a little earlier (I was trying to find the Neil Ker Memorial Fund, which I had forgotten the name of), when I noticed its page on Bri… Read More
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Voynich Manuscript-related news, views, research and reviews.Covers historical codes, ciphers, and cryptography in non-fiction, fiction, radio, TV, film, music, art...
2017-01-07 01:28
A few days ago, I suggested that a person of interest to Somerton Man researchers might well be Dr Malcolm Glen Sarre, simply because his name and 118 Jetty Road address appeared (admittedly… Read More
2016-12-28 16:49
It’s well known that f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript) has an erased ownership mark. Under UV light, you can see that it says (something along the lines of) “Ja… Read More
2016-12-26 17:12
…it might be, simply because his name and address appear (lightly crossed out) on p.6 of the production notes for the 1978 Littlemore television piece on the Somerton Man. If you sear… Read More
2016-12-23 17:26
Inspired by Julian Bunn’s just-released “Puzzles of the Voynich Manuscript” ebook (review to follow), I decided to post a list of a hundred Voynich problems – that is… Read More
2016-12-17 18:27
When I was writing “The Curse of the Voynich” a decade ago, my friend Philip Neal very kindly translated Cicco Simonetta’s Treatise on Decipherment (BNF Fonds Italien 1595… Read More
2016-12-10 16:47
Since the recent release of the Yale University Press photo-facsimile, a number of quite different takes on the Voynich Manuscript have appeared online. Here are a fair few, brutally summari… Read More
2016-12-05 23:49
Because the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang papers manage to combine specificity and vagueness in such a frustrating way, some people like to conclude that they must be outright fakes, or… Read More
2016-11-27 09:52
I’ve just been interviewed about the Voynich Manuscript for an article in an upcoming Sunday Times (apropos of the Yale University Press photo-facsimile, of course), which was a lot of… Read More
2016-11-19 12:18
Of all the text in the Voynich Manuscript, one section stands a particularly high chance of giving us information: f116v, the final page. This has a set of marginalia that (by all rights) ou… Read More
2016-11-16 00:34
Cipher mysteries usually offer us multiple bubbles of probability to work with, e.g. whether the Somerton Man was Charles Mikkelsen (close but no cigar, despite the former’s nicotine-s… Read More
2016-11-12 18:20
For a few weeks, I’ve been trying to reconcile the reference in BN3 (the third of the papers associated with Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, but which I firmly believe was written… Read More
2016-11-06 18:18
…yes, on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a slick piece of publishing, well-scanned and well-printed with top-notch images that are the crispest I’ve seen. The foldouts (something… Read More
2016-11-05 21:25
Of all the Légionnaires d’Honneur whose full names first appeared just a few days ago, I have to say that Joachim Vieillard currently seems to me – even though we have no… Read More
2016-10-27 11:40
From 4pm to 5pm every Monday to Thursday on the France Culture radio station, Nicolas Martin hosts the programme La Méthode scientifique. This covers PopSci, ‘popular science&rs&hell…Read More
2016-10-26 18:06
Too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel, some might say that The Voynich Affair by Linnet Moss suffers from both problematic elongation and improper positioning. But given t… Read More
2016-10-22 21:00
Oh well! A great big thank-you-very-much-indeed to all those fabulous, brave, generous people who pledged their hard-earned money towards my proposed Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pr… Read More
2016-10-19 23:49
One thing I’ve been trying really hard to do over the last few weeks is to identify the “Missing Corsair”, i.e. the person who (seems to have) owned the Bernardin Nageon de… Read More
2016-10-16 16:35
Cipher Mysteries commenter ‘Chris’ has put forward an angle on the Somerton Man mystery that is quite different from the narratives that have immured so many of us for such a lon… Read More
2016-10-15 22:15
A year back, I was as mystified by the whole story surrounding the letters linked to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang as anyone else: no matter how hard I tried to fit the various historic… Read More
2016-10-11 21:56
When the Conseil du Sceau des Titres met on 20th December 1810, it made a set of recommendations as to who should be rewarded for their bravery, honour, or long service by being entered into… Read More
2016-10-07 18:33
A few days ago, I was wondering here whether I could dig up more about the mini-fleet that La Bourdonnais rustled together to go to the rescue of Dupleix’s land forces in India. And on… Read More
2016-10-06 21:48
Having considered André Nageon de l’Estang in Part 1 and his son André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang in Part 2, and Jean-Marie-Justin Nageon de l’Estang (and h… Read More
2016-10-04 20:55
It turns out that we can develop the hypothesis that André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was in fact Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang very much further than at first seems poss… Read More
2016-10-02 11:55
I’m looking at three 18th century Nageon de l’Estang men in the Indian Ocean, all called André. Having looked at André Nageon de l’Estang in Part 1, I’m… Read More
2016-10-01 11:58
To try to resolve the issue of who Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang actually was, we should take a closer look at the Nageon de l’Estang family members who were in the Indian Ocean a… Read More
2016-09-30 22:02
I’ve been busy behind the scenes, creating a press release for the Gold Beyond Your Dreams Mauritian Pirate Treasure Kickstarter proposal, ready to hand off to the Press Association be… Read More
2016-09-25 15:01
“Capital” issue 132, 5th June 2013 has an article on page 15 entitled “Jean Giraud et ses Précieuses Pierres”, which discusses the death of Jean Giraud (who fo… Read More
2016-09-24 16:11
Researchers studying the Voynich Manuscript use what’s called an “interlinear transcription”: this interleaves different researchers’ interpretations of the (handwrit… Read More
2016-09-23 20:28
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Kickstarter Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pitch is now live, and has already picked up its first few backers, all of them long-time Cipher Mys… Read More
2016-09-22 00:26
It’s been a little while in preparation (difficult things almost always are), but the project I mentioned a little while ago has now gone live for crowdfunding on Kickstarter (so I now… Read More
2016-09-14 23:31
Surely hoping to emulate the stunning success of sideburns and urban beards in recent years, Gordon Rugg is now apparently trying to revive his old papers on the Voynich Manuscript, along wi… Read More
2016-09-09 20:23
Before I begin: I just stumbled upon a bot-generated webpage that claimed to be “A discussion of the geography, accuracy and geometric salesman relating to the 14C farrago of the Voyni… Read More
2016-08-31 19:28
A swaggeringly big tip of the Cipher Mysteries fedora to über-medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis (@lisafdavis) for posting this image to her Twitter feed, taken from “Black Widow &… Read More
2016-08-29 17:38
Here is as good a collection of pre-1800 maps of Mauritius as I have been able to put together. If you have others (or even better quality versions of the same), please leave a comment below… Read More
2016-08-28 22:03
I’ve been working away behind the scenes on the crowdfunding documentary proposal I mentioned here a few days ago, and it’s now starting to take shape. Here’s a sneak peek… Read More
2016-08-25 22:35
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”… Read More
2016-08-22 20:14
A little while back, the Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library announced that it would be allowing a specialist Spanish publishing house called Siloe to produce a short-ru… Read More
2016-08-21 14:55
I grabbed a long-overdue day at the British Library yesterday. Apart from looking at Indian Ocean French pirate books (much more on which in future posts), I patiently worked my way through… Read More
2016-08-19 01:57
Even though I now have a very clear idea of the documentary I’d like to make in Mauritius about the whole “Le Butin” pirate treasure mystery, there’s something about… Read More
2016-08-14 16:48
In my last post, I included a scan of the earliest known image of a cave entrance in Mauritius: but I wasn’t really satisfied by its quality. And so I decided to track down the origina… Read More
2016-08-12 21:08
Geologically speaking, volcanic activity rocks the house: land appears almost ex nihilo from volcanoes, spewed out as lava at (geologically) great speed, and occasionally explosively so. A f… Read More
2016-08-06 09:01
The matter of Bernardin Nageon l’Estang (“Le Butin”)’s papers and his (allegedly) buried treasure cache has exercised my mind greatly over the last few years, though… Read More
2016-08-03 20:23
Once upon a time, Cipher Mysteries commenter Christopher Maggi posted a link (very kindly) to a page with some vintage photos of Mauritius, including the following image of a treasure hunt i… Read More
2016-07-31 09:54
Back in February 2016, I posted about a possible “block paradigm” match for the Voynich zodiac section – using a separate text uncovered by secondary research as a close ma… Read More
2016-07-30 20:00
Over recent years, one topic on which I’ve expended much virtual ink (as well as actual book-buying budget) is that of Bernardin Nageon L’Estang’s (AKA “Le Butin&rdqu&hell…Read More
2016-07-29 20:44
We start with some film footage of the Atlantis, taken by a doctor called Karl Höffkes who worked aboard the raider. I’m not sure, but the brief glimpse of vehicles that appears a… Read More
2016-07-28 18:48
Though Byron Deveson’s current working hypothesis (that Charles Mikkelsen was the Somerton Man) has many features to commend it (not least of which would seem to be that two completely… Read More
2016-07-27 22:30
The primary set of documents covering Charles Mikkelsen’s life is in the NAA, with barcode 31817302. This is mainly comprised of single-page memos bouncing between various government d… Read More
2016-07-26 20:16
Hardy researcher Byron Deveson has been prospecting in the Aussie archives for traces of a Norwegian by the name of Charles Mikkelsen, a name long linked (though so far not completely satisf… Read More
2016-07-10 15:22
The third “le Butin” letter BN3 relates a rip-roaring story: of how a dying French sea-captain gave the letter-writer three documents describing the location of buried treasure… Read More
2016-07-07 19:36
Trawling through the New Zealand shipping records for departures from New Zealand to Sydney for 1947-1948, it turns out that there were quite a few more to consider than just the Wahine. And… Read More
2016-07-06 23:10
Since the Voynich Manuscript surfaced in about 1912, many of the best-known codebreaking experts have studied its writing (‘Voynichese’) in depth. Of them, many have concluded th… Read More
2016-07-04 14:52
Archives New Zealand has made seven million historical passenger records available online through an arrangement with Utah-based familysearch.org . The transcriptions were made by network of… Read More
2016-07-03 09:32
Claimed (with more than a passing nod to the Voynich Manuscript) to be “the world’s most mysterious whisky”, Glenlivet Cipher – priced at £90, but also somehow… Read More
2016-07-02 22:26
A comment left here today by Mark Pitt very kindly pointed me to the Elgar- and/or Dorabella Cipher-related Sotheby’s Lot 92 from May 2016. The lot contained a rather distressed (&ldqu&hell…Read More
2016-06-28 20:18
A small remark in the 2013 TV documentary on the Somerton Man seems to have escaped everybody’s attention. I covered the documentary here at the time, but arguably the most interesting… Read More
2016-06-25 20:36
The Somerton Man – found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide on 1st December 1948 – had, in his fob pocket, a small slip of paper on which was printed “Tamam Shud”… Read More
2016-06-21 01:23
The “Somerton Man” gained his epithet from Somerton Beach near Adelaide, which was where his dead body was discovered in the early morning of 1st December 1948. Yet despite the m… Read More
2016-06-18 10:59
Long-suffering-standing Cipher Mysteries readers cursed with photographic memories may recall a post I made back in 2008 that included images of Giovanni da Fontana’s rather wonderful… Read More
2016-06-12 15:54
I was stumbling my way through marine historian Joan Druett’s site when I reached a page with this image: This led me (somehow inevitably) here: And to here: And to here: And indeed to… Read More
2016-06-11 18:18
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a website called The Great Lost Treasure: across its sequentially-numbered twenty-four pages, it builds up a case for arguably the most audacious (and certai… Read More
2016-06-05 14:57
In a post a couple of months back, I mentioned what I called “The Indus Problem” implicit in the first of the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters: that even though the pre… Read More
2016-06-04 22:20
Many angry arrows have been aimed in the direction of Cipher Mysteries of late (mostly by a single vociferous individual), asserting that it has got its moderation policy Just Plain Wrong. O… Read More
2016-05-29 19:16
The problems Cipher Mysteries recently had with its last web hosting supplier were all logical consequences of scale: not only had the blog got larger and the number of comments shot up, but… Read More
2016-05-22 11:20
2016-05-14 18:16
If you’ve been wondering why Cipher Mysteries has been so quiet for a few days, it’s because my PC has been out of order (the old power supply died, *sigh*). But it’s now w… Read More
2016-04-23 23:07
I grabbed the opportunity to go to the National Archives in Kew for a short while this morning to have a look at some prize papers – papers in the archives relating to the capture of s… Read More
2016-04-16 12:10
When I looked again at the “Le Butin” documents a few days ago, I noted that I thought BN3 (the third letter, apparently dating to not long after the Fall of Tamatave in 1810) ha… Read More
2016-04-12 11:30
Films and TV typically depict code-breakers as genius mathematicians running clever programmes on the fastest computers of their day – but for the kind of code-breaking I do, putting i… Read More
2016-04-11 20:59
When, as so often happens, a cipher mystery’s genuine history gets overlaid by multiple layers of wishful thinking, unpicking them all can prove extremely difficult. In many cases, tho… Read More
2016-04-07 11:13
If sweary, angry, nihilistic (yet oddly well-informed) Australian rock ticks your boxes, The Drones would surely be for you. Their plinky take on the Somerton Man mystery (which they call &l&hell…Read More
2016-03-31 23:46
Klaus Schmeh has just published a page on a previously unknown “Eliza” Masonic grave slab somewhere in Ohio, courtesy of Craig Bauer (Editor of Cryptologia, and who has a book on… Read More
2016-03-27 17:05
For me, the Internet is a truly fabulous thing: in little more than a generation, its rapid growth has transformed the way that people find and communicate with each other, and has erected w… Read More
2016-03-27 17:05
For me, the Internet is a truly fabulous thing: in little more than a generation, its rapid growth has transformed the way that people find and communicate with each other, and has erected w… Read More
2016-03-26 10:59
A new person of interest to Somerton Man researchers is Margaret Alison Bean (formerly Miss Alison Verco, and more usually referred to in the newspapers of the day as Mrs. Arnold Bean). She… Read More
2016-03-24 21:29
I recently found this page from last year (2015) on Quire 13 (Q13) of the Voynich Manuscript, where the writer asks if anyone knows how the late Glen Claston got to his (2009) idea that the… Read More
2016-03-20 22:42
A central pillar of Mormon history is the so-called “Anthon Transcript”, which I have described in reasonable detail on the Cipher Foundations website: this was shown to Professo… Read More
2016-03-14 21:33
Three “treasure hunters” trying to dig close to rock markings in a Réunion cave since December 2015 have been arrested. There’s a short news story here with three ni… Read More
2016-03-06 12:44
A couple of weeks ago, I posted details of an interesting ciphertext I’d first blogged about back in 2009 (based on some photocopies of photographs taken decades ago by the Warburg Ins… Read More
2016-03-05 23:13
What is an Internet troll? To me, an Internet troll is anyone who puts up posts, pages, or comments (a) unsupported by evidence, (b) openly hateful, and (c) specifically designed to generate… Read More
2016-02-28 21:44
Yes, a positively huge thank you to the London Fortean Society for having me along for one of their evenings. I had a lot of fun covering the Voynich Manuscript and I hope the 100-strong aud… Read More
2016-02-21 21:35
I’ve blogged before about the Voynich Manuscript talk I’ll be giving to the London Fortean Society this coming Thursday, but I need to make sure that anyone going realises that t… Read More
2016-02-15 07:48
I mentioned the manuscript BNF Cod. Fonds Latin 7272 in a recent post, specifically because it contains various books on astronomy and astrology by the 13th century Genoese nobleman Andal&og&hell…Read More
2016-02-10 22:58
Statistical and cryptanalytical analyses tend to assume that ciphers will fit one of a small number of well-known and well-researched pigeonholes (e.g. Vigenère, autokey, etc). Unfort… Read More
2016-02-08 22:29
A few days ago, Rene Zandbergen very kindly pointed me in the direction of Lat. Borg. 898, a cipher manuscript newly digitized by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. This has 410 pages of ha… Read More
2016-02-02 21:32
In older writings, it should probably be no surprise that secret recipes and secret writing often go hand in hand. Today I was looking through Trinity College Library MS. 1351 (shelfmark O.7… Read More
2016-01-31 12:31
There has long been a tendency to frame the Somerton Man as some kind of social outsider, whether as a spy, a loner, a drifter, a criminal, or whatever. The fact that, nearly seventy years o… Read More
2016-01-29 17:27
A “research tree” is the term I like to use to describe a whole group of evidence / artefacts / phenomena / ideas that are linked together in non-chain-like ways. The term is par… Read More
2016-01-28 17:18
In a recent post, I discussed a large number of features of the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20, to try to get under its vellum skin (so to speak). One thing I’d add is that if you… Read More
2016-01-24 15:18
Back in August 2010, I posted up some observations on the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20, which included: * Tim Tattrie pointed out that ‘x’ appears on every folio of Q20 ex… Read More
2016-01-21 09:57
You might think I’d be pleased by the appearance of another Voynich statistics study (Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns), courtesy of those well… Read More
2016-01-15 20:55
Pete Bowes has had some comments left on his Somerton Man blog by a certain ‘Margaret Hookham’ (which, trivia fans, was actually Dame Margot Fonteyn’s real name). In these… Read More
2016-01-11 11:20
I’ve been persuaded by the lovely people at the London Fortean Society to give a talk next month (25th February 2016, Bell pub in Petticoat Lane, 7.30pm for an 8pm start, £4/&pou&hell…Read More
2016-01-07 01:21
Back in 2012, I got (briefly) excited by the hypothesis that the marginalia on f116v of the Voynich Manuscript might well have been added in the library of a monastery not too far from Lake… Read More
2015-12-31 15:01
Contrary to what some Voynich people like to assert, the point of History is really not to allow a thousand speculative flowers to bloom. Rather, the idea is to work so closely with the avai… Read More
2015-12-27 21:26
Google now has me thoroughly confused. I’ve been trying to track down Captain Russell, presumably arriving in Port Louis in Mauritius in 1926 with a load of technical sensing equipment… Read More
2015-12-26 22:42
When I look at all the different cipher mysteries, the main thing I want to achieve with them is a certain level of clarity. Solving them would be a huge bonus (given that most are from so l… Read More
2015-12-25 21:56
The story of how two remaining copies of the Book of Soyga (one owned by John Dee) were uncovered in 1994 by Deborah Harkness has become fairly well known – I covered it here back in 2… Read More
2015-12-24 11:30
A nice set of past Voynich limericks are elsewhere on Cipher Mysteries, but I thought (six years on) I’d write a couple of new ones for you: Might Voynichese be Nahuatl? Or incomprehen… Read More
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