2023-01-21 12:05
According to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress dashboard, more than 43000 comments have been posted (and approved) here. (Akismet tells me it has deleted more than 690,000 spam comments.) Moder… 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...
2023-01-07 23:19
Anyone who has seen the recent (2022) Netflix series “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi” (I watched this over Christmas, it’s actually rather good) will k… Read More
2023-01-06 18:29
David Morgan has very kindly sent me through a transcript (generated using ChatGPT/Glasp) of the recent ABC “Australian Story” episode on the Somerton Man. I thought it needed a… Read More
2023-01-01 19:51
Commenter John Sanders is convinced that the man at the right-hand-edge of the Webb family photo is Leslie William Scott, husband of Carl Webb’s sister Gladys May. Here are some notes… Read More
2022-12-30 19:27
Over at voynich.ninja, there’s an interesting recent thread on the (in-)homogeneity of Voynichese, i.e. how consistent (or inconsistent) with itself the Voynich Manuscript’s text… Read More
2022-12-29 20:54
In a recent post, I started trying to list out Q20 order-related microtheories, but got somewhat sidetracked by the microtheory that f58 (with its ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs)… Read More
2022-12-28 16:23
In a previous post, I wondered whether the young blonde guy that the family identified (as part of a recent ABC documentary) was indeed Carl Webb, or whether he might instead have been Carl… Read More
2022-12-25 17:39
For me, 2022 has been a long (and at times grueling) twelve months, as I’m sure it has been for many others. But even if (like me) you felt you’d aged a decade in a single year… Read More
2022-12-24 01:06
In Part 1, I looked at lots of different types of evidence that each may (or indeed may not) say something about what happened to Quire 20’s bifolios to leave them in their final nesti… Read More
2022-12-22 00:33
In Part 1, I collected together a whole load of evidence relating to Q20’s bifolio order that previous analyses had proposed. I thought I’d add a post suggesting other analyses t… Read More
2022-12-20 22:32
I thought it would be a good idea to post up as many of the different research threads relating to Quire 20’s (‘Q20’) original bifolio nesting / ordering in a single place… Read More
2022-12-14 00:17
After all the factuality of Part 1 and the opinionicity of Part 2, it’s time to actually start attacking Quire 20’s block. The issue of how exactly to attack remains tricky, but… Read More
2022-12-11 23:38
In Part 1, I tried to foreground everything you’d need to know about Quire 20 and BnF Lat 6741 in order to make it possible to try to systematically match their two respective recipe s… Read More
2022-12-11 00:34
No, I’m not blogging about a Joe Cornish / John Boyega medieval mash-up, but about applying my block paradigm attack approach to the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20. This is a &ldq&hell…Read More
2022-12-03 12:54
Since ABC’s recent “My Name Is Charles” documentary (in its “Australian Stories” strand), I’ve been sitting back trying to make sense of it all. On the on… Read More
2022-12-01 20:44
I hope everyone who attended the Voynich Conference 2022 hosted online by the University of Malta enjoyed the presentations and the Q&As. In Lisa Fagin Davis’ final presentation, s… Read More
2022-11-28 21:04
Like (hopefully a fair few) other Voynicheros, I’ve ponied up my 50 euros for the 2022 online Voynich Conference being hosted by the University of Malta in the next few days. One of th… Read More
2022-11-08 18:27
A very intriguing Somerton Man-related email arrived here today from CM commenter & researcher Angela. In her quest to find out a bit more of what happened to Dorothy Jean Webb, she deci… Read More
2022-10-16 12:53
I’ve been busy up in the loft, having a somewhat-overdue tidying session there. But rather than give a load of books to the charity shop (my default response), I wondered if any of my… Read More
2022-10-12 13:04
Frustrated by our collective inability to access the divorce papers that Dorothy Jean Webb attempted to serve on her (by then late) husband Carl Webb, Cipher Mysteries commenter Behrooz deci… Read More
2022-09-27 21:35
I’ve mentioned Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc on Cipher Mysteries in the past, though mostly in connection with his extensive “Republic of Letters” correspondence, thought to con… Read More
2022-09-26 23:12
Nick Redfern’s provocative and interesting Roswell book “Body Snatchers in the Desert” (2005) starts with a chapter outlining a conversation he had with a lady (born 1922):… Read More
2022-09-25 21:26
Thanks to a response I received from Jason Atkinson at History Hub, I’ve managed to find Project Mogul R&D files at NARA – though these aren’t (yet) online, they do at… Read More
2022-09-21 21:08
Trying to work out what happened to Dorothy Jean “Doff” Webb (nee Robertson), I was told a few weeks back that after getting divorced (in absentia) from Carl Webb, Doff’s s… Read More
2022-09-18 20:04
When in October 1951 Carl Webb’s wife filed a divorce petition (apparently not knowing of his 1948 demise on/near Somerton Beach), it listed Webb’s address as “formerly of… Read More
2022-09-16 17:40
Even though I’ve covered Project Helios’ fall to Earth [sorry!] in previous posts (much supported by David DeVorkin’s detailed account in “Race to the Stratosphere&rd&hell…Read More
2022-09-15 12:01
Given the close links between Project Helios (US Navy stratospheric balloon platform for scientific experiments) and Project Mogul (US Army long-duration high-altitude sound monitoring exper… Read More
2022-09-07 15:41
The story of what happened at Roswell is usually told in terms of two primary sites – the Foster Ranch site near Corona (where Mack Brazel and Dee Proctor found unearthly debris), and… Read More
2022-08-30 21:04
Neither Carl Webb’s family nor his wife’s family seems to have much of a clue about him; Trove and the NAA have yielded relatively little; and a (probable) two-year spell at Swin… Read More
2022-08-28 09:25
When Derek Abbott first named Carl Webb as the Somerton Man, he noted that his brother-in-law was Gerald Thomas Keane, and speculated that the “J/T Kean[e]”-named clothes in the… Read More
2022-08-20 17:20
Cipher Mysteries readers may recall that I recently suggested that, to find out more on the suggested connection between Carl Webb and the “C Webb” at Swinburne Technical College… Read More
2022-08-14 12:18
Ever since a Cipher Mysteries commenter noticed that a C Webb seemed to be linked to Swinburne Technical College, there’s been a lot of active discussion here about whether or not we h… Read More
2022-08-07 13:23
If you look Carl Webb up in the Victoria electoral rolls (and indeed on his marriage certificate), you find him describing his job as “electrical fitter” (up to 1939), and then … Read More
2022-08-05 18:14
In some ways, it feels as though we already (nearly) met Carl Webb several times over the last decade – in Melbourne’s Gilded Age of Baccarat schools, in the interstate car black… Read More
2022-07-31 13:53
Much to my surprise, my online order with the PROV (20 AUS, i.e. £12) for a copy of Carl Webb and Dorothy Jean Robertson’s 1941 marriage certificate pinged into my inbox in less… Read More
2022-07-30 21:33
According to https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-30/somerton-man-researcher-rules-out-link-to-wife/101281666, Carl Webb and Dorothy Jean Robertson were (according to their marriage certifica… Read More
2022-07-27 23:02
Once I found (from the Victoria electoral rolls) that Carl and Dorothy Jean Webb‘s address in 1942 was 63 Bromby street, the blindingly obvious next step was to look for any small ads… Read More
2022-07-26 17:56
The big news of the day (which I first saw on CNN) is that Professor Derek Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick have used DNA from the hair embedded in the plaster cast of the Somerton Man’s… Read More
2022-07-17 14:33
As part of my search for a missing US Navy balloonist, I’ve been working my way though a long list of research leads. One of these was to find out if Thomas Greenhow William (“Te… Read More
2022-07-09 17:51
Not much news here, though I have finally managed to make contact with Charles Hansford Kendall’s family, who very kindly answered my questions about him. From what they told me, it no… Read More
2022-06-03 22:47
I’ve been going through yet more of the (digitised) papers in the Smithsonian’s Captain George Henry Mills Collection, and have more to share about Captain Charles Kendall and NA… Read More
2022-05-31 20:08
A few days ago, I wondered whether I might find any clues to what happened to Captain Charles Hansford Kendall not when Rear Admiral Tex Settle was base commander of NAS Lakehurst (1946 &nda&hell…Read More
2022-05-26 07:58
I’ve got a historical material science / metallurgy / applied physics itch I’d really like to scratch, but it falls far beyond my (relatively meagre) physics skillz. I’ll d… Read More
2022-04-26 17:30
French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983) once made a series of enciphered artworks, one of which found itself uploaded to imgur (by user “drpoopandpee”, *sigh*) in 2020, tr… Read More
2022-04-25 19:02
In Part 1 and Part 2, I looked at how early British ‘geophys’ technology and Mauritian treasure hunting dreams converged in the 1920s. But once the Liverpool firm of W. Mansfield… Read More
2022-04-24 07:09
In Part 1, we saw the outlines of how technology converged with Mauritian treasure hunting mania in the 1920s. But what was that technology, and how ultimately did it link in with Mauritius?… Read More
2022-04-23 10:39
I’ve had some interesting emails recently from Patrick O’Neil, who I’m very pleased to report has picked up my long-dropped baton on Mauritian treasure hunting in the perio… Read More
2022-04-19 21:23
I’ve just had some nice emails from Belgian writer Dirk Huylebrouck, whose article on the mysterious cryptograms in Moustier church is (today) appearing in popular Belgian science maga… Read More
2022-04-16 22:10
Here’s a suggestion for a Voynich Manuscript paper that I think might well be revealing: taking raking IR images of f116v. But why would anyone want to do that? Multispectral imaging S… Read More
2022-04-07 17:00
Anyone who spends time looking at Voynichese should quickly see that, rare characters aside, its glyphs fall into several different “families” / patterns: q[o] e/ch/sh aiin/aiir… Read More
2022-04-03 20:12
It’s well-known that the distribution of Voynichese page-initial (and indeed paragraph-initial) glyphs is, unlike the rest of the text, strongly dominated by gallows characters. But wh… Read More
2022-04-02 14:35
Here’s a second paper suggestion for the virtual Voynich conference being held later this year: this focuses on creatively visualising the differences between Currier A and Currier B… Read More
2022-04-01 23:13
If you hadn’t already heard, a Voynich Manuscript-themed virtual conference has recently been announced for 30th November to 1st December 2022: and its organisers have put out a call f… Read More
2022-01-29 09:14
Can I ask for a little help? I turns out that my archive-related skills are as good as useless when it comes to locating the living: and I’d really like to contact members of the Kenda… Read More
2022-01-26 21:49
While continuing my trawl for all things to do with Captain Charles Hansford Kendall USN (1904-1949), I found (courtesy of the Social Register, Philadelphia, 1949) that “Kendall Capt C… Read More
2022-01-23 14:02
It turns out that I’m far from the only person to have dived headlong down the Project Helios rabbit-hole. While reading through ballooninghistory.com’s “Who’s Who&rd&hell…Read More
2022-01-22 22:55
As per various recent posts here, I’ve been trying to find out about a 1947 US experimental military balloon accident, as recounted by Duke Gildenberg in Craig Ryan’s “The… Read More
2022-01-10 17:22
To my great surprise, the copy of J. Gordon Vaeth’s (2005) “They Sailed The Skies” that I ordered from the US (and hence wasn’t expecting for a few weeks) arrived tod… Read More
2022-01-09 15:01
The occasional gentle thunk sound of a book landing on my doormat has of late been replaced by a near-continuous clunking sound, as my second hand book addiction has changed gears. It feels… Read More
2022-01-08 16:36
If Voynichese isn’t meaningless (and good luck to those who believe it is, that’s a fight you’ll have to fight without me), what language(s) is/are its plaintext written in… Read More
2022-01-01 15:03
In late 1944 to early 1945, America was assailed by 9000+ Japanese Fu-go constant-altitude balloon bombs flying high over the Pacific, the mulberry-papered ICBMs of the era. Though their exp… Read More
2021-12-29 22:53
As part of the process of trying to identify / eliminate small Pacific islands taken by the Americans in early 1945, I’ve been reading loads of books and articles, while grinding throu… Read More
2021-12-27 22:47
Even at the best of times, cipher mysteries are unruly little buggers to work with: never mind being surrounded by a Churchillian “bodyguard of lies”, some seem to have whole bri… Read More
2021-12-19 21:57
As far as the Truk Incident war crimes (as outlined in the previous post) go, I now have a clear focus on what I’d like to find out – which is whether the Imperial Japanese Navy… Read More
2021-12-18 16:56
Following on from my last post, this post started out with me wondering what I could find out about Japanese hospitals in Saipan and Tianan, before submerging in rather deeper waters at Truk… Read More
2021-12-17 23:41
Following my recent posts about how the 1947 Roswell Incident strongly fits the template for a cipher mystery, I’ve moved on to wondering how arch-Ufologist Nick Redfern’s profou… Read More
2021-12-01 01:14
I always find it fascinating when someone approaches a topic that I thought was a carcass stripped of every scrap of flesh, and yet from it manages to conjure up an entirely fresh-looking me… Read More
2021-11-21 04:28
Given that many different witness accounts mentioned that the ‘beams’ found initially at the Roswell debris site had unreadable writing on them, this would surely seem to be a se… Read More
2021-11-14 14:17
If you’re a little late to the party, a “cipher mystery” is a piece of old writing that we unexpectedly can’t make sense of. But the tricky thing is this: as with man… Read More
2021-11-07 12:21
Though not remotely a Ufologist myself, I’ve just watched “Roswell: First Witness” on the Blaze Freeview channel (top tip: record these and 32x fast forward through the loo… Read More
2021-10-23 17:07
I thought it would be good to collect my notes on the Tamam Shud slip together in a single post, hopefully this will give a little clarity. 1st December 1948, 6am Man found dead on Somerton… Read More
2021-10-09 23:22
Here’s a little cipher (semi-)mystery for you. The 20th century poet Edwin Morgan was so taken by the emerging world of computers that in 1949 he started collecting together files / sc… Read More
2021-09-19 21:37
A month ago, I exchanged a series of emails with a nice – though somewhat retiring – correspondent, who suggested that I might consider whether the Somerton Man was in fact Charl… Read More
2021-09-11 14:34
And yes, you have me to blame for it. So here goes… It all starts in Frascati… Today’s story begins in the Voynich Centenary Conference back in 2012, with – as I re… Read More
2021-08-22 22:40
I’ve just found a very intriguing reference to Anthony Petti’s (1977) book “English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden” (a copy of which which I have of course ord… Read More
2021-08-20 23:32
I recently posted about my search for Edouard Keff, and noted that it was possible that he might have been born in Chateaurouge as a brother of Jean Keff and Pierre Keff whose troubled (bagn… Read More
2021-08-15 02:54
If you recall, a French journalist claimed that the real identity of mysterious wife murderer Henri Debosnys was in fact poetic fantasist Edward (Edouard) Keff: and that the journalist had b… Read More
2021-08-14 09:00
I recently emailed FSSA (Forensic Science South Australia) for an update on their forensic investigation into the Somerton Man. They very kindly replied: SA Police have carriage of the inves… Read More
2021-08-08 18:45
My last post discussed the various copies of Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis still extant: since then, I have (with the kind help of Stefano Guidoni) managed to get phone scans of MS Tor… Read More
2021-07-28 23:00
Want to know about Antonio Guayneri? As always, Step One is to open Thorndike’s “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Book IV, and go straight to the index. OK: &ld&hell…Read More
2021-07-25 11:24
Even if we can’t (yet) read the Voynich Manuscript’s inscrutable ‘Voynichese’ text, and even if many (if not most) of its bifolios appear to be misordered and misboun… Read More
2021-07-24 17:55
As with just about all historical research, simply wanting to find things out isn’t enough: you really have to have a plan to guide you. And while I can see an awful lot of people who… Read More
2021-06-19 15:32
In her recent (2020) Manuscript Studies paper “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript“, Lisa Fagin Davis builds up to the conclusion… Read More
2021-06-13 15:02
Like a constipated true crime podcaster, I’m currently perched on the edge of my seat waiting for something solid to emerge. Now that SAPOL’s forensic finest (surely) have the So… Read More
2021-06-09 20:55
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to work out if there was a way I could set up a funding page for a genealogist-driven collaborative effort to identify Henry Debosnys fro… Read More
2021-05-31 17:10
A fascinating email from long-time Cipher Mysteries commenter Paul Relkin has alerted me to a pair of ciphers by mathematician Paul Olum (1918-2001), who knew Feynman at Princeton, and then… Read More
2021-05-25 22:03
A couple of days ago, I listened to a ten-minute online Somerton Man piece on Radio National Breakfast with Fran Kelly, basically because Fran had Gerry Feltus phoning in to give his tuppenc… Read More
2021-05-22 16:34
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… Read More
2021-05-19 07:32
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-di… Read More
2021-05-12 13:31
While looking for lists of people “condamne a mort” in the tumult of 1871 France, I stumbled upon a list of 34 convicts who had escaped from France’s Pacific prisons in Nou… Read More
2021-05-08 14:13
Before moving on, I thought I ought to publish my last few notes on Jean Keff and Pierre Keff, in case someone passing happens to be trying to work out their family tree. (I should again str… Read More
2021-05-07 07:55
I was certain the French archives would have good, solid information on historical prisoners, so went looking for them. And that’s how I found the official French archive site filae.co… Read More
2021-05-04 20:00
I wondered whether Retronews.fr (the BnF’s old newspaper site) might have anything to say on the subject of Jean Keff and Pierre Keff. To my surprise and pleasure, it did… Escap… Read More
2021-05-03 00:49
A trawl through newspapers.com’s (paywalled) archive throws up various tidbits to do with fantasy-spinning wife-killer Henry Debosnys. For example, that his defence counsel consisted o… Read More
2021-05-01 09:12
Even if (and I would not disagree that it’s a big ‘if’) we accept that the 14×14 rearrangement of the d’Agapeyeff Challenge Cipher’s Polybius square outpu… Read More
2021-04-30 21:19
Some interesting correspondence in the last few days has brought the case of hanged murderer Henry Debosnys (along with his curious unsolved ciphers and his not-very-credible autobiography)… Read More
2021-04-26 21:22
I’ve been thinking a lot about the off-white tie found in the suitcase the Somerton Man famously left at Adelaide’s railway station. Only an American gangster (or perhaps poor ol… Read More
2021-04-25 10:23
If you are in the UK and have an interest in historical codebreaking, I’d recommend moseying over to PBS America (Freeview channel 84) this coming Wednesday evening (28 April 2021) at… Read More
2021-04-24 08:24
According to a big story in today’s (24 Jan 2021) Adelaide Advertiser (a huge thanks to all the people who passed it my way, very much appreciated!), an application by South Australian… Read More
2021-04-18 10:54
I’ve spent some time this week working on Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s 1939 challenge cipher, which seems (to me) to be a tricky combination of substitution cipher and transposi… Read More
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