2017-12-16 16:25
After The History Channel’s recent season of “The Hunt For The Zodiac Killer” programmes (episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), I thought it was time to get back to some non-fake-new… 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...
2017-12-14 22:03
Without any further ado, here’s The History Channel’s “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer” season #1 finale, wherein Craig Bauer, having immersed himself almost completel… Read More
2017-12-12 19:58
You may not be aware that there are, out in the world, many private languages – languages that offer speakers and listeners within a particular group or subculture the ability to talk… Read More
2017-12-11 21:26
I learned, via an email from Rene Zandbergen today, that Voynich theorist Stephen Bax died a few days ago. It was only last month that he and Rene jointly formed the Voynich research presenc… Read More
2017-12-09 13:14
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… Read More
2017-12-08 18:23
If you think what the world really needs right now is yet another Voynich theory, preferably one that’s been stewing in some guy’s head for more than a decade and that could well… Read More
2017-12-02 10:08
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 sol… Read More
2017-11-27 20:24
What on earth, you may reasonably ask, is a Voynich “metatheory”? I use the term for a specific kind of Voynich Manuscript theory that seeks to explain more or less all its puzzl… Read More
2017-11-25 09:48
Here’s another Voynich-themed art show to add to what is already a medium-sized list: “Drawing Close – Voynich Series”, by Sabina Sallis. It’s at the Customs Ho… Read More
2017-11-23 00:00
A new day, and a new episode of “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer” (S01 E02, in programme guide speak) to trawl through. Luckily, though, this week’s episode proved to be fai… Read More
2017-11-21 20:36
What journalists the world over love to do is to bring two vaguely related things together to review or discuss, as if by doing so they identify an incipient trend or fashion. Once pointed o… Read More
2017-11-19 12:55
My left arm, disembodied, slowly rejoins the mothership Searching for adverbs, unsuccessful as ever Distant aches filed for future reference Blur, wash, smudged light chinks overpainting Eye… Read More
2017-11-18 21:57
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 ab… Read More
2017-11-17 23:29
The History Channel’s new Karga Seven-produced series “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer” has just started: it features top Zodiac Killer researcher Dave Oranchak, Copiale Cip… Read More
2017-11-14 21:51
A week or more ago, I started writing up a fairly hefty post on John of Sacrobosco’s famous “De Sphaera” (which is one of the books Nicole Oresme translated into French, ad… Read More
2017-11-11 21:59
Thanks to a top tip from the Cryptocollectors mailing list, here’s what the Stwórzmy Enigma Museum in Poznań posted on Facebook today: 11 listopada w Poznaniu to nie tylko… Read More
2017-11-10 23:22
Writer (and University of Bristol PhD student) Gerard Cheshire has recently been asking people to look at his paper “Linguistic missing links: instruction in decrypting, translating an… Read More
2017-11-08 20:40
There’s a big controversy at the moment about bloggers and vloggers who get paid to promote products but who do not declare it (or, perhaps more often, do declare it but in what can ea… Read More
2017-11-04 17:13
The biggest cipher news of the week (apart from learning that David Hamer’s splendid M4 4-rotor Kreigsmarine Enigma s/n M7772 is to be sold by Sotheby’s New York on 12th December… Read More
2017-11-03 10:22
A linguist, an epigrapher, and an ethnologist are in a bar, waiting to be served. The linguist says, “Did you know that Mele Kalikimaka by Bing Crosby is the most popular song featurin… Read More
2017-10-30 19:30
The problem with proposing BNF Franc. MS 565 itself as the source of the Voynich Manuscript’s inverted T-O figure is that we know that it stayed put in France (in the Dukes of Bourbon… Read More
2017-10-29 10:44
Having gone away and read (most of) Millard Meiss’s splendidly comprehensive “French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry”, and having also gone through Menut’s 1966… Read More
2017-10-27 13:03
Here are some photographs of Glenelg and Somerton circa 1948 I’ve found along the way, that I thought some of you might like. Glenelg Pier On a post on his travel blog, John Pedler inc… Read More
2017-10-22 22:40
Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter ‘p’ (in response to my request for the article), I’ve just read Beaune and Lequain’s (2007) “Marie de Berry et les livres&r&hell…Read More
2017-10-21 21:21
In response to my post on BNF Français 565, Helmut Winkler very helpfully left a comment pointing to 565’s full catalogue description, which I had previously managed to miss. (D… Read More
2017-10-19 21:50
Rene Zandbergen today very kindly passed me a link to a curious-looking document in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana that goes by the name of MSS P.I.O.6. PIO6’s Greek writing is app… Read More
2017-10-18 21:46
Back in 2014, Voynich blogger Ellie Velinska found what is surely one of the most stunning parallels yet with any of the Voynich Manuscript’s illustrations: a splendidly detailed T-O m… Read More
2017-10-17 07:40
If you want an early sneak peek at Siloe’s funky (but insanely expensive, naturally) Voynich facsimile, well… here it is: Enjoy! 🙂
The post Early look at Siloe’s V… Read More
2017-10-10 21:32
Diane O’Donovan has recently commented (here and elsewhere) and posted a number of times (on her own blog) about the priority of various Voynich ideas. For any given Voynich idea, who… Read More
2017-09-30 10:40
I thought I’d share this online article on a curious 17th century cabinet book. Though it contains no cipher, its secret contents would definitely have been a surprise: The (almost all… Read More
2017-09-28 22:10
When talking about the Zodiac Killer Z340 cipher, FBI cryptanalyst Dan Olson once pointed out that: Statistical tests indicate a higher level of randomness by row, than by column. This indic… Read More
2017-09-24 11:14
For a while, I got into the habit of picking up Voynich-related blog updates via voynich.ninja’s convenient Blogosphere Reader. However, I always knew that this was icing rather than c… Read More
2017-09-23 17:33
I’ve had the Zodiac Killer Z340 cipher on my mind for the last few days. Though I’m still finding it hard not to draw the conclusion that its top and bottom halves are two differ… Read More
2017-09-18 20:03
Here’s a link to a nice little piece on the Voynich Manuscript that came out today in classy American online magazine Vox. Though clearly triggered by Nicholas Gibbs’ recent TLS… Read More
2017-09-16 21:40
I’ve had a dissatisfying, rubbish day today: but given that every day I’ve previously had that involved some kind of interaction with Stephen Bax had been a bad day, perhaps ther… Read More
2017-09-12 19:59
Here’s the evidence that the Zodiac Killer is alive and busy with a spray can in Cyprus, visual documentary evidence to which only the most obtuse could possibly object: And if you thi… Read More
2017-09-10 21:53
The appearance of Nicholas Gibbs’ Voynich theory in the current Times Literary Supplement “Autumn Fiction Special” issue (and what deliciously outrageous irony that placeme… Read More
2017-09-09 09:55
In August 2016, I spent a day at the British Library trawling through many of its palaeography books (as I described here). What I was specifically in search of was examples of handwriting t… Read More
2017-09-06 21:55
A tip of my monkey’s uncle’s Susquehanna hat to Derek Abbott for today’s cipher history link: a new Voynich theory by Nicholas Gibbs in the Times Literary Supplement. Gibbs… Read More
2017-09-03 15:08
I posted here a few weeks ago about whether the Cisiojanus mnemonic might be in the Voynich zodiac labels, and also about a possible July Cisiojanus crib to look for. Since then I’ve b… Read More
2017-08-31 22:04
Just a quick visual idea for you to ponder on with regard to Voynich Manuscript page f57v: it’s something I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere. Back in 2010, I posted a page here di… Read More
2017-08-26 19:16
For a long time, the accepted answer has been that “bloggers do things [and document what they do] so that you don’t have to“. In this worldview, bloggers are net-savvy ind… Read More
2017-08-23 21:07
Vat. Gr. 1291 is a manuscript that has had a fair amount of Voynich-related attention over the years. A beautifully illustrated copy of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, its fol.9r contains a ci… Read More
2017-08-20 19:48
There are now many people who would happily classify themselves as ‘online researchers’. You don’t usually have to peer too far beyond the end of your mouse to see their fo… Read More
2017-08-10 21:58
Following the Volkskalender and Cisiojanus logical train of thought to its next station along, the question comes whether there might be any other information we have about the Voynich zodia… Read More
2017-08-07 23:05
I thought I’d post up a quick thought that came to me just now while looking at Fribourg Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Ms. L 309 (which is yet another volkskalender, n… Read More
2017-08-05 23:27
A few days ago, when discussing the way that the Sagittarius crossbowman appears in similar fifteenth century manuscripts, I wrote that it was clear to me “that we are looking at a fam… Read More
2017-08-04 21:02
Because Trove holds newspaper articles all the way up to 1954, you occasionally stumble across interesting stories from around the world picked up by Australian newspapers. And because I&rsq&hell…Read More
2017-07-31 23:20
A few years ago, while giving a talk at Westminster Under School on the WW2 pigeon cipher, I mentioned that (a) Typex messages were sent in groups of five letters; and (b) when some German c… Read More
2017-07-29 13:11
Australian writer David Dufty’s just-released (2017) “The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau” attempts to be two things at once: a hard-nosed revisionist cryptologic hi… Read More
2017-07-26 12:20
An interesting-sounding document referred to by Alfred Martin in 1906 (pp.174-175, thanks to Stefan Mathys!) is Cod. Sang. 760, the contents of which the St Gallen archivists describe as fol… Read More
2017-07-22 11:36
The Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundel section has long frustrated researchers’ efforts to make sense of it at a high level, never mind determining what any specific zodiac nymp… Read More
2017-07-20 12:19
Having now reread Ian Pfennigwerth’s “Man of Intelligence” and gone through various files at the NAA, I now have slightly more solid dates framing what Captain Nave was doi… Read More
2017-07-17 19:10
The notion that Jorge Luis Borges’ “Labyrinths” – a collection of idiosyncratic short stories, essays, and even parables by the much-acclaimed Argentinian writer, wra… Read More
2017-07-14 19:03
In July 1949, Australia’s greatest code-breaker Captain Eric Nave was enjoying his 160 days of accumulated holidays before starting a new job with (the newly formed) ASIO on 15th Decem… Read More
2017-07-13 21:13
Here’s something a little unusual for you all – a feature-length 1971 episode of a Sci-Fi series called “Name of the Game” on YouTube, and set in “A.D. 2017&rdq&hell…Read More
2017-07-12 21:19
No. You might instead ask: “Was the author of the Voynich Manuscript a nymphomaniac lesbian from Baden Baden obsessed with clysters?” Or how about: “Was the author of the V… Read More
2017-07-08 15:28
I’ve just uploaded a draft paper to academia.edu called Fifteenth Century Cryptography Revisited. This takes a fresh look at the topic (specifically at homophonic ciphers, Simonetta, a… Read More
2017-07-04 21:45
Between 22nd March 2005 and 6th August 2006, someone calling himself/herself “IKLP” (supposedly an acronym for “I Killed Laci Peterson”) posted a large number of comm… Read More
2017-06-28 20:45
I posted up seven homophonic challenge ciphers a few days ago, and now – though it may sound a little counter-intuitive – I’d like to try to help you solve them (bear in mi… Read More
2017-06-25 00:11
While thinking about the Scorpion S1 unsolved cipher in the last few days, it struck me that it seemed to be a special kind of homophonic cipher, one where the homophones are used in rigid g… Read More
2017-06-23 01:05
I’ve blogged a few times about trying to crack the Scorpion Ciphers (a series of apparently homophonic ciphers sent to American crime TV host John Walsh). Most of my effort has been sp… Read More
2017-06-10 22:29
Apart from the case of the Somerton Man, has any other police investigation ever revolved around a book left in a complete stranger’s car? Personally, I’d be surprised: this seem… Read More
2017-06-09 23:04
During and immediately after World War II, governments everywhere looked with dismay at their non-functioning factories, empty warehouses, and depleted male workforce. Even though the normal… Read More
2017-06-06 23:50
It would be fair to say that the title of George Edmunds’ hefty book “Anson’s Gold and the Secret to Captain Kidd’s Charts” somewhat undersells its scope. Edmun… Read More
2017-06-02 22:01
As I wrote before, I think we have four foundational challenges to tackle before we can get ourselves into a position where we can understand Voynichese properly, regardless of what Voyniche… Read More
2017-05-30 21:37
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… Read More
2017-05-29 11:56
Since my recent post on the silk dress cipher, Jim Shilliday left an extremely helpful comment, in which he suggested specific readings for many of its various codewords. So here’s a l… Read More
2017-05-22 21:50
OK, so there’s like another Zodiac film coming out this summer (2017), and it’s like called Awakening The Zodiac. And if that’s not just like totally thrilling enough for y… Read More
2017-05-21 13:59
This, you may be a little surprised to read, is a story about a “two-piece bustle dress of bronze silk with striped rust velvet accents and lace cuffs“, with original Ophelia-mot… Read More
2017-05-14 14:51
As I see it, there are four foundational tasks that need to be done to wrangle Voynichese into a properly usable form: * Task #1: Transcribing Voynichese text into a reliable computer-readab… Read More
2017-05-06 15:38
In the Voynich research world, several transcriptions of the Voynich Manuscript’s baffling text have been made. Arguably the most influential of these is EVA: this originally stood for… Read More
2017-05-03 21:48
For far too long, Voynich researchers have (in my opinion) tried to use statistical analysis as a thousand-ton wrecking ball, i.e. to knock down the whole Voynich edifice in a single giant s… Read More
2017-04-30 07:18
I’ve just had a particularly interesting email exchange with Paul Relkin concerning the Feynman Challenge Ciphers, which he has generously allowed me to share here. The context is that… Read More
2017-04-29 13:15
Just a short note to say that I’ve today decided to stop selling physical copies of “The Curse of the Voynich”. I first published it at the end of 2006 (the front page says… Read More
2017-04-23 16:47
What I have long tried to do with this blog is to genuinely advance our collective knowledge about unbroken historical ciphers, not by speculating loosely or wildly (as seems to be the norm… Read More
2017-04-16 16:51
Back in 2006, I reasoned (in The Curse of the Voynich) that if the nine-rosette page’s circular city with a castle at the top… …represented Milan (one of only three citie… Read More
2017-04-05 23:40
Whether we like it or not, history as practised nowadays is a tower built upon textuality, upon the implicit evidentiality striped within and through texts. Even archaeology (of all but the… Read More
2017-04-03 23:09
Here’s a thing that struck me the other day about the Anthon Transcript that I thought I ought to mention. The way that the story has been passed down to us makes it far from easy to r… Read More
2017-04-02 11:53
Having studied unsolved cipher mysteries for more than a decade, it seems to me that there are some distinct patterns of behaviour around them (by owners and by others) that serve to muddy t… Read More
2017-03-29 21:18
The other day, I was wondering where in East London (according to the story the owner told me) the Blitz Ciphers were found: and also wondered if they might have been left behind by some kin… Read More
2017-03-19 17:22
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 i… Read More
2017-03-15 21:47
In a recent post here, I floated the idea that the Zodiac Killer’s Z408 (solved) cipher’s unusual homophone distribution may have arisen not conceptually (i.e. from a hitherto-un… Read More
2017-03-11 23:02
Though originally published in 1998 and 2003, and most recently published in three volumes in 2013-2014, “Maps, Mystery and Interpretation” is in reality a single (very large) bo… Read More
2017-03-11 23:02
Though originally published in 1998 and 2003, and most recently published in three volumes in 2013-2014, “Maps, Mystery and Interpretation” is in reality a single (very large) bo… Read More
2017-03-05 21:32
A little while back, I had a email from Marie about Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s (1939) book “Codes and Ciphers”, highlighting some interesting mistakes she had found in h… Read More
2017-03-02 21:14
Prolific (if occasionally prolix) Cipher Mysteries commenter bdid1dr has long wondered whether the Somerton Man was someone in her ex-husband’s family. (She also suspects her ex-husban… Read More
2017-03-01 13:56
Well, here’s a thing. The Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, to be held in a month’s time at Merton College (31st March 2017 to 1st April 2017) on the theme of &ldqu&hell…Read More
2017-02-26 12:04
A few days ago, Australian robotics hacker Marcel Varallo (whose gladiatorial hacks making Roombas fight each other amuse me greatly) very kindly posted up two new scans of the Somerton Man… Read More
2017-02-21 22:44
Voynich researchers without a significant maths grounding are often intimidated by the concept of entropy. But all it is is an aggregate measure of how [in]effectively you can predict the ne… Read More
2017-02-19 16:10
Given that the Zodiac Killer’s first big cipher (the Z408) got cracked so quickly, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that he used a slightly different system for his second big c… Read More
2017-02-12 18:45
In some ways, it’s the shortest of distances from [Ethel Voynich] to [Ethel Merman], so why not “Voynich, The Musical“? Close your eyes, imagine a Broadway stage, take out… Read More
2017-02-12 00:31
Two of the least commented-on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” alphabet are (a) its symmetry and (b) its partitioning into quite well-known (but distinct) u… Read More
2017-02-08 22:35
Hi There! We’re looking for people to write up their theories on cipher mysteries such as the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers and how astroturfed the Tea Party is. You may be surp… Read More
2017-02-01 11:57
I thought I’d share with you the following email I recently received via an anonymous remailing service: This is being written to you on behalf of a large group of Voynich theorists. E… Read More
2017-01-23 21:07
What is the difference between theories and metatheories? Given that the former can sensibly range from hand-wavy general theories (“the Voynich Manuscript was written by a mad alchemi… Read More
2017-01-22 13:47
I should mention that there’s another André Nageon lurking in a gap in the Nageon de l’Estang timeline (slightly after the others that I covered in parts one to four): and… Read More
2017-01-21 18:45
One of the intriguing (yet annoyingly hard to pin down) parts about the third Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letter BN3 (that I have argued was probably written by an as-yet-unidentified… Read More
2017-01-20 22:50
A few years back, Bill Walsh sent me a (fairly early, as I recall) draft of his vaguely-Voynich-Manuscript-themed novel to have a look at. And now that a proper copy has finally landed on my… Read More
2017-01-13 21:25
Put wrestling fan US President-elect Donald Trump in the ring with the Voynich Manuscript, and who would win? Actually, the two may be more evenly matched than you think… For a start… Read More
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