2023-06-23 16:36
Prompted by Karl Kluge, I’ve been reading Dennis Crenshaw’s “The Secrets of Dellschau” to try to work out my own angle on the mysterious Sonora Aero Club and its alle… 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...
2023-06-08 22:42
You know, I’m so glad you asked me that question, it’s almost as if I was waiting to be asked. It turns out that there were in fact two airship ciphers. Well… one. Well&he&hell…Read More
2023-06-05 07:57
In the last post, I brought together all the sightings of the October 22 1896 Meteor I could find, and was able to conclude that they were all indeed sightings of an unusual meteor (rather t… Read More
2023-06-04 09:05
OK, now that I’ve collected a ton of reports, it seems abundantly clear that the October 22 1896 Meteor sighted in California was indeed a meteor, and not an airship. What seems to hav… Read More
2023-06-03 08:37
Searching for “W. M. Richards” (who took “A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor”) following my last post, it struck me that that person might well have been… Read More
2023-06-02 21:30
Following on from my post yesterday, I found a copy of the Stockton Evening Mail for 23 Oct 1896 (p.5) in newspapers.com, which (to my delight) told the story of what happened in Saceamento… Read More
2023-06-01 22:06
My copy of Daniel Cohen’s (1981) “The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s” arrived yesterday, and I’ve started working my way through it. Initial impressions ar… Read More
2023-05-29 16:39
From the time of writing “The Curse of the Voynich” to now, I’ve felt annoyed with myself for not being able to figure out precisely what is going on with the Voynichese &l&hell…Read More
2023-05-28 18:27
Wonderful news – a long-standing cipher mystery (to be precise, a pair of them) has been broken! Today I received a message from David Vierra announcing that he had broken Feynman Ciph… Read More
2023-05-27 12:08
I’ve previously included a link to Dr Battey’s (1893) “Aerial Machine” patent on Google Patents (it was even cited in a 2018 patent!), because it seems to me to share… Read More
2023-05-26 07:31
Just a quick post to say that Cipher Mysteries’ email subscription button now no longer works, because the Feedburner service behind it is no longer (since a little earlier this year… Read More
2023-05-21 00:49
After my last post, I went looking for a source for the 1896 Airship Flap that concentrated specifically on the reports of flying machines and strange lights in the California sky in late 18… Read More
2023-05-15 07:12
The 1896-1897 Airship Flap is a slice of Forteana that I think is tasty enough to satisfy the appetites of both Ufologists and steampunk enthusiasts simultaneously. As such, it has plenty of… Read More
2023-05-14 09:00
When dealing with a person who died less than a century ago, it’s almost always a good idea to look at their family tree. Might they have left some papers, articles, diaries, memoirs o… Read More
2023-05-13 11:21
Given that the first two well-attested full-scale metal-clad airships (both by David Schwartz and industrialist Carl Berg) were in Russia and Prussia in the 1890s, it should be no great surp… Read More
2023-05-10 22:55
A full account of how Walter McCann came to take two photographs of the mysterious airship appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald on Monday, April 12, 1897. The text of that article is helpful… Read More
2023-05-08 17:12
Following on from my last post on metal-clad airships, I thought I ought to look a little more closely at Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey of New York and his nitro-glycerine-pellet-powered airsh… Read More
2023-05-07 21:23
Though the whole idea of metal-clad airships sounds like a steampunk fantasy, they were in fact completely real – the US Navy famously commissioned one (the ZMC-2), and plenty of peopl… Read More
2023-05-04 22:46
Would it surprise me if I’m currently the only person in the world who genuinely wants to know exactly what Thomas Greenhow Williams (‘Tex’) Settle’s US Navy timeline… Read More
2023-04-29 07:43
The last Cipher Mysteries post (from Jo) on Hickey Taylor only had a single scratchy picture of him playing bridge backstage. However, this lack of good images prompted CM commenters to dig… Read More
2023-04-22 09:21
(Nick: here’s a guest post [lightly edited to house style] from Melbourne-based Cipher Mysteries commenter Jo, introducing Hickey Taylor to the Somerton Man discussion. Over to you, Jo… Read More
2023-04-16 13:03
Much as I’ve enjoyed looking through old J. C. Williamson programmes and Melbourne bridge columns hunting for Gerald Keane and Carl Webb, I can’t help but wonder if it’s ti… Read More
2023-04-10 09:51
I’ve recently had some nice correspondence with Rafał Miazga, an independent Polish researcher who, having deftly avoided getting trapped by the perils of Voynich Manuscript resea… Read More
2023-03-19 00:28
Some Cipher Mysteries commenters have speculated that Gerald (Jerry) Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s might have connected him to the run of “Under The Counter” at A… Read More
2023-03-11 12:24
Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter Poppins, we now know that Carl Webb’s close relative Gerald Keane was known as Jerry Keane. This was from the souvenir programme for a J. C. Willia… Read More
2023-03-05 17:39
If you’ve previously looked at the final page of the Voynich Manuscript (f116v), you probably know exactly what I’m talking about here: the strange marginalia / pen-trials / what… Read More
2023-02-18 15:08
Like most people, I’ve read numerous articles about ChatGPT recently. Perhaps the most entertaining was where ChatGPT (sort of) played chess against the #1 chess engine Stockfish, with… Read More
2023-02-13 20:55
I had been looking, as you’d expect, for something completely different: but when I found out that “A Takapuna Scandal” starring Hector St Clair was available online, I tho… Read More
2023-02-10 22:37
Pretty much everyone and their dog now knows about the mysterious white tie (marked “J Keane” or “T Keane”, depending how you interpret the markings on it) found in t… Read More
2023-02-04 18:14
Contract bridge was a fashionable game in the 1930s and 1940s; columns presenting bridge news and puzzles were popular recent additions to newspapers. What was appealing was that bridge prob… Read More
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
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
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