A song about Harold T Wilkins…
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 working again, no thanks to...
View ArticleCipher Mysteries is once again live…
…but what a pain in the neck moving a large blog from a single-site WordPress install to a WordPress multisite install is. 🙁 I started trying to count how many individual steps it took to get it all...
View ArticleA change of focus for Cipher Mysteries…
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 also...
View ArticleBest Practice For Bloggers?
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. Obviously,...
View ArticleThe “Indus” and the “Indostan”…
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-1800 BN1 mentions “les...
View Article“The Great Lost Treasure”…
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 certainly the...
View ArticleHumour at its gravest… .
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 here: This...
View ArticleFrom Giovanni da Fontana to Richard Windley…
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 Bellicorum...
View ArticleThe search for the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat…
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 mass of forensic...
View ArticleCrossing the Tasman Sea, 1945 to 1948…
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”. It was subsequently determined that...
View ArticleTeaching Adelaide migrants to speak English…
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 bit begins...
View ArticleElgar micro-cryptogram sold at Sotheby’s…
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 (“binding broken, pages...
View ArticleGlenlivet Cipher…?!?
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 “exclusive to Selfridges” at £110, don’t...
View ArticleWahine passenger lists, 1947-1948
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 generous...
View ArticleFifteenth century cryptography…
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 that it was written using...
View ArticleThe USNS Marine Phoenix…
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 so I went...
View ArticleMight Malroux be the missing corsair’s dying captain?
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, urging him – as a...
View ArticleNotes on Charles Mikkelsen…
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 satisfactorily)...
View ArticleCharles Mikkelsen Timeline…
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 departments during...
View ArticleThe M/V Tirranna’s final days…
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 separate people...
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