Looking for a Baltimore / Washington crypto collaborator…
This website may have been quiet-ish of late, but the lights here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion have been burning into the night. Yes: once again, I find myself hot on the trail of one of the ‘classic’...
View ArticleTypex seen through code-breaking eyes…
Previous posts here have established (I believe) that the WW2 Pigeon Cipher was almost certainly encrypted using the British Typex cipher machine. So I think it would be a good idea to look at this...
View ArticleWhy a Hoopoe’s Heart?
Everyone knows Macbeth’s witch’s ingredient list: Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and...
View ArticleDomingo Delgado and the “Amelia Manuscript”…
You might be interested to know that an interview with (relatively new) Voynich researcher Domingo Delgado was posted to YouTube a few days ago. In this, Delgado describes how he thinks the Voynich...
View Article“Carte générale de l’Isle de France avec le détail de son Terrier et les noms...
This “Carte générale” is a really great 18th century map of Mauritius held at the BNF, one that Cipher Mysteries commenter Anthony Lallaizon alerted me to. The BNF shelfmark is “département Cartes et...
View ArticleHidden treasure, Pointe de Vacoas, and 300 dead dodos…
In my last Cipher Mysteries post, I floated the idea that when Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang famously wrote that… j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois … he may have been referring not to the...
View ArticleThe Nageon de l’Estangs in 1760…
Here’s an official document from 1760 from the Mauritian Archives relating to the Nageon de l’Estang family property: (Click on the image to get a higher resolution JPEG.) And here’s a transcription...
View ArticleThe Glut of Somerton Men…
The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years. Was he a...
View ArticleZodiac Z340 is CRACKED!
Dave Oranchak posted today about how he (along with Jarlve and Sam Blake) cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous Z340 cipher. Here’s his video: Unsurprisingly (to me), it turned out that code breakers...
View Article“A Massive Hunt”– Clarkson, Hammond & May take on a Cipher Mystery…
Putting to one side the bombshell news that the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher has been cracked, the other big cipher-related event in December 2020 was that Clarkson / Hammond / May’s Grand Tour Special...
View ArticleAfter Z340, which cipher mysteries could get cracked in 2021?
In the wake of Dave Oranchak’s epic crack of the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher, which other unsolved ciphers might get cracked in 2021? For me, the way the Z340 was solved highlighted a number of issues:...
View ArticleCipher mystery things I aim to find out in 2021…
Researching cipher mysteries is almost always ponderous and frustrating: it will doubtless take all of 2021 for the work I put in to the WW2 pigeon cipher and the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters...
View ArticleThe Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery…
Mauritius has long had a surfeit of treasure hunters, though also a shortage of actual treasures. In fact, in Alix d’Unienville’s (1954) “Les Mascareignes: Vielle France en mer indienne“, M. Aimé de...
View Article“Mostly Harmless” now identified as ‘vaejor’…
In a recent post, I briefly mentioned an unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless” who had been found dead in a tent in Florida in the summer of 2018. He had a fat wodge of cash in his pocket, a...
View ArticleWas SM a boxer, a wrestler, or a clog dancer?
And yes, he could have been all three, or indeed none of them. But please bear with me, there’s a lot of ground to cover here. Boxing The background here is that I suspect that in the late 1930s to the...
View ArticleThe Somerton Man, Four Straight As, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the 1930 US Census…?
Ever the provocateur, Pete Bowes’ latest challenge concerns the fact that if you look at each of the four short uncrossed-out lines of mysterious text indented on the back of the Somerton Man’s...
View ArticleWhy would a Lithuanian be called “Joseph Kean”?
This is, of the course, the single question that bothered me most after writing my most recent post on the Somerton Man. As you’d expect, almost all the Keans/Keanes I found were Scottish or Irish...
View ArticleNotes on Balutz…
I was recently reminded that, having got sidetracked by Triantafillos & Stelios Balutis, I hadn’t got round to returning to the Balutz line of inquiry. So here are some notes on Balutz-surnamed...
View ArticleThe Old Canton Cafe Baccarat School Timeline…
Carrying on with the Somerton Man Melbourne nitkeeper research thread, here’s a timeline I’ve reconstructed for the (in)famous baccarat school that Christos Paizes (AKA “Harry Carillo”) and Gerald...
View ArticleCan you decode Robert Walker’s code names?
James Robert Walker’s life story, smuggled out of Pentridge Jail just before his suicide, was sensationally serialized in the Argus in September 1954 to October 1954. If you want to read it, I edited...
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