Welcome to Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries, a blog devoted to real unsolved historical code/cipher mysteries, as well as to exploring how those objects get portrayed in books, films, TV, radio, music, opera, sculpture, design, metalworking, eBay scams, etc. If this is your kind of thing, subscribe (free) by email by entering your email address in the box at the top right and click on the "Subscribe" button below it - you'll get no more than one cipher mystery post a day, always interesting, I promise!


So... what are my top Cipher Mysteries?


#1
(Top secret, to be announced soon...)
#2

The Voynich Manuscript

It's spooky, freaky, unsettling, and extraordinarily hard to pin down, and thoroughly deserves its inevitable place near the top of any unsolved cipher list. For if an unreadable 200+ page handwritten book with pictures of unidentifiable plants, strange circular diagrams, and small naked women doesn't stimulate your imagination or curiosity, you probably do have a heart of stone, right? You might also be surprised by just how many novels stir the Voynich Manuscript into their plot to add some 'cipher mystery spice'. Alternatively, you can profit from all the haziness surrounding it and reinvent yourself as a 'world-class VMs expert' in a mere five minutes (might look good on your CV).

So, the mystery is...   why the best codebreakers in the world have no idea how to decrypt it, when (at 550-odd years old) the Voynich really ought to be simple to crack...
#3

The Anthon Transcript

Though at first sight this looks fairly humdrum, what is at stake here could barely be any higher. The Mormon Church (i.e. The Church of Latter Day Saints, or 'LDS') holds it as a central point of faith that the transcript shown to Professor Anthon was nothing less than this: a direct representation of the 'reformed Egyptian' written on gold plates revealed by angels to Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr in 1823. There is no other physical proof of this miracle!

So, the mystery is...   why the Anthon Transcript's 'Caractors' so strongly resemble 17th / 18th century shorthand...
#4

The Beale Papers

In 1885, a pamphlet appeared that included a set of three encoded papers allegedly constructed by "Thomas Jefferson Beale" in 1819 / 1821, and that claimed that these papers (now known as 'B1', 'B2', and 'B3') identified the location of a huge treasure haul. Teasingly, it included a decryption of B2 (using a miscounted Declaration of Independence as a codebook), but nothing for B1 or B3. Despite such an unconvincingly novel-like set-up, people have ever since feverishly attempted to decode these, with some hopefuls even digging up remote parts of Bedford County, Virginia in a (so far vain) attempt to get rich, rich, rich.

So, the mystery is...   why, when this looks so much like a Poe-inspired Victorian fake, close analysis of B1 has revealed a whole set of paradoxical results...
#5

The Rohonc Codex

The Rohonc Codex has long been written off in the literature as a nationalist fake probably concocted by a notorious Hungarian forger. Yet despite its shaky provenance, recent critical analysis reveals it to be much closer in spirit to the Voynich Manuscript than previously thought. Might it have been a real cipher mystery all along?

So, the mystery is...   why, when it looks so much like a simple cipher / shorthand Life of Christ written right-to-left, nobody has managed to decipher this...
#6

The HMAS Sydney Ciphers

Who sank the HMAS Sydney in November 1941? Did the mysterious Dr List conceal the truth by hiding some German shorthand notes in some drawings? Why did the Kormoran's Captain Detmers also hide his accounts of the sinking in cipher?

So, the mystery is...   why, despite the best efforts of an Australian commission to find out the truth, are there so many loose ends?
#7

The Tamam Shud Cipher

Australia, 1948, and a curious affair that has everything you'd expect from a lurid spy thriller: an anonymous corpse on a beach that ends up embalmed, lots of red herrings (all deliberate, it would seem), a fragment from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ("Tamam Shud", after which the whole case has become known) hidden in a secret pocket, links to people who apparently can't ever be tracked down, and a short piece of ciphered text that may possibly be a roughly-written suicide note. Or not! All very strange...

So, the mystery is...   what was going on, what the ciphertext says, who the corpse is, anything really...
#8

The D'Agapeyeff Cipher

The code-breaking literature has a long tradition of issuing "challenge ciphers" for the astute reader to break (such as Bellaso's ciphers), and Alexander D'Agapeyeff's slim 1937 volume "Codes and Ciphers" was no exception. The only problem is... nobody has yet cracked it, despite (relatively clear) signs that it is some kind of 14x14 transposition cipher. Even D'Agapeyeff couldn't remember how he had enciphered it!

So, the mystery is...   why, when it looks as though it was actually meant to be fairly simple, hasn't anyone broken this?
#9

The Codex Seraphinianus

In 1978, Italian architect Luigi Serafini concocted a strange (and deliberately unreadable) book, filled with bizarre drawings done in the style of an instruction manual for an alien civilization oddly reminiscent of ours. Though many initially thought the writing in it was florid "lorem ipsum" nonsense, several people independently discovered that the page numbers followed a rigid but 'idiosyncratic' (OK, quite twisted) scheme, based loosely around base 21 with various exceptions.

So, the mystery is...   whether Serafini's ornate text is also meaningful, or merely a playful joke styled in the style of an alien ciphertext - and whether he'll ever tell us...
#10

The Dorabella Cipher

In 1897, the composer Edward Elgar sent a short enciphered letter to his (much younger) lady-friend Dora Penny – because his nickname for her was "Dorabella", the note became known as "The Dorabella Cipher". What it actually says is doubtless fairly vapid and brief, but its inability to be deciphered has helped it become a popular entry in lists of cipher mysteries. Curiously, Elgar used the same cipher alphabet several other times, always as a simple cipher... yet applying that alphabet to the Dorabella Cipher doesn't work. Very strange!

So, the mystery is...   why the note by Elgar - who, despite his love of wordplay, was actually no great cryptographer - remains unbroken to the present day...
#11

The Phaistos Disk

While digging in a Minoan palace in Crete in 1908, Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier sensationally found a fired clay disk covered in unknown spiralling symbols, dating to around 1700BC. Or maybe he faked it. As with the Voynich Manuscript, just about every possible explanation - game, calendar, key, shopping list, hoax - has been proposed, along with just about every ancient language. Similarities with the writing on other artefacts have been proposed, but it has to be said they're not particularly strong. It's a mystery!

So, the mystery is...   what this unique circular artefact was for, and whether we'll ever be able to reliably work out what it says...