“Alien” cipher language…?
Ever heard of Palo Alto CARET Labs? Nope, neither had anyone else until “Isaac” posted about his experiences at “PACL” in the mid-1980s as part of a team trying to turn “extraterrestrial technology” taken from “crash sites” into consumer goodies (such as a personal anti-gravity machine, apparently) for our sated materialist society.
So far, so mainstream UFO subculture: but what moves Isaac’s story into the A-list of recent UFO narratives is the set of lovingly-constructed images accompanying it. Some of these show machines (like a junkyard engine with neatly stencilled-on white lettering), while others are extracts from technical report “PACL Q4-86″ (though why smuggle out a redacted version?) showing abstract representations of octal software / hardware with wonderfully obfuscated descriptions (e.g. “Isolated view of a three-node AB-type semaphore cascade, extending from an exterior vertex of an octal junction”).
There’s a ton of online discussion of Isaac’s images, nowadays mostly centring on whether Adobe Illustrator or Adobe AutoCAD was used to create his pretty diagrams (I’d say Adobe Illustrator, with lots of text and element reuse to make it seem like more than it actually is).
Though I’m not a ufologist (“Men In Black” is about as close as I get), what I like here is his funky alien alphabet - equal parts Star Fleet and Japanese (Kana). For all Isaac’s talk that this expresses a ‘non-compiled alien symbolic programming language’ (yeah, riiiight), it closely resembles a European monoalphabetic cipher in the following basic ways:-
- There seems to be an explicit numbering system
- There seem to be a Romance-language-size character set
- There seems to be a sharp language-like distribution to the symbols
Hence, I predict that the UFO hoaxer created a simple A-Z/0-9 alien font in Adobe Illustrator and just typed a load of technical-looking nonsense along lots of curved paths. For example, here are some of the number-like text fragments from various pages:-
To my eyes, this gives the impression of someone cut-and-pasting nonsense numbers – I’d predict that the shapes either side of the repeated string on the left are ‘(‘ and ‘)’ respectively (they reappear in matched pairs elsewhere in the diagrams), that the left pair of strings each reads “(5604)”, and that the other two strings encipher ’12′ and ’160′. Note that I’m guessing those leading digits are 1′s, on the basis that Benford’s Law probably also holds true on alien worlds. 
If you’re interested in trying to crack this for yourself, feel free to download pages 119, 120, 121, 122, and 123 from Isaac’s Fortune City pages, and see how far you can get. Good luck!
November 20th, 2009 at 5:38 am
Wow! Thanks, Nick! I wonder if he knew Bob Lazar?
There’s a lot there, but my very first thought: the gadget shown in PACL Q4-86 Report Photo 4.1-4 looks like a Curta calculator, with the “alien” character set.
November 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Great stuff!
It is clear that ‘we are not alone’.
What I mean is: us Voynich researchers.
Browsing through the Net on this topic shows that weird theories and
never-ending discussions abound, and in these terms the UFO people
are beating us hands down
I like this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZTtoIH9RLw
Rene
November 20th, 2009 at 9:12 am
They may beat us on quantity of madness, but on quality? Never!
November 20th, 2009 at 9:18 am
I certainly wondered about the scale of that picture (the lack of backdrop is what set me thinking that) – in fact, my first idea was whether it was actually a scale model made to look big by a tiny camera. Could well be a Curta calculator, that would be the right kind of size – and an artefact that is fairly “alien” to modern eyes.
November 20th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Hi René! The video is way cool! But do you think that advanced-tech aliens would be happy with us shooting their drones? Would we Merkins like it if the Taliban shot down some of our Predators? And who says those are ‘drones’, anyway? Suppose there are aliens inside! It doesn’t seem like a good idea to make them mad!
The MySpace page is kind of interesting.
November 20th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
The week part of the whole thing is that it is both capable of becoming
invisible and has anti-gravity.
It would have been sufficient to have invisible rotor blades.
Anyway, nobody think that there is something rather important missing
from this account of Isaac?
November 20th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
It’s all weak… for me, the issue is more whether or not you think the diagrams are pretty.
After all, we Voynich researchers tend to have a bit of a soft spot for circular diagrams.
November 20th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Curta Calculator – not to be too much of a spoilsport, but I don’t think there’s a significant resemblance. One could just as well make a case that the alien technology was based on a vornado.
November 21st, 2009 at 4:44 am
Yes, we have a soft spot for circular diagrams. I do like mandalas in general. Many say we have soft spots elsewhere too!
What do you mean, René? Isaac’s true identity?
An Ixquick search on “CARET alien technology” was surprisingly productive. Here’s a debunking:
http://www.theironskeptic.com/articles/issac/issac.htm
November 21st, 2009 at 10:40 am
Hi Dennis,
this thing is rather the opposite from the Voynich MS in many respects.
For example, in this case ‘modern forgery’ has to be the foremost theory
in terms of likelihood. Also, these characters, while supposedly alien,
look more familiar than the Voynich MS, because they are from our time.
The glaring omission is the complete lack of interest where all this
comes from. Not a single word about it. It’s not even clear if these drones
are supposed to be original (alien) parts or human re-engineered
ones. Completely incredible.