Cipher Mysteries

A few days ago on an ‘AboveTopSecret’ online forum, user ‘NerdGoddess’ posted links to photos of a curious runic cipher her boyfriend found on a piece of paper on his fence not long before, and asked if anybody could decrypt it.

Of course, the fact that the cipher half comprises eleven miscellaneous shapes (letters & runes, all different) plus a dot would seem to make reliable decipherment unlikely, unless it just happens to be extremely close to an existing cipher alphabet. Similarly, the thirteen digits seem pretty non-specific (phone numbers and Swiss bank accounts aside), apart from the way that the first three (’463′) are the same as the last three (’364′) reversed.

All the same, her post provoked fourteen pages of responses (probably even more by now) ranging from the sensible to the speculative to the downright opportunistic:-
* Maybe it’s a mixture of various Futhark runic alphabets?
* Maybe it’s a phone number concealed by someone called Amy?
* Maybe it’s related to the Rushville Runestone?
* Maybe it’s written in a gang cipher?
* Maybe it’s Gnommish (from Artemis Fowl), Enochian, hobo, Roma or Pavee markings?
* ‘Dump your loser boyfriend, baby, and go out with me instead’ (Ha!)

Incidentally, the Rushville Runestone has its own nice (but thoroughly solved) cipher mystery story: found in woods near Rushville, Fairfield County, Ohio in 1972, it turned out to be a physical copy of some runes shown in a hand-drawn picture illustrating Neil Shute’s novel “An Old Captivity” (1940), and saying “Haki / Hekja”.

Back to Cincinnati: and I have to say it’s clear to me that when we look at this ciphertext, we’re supposed to think ‘cipher runes‘, in particular based on either the Elder Futhark…

…or the Younger Futhark…

Having said that, it’s basically a lousy fit for any of them. If you optimistically pick & choose letters from whichever Futhark alphabet you futharking well like, about as close as you can get is “f h e n [A] . s h [H] d t [?]“. Which is my cryptographic way of saying ‘not even close’. Put it this way: it wasn’t a runic purist who left this message.

All the same, I quite like the way that the letters seem (if you reverse them) to spell out AMY, which is why several people have proposed that the author of the note was someone called Amy, perhaps leaving her phone number in a mysterious (and steganographic) way: but there’s one last theory that hadn’t (last time I looked) yet been proposed.

You see, the other interesting thing about the digits is that few of them repeat, and all of the numbers 1-9 appear. So… what if these digits are the key to a transposition cipher? That is, what does the bottom line become if its shapes are transposed in the order given in the top line? Here’s what it looks like before transposition (admittedly not 100% sure)…

…and after transposition…

The nice thing about doing this is that the dot gets transposed to the very end of the cipher, which would seem to provide weak confirmation we’re going in the right direction. But… what does it say? If you squint, does it say “TO MY WITCH WA.”? Curious, and very possibly wrong, but perhaps this might be enough to help someone to recognize the kind of cipher being used here and to decrypt it more reliably. Enjoy!