Cipher Mysteries

To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory. Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese 'word' super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: "fachys ykal ar ytaiin ...

Here's a nice story that should bring heart to researchers struggling with uncracked homophonic ciphers (e.g. Zodiac Killer Ciphers, Beale Papers, etc). Kevin Knight, who Voynich Manuscript researchers may remember from various posts here, has now co-authored a 2011 paper with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer from Uppsala University on how they cracked a hitherto unknown (to ...

Fate dealt Stanley Picker a strange card that day: he just happened to be ambling past the burning library on his way home from work as the rampaging mob surged out into the street pushing trolleys of rare books and manuscripts. Amidst all this mayhem, Stanley only had eyes for the odd little cipher manuscript balanced precariously on top of one ...

Here are some piquant canapes to twingle your Voynich tastebuds, a bit like "Space Dust for researchers". (1) Gerry Kennedy has discovered that a deathmask of Wilfrid Voynich was taken, and that it still exists. (2) Jackie Speel tells me that "in 1916 Wilfrid Voynich was involved in a friendly law case with the Lincoln Cathedral authorities over the ownership of one ...

Here's a particularly interesting Voynich Manuscript paper declassified by the NSA in 2002 (but only recently released as a PDF scan) - so many thanks to the ever-vigilant Moshe Rubin (of Chaocipher Clearing House fame) for pinging me with a link to it, much appreciated! :-) Of course, Brigadier John Tiltman's The Voynich Manuscript - "The Most Mysterious Manuscript ...

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * Chapter 3 - "Unjust Desserts" "I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?", said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket's material through her Swiss army knife's magnifying glass. "No, it was my grandfather's - Mani Harvitz, he ...

The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman's "First Study Group" of WWII cryptologists: but I've recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days ...

"The Chaocipher" is a devious cipher system invented in 1918 by John F. Byrne: allegedly, it was so complex that nobody could crack his challenge ciphertexts (even with the plaintext to refer to!), yet was so simple that its mechanism was claimed to comprise only two rotating disks small enough to fit in a cigar box, and could be operated by a ten-year-old (admittedly a ...

At the start of my own VMs research path, I thought it was important to consider everyone's observations and interpretations (however, errrm, 'fruity') as each one may just possibly contain that single mythical seed of truth which could be nurtured and grown into a substantial tree of knowledge. Sadly, however, it has become progressively clearer to me as time has passed that any resemblance between ...

For the most part, constructing plausible explanations for the drawings in the Voynich Manuscript is a fairly straightforward exercise. Even its apparently-weird botany could well be subtly rational (for example, if plants on opposite pages swapped their roots over in the original binding, in a kind of visual anagram), as could the astronomy, the astrology, and the water / balneology quires (if all ...