Cipher Mysteries

I recently received a note from independent Dutch researcher Esther Molen describing her Voynich theory: she was happy to see it given a post of its own, so... here it is! * * * * * * Here is my [Esther Molen's] translation and ideas. The Voynich Manuscript is mainly written in medieval Latin in combination with medieval French and medieval ...

A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn't a 'crowd', but (rather delightfully) a 'murder' of crows. What, I ...

Just so you know, I'll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants' exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted ...

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 ...

Unless you've been in something dangerously close to cryogenic suspension for the last year, you'll know that these have been troubled times in Egypt - but you may not have heard that these have also been troubled times for Egyptology. Adding to 2011's regime-changing brouhaha, Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian government's ...

The indefatigable Cheryl Bearden has been filling in the gaps for our elusive "H. C. Reynolds" tenuously linked to the Tamam Shud cipher mystery man, and has dug up nine more crew manifests in the Sydney archives with his name ...

In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two "dry migraine" attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps ...

A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research! As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the "ugly duckling" artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in ...

Yet more for you on our elusive young Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, who may or may not be the mysterious "Unknown Man" found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948, etc etc. Firstly, I note with great interest Gerry Feltus' comments on the whole H. C. Reynolds thing. He writes:- In early February 2011, I received a letter from ...

If you've been following the flurry of recent posts (and indeed comments) here on the Unknown Man, you'll know we've done two things: * successfully linked the "H. C. Reynolds" on the US seamen's temporary ID card to a young "H Reynolds" working on the SS Manuka and the RMS Niagara, and constructed a six-month timeline for his sea-life from ...