Cipher Mysteries

Cipher Mysteries readers in the US may well have watched Brad Meltzer's recent "Decoded" episode on the Declaration of Independence. Though you might well think that the description listed below doesn't sound particularly promising... The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of American Democracy. Could it contain hidden messages from our nation's forefathers intended to be discovered years later? ...

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 ...

Please bin yesterday's Cipher Mysteries post on the Beale Papers - a lesson in what happens when you try to write both code and a blog post in the middle of the night. Here are the corrected stats:- Declaration of Independence: initial letter distribution (A,12.82%) (B,3.66%) (C,4.05%) (D,2.82%) (E,2.75%) (F,4.73%) (G,1.45%) (H,5.88%) (I,5.11%) (J,0.76%) (K,0.31%) (L,2.60%) (M,2.14%) (N,1.45%) (O,10.92%) (P,4.50%) (Q,0.08%) (R,3.05%) (S,4.81%) (T,19.16%) ...

Though technically they're probably not in cipher (rather, they're almost certainly three wobbly dictionary codes), they definitely form an historical mystery: and even today, the Beale Papers' promise of 19th century treasure continues to inspire people to borrow a distant cousin's mini-diggers and covertly dig implausible holes not too far from where Buford's Tavern once stood. Which is, of course, both foolish and most likely illegal, so ...

Here's a nice little thing that might possibly earn a Cipher Mysteries reader 100 US$! Once upon a time in Copenhagen, a bright mathematics professor called Julius Petersen briefly stepped into the world of codes and ciphers. He wrote and published a pamphlet on cryptography called Système cryptographique, as well as a series of eight fortnightly articles on the subject for ...

Here's the hot-off-the-presses official trailer for "The Thomas Beale Cipher" animation I mentioned a short while back, coming to a film festival near you:- Looks pretty good, I'd say. If the video isn't embedded above, feel free to head over to the official site, courtesy of Polymix on Vimeo. Enjoy!

Just a quick note to say that I've been working behind the scenes for a few weeks on a revised Cipher Mysteries home page, incorporating a nice clickable list of what I think are the top unsolved cipher mysteries of all time, some of which you may not have heard of:- (--Top secret, yet to be announced--) The Voynich Manuscript The Anthon Transcript The Beale Papers The Rohonc ...

I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an "easy in". Just saying "code" conjures up... Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really) Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of 'The Secret') A central McGuffin that is ...

Some more thoughts on the curious "key" sequence in the Beale Papers... Back in 1980, Jim Gillogly applied the Declaration of Independence codebook for the second Beale Paper ("B2") to the first Beale Paper ("B1"), and discovered a very unlikely sequence in the resulting text: ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP. The chance of the middle section alone ("DEFGHIIJKLMMNO") occurring at random is about one ...

It seems as though penetrating public cryptographic analysis of the three Beale Papers (B1, B2, and B3) halted abruptly in 1980 when Jim Gillogly pointed out a problem with B1. If, as he pointed out, you apply to B1 the same dictionary code used for B2 (famously derived from the Declaration of Independence), you get a ciphertext with some distinctive ...