Cipher Mysteries

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google's hits are for ghastly sites listing "Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries" or "10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes". Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I'm not getting "Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips" and ...

Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from "Fred Jones / Will Smith" about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: "Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com " As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the ...

A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about "The Subtelty Of Witches" in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book "The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers" (which he wrote under ...

Tony Gaffney, a chess player / tournament organizer I knew back in the early 1980s when playing for Hackney Chess Club, made some fascinating comments to my recent blog post on The Subtelty of Witches and Eric Sams' attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher. Firstly: having spent a looong time in the British Library looking at ciphers (you'll see why shortly), Tony ...

...or, in all its prolixitous glory, "The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World's Greatest Cryptographers", by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as "Can You Crack the Enigma Code?" in 2006. You'd have thought I'd be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, ...

Here's a claimed solution to the Beale Papers (but press Cancel on the login popup, and if browsing there under Windows, I wouldn't advise installing the ActiveX control that pops up) which I didn't know about until very recently. I thought I'd mention it here because, as any fule kno, the Beale Papers are one of the few ...

I'm a lousy fiction reviewer, probably for two main reasons: (1) creative writing classes taught me how to spot when writers are cheating (in order to make me a more honest writer myself); and (2) years of Voynich Manuscript-related research has made me constantly alert for infinitesimal details upon which the answer might just hinge. Put these two together (a lie-detector ...