Before Isaac, there was Chad (etc)…

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When “Isaac” posted his alien alphabet / antigravity stuff in June 2007, it was (he claimed) in response to recent reports of strange ‘dragonfly’-shaped drones, some of which had the same ‘alien’ writing on them:

  • 10 May 2007, Bakersfield, California – “Chad” (April 2007 + 06 May 2007)
  • 12 May 2007, Lake Tahoe, Nevada – “Deborah McKinley” (05 May 2007)
  • 20 May 2007, Capitola, California – “Raj / Rajman / Rajinder Satyanarayana” (16 May 2007)
  • 06 Jun 2007, Big Basin, California – “Stephen” (05 Jun 2007)
  • 11 Jun 2007, Big Basin, California – “Ty Branigan” (05 Jun 2007)

Those sightings are well documented in a “One Year Later” article in MUFON Ufo Journal April 2008 (pp. 3-11): the TL;DR version of that is simply that none of the claimed witnesses is credible, sorry. [If you don’t know about MUFON, it describes itself as an independent follow-on to Project Blue Book, and that it always starts by assessing the credibility of witnesses.]

Regardless, I decided (as I did with Isaac’s JPEGs) to take a digital forensic look at the various drone images, to see if there was anything interesting there: and I began with “Chad”.

Chad’s drone images

Chad’s drone story first appeared on Coast to Coast AM, and starts as follows:

Last month (April 2007), my wife and I were on a walk when we noticed a very large, very strange “craft” in the sky. My wife took a picture with her cell phone camera (second photo). A few days later a friend (and neighbor) lent me his camera and came with me to take photos of this “craft”. We found it and took a number of very clear photos. Picture #1 is taken from right below this thing and I must give my friend credit as I was not brave enough to get close enough to take this picture myself!

I started by downloading numerous variations of Chad’s images, but (viewed through a JPEGsnoop microscope) none of them seemed to me to be an original image. However, once I found Chad’s images from the Coast to Coast AM website itself, JPEGsnoop had an absolute field day.

The first image I looked at in depth was “Craft050607b.jpg”:

There’s an absolute riot of EXIF metadata going on here. For a start, we can see that the image creator used Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is sold as a cut-down version of Adobe Photoshop:

[Software                            ] = "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0"
[DateTime                            ] = "2007:05:06 17:20:08"

We can also see that it was saved out in Adobe Photoshop with quality setting 5:

  8BIM: [0x0406] Name="" Len=[0x0007] DefinedName="JPEG quality"
    Photoshop Save As Quality                          = 5 
    Photoshop Save Format                              = "Standard"
    Photoshop Save Progressive Scans                   = "3 Scans"

Similarly, the creator used Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Converter, which is typically used to import raw (unprocessed) photo data from (generally high-end) digital cameras:

 SW :[Adobe DNG Converter      ]                                [                ]                  
 SW :[Adobe Photoshop          ]                                [Save As 05      ]

Oddly, though, there was a slice name that seems to imply that this was from a scanned image:

      Name of group of slices                            = "ScannedImage-2"
      Number of slices                                   = 1

UUIDs and Melissa

Finally: also embedded in many of the file metadata is a version 1 format UUID. Historically amusingly, its strategy for constructing a universally unique id is by combining a device’s six-byte MAC address with the number of 100-nanosecond ‘ticks’ since midnight 15 October 1582 UTC, which was (as I’m sure you’ll all recall) the precise date when the Gregorian calendar was first adopted.

Decoding Chad’s UUIDs using an online UUID Decoder gives us:

  • “Craft050607a.jpg” has UUID 013dfdd9-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:15:04.703125.7 UTC
  • “Craft050607b.jpg” has UUID 013dfdd9-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:15:04.703125.9 UTC
  • “Craft050607c.jpg” has UUID c822a9ca-fc30-11db-b305-b8a28f50b702
    • MAC address b8:a2:8f:50:b7:02, generated on 2007-05-07 00:20:38.390625.0 UTC.
  • “Craft050607e.jpg” has no embedded UUID
  • “Craft050607x1.jpg” has UUID 8e3de69f-fd14-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:31:06.515625.5 UTC
  • “Craft050607x2.jpg” has UUID 8e3de6a2-fd14-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:31:06.515625.8 UTC
    • This didn’t seem to use Adobe DNG).
  • “Craft050607x5.jpg” has UUID 74fb1a10-fd17-11db-a9e5-8988b4fa457e
    • MAC address 89:88:b4:fa:45:7e, generated on 2007-05-08 03:51:52.625000.0 UTC
    • This too didn’t seem to use Adobe DNG.

At first glance, it might seem we have identified Chad’s two PCs! Except… we haven’t: the OUIs (the top three bytes) of the two MAC addresses are not recognised, so it is almost certain that Adobe’s software picked a random MAC address at the start of each of the two sessions. This is almost certainly because of privacy concerns: what famously happened in 1999 was that the creator of the Melissa computer virus was tracked down via his MAC address embedded in a UUID embedded inside his virus. And so people started randomising the MAC address portion of UUIDs, which eventually led to UUID format v4 and v5.

Hence: unless “Chad” happened to write out any other JPEGs during those two specific sessions, I think we are unlikely to be able to use the MAC address portion of Adobe UUIDs generated in 2007 (and afterwards) to track down anything else linked to this person, alas.

Finally: note that each of these JPEG files contains two UUIDs formed from timestamps that differ by:

  • Craft050607a – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607b – 900 nsec
  • Craft050607c – 333 msec
  • Craft050607x1 – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607x2 – 200 nsec
  • Craft050607x5 – 2.95 sec – this seems to be because the base UUID is that of Craft050607x2 (it was apparently cropped from that image and saved three seconds later)

I don’t really know what this means, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Lake Tahoe images

I also found copies of the Lake Tahoe images on a (very helpful) Avalon Library page. The two files were called “7013_submitter_file1__070505_02.jpg” and “7013_submitter_file2__070505_03.jpg” (which I presume are partly MUFON case file references).

7013_submitter_file1__070505_02.jpg included some interesting metadata. Overall, JPEGsnoop’s assessment was this:

SW :[Apple ImageIO.framework ] [075 (High) ]

The sensor was annotated as “MSM6500” (which I presume is the Qualcomm chip), and there’s Adobe Photoshop XMP metadata in there too. For once, the EXIF data is consistent with a digital camera:

[ExposureTime                        ] = 1/21 s
[ExifVersion                         ] = 02.20
[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:11"
[DateTimeDigitized                   ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:11"
[ComponentsConfiguration             ] = [Y Cb Cr .]
[Flash                               ] = Flash did not fire
[FlashPixVersion                     ] = 01.00
[ColorSpace                          ] = sRGB
[ExifImageWidth                      ] = 0x[00000200] / 512
[ExifImageHeight                     ] = 0x[00000180] / 384
[CustomRendered                      ] = Normal process
[ExposureMode                        ] = Auto exposure
[WhiteBalance                        ] = Auto white balance
[DigitalZoomRatio                    ] = 2/1
[SceneCaptureType                    ] = Standard
[SubjectDistanceRange                ] = 0

The second image was captured five seconds later (also without flash):

[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:05:05 18:52:16"

Stephen images

Here, the EXIF data (in “IMG_1060”) is definitive about the camera used (the Rebel XT is a good camera, I have one myself):

[Make                                ] = "Canon"
[Model                               ] = "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT"

The other camera EXIF data is very much what you’d expect for a daytime shot:

[ExposureTime                        ] = 1/4000 s
[FNumber                             ] = F5.6
[ExposureProgram                     ] = Aperture priority
[ISOSpeedRatings                     ] = 1600
[ExifVersion                         ] = 02.21
[DateTimeOriginal                    ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:49"
[DateTimeDigitized                   ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:49"
[ComponentsConfiguration             ] = [Y Cb Cr .]
[ShutterSpeedValue                   ] = 7694/643
[ApertureValue                       ] = 7163/1441
[ExposureBiasValue                   ] = 0.00 eV
[MeteringMode                        ] = Pattern
[Flash                               ] = Flash did not fire
[FocalLength                         ] = 50 mm
[FlashPixVersion                     ] = 01.00
[ColorSpace                          ] = sRGB
[ExifImageWidth                      ] = 0x[000009C0] / 2496
[ExifImageHeight                     ] = 0x[00000680] / 1664
[ExposureMode                        ] = Auto exposure
[WhiteBalance                        ] = Auto white balance
[SceneCaptureType                    ] = Standard

This too had an Adobe XAP block, but without any UUIDs.

IMG_1061 was taken two seconds later (properly focusing on the distance):

[DateTime                            ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:51"

IMG_1062 was taken four seconds later again:

[DateTime                            ] = "2007:06:05 13:12:55"

The Ty photos

Interestingly (and this wasn’t lost on forum commenters at the time), these photos were handled by Adobe Photoshop CS2 (“Creative Suite” version 2) Macintosh, as is abundantly clear from the metadata. These annotate an image being loaded (at 22:32:53 on 2007-06-16), modified, and then saved out 5.5 minutes later (at 22:38:20). The time zone was -06:00.

      |         <xap:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xap:CreatorTool>
      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:32:53-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:38:20-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:38:20-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>

The first image I looked at (DroneBigBasinTy060507aa.jpg) had a UUID of 22702A38-1DB6-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C, which decodes to:

  • Date/time = 2007-06-18 16:08:21.330181.6 UTC
  • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c (which, once again, is almost certainly randomised per session)

i.e. 2 days after the CS2 date. JPEGsnoop’s overall verdict:

EXIF Software: OK [Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh]
 SW :[Adobe DNG Converter      ]                                 [                ]                  
 SW :[Adobe Photoshop          ]                                 [Save As 05      ]

60507bb.jpg had XMP but no UUID:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:45:28</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:47:47</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507cc.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:50:49-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:52:33-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:52:33-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • 5BADA44A-1DEE-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:50:49.180065.0 UTC
    • MAC Address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c 

60507ee.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:41:33</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:43:14</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507ff.jpg had only XMP:
          |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:53:02</xmp:CreateDate> 
          |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool> 
          |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:54:34</xmp:ModifyDate> 

60507gg.jpg had only XMP
          |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:38:36</xmp:CreateDate>
          |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
          |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:40:57</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507hh.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:43:29</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:44:44</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507ii.jpg had only XMP:

      |         <xmp:CreateDate>2007-06-16T23:03:21</xmp:CreateDate>
      |         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh</xmp:CreatorTool>
      |         <xmp:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:05:26</xmp:ModifyDate>

60507jj.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T23:01:06-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:03-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T23:03-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID 668A3FCB-1DEF-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:58:16.899783.5 UTC
    • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c

60507kk.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:58:42-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T23:00:30-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T23:00:30-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID = 668A3FC7-1DEF-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:58:16.899783.1 UTC
    • MAC address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c

Finally, 60507ll.jpg had both:

      |         <xap:CreateDate>2007-06-16T22:55:22-06:00</xap:CreateDate>
      |         <xap:ModifyDate>2007-06-16T22:58:17-06:00</xap:ModifyDate>
      |         <xap:MetadataDate>2007-06-16T22:58:17-06:00</xap:MetadataDate>
  • UUID = 5BADA452-1DEE-11DC-8078-C1028E507E7C
    • Date/time = 2007-06-18 22:50:49.180065.8 UTC
    • MAC Address = c1:02:8e:50:7e:7c 

From this, it seems as though these images were initially processed on 2007-06-16 between 22:32 and 23:03, before being saved out two days later (as a batch?) between around 22:50 and 22:58.

The Drone Research Team Forum

According to MUFON, Raj’s 12 drone pictures were sent to Linda Moulton Howe who scanned them in and posted them. So any digital forensic analysis of these should only lead back to her, not to him.

In terms of content analysis, I should note that one group of 2007-drone researchers (the now-defunct Drone Research Team, though their pages live on in the Wayback Machine) believed that they had identified the precise telegraph pole in Capitola, CA that appeared in Raj’s pictures. They even printed out 400 flyers and posted them to all the pole’s neighbours to see if anybody had seen anything. (I believe the answer was a resounding no.)

Incidentally, the Drone Research Team’s main members were (according to this site):

  • Tomi01uk (UK)
  • Onthefence (Canada)
  • 10538 (USA)
  • Nemo492 (France)
  • Raska (France)
  • Elevenaugust (France)

To identify the site, they hired private investigators Frankie Dixon and T.K. Davis, but also asked them to try to identify the other drone sites. (A story covering their search ended up in the Los Angeles Times in 2008.) Here’s an animation created by arkhangels overlaying one 2007 drone image with an image taken by the private investigators:

Even though “Chad” claimed to have taken his photos in Bakersfield, it turned out that the actual location was a little distance away. Similarly, the “Stephen” drone picture turned out to be not Big Basin State Park, but (thanks to Pacific Gas and Electric meter reader Tom) Bohlman Road Ridge in Saratoga.

The Silpho Moor UFO cipher mystery…

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Today, I have a curious story of a 1957 cipher mystery from Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a flying saucer spin. And – best of all – its secret history has (as far as I know) never been fully revealed.

The first press write-up dates to the 9th December 1957, when the Yorkshire Post ran an article (which I haven’t seen) “Mystery object found on Scarborough moors”, “Has ‘Unusual Hieroglyphics’”.

However, most of the contemporary accounts appeared in that august publication Flying Saucer Review…

Three Men in a Car

According to the Flying Saucer Review 1958 Mar-Apr (Vol 4 No 2) p.4:

“[…] three men, Messrs. Frank Hutton [a property dealer], Charles Thomas [a butcher] and Fred Taylor [a tailor], were driving up a steep hill on Silpho Moor at night when the engine of the car cut out. They then saw a glowing object in the sky above some trees and it seemed to go right down into the ground.

“Mr Hutton went alone with a torch and found the object in some bracken and then went back to tell the others. On the way he passed a man and a woman on a little used path. When he got back with his friends to the spot where he had found the object in the bracken it was no longer there. After apparently making enquiries they got in touch with the man […]. There was quite a little bargaining and eventually the object was passed over to them for £10. […]

The story continues in Flying Saucer Review 1958 Jul-Aug (Vol 4 No 4) p.19, which helpfully included images of the object (top left, top right) as well as the mysterious hieroglyphics on the outside (bottom left) and some of the 17 sheets of strange imprinted writing (bottom right) that were found inside. These photos were “reproduce[d] through the courtesy of both Dr. James B. Williamson, of Middleton, Manchester, and of the Manchester Flying Saucer Research Society“, and were presumably taken by its President, John Dale:

Though the reproduction isn’t, ummm, out of this world, the first two pieces look like this:

Philip Longbottom and “Ullo”

This object quickly found its way into the hands of an “Anthony Avenel[l]” (actually Anthony Parker, Mr Hutton’s solicitor), who examined the object in the company of a reporter from the local newspaper and Scarborough cafe owner (and ex-electrical and mechanical engineer) Philip Longbottom. Before they drilled into the saucer object to open it up, Avenell had already looked at the imprinted markings on the outside enough to think that it formed some kind of message.

Once it had been pried open, inside they found 17 small copper sheets “joined at one edge”, containing roughly 2000 words of hieroglyphics, in some kind of a cuneiform language. Each letter was formed from two stamped lines, so gave a superficial impression of T, L and V.

Despite knowing nothing about ciphers, Longbottom spent 100 hours decrypting the mystery message: his decryption appeared in the Flying Saucer Review 1958, Nov-Dec (pp.15-17). He wrote:

I took a copy, symbol by symbol, of the key on the outside of the object, and also of the first few lines of the first page of the book, worked through most of the night on this, and finally ended up with a reasonable translation and also, which was more important, was able to evolve a sort of code card, or more elaborate key, to the whole of the heiroglyphics.

[…] It was soon found that each symbol had several alternative meanings and sounds, depending upon its position under, over or across the line or, in some cases, its proximity to the line. Some of the symbols are abbreviations, and several of them are phonetic spellings of familiar words. The whole thing is not just a simple substitution code, but is a very complicated effort. [pp.15-16]

Longbottom added that “the scrolls are now in the hands of a cypher expert, so that we may expect a more accurate translation in the near future, although I expect the gist of the message to remain unchanged“.

He also noted that he had been shown “a paper with heiroglyphics on” by a man called George King (a psychic), “and asked if they resembled those on the scrolls. I replied that one or two were something like them and that is all.” King’s article on this appeared in the April 1957 issue of Cosmic Voice (which I haven’t really summoned the enthusiasm to search for, I must confess).

Longbottom’s “Text of the Scrolls”

My name is ULO and I write this message to you my Friends on the Planet of the sun you call Earth. Where I live I will not say. You are a fierce race and prepare travel. No one from any other planet ever has landed on earth, and your reports to the contrary are faulty. Men cannot travel far in space vehicles owing to sudden changes in speed direction and many other reasons. They are machines, part at out “control”, part “auto-control to avoid objects in way. It is impossible to receive radio over far distances owing to natural waves in space unless key of several frequencies is used, but we can receive single frequencies from near transmitter recorder in space vehicles.

From here to end of message is written by me, Tarngee. I am since three earth years secretary for Ulo who has injured his arm while repairing space vehicle. He lost swimming race with me and I made him tell me reason. Now I write for Ulo. It is friendly if I write about our women. I am of average height. We can’t tell quite your size to compare but I am of height four times across.”

I could transcribe more but personally that’s as much as I can handle before it starts getting really quite silly – but don’t take my word for that, feel free to read Flying Saucer Review for the remainder.

As to whether this decryption was correct, an article by Dr David Clarke (a Sheffield Hallam University lecturer) reports that “Dr [John] Dale also got a language expert at the University to translate the symbols. It was very easy as the code was simple.  Based only on a simple L shape in various clock face orientations. Not exactly the product of an extra-terrestrial Einstein.“

Well… OK. But I’d prefer to see the ciphertext and form my own opinion.

The prehistory of the Silpho Moor saucer

When I was researching this a couple of months ago, I found a webpage by someone who claimed that they had seen the same lettering on a fake alien artifact a few months before the Silpho Moor flying saucer incident. Moreover, that preceding artifact had been produced not on Betelgeuse but in Birmingham.

Unfortunately, when preparing to write this page, I haven’t been able to find my way back to that website. If anyone happens to find out where that claim came from, please leave a comment below, thanks!

An epilogue from Paul Grantham?

According to Paul Grantham’s entertaining (and more than a tad skeptical) online account of the above (sadly now only available via the Wayback Machine), an allegedly reliable source told him:

The saucer was in fact one of a batch of secret surveillance objects code named PF228. Three of those launched went astray, two falling into the Atlantic, the other being lost somewhere over northern Britain. He recognised my description of the object as he was working at the base at the time of their launch. They were (he claimed) deliberately disguised as UFOs for the very reason that we discovered. If one were to be found, no-one would believe anyone about it.

It was secretly purchased back from the finders for an undisclosed amount of ‘hush-money’.

Well… I’m not exactly convinced by this, but I couldn’t leave it out, now, could I?

Silpho Moor Bibliography

Isaac Koi’s web page on Silpho Moor helpfully includes a list of book references that discuss the incident.

Moor Questions Than Answers

  • If the saucer was in a restaurant for years, where was that?
  • Where is the saucer now? (A few fragments turned up in the Science Museum)
  • Has anyone got photographs of the message?
  • Has anyone got a transcription of the message?
  • Who was the languages expert that John Dale passed it to?

In search of “Isaac”…

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Who was the mysterious “Isaac“, who claimed to have been working on an alien language in a Palo Alto research institute (“CARET”) in 1984-1987? In 2007, this Isaac posted a page on the free hosting website Fortune City (which has now been archived) with a load of scanned ‘alien’ documents; then answered various follow-up questions (I found what seems to be a complete archive of these on the “Metallicman” website); and then completely disappeared. Everything online since then relating to Isaac’s actual identity appears to be 50% speculation, 50% noise, and 0% fact.

Might a white hat hacker be able to find more details about Isaac, e.g. his IP address, email address etc? I think probably not, because I believe that Fortune City’s account details or server logs were never leaked or exploited (though please tell me if I’m wrong). After a heavily-oversubscribed IPO at the peak of dotcom mania, Fortune City crashed in 2012, and became Dotster (had you ever heard of Dotster? No, me neither). Now, not unlike Ozymandias, “nothing beside remains” of this “king of kings”, and only “the lone and level sands stretch far away”.

All the same, my question today is this: might digital forensics be able to identify “Isaac”?

Under A Digital Microscope

I started by examining Isaac’s JPEGs: these had no metadata or even comments, and their raw data (using HxD) revealed nothing of interest. JPEGSnoop, however, revealed that all the images appeared (according to its database of JPEG header signatures) to have been saved out from Adobe Photoshop. The range of different quality options used suggest to me that the user was (at least) a fairly experienced Photoshop user.

The JPEGs divided into two obvious groups:

Document scans:

  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p119- Adobe Photoshop – Save as 07
  • 2550 x 3199 quality 90 – p120 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3234 quality 90 – p121 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3203 quality 90 – p122 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3247 quality 90 – p123 – Adobe Photoshop – Save For Web 015
  • 2550 x 3298 quality 53 – cover – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3313 quality 87 – p2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3266 quality 87 – p3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3290 quality 76 – p4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3294 quality 82 – p5 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 06
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 86 – p6 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p7 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 04
  • 2550 x 3278 quality 76 – p8 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 82 – p9 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05

The dimensions suggest to me that the scanner’s native resolution was 2550×3300 (or an integer multiple of that, e.g. 1200dpi rather than 300dpi). So I would expect that Isaac used something like an HP Scanjet 3570c, which was a popular choice of scanner at the time (and has a 1200dpi native resolution).

Photographs:

  • 1768 x 1203 quality 95 – photo 1 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1762 x 1151 quality 95 – photo 4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11

Superficially, you might think that the dimensions of these images suggest that they were taken with a digital camera whose native sensor width was 1768 (roughly 2.2MP). However, a web search yielded no obvious technical matches.

Hence it’s far more likely that these were in fact scanned in from 35mm negatives and digitally inverted. What we call “35mm film” is actually made up of a 36mm x 24mm rectangle per individual frame (with a 2mm gap between frames). Hence 36mm = 1.41732 inches, and 1.41732 inches x 1200dpi would yield 1700 pixels, which is tolerably close to 1768 pixels. Note further that 37mm would yield 1748 pixels, so we seem to be very much in the right neighbourhood here.

Finally: I should perhaps also mention that Amped Authenticate offers a set of commercial JPEG analysis tools that seems to be even more turbo-charged than JPEGSnoop, but you (alas) pay handsomely for that privilege.

A Scanner Darkly

What can we tell from the images themselves?

For fun, the first thing I tried was to contrast enhance the areas of the scans that had been redacted, just in case the redaction had been inexpertly done (and the text beneath was still recoverable).

As expected, this produced nothing of interest: but while doing this, I did notice something a little unusual. Even though the source material being scanned was monochrome, a faint streaky blue vertical line artifact appeared about 30% of the way in from the left edge in the scans.

After a little thought, I then realised that this artifact was most likely caused by a flaw in the scanner head itself (which might possibly have been damaged during its manufacture). And I also realised that this could essentially be used as a digital fingerprint for Isaac’s scanner.

Here’s what a raw image looks like in Gimp (at 18.2% of original size):

In Gimp (though you could also use ImageMagick etc), to make Isaac’s scanner’s blue-flaw column visible (it’s between x = 752 and x = 760 in the original 2550-wide images) use the menu option Colors –> Value Invert :

Because of the way JPEG down-samples blocks of colours, the blue column isn’t easily visible in normal images: but once the values have been (numerically) inverted, it becomes clear to see. The redacted text blocks make it particularly easy to see (i.e. it’s visible on black text, but not on white background).

JPEGSnoop helpfully offers the ability to look at individual JPEG planes (the other forensic toolboxes I tried didn’t), so here’s a JPEGSnoop screengrab of the Cb plane for part of the same image, with a patchy vertical white streak where the scanner’s blue artifact is:

This is where the digital forensics chase starts to become interesting…

Once again, “the game is afoot!”

The idea now is simple: even though there may be no direct trace of “Isaac” anywhere on the Internet, might we be able to find any other scans made with his same subtly damaged scanner head and posted online? That is, might we be able to find other scans made with Isaac’s scanner?

Given that Isaac posted his alien writing scans on Fortune City, it seems a reasonable guess that he may well have posted other scans to other free Fortune City accounts.

Furthermore, Isaac’s way of working seems to have been be to leave the width of each scan intact (at 2550 pixels) and to trim its length. So I would initially only be interested in images where the width is exactly 2550 pixels.

Finally, the whole point of Fortune City was that it was a place to host stuff that was completely free (it made its money from banner ads). So we would probably only be interested in 2550-pixel-wide images with this specific blue colour flaw that were also hosted by Fortune City.

Step 1 could be to webcrawl the fortunecity.ws archive (there must surely be a list of accounts?) and compile a list of 2550-pixel-wide JPEGs/JPGs. Step 2 would be to grab them (into an AWS bucket?) and run an image filter on them. Step 3 would be visual inspection, or an automated sort based on a metric.

So… who wants to help give this a go? Will this reveal Isaac’s identity?

In search of Mauritian shipwrecks 1740-1750…

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If the Last Will and Testament written by Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang is genuine (or, at least, perhaps only modestly embellished in the copying) and – as part of that – was indeed written by him, it can only have been written prior to his death in 1750.

I previously also wrote about the intrigue and politicking around La Bourdonnais’ fleet that he hustled together in 1745-1746 in Mauritius, and speculated that Bernardin – himself a lifelong sailor in the Compagnie des Indes – might well have got caught up with that whole operation. But all the same, that was just my guess: the fact that Bernardin died in Port Louis in 1750 provides a solid terminus ante quem regardless.

It further seems likely (to me) that even five years would be an eternity to wait before returning to cached treasure, so the decade 1740-1750 seems a good basic search period to start with. So we might ask: can we find a historical source for Mauritian shipwrecks during the period 1740 to 1750? And if so, can we use that to steer us any closer to a likely source for Bernardin’s treasure?

“Maurice : Une Ile et Son Passé” (1989), by Antoine Chelin

I found a digitised copy of this book online: this runs from 1500 to 1750, and chronologically lists many (though of course not all) events in Mauritius’ history.

The author (who wrote in Mauritian newspapers for many years under the anagrammatic byline “HELNIC”) first published this book in 1973, then released a chunky supplement to it in 1982, before finally merging the two into a single larger book in 1989.

Here, we’re specifically interested in shipwrecks (“naufrages“) and hurricanes (“ouragans“) in the period 1740-1750 on Mauritius. In the following, I’ve used Chelin’s numbering system to make it easy to look up individual events in the original book.

298: 11 Jan 1740: hurricane which caused considerable damage in the bay of Port Louis

325a: 13 Dec 1743: violent hurricane which caused considerable damage to the whole island

337: 17-18 Aug 1744: the shipwreck of the Saint-Géran off the Ile d’Ambre, close to Poudre d’Or, subsequently made famous by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre by his fictionalised version of the event in his novel Paul et Virginie. The ship had a cargo of 54000 Spanish piastres plus machinery for a sugar factory that was being built.

354: 10 Dec 1746: return of Mahé de La Bourdonnais from Madras.

361: 21 Jan 1748: hurricane which caused great damage to boats in the harbour of Port Louis – the Brillant, the Renommée, and the Mars were all beached, and three other boats were lost. “The kilns of Isle aux Tonneliers were destroyed, houses in Port Louis were thrown down; Pamplemousses Hospital
was flattened, the wings of the Monplaisir building in Les Pamplemousses lost their roofs, bridges were washed away, shops in Port Sud-Est were knocked down, the newly-built battery at Trou-aux-Biches was flattened by the waves.“

377: 7 Nov 1748: “departure for India of part of the squadron under the orders of Capitaine de Kersaint. It is composed of the Arc-en-Ciel, Capitaine de Belle Isle, 54 cannons, crew of 400; the Duc de Cumberland, enseigne Mézidern, 20 cannons, crew of 179; and L’Auguste, enseigne de Saint-Médard, 26 cannons, crew of 130.”

378: 9 Nov 1748: “Departure of the rest of de Kersaint’s squadron, consisting of Alcide, captained by de Kersaint, 64 cannons, crew of 500; Lys, frigate captain Lozier Bouvet, 64 cannons, crew of 476; the Apollon, enseigne de La Porte Barrée, 54 guns, crew of 383; and of the Centaure, ensign de La Butte, 72 guns, crew of 522.”

379a: 26 Nov 1748: arrival of the frigate Cybèle from Pondicherry, announcing the news that the siege of that place by the British had been lifted.

389: 10 Jul 1750: shipwreck of the Sumatra at l’Ile Plate, which had left Port Sud-Est carrying a cargo of wood headed for Pondicherry (14 crew drowned).

A new Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang timeline?

Previously, I had speculated that Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang might have been part of La Bourdonnais’ cobbled-together fleet that sailed to Madras in May 1745. It was certainly true that many Mauritians, rattled by the loss of the Saint-Géran in January 1744, didn’t want to take part: though as a former sailor in the Compagnie des Indes, I suspect Bernardin was unlikely to have been in that group.

In March 1748, (British) Admiral Boscawen arrived at the island with 28 boats en route to Pondicherry, angling for a fight: however, the only French ship he encountered was Capitaine de Kersaint’s Alcide at Port Louis. When Boscawen subsequently arrived off the Coromandel coast in August 1748 in his flagship the Monteran (after a detour to Bourbon in July 1748), his fleet was (according to H. C. M. Austen, p. 21) “the greatest European fleet ever seen in the East“.

Later in 1748, a small French/Mauritian fleet assembled itself under Capitaine de Kersaint. Maybe Bernardin could not say no to joining that small squadron that left Mauritius in November 1848 to try to relieve the siege of Pondicherry. However, they were not to know that the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had already been signed on 30th April 1748, making their journey pointless.

And so I can’t help but wonder: might the “treasures saved from the Indus” hidden by Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang have been from a ship wrecked by the huge cyclone that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748? And might the enlistment Bernardin talks about in his Last Will and Testament have been the (actually unnecessary) squadron under Capitaine de Kersaint that left Mauritius on 7-9 November 1748?

“I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France, plus my treasures saved from the Indus.”

Note: full letter here

It’s an interesting possible timeline, that (if true) would answer some of the questions I’ve had about timing that have long seemed very slightly off. Even so, the account does remain fairly hypothetical: though on the positive side, it does perhaps suggest some ideas about where to look next.

So… where next for this?

The first thing I’d like to see are contemporary accounts of the hurricane that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748. The information Chelin reports must (surely) have come from somewhere, but from where? Mauritian newspapers only go back (very incompletely) to 1777 – Le Cernéen and Le Mauricien only started in 1832 and 1833 respectively.

I should perhaps add that the Wikipedia page on tropical storms in the Mascarenes only mentions two from the period 1740-1750 (though note that Grant’s book includes a long section on hurricanes on Bourbon compiled by the Abbé de Caille?):

  • March 8, 1743 – A strong cyclone passed near Mauritius.
  • February 1748 – A strong storm

Note that a letter discussing the 1743 cyclone is quoted in Garnier and Desarthe (2013):

Letter of the governor of the Ile-de-France (Mauritius) of March 8th, 1743:

We had a hurricane on March 8th. The big rashness of the wind lasted only from ten o’clock in the evening till two o’clock at night. Several vessels ran aground in the port because of very high waves which reached the store of the port. The harvest was almost completely destroyed, in particular the corn, the potatoes and the sugar canes. On the other hand, the rice and the manioc were protected. As soon as our port (Port Louis) will be repaired, I shall send to you by boat of the peas of the Cape (South Africa) and the beans which you can distribute in the poorest and to the blacks.

As far as the Jan/Feb 1748 Mauritian hurricane goes, I did find a (fairly miserable) letter from Baron Charles Grant de Vaux dated 10 March 1748 (pp. 293-294):

We have been informed that fifteen ships have been dispatched from the East, laden with provisions for our islands ; but unfortunately the English fell in with them, and, being superior in point of force, have taken them all, except a small vessel, which escaped to make us acquainted with our misfortunes. We live at present in a most wretched state of incertitude, in want of every thing ; and, to complete our misery, afflicted with a continued drought, which has known no interval throughout the year, but from an hurricane that visited us during the last month. It ravaged every thing, and occasioned many fatal accidents. Several persons were killed and wounded during its continuance ; and, to complete our distresses, it was succeeded by a cloud of locusts, which devoured whatever the hurricane had not laid waste. Such is our present situation, &c. &c.

For other sources, I haven’t yet found any journaux de bord covering 1748 (the Achilles’ only goes up to 1747), nor any prize papers, and the Log of Logs starts from 1788, alas. I’ve also asked Professeur Garnier if his researchers found any sources on the 1748 hurricane. Myself, I haven’t yet found anything relevant in gallica.fr, though the chances that something useful is there are surely quite high. The French maritime archives are similarly daunting and huge.

But at least I’m looking for something now. 🙂

Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard…

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Perhaps you well-informed people already knew, but recently I was surprised to discover that during WWII, these three luminary SF writers all worked at the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. Because this overlaps some of the other history I’ve been working my way through of late, I thought I’d tell this story again (but from my own angle).

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, 1944

(Image from Asimov’s 1979 autobiography “In Memory Less Green”)

“Astounding Science Fiction”

When the United States joined WWII in 1941, Robert Heinlein (who had previously served in the US Navy, but had been discharged in 1934 because of ill-health following tuberculosis) immediately asked to be re-enlisted. Though he was (eventually) turned down (because of poor eyesight), he was then asked (by Commander A. B. Scoles, his old classmate and fellow Naval Academy graduate) to write an article for Astounding magazine about the Aeronautical Materials Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia (that Scoles ran). When Scoles also asked if he would like to work there, Heinlein agreed. As an aside, one of his superior officers there was Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, who Heinlein later married (after his second divorce in 1947).

While working as a civilian employee (his military clearance took a while to come through), he recommended they hire his fellow writer L. Sprague de Camp, who had a similar background in engineering. As with Heinlein, Sprague de Camp then encountered a delay before he could attend a suitable course at the Naval Training School at Dartmouth. Hence he also initially worked as a civilian engineer there before completing his course and gaining a commission as a full Lieutenant (much to his surprise, because he had only expected to become a Lt J-G).

Heinlein’s other personal personnel recommendation to the factory was Isaac Asimov, who had a Master’s in chemistry. Yet again, it took six weeks for Asimov to get clearance, his “first experience with government red tape”. This was his first time he had lived away from his family, and quickly discovered that he “wished to live soberly and reasonably – exactly as my parents had expected me to live. It was a dreadful disappointment.” Asimov subsequently thought of his time working there as a failure – that if he had been employed to do the same work during peacetime, he would have been fired. And so he returned to writing in 1943.

All the same, that’s how come the three (now very famous) SF writers all ended up working in the same Navy Yard during WWII – not exactly coincidental, but an interesting historical adjacency nonetheless.

What did they each work on?

This is actually the part I’m most interested in, because their memories of what they did there all help cast a bit of light on the innermost workings of the US Navy’s generally secretive R&D.

According to this page, Heinlein supervised a pressure chamber for testing the high-altitude suits (e.g. for stratospheric ballooning) that would later become space suits. In a 1986 foreword he wrote for Theodore Sturgeon’s novel “Godbody”, Heinlein heavy-handedly hinted at his top secret work there, including an (unnamed) radar project plus a brainstorming job on “antikamikaze measures” for “OpNav-23” (whatever that was). Though for balance, I should add that many of the Heinlein biographical sites I’ve looked at are more than a little skeptical that he actually did much top secret stuff at all.

Similarly, de Camp ran a separate engineering section, which “perform[ed] tests on parts, materials and accessories for naval aircraft; and when called upon, to do original design and development work.” Part of his worked involved running a “Cold Room” for low-temperature equipment tests. This is described in his 1996 autobiography “Time and Chance” (available for £1.99 on the Kindle). [Did you know de Camp’s first name was “Lyon”?] The contractor’s freon cooling circuit never worked, so in the end they used dry ice cubes to brute-force the Cold Room to -96F. De Camp also worked on “trim-tab controls, windshield de-icers, oxygen regulators, low-temperature protective equipment, hydraulic valves, corrosion controls, and piezoelectric materials“. Though I should add that he poured scorn on a story about ‘three pulp writers designing a space suit’ that appeared in print: “the nearest any of us got to space suits was when I saw a suit, designed by a private contractor, being tested by Larry Meakin, one of the civilian engineers, in the Altitude Chamber“. The last noteworthy thing de Camp did while at the Naval Air Experimental Station was “to put on an Exhibition Day, with flying demonstrations“, as a piece of general public outreach. However, his memoirs give no further details of what that involved.

Asimov’s memories in his 1979 autobiography “In Memory Yet Green“ appear in Chapter IV “The War and the Army – in That Order“. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard rarely took him out the chemistry laboratory: “its purpose […] was to maintain the quality and performance of hundreds of different materials used by the naval air forces“. His work “consisted largely of testing different products intended for use on naval aircraft – soaps, cleaners, seam sealers, everything – according to specifications. […] I was testing various plastics and other substances for waterproofness by placing weighed amounts of water-absorbing calcium chloride in aluminum pans, covering them with the film to be tested, and sealing those films with wax around the edges. I then weighed them, placed them in a humidifer for twenty-four hours, took them out, dried them and weighed them again.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a scream.

Finally, “The Philadelphia Experiment”

L. Sprague de Camp was once asked by a fan about “The Philadelphia Experiment”, as described by Berlitz and Moore in their 1979 book. “Aha!“, said the fan, “Now I know what you, Heinlein and Asimov were up to in that Naval laboratory” – i.e. popping the destroyer escort USS Eldridge and its crew through some kind of crazy dimensional portal to the Norfolk Navy Yard (which was 200 miles away), and then popping it back again.

Of course, de Camp thought the entire thing was complete nonsense (“a book of marvels for the gullible”) that none of the three writers had even heard of during their time there. Having said that, he did concede that “an invisibility project would have been more fun than running endless tests on hydraulic valves“. I’m sure Asimov, at least, would have agreed.

Isaac, CARET, Starfire Tor, Alienware…

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Since posting up some images way back in 2009, I haven’t really covered the (allegedly) ‘alien’ language claimed to have been stolen from a (fictitious) “CARET” research institute in Palo Alto by a mysterious Fortune City poster called “Isaac”. The whole lot was – in my opinion – nothing more than a Ufologist-trolling hoax (albeit one of the better-looking ones).

Starfire Tor

However, I recently found out that Isaac’s alien alphabet had (supposedly) been debunked by an online poster called Starfire Tor. She had noticed that the same font had been used by Alienware for a viral-style marketing campaign, based around a competition where breaking a ciphertext could have won you a trip to New York City worth $2800. Here’s what the ciphertext looked like (image from Starfire Tor’s website):

Alienware (which by then had been Borg-ed up by Dell Computers) also used the font to stamp “ALIENWARE” onto their promotional desktops (image also from Starfire Tor’s website):

For Starfire Tor, this was a slamdunk: a huge corporation like Dell would never (she reasons) just steal someone else’s font, ergo Dell/Alienware must have commissioned the font design in the first place, ergo they must have been (somehow) behind the whole Isaac/CARET thing. End of story.

However… take a closer look at all three versions of the alien alphabet, and you’ll notice they’re all slightly different. The competition alphabet contains four extra glyphs (plus a dash and a full stop) not in the Isaac alphabet: while the ALIENWARE stamped-out alphabet has one of the new competition glyphs (for the “A” in “ALIENWARE”) plus a unique reflected version of a glyph in the Isaac alphabet (the “E” in “ALIENWARE”). Additionally, the three alphabets all render the alien vertical bar glyph in different ways.

Hence it seems as though what actually happened was that Dell/Alienware just got their in-house artists to rip off the bloody aliens. (Presumably hoping that they came in peace, rather than with trademark attorneys?) So, even though I’m sure Alienware founder Nelson Gonzalez (who was famously a fan of all things ufological, hence his company’s name) would have loved to have been part of an alien conspiracy, I don’t believe that this was what happened (or else Dell would have just reused the existing font, right?)

Anatomy of an Alien (Alphabet)

In my 2009 post, I noted that it looked as though the alien text was made up of some letters, some numbers, and a few pieces of what seemed to be punctuation. I also complained that nobody had actually bothered to transcribe the alien text (presumably because going round in circles is a pain in the neck).

All the available Isaac CARET scans are online here, taken from pages 119 to 123 of a fictitious CARET book. Note that pages 120 to 123 are just zoomed-in versions of parts of the (larger) diagram on page 119, so there’s actually only a single diagram to work with.

Looking more closely, the alphabet contains a large number of apparent groupings, which suggest that a kind of “pigpen”-style glyph generation process might have been in play here. With that in mind, here’s my work-in-progress transcription key for Isaac’s alien alphabet:

It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed one or two really rare glyphs (the lettering is large in some places and tiny in others), but I believe that this covers just about everything that appears. (I’m reading all the strings clockwise.)

Alien Alphabet Transcription

Inevitably, I tried to use this to transcribe some of the text (in the middle of the “octal junction”, p.120):

FKRYRSAKML SBUN M HY

X2L R -JM EW1D DT-ED (345-521) BV-KA P6FKL (])

SHJD C-XEGYRI (DEB)

JMRI LAI-FELK GUHFVX (KLN) [

However, I have to point out that CryptoCrack wasn’t hugely impressed. But maybe someone else will have more perseverance and luck than me.

“NB Gas” decoded (in plain sight)…?

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Charles Dellschau’s curious notebooks talk elliptically about a mysterious lifting gas called “NB Gas”: this was discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, harnessed) by miner Peter Mennis. It was created by dripping a green liquid (which Dellschau nicknamed “suppe”, for “pea soup”) onto an electrode, releasing the “NB Gas”, thus giving – so the theory goes – an airship buoyancy, and defying gravity. Unlike hydrogen, “NB Gas” was thought to be far less explosive, and thus more suitable for safe airshippery.

Going through the list of possible lifting gases, the best candidate by far would seem to be ammonia (NH3): though because its lifting power is far less than that of hydrogen, ammonia balloon envelopes would need to be significantly larger than hydrogen balloon envelopes (and let’s put all the other practical issues to one side too).

In his notes, Dellschau seemed not to know either what NB Gas was or why it was called that. But perhaps – I wonder – it was supposed to have been written “N-B” Gas instead? Because if so, the reason for the name would have surely been hidden in plain sight:

Now you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it, can you?

Charles Dellschau, Columbia, The Special AKA, and Scooby Doo…

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At the time of his death in Houston, Texas in 1923, Charles Dellschau was nothing more than an unknown (and indeed unremarkable) retired butcher. Yet a century later, his drawings of brightly-coloured (if somewhat implausible-looking) airships are feted as Art Brut and exhibited widely: while researchers continue to rummage through his books of recollections to try to work out how true (or, conversely, how imaginary / fantastical) his accounts of what happened actually are.

Some people even believe not only that Dellschau’s group of (alleged) Californian inventors flew dirigibles (steerable airships) before 1860, but also that this (somehow) proves that a steampunk super-science cadre was living in our midst; and from there spinning off into all manner of alt.history craziness.

To be fair, it does seem entirely plausible that Dellschau was living in / near Sonora or Columbia in California in 1857-1859, and perhaps at the start of 1860 too. For instance, he’s clearly familiar with nearby places (e.g. Knights Ferry), and later parts of his story do line up satisfactorily with actual evidence.

But for all that, 1857-1859 remains a yawning gap in his CV/résumé. And the fact that there is no evidence linking him to Columbia or Sonora in those years is certainly annoying. So… what’s going on here, then?

Columbia, California

Prior to the Gold Rush, Columbia was barely on the Californian map: but with the rapid hyper-scaling that followed the discovery of gold in 1848, the town quickly had its own shops, bars and hookers, and even its own printing press. It grew so fast that the town was even seriously proposed as a new California state capital to replace Sacramento.

But if you fast forward to 1860, Columbia was a bust: it all panned out, you might say. The last hurrah was a rumour that there were copper deposits beneath the town itself, which triggered frantic digging, rendering many of the buildings unsafe. And then, finally, the few remaining miners there decamped to other nearby towns, such as Copperopolis (though the astute ones had gone long before).

And so we already have a direct answer as to why the archives have no concerted trace of Dellschau and his airship-designing drinking buddies. This was because the 1850 and 1860 dates of the US Census stood rigidly either side of Columbia’s all too brief flourishing – its success was a proverbial flash in the pan. By 1860, pretty much everyone had moved on (including Dellschau himself), leaving the town a (literally) hollowed-out shell of its former thriving self.

Once again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Special AKA

In my head, the soundtrack to all this is – perhaps inevitably? – the major chord middle 8 in The Specials’ “Ghost Town”.

“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played inna da boomtown“

For me, this brief snatch of the lyrics captures Dellschau’s drawings best: specifically, his burning, shining nostalgia for whatever happened in those three brief years in California, “inna da boomtown“. To my eyes, his bright, almost DayGlo images speak of a past full of possibilities, of a shared peak experience, of everyone at their best, but all reconstructed and captured in far greyer days half a century later.

And then, as the old joke goes, “Tea break’s over, back on your heads“. 😮

Scooby Doo

As you may possibly remember, the theme of abandoned gold rush mining towns appeared in the “Miner 49er” Scooby Doo episode “Mine Your Own Business” [S01 E4] (spoiler: the Monster of the Week was Hank the caretaker, on stilts):

Strictly speaking, Columbia never became a Californian ghost town (unlike, say, Agua Fria in Mariposa County): it stumbled along until 1934, when New Deal archaeologists went in to make sense of the mess: in 1945, the town was restored and turned into the core of Columbia State Historic Park.

The questions everyone ends up asking about Dellschau’s notebooks are very often to do with what his motivation was for writing them. Was it all an act of scientific journalism (of real airships), or an act of pure personal creative expression?

All the same, maybe Dellschau saw himself as a kind of caretaker, trying to keep the memories of his boomtown days alive, even if everyone else involved was now far away or long dead: and where it is highly doubtful whether the airships he was documenting were ever constructed, let alone flown.

For me, I can’t help but wonder whether the 1896-1897 Airship Flap was the thing that first triggered Dellschau into writing down his recollections and reconstructing the designs proposed by his drinking club friends back in 1857-1859. Might his actual motivation have been to instead prove that they (rather than these gosh-darn Airship Flap pretenders) were the real inventors of the idea of the airship?

Ultimately, I guess that makes me Fred Jones removing the monster’s mask to reveal Dellschau as an obsessed caretaker not of a lost history of built airships, but of a lost history of conceptual airship inventors. That is to say, I suspect the ‘gold’ Dellschau was trying to attain was a place in airship history for his inventive friends, from his younger boomtown days when everything – briefly – seemed possible.

“And I’d have got away with it too, if it weren’t (etc)“.

On NB gas, suppe, and NYMZA…

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Anyone trying to make sense of Charles Dellschau’s partly-enciphered airship drawings will quickly run into three roadblocks: (1) what was the mysterious “NB gas” that allegedly made the airships buoyant? (2) What was the curious green “soup” that was allegedly used to release additional NB gas whilst in flight? (3) What was the mysterious group “NYMZA”, whose enciphered initials appear on so many pages of Dellschau’s notebooks?

Here’s what “NYMZA” looks like in Dellschau’s cipher:

NB Gas

In terms of chemistry, there are very few substances that are less dense than air at normal air pressures and temperatures (and that can hence be used to lift an airship).

Of these, hydrogen is the best known, but it is prone to explosion; methane too is similarly prone to going bang; while helium was only properly isolated in 1895 (and so was not in play in 1856, the year when – according to Dellschau – Peter Mennis discovered “NB gas”), broadly similar to neon, krypton, argon etc.

However, there is one other “lifting gas” that was within reach of inventors circa 1850: ammonia. Even though ammonia is only half as dense as air (by way of comparison, hydrogen has 8% of the density of air, so an ammonia-filled balloon would need to be a fair bit bigger to get the same lift), and is stinky and noxious, it has many secondary benefits.

Interestingly, there’s a 2016 article by Brett Cohen (Karl Kluge kindly pointed this out to me, thanks Karl!), published in “Shadows of Your Mind” Vol. 1 #10, pp.78-81), that proposes that Peter Mennis’ NB gas was indeed ammonia.

It’s a good theory, certainly better than Jerry Decker’s somewhat forlorn theorification that Mennis may have found one of 26 elements supposedly missing from the periodic table before hydrogen. (*sigh*)

Even if we proceed by Holmesian elimination, ammonia seems a strong pick. And yet… it has to be pointed out that ammonia’s relatively meagre advantage over air as a lifting gas would probably have meant bigger balloon envelopes than the ones depicted by Dellschau. This is a tricky issue that everyone panning Dellschau’s notebooks for historical gold dust has to face up to.

All the same, I think it’s fair to say that ammonia is a very strong candidate for NB gas, with no obvious alternative contender (Dellschau repeats many times the idea that other gases were too explosive to be used in airships – and though ammonia is, ummm, slightly explosive, it’s still less troublesome than the others).

Suppe

The second problem is the “suppe” (which Dellschau always paints green): this is a liquid substance that get somehow poured onto a spiked ‘turner’ device, releasing the NB gas. At one point, Dellschau calls it “pys suppe” (which I believe means “pea soup”, though you will have to form your own opinion).

Want your airship to go up? Pour “suppe” onto your spike turner to release NB gas into your balloon envelope. Want your airship to go down? Release some NB gas from your balloon envelope. Whereas the most technically aware balloonists of the day were using ballonets (inflatable air bags inside the hydrogen gas bag), an ammonia-based airship need – theoretically – not use any such additional mechanism.

Cohen thinks that the two substances that were added together to release ammonia were were ammonium chloride (NH4Cl, A.K.A. sal ammoniac) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH, A.K.A lye, or caustic soda, first properly isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1807). The equation he points to is:

NH4Cl + NaOH –> NH3 (ammonia gas) + NaCl (sodium chloride) + H20

In Cohen’s concluding paragraph, he proposes “that ammonia gas (NH3) could be produced from a simple mixture of two solids, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) dissolved completely in water and allowed to react.”

Incidentally, ammonium chloride is used as a food additive under the title “E510”. If you’ve had “salty liquorice” in Northern Europe, you’ve probably eaten ammonium chloride.

Overall, Cohen’s account is sensible and rational: and yet it has to be said that neither ammonium choride nor sodium hydroxide has a green appearance. In Crenshaw’s book (p.89), Peter Mennis’ discovery of NB gas is phrased in terms of “searching for a better way to extract gold from quartz”, and an experiment that went wrong (in a good way), though Crenshaw doesn’t connect this explicitly with references to Dellschau’s notebooks.

Cohen may be right, or he may be wrong – it’s hard to tell. Even if Mennis’ NB gas is indeed ammonia, I think it’s hard to feel confident the “suppe” secret sauce has yet been figured out properly.

NYMZA

In many places, Dellschau alludes to what seems to be a shadowy group of investors who were at least partially bankrolling the inventors in the Sonora Aero Club: he calls the group “NYMZA” (but only ever writes its initials in cipher, as far as I can tell).

If NYMZA is an acronym, it’s certainly a curious one: though it’s hard not to read the first two letters as “New York” (arguably the investment capital of the world back then), the “MZA” part feels much more like a German acronym.

If the “M” is the first letter of a German word, I wondered if it might be (for example) “mechanisch or mechaniker”. Similarly, I wondered whether the “Z” might stand for “zunft” (guild), “zirkel” (circle), or “zeichner” (draftsman / designer). Finally, I wondered if the “A” might stand for “Assoziation”. However, my cunning websearches for all of these yielded plenty of false positives, but nothing actually helpful.

Yet Dellschau himself was born in Prussia in 1830, and his written language is a mishmash of English, German, French and sometimes apparently phonetic renderings. For example, I personally find it hard not to read all Dellschau’s transcriptions of “Moyk Gorée” and not to wonder whether the person’s name was simply “Mike Grey” (possibly from Britain or Ireland?).

In that context, it’s also quite hard for me to look at “NYMZA” and not wonder whether this was an imaginary Anglo-German group of investors that Dellschau had himself made up. In which case, the question is whether Dellschau had made it up in 1857 in California, or whether he made it up back in Houston many years later.

Your thoughts, Nick?

Though it would be nice to believe that NYMZA and Sonora Aero Club existed just as Dellschau’s notebooks imply, there currently seem to be more historical and technical impediments than supporting evidence.

To be fair, I can imagine that Californian miner Peter Mennis existed, and even that he indeed discovered a lifting “NB gas”; I can even imagine that Mennis may have been able to build a small test balloon using his NB gas, and excite other people’s imaginations.

Yet startup ventures throughout history have faced immense difficulties re-engineering a demonstrator into something that works at scale: and, so far, I don’t really see any way that the rest of the Sonora Aero Club (itself a name that wasn’t really possible until 1900 or so) was anything apart from a local Liar’s Club / drinking club formed to fantasize about manned flight amidst the brutal day-to-day madness of a Gold Rush.

But hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. 😉

Cipher Mysteries is migrating from Feedburner to Follow.it …

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Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve (at long last, only two years late, etc) moved Cipher Mysteries’ email subscription handling from (the now long defunct) Google Feedburner to sassy new Feedburner replacement Follow.it. Everyone who was formerly subscribed via Feedburner should (fingers crossed) now be subscribed via Follow.it instead.

The nice follow.it people tell me that you can do various funky subscription things via their web interface (e.g. RSS trickery, or redirect it to your Twitter feed, etc). But frankly I guess most people will just receive it via email as before.

Let me know if you run into any problems or anything unexpected! Next stop – finding a new WordPress theme…