Read more: 鈥�Unbreakable: Eight codes we can鈥檛 crack鈥�
A well-dressed man found dead on an Australian beach in 1948 wrote an indecipherable scribble in a book of Persian poetry
ON A warm summer鈥檚 night in 1948, witnesses saw a well-dressed man lying on the beach in Somerton, near Adelaide, South Australia. By 6.30 the next morning, the man had not moved. He was dead.
Advertisement
An autopsy revealed organ damage consistent with poisoning, but no foreign substances in his body. He carried no identification. Fingerprint and dental-record searches came back with nothing. His clothes had no labels and were heavy for a night so balmy, suggesting he was not a local.
Thus was born the legend of the Somerton Man. It remains one of the most mysterious unsolved deaths in Australian history. To this day, we don鈥檛 know who he was. A well-dressed drunk? A forlorn lover? A Russian spy? There is no shortage of theories, but facts are scarce. He did, however, leave behind a code.
Six months after the body was found, investigators discovered a small scrap of paper in a concealed pocket in his trousers. It read, simply, 鈥淭amam Shud鈥� 鈥� Persian for 鈥渆nded鈥�. When investigators announced this find, it generated a new lead. Shortly after the death, a man who had parked his car and left it unlocked near the beach on the night Somerton Man was discovered found a copy of Persian poet in his car. The last page had a piece torn out of it that matched the mystery scrap in the Somerton Man鈥檚 trousers. In the back of the book was a lettered code, scrawled over a few lines (pictured opposite).
Eventually all other leads pursued by the police came to dead ends, so this unsolved code is one of the few remaining clues that might yet reveal the man鈥檚 identity.
at the University of Adelaide is leading the most recent effort to untangle the mystery. His main approach uses software originally designed to identify the author of unknown texts. 鈥淢y goal was not to crack the code, but to take a step back and apply statistical techniques to rule out which type of cipher techniques the Tamam Shud code is definitely not,鈥� he says.
He applied a simple 鈥渇requency analysis鈥�, a technique that involves counting the number of times each letter appears and that can spot the signatures of certain methods of coding. Though the brevity of the code makes it hard to be sure, Abbott and his team ruled out 20 different code types.
Abbott also claims to have ruled out the possibility that it is gibberish. His team had 30 people write random collections of letters and compared the results to the code. 鈥淭he statistics of the letters show that the code bears structure and information content,鈥� he says.
His current theory is that the code is composed of the first letters of English words. The team is searching for patterns of words in e-books, looking for common passages that may have been used in the hidden message. They hope to soon expand their search to the entire web.
Abbott says that a faster route to figuring out the man鈥檚 identity would be to exhume the body and analyse the DNA and the isotopes present in his bones. 鈥淭he bone isotope test will reveal where he was born. With DNA we can find which family tree he belongs to.鈥� But unless he can persuade the police to take a fresh look at the case, the code is all we have to go on to solve this enduring mystery.
Read next article: 鈥�Unbreakable: Beale鈥檚 buried treasure鈥�
