I was reading about Hallermann–Streiff syndrome this morning, and was a little surprised by the huge gap between Aubry (who first discussed elements of it in 1893, though only partially and in the context of congenital alopecia) and Hallermann (1948) and Streiff (1950) (after both of whom the syndrome was named). And so I went … Read More → The post 1908 medical reference to Hallermann–Streiff syndrome (HSS)… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Having just posted about Project NEPA (and now reading Alex Wellerstein’s fantastic “Restricted Data”), something clicked in the back of my head about Nick Redfern’s source “Black Widow” (in his book “Body Snatchers in the Desert”). According to Redfern, she claimed that “[she] met a lot of the NEPA and ANP people at Oak Ridge...”. … Read More → The post Was Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” actually Millicent Dillon? ....

I’ve been trying for a while to find a reliable insider account of the early days of Project NEPA. Helpfully, I found two accounts of Project NEPA written by Lt. Col. Clyde D. Gasser, the Air Force Engineering Officer for project NEPA in Spring 1947. Incidentally, his 1990 obituary is here, and I also found … Read More → The post How did Project NEPA actually start? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

My search for scientific balloon history 1945-1949 has just taken a sharp turn to one side. I’ve managed to locate a folder in the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama that has (or, at least, in 1986 had) information about some super-early scientific balloon stuff that might possibly be what … Read More → The post Looking for a researcher near Montgomery, AL… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

[*] Well, a bit of it, anyway. Over the last weeks, my Cipher Mysteries inbox has been inundated with AI-generated theories. But – and with my apologies to the genuine cipher theories that also landed there, which I promise I will get back to – I’ve instead been focused on the Voynich Manuscript. Or, more … Read More → The post Finally, I can read the Voynich Manuscript! [*] appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

As I noted last year, it’s well documented that the round-ended capsule-shaped metal stratospheric gondola designed by Charles Burgess and Tex Settle (referred to as “The Flying Coffin”) was approved by Rear Admiral Moffett, who died in April 1933 (on the US Navy airship USS Akron). It’s also known that it was constructed in the … Read More → The post The Roswell capsule: was it Tex Settle’s Flying Coffin? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

For decades, Roswell researchers have tried to gain access to Project Mogul documents. Most famously, UFO skeptic Robert Todd submitted numerous FOIA requests during the 1980s and 1990s to try to access some of them. According to the McAndrew US Air Force report, it was Todd’s efforts that ultimately led to the Project Mogul account … Read More → The post Where are all the Project Mogul documents? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I keep mentioning Project NEPA here, but it’s not exactly well known. So, for a bit of fun I thought I’d draw out the lines connecting it with the Fallout game series’ Vault Boy mascot. As you might guess, this whole story arc hasn’t really got a happy ending. From the Manhattan Project to the … Read More → The post From Project NEPA to Fallout’s Vault Boy… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

As per my last post, I’ve been trying to dig up all the Project Mogul reports to get a more detailed (and less curated) look not only at how it worked, but also at how it interworked (e.g. with Project Helios, etc). These appear to be in the unhelpful state where they have been declassified … Read More → The post The Beginnings of Space Biology appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I put the following diagram together to make it easy to see how I think the various pieces of balloon technology fitted together. The “Project -X-” is, of course, a placeholder for the (still unnamed) project or operation that ended up (thanks to the magic of plausible deniability) at Roswell in 1947. There are numerous … Read More → The post 1930s-1940s Balloon technology flow chart appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Here’s a nice story about Walt Singlevich, that I found in “The U.S. Air Force’s Long Range Detection Program and Project MOGUL” by James Michael Young in Air Power History (2020 winter). Walt Singlevich Young writes: “During the Second World War, Singlevich worked for DuPont but was assigned to the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge“; … Read More → The post Meet Walt Singlevich, a Roswell alien… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

While writing up my last post on Roswell meteorology, I noticed that Duke Gildenberg – who presented himself as a UFO arch-skeptic more and more as he got older – appeared to make some assertions about the very first big UFO incident of the 1947 ‘flap’: the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. Firstly, Gildenberg’s “Roswell Requiem” … Read More → The post Duke Gildenberg on cluster balloons, Colorado, and Kenneth Arnold… appeared first on Cipher ....

....

“A man is found dead in the desert, next to an open package. How did he die?” Many will immediately recognise this puzzle format, which became popular for a few years thanks to the 1967 publication of Edward de Bono’s “The Use of Lateral Thinking”. Nowadays, de Bono’s whole “Lateral Thinking” fad is long forgotten, … Read More → The post Roswell and the modern secrecy silo state… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

How do you make an egg flip? Show it a soldier who’s ready to dip! Best Christmas wishes to all Cipher Mysteries readers and commenters, even the slightly crazy ones (and no, I don’t mean you, you’re not crazy at all, I swear). The post A Christmas 2025 message for you all… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

“And you’re 100% sure this won’t be traced back to me?”, the sweaty man asked a little nervously. “I mean, my wife Mandyleen thought I shouldn’t meet you, but tonight’s her Krav Maga club night. Yeah, if you came at her with a knife, you’d get a broken wrist [he snapped his fingers proudly] like … Read More → The post An onion for your thoughts… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

It’s a phenomenon that’s been growing recently: lots of Chinese addresses in the Cipher Mysteries weblogs, to the point that maybe even 20% of all visitors here are from China – from all over China. Maybe I’m missing something big? So please excuse me while I ask my Chinese visitors what they hope to see … Read More → The post Cipher Mysteries is getting so many visitors from China: but why? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Here’s a fun modern-looking enciphered document for you, of the kind that Klaus Schmeh used to like so much. I found it via a post by Richard Brisson (www.ultrasecret.ca) on cryptocollectors: note that this “Manoscritto misterioso” sold for 250 Euros. Here’s how the eBay seller described it (translated from Italian): A manuscript book of unknown, … Read More → The post Fun modern Italian cipher mystery appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

For context, I’m trying to read the last chapter of Carl Webb’s (the Somerton Man) life, i.e. between 31st May 1947 (the last glimpse of him in the Melbourne small ads) and 1st December 1948 (when he was found dead on Somerton Beach, near Adelaide). The high levels of lead in his system (found by … Read More → The post Broken Hill Associated Smelters collection at the University of Melbourne’s archives… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Every fule kno that plucky professor Derek Abbott somehow (let’s not dwell on the details) got hold of a hair embedded in a plaster cast made of the Somerton Man, and then got his students to laser-zap it, revealing a spectroscopic timeline for the last fortnight or so of his life. The most headline-grabbing graph … Read More → The post Somerton Man, hair, arsenic, splenomegaly, leukemia, and Fowler’s Solution… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Following on from my last post, I’ve been digging further into Broken Hill miners (such as BHP) and Port Pirie smelting (BHAS, basically). Expect a lot of spoil and a small amount of shock and ore. BHP at Port Pirie and Whyalla I found this article on Trove from 28th August 1948 (from the BHP … Read More → The post Port Pirie smelting, and the politics of lead poisoning… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

When writing up my Trove search notes for “instrument maker”, it struck me that I should hunt for lead-related jobs in the Adelaide Advertiser’s Situations Vacant listings for the first part of November 1948. Researchers have typically assumed that Carl Webb was living far away from Adelaide, but what if he had been working in … Read More → The post Situations Vacant in Port Pirie, November 1948 appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

For me, searching small ads in Trove is like perfidiously picking people’s past pockets: so much of their life is embedded in their ads, by which I mean not just their property but their hopes and their dreams too. Back in 2022, I looked at Carl Webb’s small ads, the last of which seems to … Read More → The post “Instrument maker with ability and experience”… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Almost since the day it happened, the Roswell Incident has been presented as pantomime rather than history. The pro-UFO camp cheer whenever a vaguely plausible alien explanation pops up; while the skeptic camp get their kicks from booing stupid theories. Aliens? They’re behind you! Oh, no they’re not! Well, I’ve had enough. And since nobody … Read More → The post Saying farewell to the Roswell pantomime… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Since posting on the problems presented by the Roswell ‘alien’ capsule, I’ve done some more thinking, trying to get inside the head of a 1947 biophysicist planning some kind of unethical human-subject high-altitude experiment, that we might now think of as “the Roswell experiment”. So, here’s my reconstruction… Physiologically, what was Project Helios trying to … Read More → The post Roswell: reconstructing the Roswell experiment… appeared ....

There are numerous Roswell witness statements that mention what the ‘Roswell aliens’ (who I would instead call ‘test subjects’) found in the ‘capsule’ were wearing, but these are spread throughout the (already very diffuse) literature. Hence I thought it would be helpful to wrangle them all (unless you know of any others?) into a single … Read More → The post What were the ‘Roswell aliens’ wearing? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Nick Redfern mentioned gonzo journalist’s John A. Keel’s story in Chapter 11 of his book “The Roswell UFO Conspiracy” (his 2017 follow-up to his “Body Snatchers in the Desert”), but it’s so good that I thought it worth looking more closely at. Keel’s story was itself a follow-up to a previous piece on Fu-Go balloons … Read More → The post John A. Keel’s “Return of the Fu-Gos”, Don Piccard’s balloon licence, and JN-25… ....

On the surface, nothing links the two at all: the Roswell Incident happened at the start of July 1947, while the CIA was formed in September 1947. But… perhaps there’s something a bit deeper to be had here. CIA Covert Operations If – like me – you think that Roswell was entirely man-made (and not … Read More → The post What links Roswell to the CIA? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

On the surface, nothing links the two at all: the Roswell Incident happened at the start of July 1947, while the CIA was formed in September 1947. But… perhaps there’s something a bit deeper to be had here. CIA Covert Operations If – like me – you think that Roswell was entirely man-made (and not … Read More → The post What links Roswell to the CIA? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Some historical researchers like to track the known ownership of things, e.g. they follow the Voynich Manuscript’s ownership trail from Sinapius to Kircher all the way through to the Beinecke. For me, I couldn’t think of anything worse – I want to know about the prehistory of an artifact, its uneasy secret life long before … Read More → The post Roswell Timeline: What Did (and Didn’t) Happen… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.