[Panel Session] Cryptologic History panel Oct. 19, 2017

[doranchak]

Doranchak
I expect you know that Nick Pelling, a researcher and cryptologist who has studied the VMS for almost twenty years, providing much original commentary and so on, has also been interested in the zodiac ciphers.

His posts at  ciphermysteries.com  should give you a fairly solid ground from which to advance any new ideas you may have.  Nick not only provides his own thoughts, but links to the work of earlier researchers, or those whose opinions agree with or differ from his own. 

Hope the talk goes well.

Thanks Diane.  Yes, I know Nick and comment on his blog from time to time.  He has some interesting ideas about the Zodiac ciphers.  I also follow the ongoing debates in the comments about issues surrounding Voynich research and theories.  They are very similar to the debates arising from the Zodiac case in which people get locked in with certain suspects and can't understand why others won't accept their suspects.

The talk went well - I am hoping to finish and upload the video some time today.  I hope to see more Voynich-related talks at this symposium.  Richard's was the only one.  In 2015 there weren't any, except for a mention by Klaus Schmeh in his talk about encrypted books.  A while back, Kevin Knight at USC did a talk called "What we know about the Voynich Manuscript" which I really enjoyed because it was a great summary of factual statistical information derived from the VMS text.  I'd like to see more talks like that.  There is so much text to work from, I'm sure there are a lot more observations that would be interesting to talk about.