Somerton Man: The letter C from the 'code' page updated

Some time ago in another forum,  I posted an image of the letter C which is the last letter of the fourth line in the Somerton Man code.

It has an unusual appearance with pronounced 'serifs' at both ends of the letter. It is important to remind ourselves that the shape of the C including the serifs, came about as the result of the SA Police tracing over markings that they saw on this page. There's a whole discussion yet to be had on just why the did this but that's for other posts.

Importantly these markings traced by the Police were supposedly only visible under a UV light. An interesting aspect of this is the perception held by many that what the Police saw were impressions left in the paper and that was the focus of their tracing efforts. I am happy to take advice on this but tests I have carried out using a UV light do not pick up indentations or impressions left by a sharp instrument, they do pick up any colour markings as in pencil or pen etc.

This suggests that the process followed was to firstly examine the page, identify whatever patterns they were able to see, probably use a light form of marking the lines for later recognition, photograph the whole area of the page concerned. This photograph would likely have been taken under UV light conditions. It was a photograph of the code page that was then traced over. It is also fair to say that the Police at the time may not have been able to see all of the detail that we can now see.

Back to the letter C and its earlier examination.The only image I had at the time was a low resolution one that lacked in detail. I had a basic camera without macro lens and had only minimal lighting. That resulted in an image that showed considerably less detail as you will see in this post.

I have in the last few days examined the letter C yet again but this time using a High Resolution picture of the code page, a better camera with macro lens and I also used UV lighting, the latter throwing up a lot more detail of the page itself and the nature of individual letters as you will see.

This first image is the latest version from a high resolution, 400 DPI, picture of the code page. In it I have brought in an unmarked and then marked version so that we can all see the original markings/letters/numbers highlighted. What is important here is to take a note of the groupings and overall patterns that have been formed by the markings/letters/numbers within this letter. They are highly unusual but there is another example from another copy of the Rubaiyatt some of which we have already posted. I will be posting comparison examples of other handwritten and type set letters in the next few days.

This next image was taken about 15 months ago in March 2012. It was a surprise to see the information that appeared to be within the letter C as shown. I was convinced that the 'letters' that appeared in the lower half actually spelt out JESTYN with the N being hidden within the bottom serif highlighted.

The reality is that the clusters and groupings of even smaller markings/letters/numbers as shown in the image above lay within the darker shapes.

This is the result of a low resolution, 96 DPI, image, it simply does not carry the definition or detail as per the image above which was taken from a 400 DPI version of the code page.

A lesson learnt and gladly shared and for those that I had heated discussions with on this topic I hope you can now see what actually occurred.

The analsis task ahead is a challenging one, fortunately I now have some good materails and resources to work with and will be posting regularly as things progress.