SOMERTON MAN: Code Letter Analysis: Right Lower Quadrant & Q stage 2

The Individual Letter Project is Underway

Lower right quadrant images

This is a group of 7 letters from the lower right quadrant of the code page, I've uploaded this image to give you some idea of the scale of the task and just how much work needs to be done. You may notice the letters all have content and some are reasonably visible but work still has to be done to bring up the detail that everyone wants. Note the line that continues through the A, Q and C. Does that mean that it wasn't actually a letter A?

Letter Q Initial and Stage 2 Comparison

As you can see the image on the left is from the original Somerton Man Code page from the copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam found and associated with him and on the right, the image is the same one but with color shades partially removed and this is what you see. There is a question as to whether the SA Police were actually able to see this detail to the same extent as we see it here, subject of another post at a later time.

Obviously more work to do to lift and properly identify the letters and numbers but their markings are visible all the way around the letter Q in the right hand image. In fact if you look carefully, you can just about see darker grey markings in the left hand image.

A word of caution, there will be at least another version of this image and it will be clearer, I've released this one to show progress to date.

The process is slow and quite tedious, removing the various shades of grey from a number of areas around this one letter takes time. The letter Q has taken a number of hours to get to this stage, there are 50 letters in total plus other markings to be analysed in this way.

These are not smudge marks, they are deliberately written micro letters and numbers.

I should point out that the original image file of the code page came from the University of Adelaide and is a 400 DPI version. I have a copy of that for download from this blog or you may prefer to use the University version.




Your comments, input and thoughts are welcome, I will be doing further work on this and then listing the letters/numbers on the blog. Call back in a few days and that should be done and then on to the next letter.