Somerton Man: UV Light on photographs. How it works..

       

In the recent exchange with another blogger regarding the use of UV lighting to show up details not readily viewable with the naked eye. I made it clear to him that UV can and is used on photographs or even scans and his statement was:

'There is no point at all in using IR lighting, UV light, backlighting or glancing illumination on a high quality photograph, because the specific point of those techniques is to make physical aspects of the original object visible *that would not be visible in a straightforward RGB scan*.'

The above statement made by the same blogger is uninformed and misleading information.

The reality is that many of today's papers/photo papers make full use of OBA's or Optical Brightening Agents and sometimes known as UV reactive papers to add brightness to an image. The two images at the top of this post are an example of a genuine image and a forged image, on the left, you see the genuine article a collectable card, it looks dull because it was printed on very plain paper, the right-hand image shows up much brighter as you can see which also makes it a forgery because the paper on which it is printed is OBA treated paper which wasn't around when the original image was made.

What has this to do with the Somerton Man Code page? If you go back through the posts on micro writing, you'll see that I always talk about printing out the image of the page or the individual letters, they are printed onto good quality OBA treated paper so that they react to UV light and consequently they provide more contrast and show additional detail.

On another matter Nick, your latest post includes another example where you mislead people. Here we are:

'Line #5 seems (to my eye) to end with an underlined ‘R': if this is indeed an acrostic letter (and not, say, the second half of the ‘AR’ Morse Prosign for “All Received”), then I do wonder if it is short for ‘Repent’, a fairly decent (and Rubaiyat-themed) rhyme for ‘Content’.'

Notice how easy it would be for the casual and unsuspecting viewer of the Cipher Mysteries blog to assume that this was actually Nick's work when it is clearly not. Nick, it's considered polite when using other peoples 'finds' or content to acknowledge the source. The AR and Prosign find was made by me and published on this blog in June 2014 and in the  Adelaide Advertiser here. Your post is reliant on your plagiarism of my work, tacky stuff Nick.

You have lifted your information from this blog and or the Advertiser but neglected, overlooked or more probably, deliberately not declared your source. I think that Nick is badly afflicted by 'Terminological Inexactitude', as Churchill puts it.