...CONTINUING THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH... We are the leading fact, evidence-based, and authoritative blog on the Somerton Man case. The TAMAM SHUD case, all began with the discovery of the body of a man on Somerton Beach, South Australia on Dec. 1st 1948. He had been poisoned. No identification was found on the man or at the scene, and there were no signs of violence. The sand around the body was undisturbed. The discovery of secret codes and a local telephone number add to this enduring mystery,
Using the new Infrared technique we are obtaining vastly improved results. The above is the letter X over the two crossed lines in the centre of the page.
I thought the original code page was lost, so my question is how can a technique like this work with a digital or photographic copy of the original which doesn't have the different materials? Tim
ReplyDeleteThanks Tim, the original photograph of the code page was taken by SAPOL, Jimmy Durham was the photographer. To the best of my knowledge, he used Glass Plate photography for the job as the method records extremely fine details and in fact is sometimes used today for high quality photographs. The copy most of us use was held by The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide. Gerry Feltus sent me a copy of the one he had. Whichever image you might have, it will have come from the Advertiser scan originally as did the one I have. It's a 400 DPI image which is regarded by most photographers as being more than sufficient to get a good clear image, you may read of many publishers of photograph requiring 300 DPI for their printing standard. There have been numerous attempts over the years to improve on the base image but scanning at a higher DPI doesn't and can't add any data to the file, it adds pixels but no information.
ReplyDeleteTo your point, What matters is that we have a very accurate and high resolution image which can be reproduced. In this case I used an ink jet printer set to fine quality and printed on to bleed proof paper to get the result that you see.
From a lighting perspective, I used an LED backlight which accounts for the brownish tinge, and the reflected Infra red which is a technique used in forensic photography such as questioned document recovery. The IR source is set at an angle and the camera at another angle, the IR is 'bounced' or reflected off the surface of the object. it captures the information in that manner. Getting the correct angles is a matter of trial and error.
You can test these methods out yourself, using a basic IT light source and a mobile phone camera. It's not generally known but Mobiles are not fitted with very efficient IR blockers so they will take reasonable images as they did for the images in this post.
If I can suggest that you test the method for yourself you don't need expensive equipment. A decent mobile phone, a reasonable inkjet printer and of course a PC or laptop. The file can only produce what it holds, in this case a quality high resolution image, if you print that out on to bleed proof paper you will get the same or very results to those shown here. I would be interested to hear how you go with that.