THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LETTER 'A'

 USING COMMON ITEMS AND COMMON UNDERSTANDINGS IN AN UNCOMMON WAY...

In recent posts made elsewhere, there has been much discussion about whether the 4 instances of the letter 'A' had any meaning, did they form part of a secret code?

A number of 'learned' people gave their considered opinions based on what appeared to be some kind of frequency/statistical analysis and the likelihood of the 4 letters being part of a code of some kind. They unanimously voted that, according to their analysis, any connection was extremely unlikely

I disagree.

The code page, verse 70 with its illustrations, inscriptions, and printed words, and even the letters of the torn piece contain information in the form of hidden codes.

These are not standard codes, these are codes made by agents in the field, the real practitioners of tradecraft who knew full well the art of clandestine communications and that of concealment.

In a relatively recent post, I included a link to 14 short video clips dealing with these two tradecraft staples, these films were made in the early 1940s and the methods they described could still be used today.

One in particular related to what's best called an 'Item' code. The items could be the contents of someone's pockets for example. In the case of the Somerton Man, there were a number of items, 1 bus ticket, 1 train ticket, 1 handkerchief, 2 combs, 7 cigarettes, 1 box of matches?, 1 pack of chewing gum etc. An item code might read: B, T, H, C, C, C, M,  I am sure you know the drill. An alternative might be expressed in numbers: 1, 1, 2, 7, 1, 1. Perhaps a substitution cipher? Or maybe a Hill Cipher? Or just maybe nothing but you won't know unless you try.

The Concealment

Now let's return to the letter A, there were 4 instances where the letter A appeared in the seventh position on 4 lines as they appeared in the unformatted version of the code page. 

But it is not about the letters 'A', it is about the number associated with their position. Thus we have two numbers to consider, 4 instances and the 7th position.

1. 7. letters M 

2. 7 Lines

3. 7 letter authenticator in the reformatted lines, DANETTA

4. 7 letters taken from the reformatted 7 line code

The letter M is the only letter on the code page with 7 instances

The hidden code is within the individual letters as I have always maintained, with item 4 perhaps it's the key to the microcode strings:  A O A I Q S R ?

That's the elegance of it all, it's all down to one number, once you have that everything else falls into place.

Take another look at the earlier post on the significance of the number 7 across the Somerton Man case.

https://tamamshud.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-code-page-each-line-begins-with.html

For the experts, in a case such as the Somerton Man where it is clearly related to espionage, you cannot use the code lessons or maths learned at Uni, field agents were, by and large, a different breed who made use of common items and common understandings in an uncommon way. They thought laterally and it worked.