SOMERTON MAN CODE PAGE: MICRO DOTS? A MAJOR DISCOVERY... UPDATED 5th July 21

IS THE TORN PIECE
A SERIES OF MICRODOTS?

The above is an extreme close-up of the letter T from the torn slip of paper found in a hard-to-find waist band fob pocket of the trousers that were being worn by the man found on Somerton Beach on December 1st, 1948.

When you examine it closely you will see diagonal, numbers, letters, and perhaps even a word or two handwritten in appearance but were they reduced in size and placed on a microdot? As some will be aware, microdots although often used in a dot shape to mimic a full stop in a document, could in fact be made into any shape.

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UPDATE 5th July 21

Here are two more images of the same letter T, they have been rotated right then left off the perpendicular view in order to better show an alternative, possibly rectified, view of the 'diagonal' aspect shown in the first image at the head of the page.

1. Minus 50 view:



2. Plus 50 View:

Viewing these two aspects, it occurs to me that it is possible that what we are seeing is a microdot image of sorts.

Here's the current possibility based on what we see here:

1. The 'microdot' image actually covers far more than that visible within the letters of the words TAMAM SHUD. What if the 'microdot' contained information that covered the entire page on which the words appear? Is it an 'overlay' image of some kind?

2. Whoever tore the piece out of the book could have done so in order to render the remaining part of the original 'microdot' quite useless.

3. Perhaps we should rethink the statement of Len Brown when he said that the torn piece was an exact fit for the space found in the book? He was quite adamant about it.

(Some 10 years ago, in fact, it was on the Adelaide University FB page, I had posted an image that I had been working on that actually showed the whole page from which the slip was torn and it was covered with very small markings. Time to revisit that work.)

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I've had more than a few thoughts about this and one was that perhaps it was following the weave of the paper. However, when you examine the paper on which the words TAMAM SHUD were printed, there is no detectable weave as such, it was made from  'paper pulp' as far as I'm aware.

TAMAM

I will publish both words in the coming week, in the meantime, here's the word TAMAM and as you will see the writing appears to follow the shape of the individual letters and seems to 'bridge' between some at their base. 

A stand out feature is the second letter A, note how the writing follows the slope almost precisely.

There are a number of questions raised by these images, the first one is, as mentioned, are these micro dots or was it all handwritten? I can provide an answer to the handwritten question:

• The horizontal dimension for the first two letters is 5mm. 
• The second A is just under 2.5mm wide
• The width of the down slope of the second A is 1.2 mm

We can say that the height of the letters in the downward slope of the second letter A is .35mm. That is certainly achievable by hand.

There's a lot more analysis to be done but I thought that it was such an important discovery that it needing posting quickly.

COMPARISON: BLEED PROOF PAPER

One of the test I always do is to compare the background photo paper that I use to print the final images. I use the same kind of 'bleed proof' paper for all the images I process in the SM case. Here's a close up image of line 2 from the SM code page as a comparison:

Whilst you can clearly see the microcode within the marked over letters/line, there is no trace of any kind of background weave in the paper. We can conclude that the diagonal writing in the Tamam Shud torn piece was not the result of a pattern in the background paper.