I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes:
I would guess that he is using "E" as a separator, since it seems to occur at almost all end-of-lines and before punctuation/numbers. And maybe the letter just before "E" has some significance, as there is only a small set of letters that appears there, with "SE" extremely frequent. It's possible that he is stripping out vowels as a kind of shorthand.
Excellent. I personally love this sort of thing, though I'm rarely successful.
I was typing out the letters as I saw them, and I noticed that I interpreted many of your "S" as the number 5, but after looking at the way he wrote "S", it appears relatively consistent throughout the text.
So letter groupings became interesting:
SE - 66 matches
RSE - 18 matches
In the first document TFNRE appears twice.
Here's my interpretation from looking at the two documents (I really wish there were seriously high resolution scans of these docs, it'd help to sort out the asterisks which I used to represent characters I couldn't reasonably identify)
This is the sort of problem I'd like to give to my child (as Douglass Adams states throughout his books) ... no bias or formula to work with. The "Street Smart" comment struck me a bit. When I was a kid, being "Street Smart" was a compliment used in contrast to someone who is "Book Smart". Being "Book Smart" was bad. Street Smart == Application of knowledge, Book Smart == would beat you at trivial pursuit/Jeopardy, but wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge.
Here is an updated version of your work. I went through and replaced all the asterisks with the letters. The lines I replaced are in lowercase. The asterisks that remain are characters that are to scribbled to read.
The lines that Have the dash - next to them stand out heavily. As someone has stated before (I believe it was thinkalone 6), they may represent Interstates.
The biggest question is what language did Ricky McCormick speak? Was he known to use any slang?
Another part that stuck out at me was the numbers 99.84.52. I would have to take a punch and say that it is a PO box combination code. I put the numbers in brackets {---} to spot easlily. But what got me was the lines before and after the numbers, 651MTCSEHTLSENCUTCTRSNMRE and UNEP25ENCRSEAOKTSENSKSENrSE It has to be an address of some sort and location. UNEP25ENCRSEAOKT. This looks possibly like an adress. I focused on that portion for a few minutes and could not bypass the feeling of an address. Where to I dont know. But thats all Ihave for now. I am going to get some sleep and dive back into it when I wake up. If you have any comments or even something to help or add, Email me when you reply so that I will know when to check. Thanks! Y! Plutoniumrings
My first though also, but 99.84 isnt a radio station (Im in st louis); 99.9 used to be the classical station here though; I see nothing St. Louis related in the texts, that makes much sense unfortunately
I'll have a look at the differences in our transcriptions when I get back from work tomorrow, and maybe try and think of some more angles to approach this.
I developed a coded language when I was a kid, which I still use sometimes. I have looked at Ricky's notes but all I have is some theories based on my experience with my own language. Hopefully that helps.
My own language is letter-for-letter encryption, which makes it a lot easier to memorize the key (I was 8 years old when I invented mine). I suspect that is what Ricky did since I noticed that some individual characters were corrected.
Also, after almost 40 years of using my own language, I have developed "shorthand for the shorthand", so some of my words are abbreviations or shorthand for actual words - which makes letter-for-letter decryption tricky. When things get complicated, I insert a character I know does not belong in my key to indicate the beginning and end of some shorthand alteration. I suspect Ricky might have used parenthesis.
My key duplicates some characters (i.e. they mean something else depending on how they are used). I am wondering if Ricky's numbers are not always numbers. One piece that struck me, was the "99.84S2..." sentence because in my own system I don't use the number zero. So I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if Ricky thought the same way, and a period is shorthand for a zero in a telephone number?
I do not write things down in code just for the fun of it. Although it is fun trying to decipher code. I use it to write down passwords, bank account numbers, etc. that I don't want anyone to know. In other words, very precise pieces of information. The problem is, for all we know, Ricky could have been an aspiring artist and these could be his lyrics that he thought were worth millions. This is a lot of writing for one codified note. My guess is that these are several pieces of information that may not be necessarily related, such as a list of contacts or a log/diary of some sort. The note on the FBI site looks like it was all written down in one sitting. Therefore, there is a high likelihood that these notes were transferred from somewhere else (or Ricky's head) as a way to safeguard something for himself and nobody else (i.e. the law). Therefore, the diary/log idea is less likely than a list of contacts or places.
Your text files appear to be missing the indention that was in the original note. Any Python developer could tell you that whitespace can be extremely important. ;-)
When I trying to convert from hand-writing to upper-case text, I couldn't help but think about the loss of fidelity.
It's an important point. It may have meant something, or it may have meant that he was writing on a piece of paper against a surface that wasn't large enough, so he had to shift the paper around (I wonder why the second page has a bunch of circles around text, while the first page does not).
But you are both correct, the indentation, circling etc. may be important, but I just wanted to get the letters down initially. Start with the basics and work up!
You need to decipher the code using the Hungarian language not English. The only set of words in the entire two pages that could be translated to a meaningful English phrase is on the first line of page 2 (NOTES) The words are "SE ERTE", which means "I do not understand" in Hungarian. It is not unusual for people that speak foreign languages to intermix languages. In this case however, its placement on the first line of the "NOTES" page seems to be a "Key" to solving or "Understanding" the crypto.
I am a Hungarian and just reading the comments on this case. You are not the first one came up with the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't ring any bell in my language. 'I don't understand' is NEM ÉRTEM / NEM ERTEM in Hungarian. SE ERTE doesn't mean anything in this context. The closest thing could be NEITHER FOR HIM/HER = SE ÉRTE
It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters.
This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.
I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something.
Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency around?
I don't want to discourage you, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. I know there are a lot of people smarter than me, and I am no expert here so I thought you might know something I don't.
I wonder what his influences would have been around 1965...he would have been around 7. I also did catch that he is very detail oriented when it came to correcting his "mistakes".
Exactly. To clarify: a transposition cipher is one that just scrambles the letters in the plaintext according to some algorithm to get the ciphertext, which would cause you to get the same letter frequencies as the plaintext.
The problem is figuring out the rules of transposition so you can reverse them to decipher. There are tons of possibilities and you can't exactly plug a corpus this large into an anagram solver...
That said, the fact that there are also several repeated sections ("words") does make me wonder if it's a hoax, that's not something I'd expect to see with a transposition cipher, unless the transposition rules somehow preserved repetition in passages?
to your .bashrc? A quick test of this in my terminal and the alias takes precedent over the ln command. Although, I guess it'd be worth doing a few tests to make certain!
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http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
The combination of cron, rsync and hardlinks, makes for incremental backups with versioning and minimal storage space, all over ssh.