Dear TIGHAR researchers,
on december 13, 2007, Tom King asked '... what characters in Morse are similar enough to "2" "8" "1" and/or "N" to be plausibly thus mis-keyed?' but got apparently no answer.
Did really nobody realize yet that 281 N ..--- ---.. .---- -.
may sound very much like -. --- --- -. .- -. ?
The essentiel hypothesis you have to make is that the 'poor keyer' who sent the message typed the first dah in a hurry (or that the beginning of the dah was lost with the beginning of the message), then forgot two spacings, which made the operators read as two numbers the beginning of the word, actually made of four letters. The repetition --- --- (O O) obviously could make this misreading and/or miskeying more likely. Then, having heard two numbers, the operators had probably their ear switched to catch numbers: .-, whatever follows, is the beginning of number 1, so they heard 1. Lack of a proper keying set-up may also have made the dah of letter A so long that the operators actually heard it as a .----
May be this is much too speculative, but the track opened by Tom three years ago may deserve being followed a little further. A 'poorly keyed Morse' message may mean something else than what the official report told about it (especially when it seems to be nonsense), but one must go back to Morse code. Could professional users of the Morse code (I am none, but I suppose there are still many around) tell us a little more about how messages can be transfomed by poor encoding plus decoding, and whether my hypothesis has a non negligible probability of having something true in it ?
Oh, by the way, for all of you who do not have the Morse code at hand, the -. --- --- -. .- -. sequence that I propose to read instead of ..--- ---.. .--- -. just means (many of you will have guessed it from the remark on the O O ...): N O O N A N ! Poor Guy who maybe doomed himself by sending his own name on the air.
A2 (who will forgive me for this poor keying)
Christophe Blondel