Hello all,
I recently read about the
"alternate" interpretation of the 281 message. I put "alternate" in scare-quotes since I think the interpretation is quite fanciful; once you allow yourself the freedom of adding and removing dots from a morse message, you can create basically anything you want.
However, the approach did intrigue me.
I took the original 281 message and translated it to morse via the
International Morse standard (can I presume this is what AE & FN would have used?). I removed all word separators and wrote a quick program to scan the message against a dictionary of over 100,000 English words (translated to morse, of course!). I took the length of each word, in morse, as being a measure of coincidence; the more morse symbols per word (n), the less chance of it occurring by chance in proportion to 2^n.
There were four words which, at 22 morse symbols each, produced the most coincidental match:
calcined
fangless
longitude
shutoff
I didn't know "calcined" and "fangless" were words, but there you go! The word "shutoff" appears in the original 281 message as two words ("shut off") - so no surprise there. The word" longitude" caught my attention, however, as it may yours!
Following this line of enquiry, I decided to determine where the word "latitude" would be most likely to appear. It doesn't appear verbatim in the original message, but it turns out you can find "latit" in two places without modification. The most likely occurrence requires three codes to swap between dots and dashes to reveal a full "latitude". Here is the original message (let's hope my formatting kung-fu holds):
2 8 1 N O R T H H O W L A N D C A L L K H A Q Q
/..---/---../.----//-./---/.-./-/....//..../---/.--/.-../.-/-./-..//-.-./.-/.-../.-..//-./..../.-/--.-/--.-/
B E Y O N D N O R T H D O N T H O L D W I T H U S
/-..././-.--/---/-./-..//-./---/.-./-/....//-../---/-./-//..../---/.-../-..//.--/../-/....//..-/.../
M U C H L O N G E R A B O V E W A T E R S H U T O F F
/--/..-/-.-./....//.-../---/-./--././.-.//.-/-.../---/...-/.//.--/.-/-/./.-.//.../..../..-/-//---/..-./..-./
Here are the final two "lines" (arbitrarily broken) of the message with "latitude" and "longitude", showing the changes to the underlying code:
L A T I T
/-..././-.--/---/-./-..//-./---/.-./-/....//-../---/-./-//..../---/.-./.-../.-/-/../-/....//..-/.../
/..-/-.././
U D E
L O N G I T U D E
/--/..-/-.-./....//.-../---/-./--./../-/..-/-.././---/...-/.//.--/.-/-/./.-.//.../..../..-/-//---/..-./..-./
I haven't had any luck trying to discern any meaningful numbers yet, but am drunk so to that end thought I would post so someone more sober might take an interest. Note that I have no dog in this fight... I don't care where AE & FN are found... as long as they are (someday) found! Perhaps that's why I haven't bothered trying to decoded numbers yet

All this, of course, is entirely possible to be a coincidence. I can find the words "manless" and "penis" in the message, but I don't think AE was making any untoward commentary about FN (insincere apologies in advance to those who will undoubtedly take offence at my joke). So take all this with a grain of salt. It is interesting, to say the least, but may also be another red herring.
Darren.