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Secret communication is nothing new. Books on the history of cryptography reveal that hidden messages date to as far back as there are records. After millennia of efforts to conceal messages, one might think that every imaginable cryptographic technique was tried long ago and is now widely known. "Not so," according to Morten St. George, author of a book on cryptic thinking.

St. George maintains that forty-two of the Nostradamus prophecies employ a unique type of cryptography that until now has never been identified, catalogued, or reused. Moreover, St. George claims that it may be the most powerful form of cryptography ever devised. Surprisingly, however, its techniques are extremely simple; it employs no complex mathematical codes or anything like that. As St. George puts it: "Its enormous strength lies in deception. If you don't know that cryptographic techniques are being employed, if you don't suspect that there is a hidden communication underneath, then you look no further than what's on the surface and the real meaning forever evades you." St. George calls it "deception cryptography."

To illustrate deception cryptography and its techniques, I will return to the "historical secrets" of an earlier article to show how those secrets were uncovered. In case an acknowledgment box for this article doesn't appear in all places, I am inserting here an opportunity to thank Morten St. George for this follow-up interview, for technical assistance, and for permission to derive material from his cryptic thinking book. Note that the book's analysis often spans many pages and in a paragraph or two I can only hope to point to the key elements.

*** Napoleon Bonaparte was murdered on his island of captivity by poison in the wine, instigated by a woman enraged over the defeat of his army in 1813.

St. George informs me that countless Nostradamians have meticulously examined each and every stanza looking for tie-ins with Napoleon, and in the end they believe they found dozens of stanzas that apply to Napoleon. St. George observes that there are only two stanzas that really do apply to Napoleon, and to his knowledge, no Nostradamian has ever found either one of them.

The stanza that deals with Napoleon's death is numbered VIII-13. There, the road to Napoleon lies in the first few words of the third verse: "Army to a thousand years." You need a number for adding a thousand years, but internally this stanza has no numbers. You are therefore forced to resort to the stanza number, VIII-13, or 813, producing the year 1813. The army of 1813 was one of the most famous in all of history, Napoleon's Grandee Armee. In 1813, in the aftermath of its retreat from Russia, that great army wholly disintegrated. In the last verse, the poison drink (inferred from elsewhere to be wine) kills two people. The second person was Napoleon's bodyguard.

Often, the prophecies affirm a theme elsewhere. In VIII-13, the affirmation lies in the second verse that invokes Greek mythology, a classic myth of betrayal, referring to the hero Bellerophon by name. Bellerophon was the name of the English ship that took Napoleon into captivity.

*** President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a group of conspirators led by his vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Officially accused by the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald was completely innocent since the bullets that killed Kennedy were fired from a rooftop, not from an open window.

St. George derives this from the stanza numbered VI-37. "From a rooftop, evil ruin... Innocent of the act, after his death, he shall be accused." Then comes the all-critical final verse, beginning "The guilty one hidden." According to St. George, "hidden" is a magical word in the prophecies. You have to take it literally. The name of the guilty one is hidden in the French words that follow: "taillis" to the "bruyne." Symbolic of the death of a Roman Catholic (Kennedy) would be the Latin cross, so that's what you have to create. Put "taillis" directly on top of "bruyne." For the left side of the cross, bring down the three letters "B", "A", and "I". For the right side of the cross, bring down the three letters "N", "E", and "S". That spells out "Baines." Now looking at the middle of the cross, up on top, we see the letters "LY". Four letters have to be invented to complete the central shaft on the bottom end. The guilty one: LYndon BAINES.

*** The JFK conspirators were also behind the assassination of Kennedy's brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, several years later.

The answer here lies in stanza VI-11. This stanza begins by talking about a family with seven children, retroactively clarifying that the children at that time consisted of four sisters and three brothers, of which the oldest two will be surprised by death. The last two verses read: to kill the two brothers (an instance of grammatical deception) they shall be seduced; the conspirators shall pass away in their sleep. It's clear: these conspirators killed both Kennedy brothers, and since the conspirators died of natural causes, we can infer that they got away with it.

In The Mechanics of Deception Cryptography - Part II, I plan to show how deception cryptography ingeniously conveys information about the assassination of Martin Luther King, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and other secrets. At this point, I took a break from the technical stuff to ask Morten St. George if he can foresee future events in the prophecies.

Unfortunately, St. George answered in the negative. He says that beyond the inherent obscurity of deception cryptography, future events are rarely envisioned, and if you can't envision it, you can't predict it, no matter how clear or unclear the wording might be. St. George gave me a couple of examples, "Can you envision before the event that a phrase like "dead alive like a stump" could be alluding to Ronald Reagan's brain-dead Press Secretary? But after the event you can see it. Or can you envision before the event that a phrase like "from the sky shall come a great king of terror" could be alluding to hijacked airplanes on a terror mission? Only after the event it makes sense."

St. George continued: "For sure, anyone can use the prophecies to make predictions but that doesn't mean they will come true. I have a good one for you, a natural disaster beyond human manipulation: Earthquake Strikes in December 2006. It could be an earthquake in the North Atlantic, with tidal wave reaching London, or it could be an earthquake that hits the Greek city of Corinth. Mind you, the stanzas in question were already spectacularly successful for past events, and normally there would be no expectation of a second application. But here there is. I see a danger of failure, not of prophecy, but of one of the fundamental ciphers of deception cryptography. The prophecies do not fail."

Deception cryptography clearly has its weaknesses, and also a few unusual strengths, on which I plan to expand next time.