Alien inscriptions

Documents that were allegedly written by contactees or aliens in an incomprehensible and obviously unearthly language often appear on the Web. The case that will be discussed today is no exception.

Usually this document is accompanied by signatures like "Experts found suspicious alien inscriptions in the crashed UFO that no one can decipher" without specifying any details. Outwardly, it looks like a telegram written in a strange language.

We tried to figure it out and found additional information about this letter.

This case is known as the "Brooksville Martian" or the "Brooksville Incident" of 1965. Here's the UPI report from the Tampa Tribune:

BROOKSVILLE (UPI)-- "It made a whistling sound and went straight up at 5,000 mph or even faster," retired longshoreman John F. said yesterday. Reeves, describing a flying saucer he claims to have stumbled upon while walking in the woods nearby. . . . He said he was making his way to an object about 100 feet away when a robot-like creature appeared and approached him, stopping less than 15 feet away. . . .

The flying saucer had a diameter of 20 to 30 feet and a height of six feet and stood on a four-prop landing gear.

"It was bluish green and reddish purple with two windows on top," Reeves said.

Reeves said he only saw one robot, and he dropped two pieces of cloth-like paper as he was returning to the saucer. Reeves said he took out the papers and there was "a very strange handwriting on them."

I deciphered this strange message Jack Robinson, which can be read in detail in his article "The "Martian" Who Came to Brooksville" (WINTER 2006-07). He treated it as an ordinary terrestrial cipher, replacing the letters of the English language with symbols. We will give here the key points of the article:

Maybe I could treat it as a cipher with a simple substitution — similar to the "crypto quotes" that sometimes appear in newspapers:

Pay attention to the repeated appearance of a three-character "word" starting with what looks like some kind of error (the 2nd group in the first full line, the last group in the next full line and the 1st group in the fourth full line). I assumed that this group of three characters could represent the word "God"; it didn't work. I was unsuccessfully guessing other three—letter words until I tried "you" - and it worked.

Then it was possible to insert the letters y, o and u where they appeared elsewhere in the message. This allowed me to guess some other words, for example, _oo in the fourth line may mean "too". Then I could identify more "t" elsewhere in the message. Etc. Finally, I translated almost the entire message:

Planet Mars
Ston  _ _ _ _
Are you coming home
soon  We miss you
very much  Why did
you stay away too long
(?) _ _ _ _ _ g _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Imagine: the Martian language translates letter to letter and word to word into English! And they call their planet by the same name as we do! What invaluable knowledge we have gained by deciphering this alien message! Either that, or the whole event was a hoax. 

For those who are interested, the message to the Martian sounds like this: "Planet Mars Moan _ _ _ _ You will be coming home soon, we miss you very much Why have you been away from home for so long."

Despite the fact that the case is an obvious hoax, this message appears in many publications so far as an alien message.