When news articles refer to amateur detectives who have devoted time and effort to investigating the Somerton Man mystery, they are referring to people like Nick Pelling.
The 57-year-old London-based computer programmer, author and researcher has never set foot in Adelaide, let alone on Somerton Beach.
But that hasn’t stopped him from pursuing the case with the tenacity one would expect from someone of his abilities.
His Cipher Mysteries blog is a testament to his ability to trawl through undigested records like those of Trove, the National Library of Australia’s open access digital archive.
“History is a funny old thing,” he said.
“The stuff in the archives is the stuff that didn’t get thrown out that day – it’s the stuff that somehow survived, just by chance.
“As a historian, you have to combine different types of evidence because you only have scraps.”
Mr Pelling, pictured in 2014, shares his research into enigmatic cases on his Cipher Mysteries blog. (YouTube: Gamification World)
The Somerton man is not the only enigmatic case to have caught Mr Pelling’s attention, but it is the most recent to hit the headlines.
Last week, Adelaide-based academic and long-time Somerton Man devotee Derek Abbott announced that he and a US-based colleague had solved the mystery.
They identified the man as Carl “Charles” Webb, an engineer born in Melbourne.
The breakthrough has spurred Mr. Pelling to discover more.
He believes Webb’s hypothesis is compelling and wants to find evidence to support it.
Somerton Park beach, pictured in 2018, where the Somerton man’s body was found 70 years earlier. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“My best case scenario is that we find a picture of Carl Webb. He was married – people have wedding pictures, it’s a big day,” he said.
“We may be able to find more records of what Carl Webb was doing in the year and a half after he left his wife and before he died. [in 1948].
“Not that long in the grand scheme of things.”
Detective work and the Da Vinci Code
A suitcase and belongings found at Adelaide train station are believed to have belonged to the Somerton man. (Supplied)
For Mr. Pelling, discovery is as much about pathways as it is about epiphanies: the researcher never knows how much treasure is waiting to be unearthed.
“The idea of Dan Brown and his colleagues is that the archivist finds … one document that explains everything, that’s never the case,” Pelling explained.
“[But] if you can ask the right questions to the right people, all sorts of things open up.
“Things like photographs, newspapers and magazines persist in attics and attics.”
Over the years, Pelling has corresponded with Australian experts, including retired detective Gerry Feltus, who praised Mr Pelling’s efforts.
“It has a massive website, and people from all over the world have been contributing to it,” Feltus said.
Retired detective Gerry Feltus authored the book The Unknown Man: A Suspicious Death at Somerton Beach. (ABC Australian Story)
Methodical by nature, Mr Feltus is withholding judgment on the Somerton man’s identity until the police and Forensic Science SA complete their own investigations.
“They are both working on it at this stage,” he said.
“Because of what I know and what I believe, I’m not ready to sit back and say I’m satisfied that the person is Webb.
“If it’s Webb again, I’d have to say that’s great news, simply because it would clear up a lot of things.”
Move behind the veil
For Mr Pelling, coding came before codes: he started designing his own computer games while still at school.
But when the encryption bug hit, it hit hard. He became fascinated with something called the Voynich Manuscript, an enigmatic text believed to date back to the 1400s.
While she can’t remember exactly when she became interested in the Somerton man, she does remember why.
It was the sequence of letters linked to the case, which Mr Pelling doubts is a code, that caught his attention.
The sequence of letters, thought by some to be a code, was found inscribed in a book of poems related to the case. (Supplied: Australian Police)
“Mysterious writing excites people’s imaginations,” he said.
This point is the premise of the blog: Cipher Mysteries is a place where those who share their passion for cryptography can exchange facts they’ve gleaned from archives like Trove.
“Trove is the most wonderful resource for historians,” he said.
“Every country should take a long hard look at Trove and say, ‘Why don’t we do this?'”
But Trove can only take you so far, he said.
All sorts of factors, including socio-economic ones, determine how many traces a person leaves on posterity.
“Genealogy has a very middle-class bias. If you’re good, you can write letters to newspapers,” he said.
“If you’re working class, you’ve got other things on your mind. There are a lot of people whose lives aren’t decorated by Trove.”
Does Trove have more clues to the story of Somerton Man? Or will they only be found in those lofts and attics?
“I hope we can move from the Trove-type story to the family story,” Pelling said.
“Rebuilding a person’s life is going to be a bigger job.
“I don’t think you can ever see the Wizard of Oz, but you can see a little beyond the veil.”
The remains of the Somerton man were exhumed in 2021 to allow Forensic Science SA to carry out its own investigation. (ABC News: Daniel Keane)