It's understandable, I suppose, that I get really torqued by the misuse of the word skeptic to mean "doubter" or "disbeliever."
Skeptics respect evidence, facts, logic, and the scientific method; their litmus test is, "Is this supported by what we know to be true?" They rid themselves of biases -- insofar as is possible -- and start from a position of clear-eyed curiosity, proceeding from there to wherever the data leads.
So please stop calling people like RFK Jr. "vaccine skeptics" and ones like Lee Zeldin "climate skeptics." They are science deniers, pure and simple, ignoring mountains of hard data in favor of their own ideological stances.
The trouble with being a skeptic, though, is that it can leave us in the position of saying "we don't know, and may never know." When the information we have is insufficient to reach a conclusion, we have to hold making up our minds in abeyance, indefinitely if need be. This can be intensely frustrating. Humans want answers, and sometimes those answers are simply not forthcoming. At that point, being pressed to respond to the question, "But what do you think the answer is?" is completely pointless.
If we're respecting the skeptical process, we don't think anything. We don't know, and that's that, at least until more evidence comes to light.
We've seen a few examples of this here at Skeptophilia -- the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich, the nineteenth-century footprints in the snow in Devonshire, the origin of the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, and the famous Dyatlov Pass incident, to name several. Today, though, I'd like to tell you about a different one, just as peculiar and intriguing, and no less mystifying -- the odd case of "Somerton Man."
The bare bones of the case go something like this.
On 1 December 1948, the dead body of a man was found on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia. He was well-dressed, in a suit and tie, and propped against a seawall; several passersby thought he might have gotten drunk and passed out or fallen asleep there, and walked right past him, before someone thought to check for a pulse. Police were called, and here's where things get even weirder; he had no identification, all the tags had been cut from his clothing, and in his pocket was a torn slip of paper with the printed words "Tamám shud" -- Farsi for "it is finished." The only other things in his pocket were a comb, a box of matches, a cigarette packet, and an unused train ticket and bus ticket.
The man was quite ordinary; about 180 centimeters tall, maybe in his forties, with reddish-blond hair and gray eyes. His autopsy showed signs of internal bleeding and inflammation of the spleen and liver, perhaps consistent with poisoning, but toxicology tests were unable to recover any specific toxin responsible.
Photographs of the dead man's face published in newspapers resulted in no identifications.
But a month later, officials at the Adelaide railway station were going through items that had been left behind or unclaimed, and turned over to police a brown suitcase (also with its label removed) that had been checked in on November 30. It proved to contain a red dressing gown, a pair of slippers, a pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, and various small personal items. Most interestingly, it also contained a card of orange waxed thread that matched thread used to repair the pocket of the trousers the man was wearing when he died. A laundry bag in the suitcase had a tag saying "T. Keane." But a search found that no one named Keane had been reported missing in Australia -- nor in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Ireland.
The case took a significantly bizarre turn when a man the authorities named as "Ronald Francis" -- police policy in Australia in the 1940s often protected witnesses in infamous cases by using pseudonyms, and his actual identity has never been made public -- responded to an inquiry about the odd piece of paper with "Tamám shud" printed on it. He came forward with a copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat that had part of the last page torn out (and indeed, the book ends with those words). The torn scrap matched the missing piece in the book perfectly. But Francis's statement gets even stranger than that. The book wasn't his, he said; he'd found it tossed in the back seat of his open-topped convertible, only a day or two after the body was found on Somerton Beach, and hadn't thought to look through it until he saw an article in the local newspaper that mentioned the torn slip with the Farsi words. Weirdest of all, on the back of the book were some faint indentations, as if someone had used it to support a piece of paper they were writing on. Here is an enhanced image of the indentations:
It certainly looks like a code -- but short passages are notoriously difficult to decrypt, and this one has resisted all attempts at decipherment.
Also scribbled in the book was a telephone number, which turned out to belong to a nurse named Jessica Ellen Thomson who lived only four hundred meters north of where the body was found. She claimed not to have any idea who the man was -- but the police investigator in charge of the inquiry later said when she looked at a photograph of the corpse, she had seemed "completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint." She said she had once owned a copy of the Rubaiyat but had given it to a friend, Alf Boxall, during the war. The police pursued a hypothesis that the dead man was Boxall, but that came to naught when Boxall was found alive and well in Sydney, and still had his copy of the Rubaiyat -- with Thomson's name handwritten on the inside front cover -- and an intact last page.
Jessica Thomson died in 2007, and her daughter Kate gave an interview in 2013 in which she stated outright that she thought her mother had lied -- she had known the man's identity, Kate said, and was covering something up, but what that might be she wasn't sure because her mother had never wanted to talk about the case. She also stated that her mother had known Russian but never explained to her how or why she'd learned it, and expressed a surmise that her mother and the dead man might have been spies for the Soviets. But inquiries into that angle, too, ended up turning up nothing of note.
On the 14th of June, 1949, Somerton Man -- still unidentified -- was buried at the government's expense in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery.
About the only progress in the case came in 2022, with a tentative (and distant) genetic match of hairs from the dead man to members of a Webb family of Melbourne. One member of the family, Carl Webb, born in 1905, was a shady character, described as "moody, violent, and threatening." He had a history of mental illness (including suicide attempts), and had vanished for parts unknown in 1947. Interestingly, Webb had a sister named Freda who married a man named John Keane -- recall the tag on the laundry bag saying "T. Keane" -- but Webb had never gone by the name, to anyone's recollection, and no members of John Keane's family were unaccounted for (or seemed to have anything at all to do with the case).
So it certainly seems like Webb could be a possibility. But this leaves the connection to the code, the slip of paper, and Jessica Thomson still unexplained -- as well as how and why he died.
In the end, we're left with a mystery. Almost eighty years ago, a well-dressed dead body showed up on an Australian beach, and to this day we have no easy solution to explain what happened to him. The only person who may have had more information was Thomson, and she died eighteen years ago without ever divulging to anyone what, if anything, she knew about the mysterious man.
Frustrating, isn't it? There's a deep drive in us to know the answers, and sometimes, they stay tantalizingly out of our reach. But as skeptics, we have to be willing to state "I don't know," and let things lie. It may be that some time in the future, more information about the mysterious life and death of "Somerton Man" will be unearthed, but until then -- he is, and will remain, a complete cipher.
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