For context, this is the Youtube video you posted elsewhere, in which Valeria Vecchione describes in detail her findings and her ideas:

https://youtu.be/XiAdRqr3uj0?si=Y1duTEp_PEEcUQL6

And here, the pages of the Gente edition in question.

These are the videos, in chronological order of publication, in which researcher V. Vecchione presents and analyzes her findings:

https://youtu.be/YhkhVdJyE3w?si=o7IqDTNlJUJSPKAX
https://youtu.be/H-Xzlxx3Lo4?si=3zN3EvXWgoH1G8sD
https://youtu.be/2xgDgm3M6GI?si=QN-zqjYbke8J42sR
https://youtu.be/fg180dlhfr8?si=TkruND-w3ThSk94D
https://youtu.be/XiAdRqr3uj0?si=RN3ZzH1LvClpSMy8

The last video is likely the most relevant, as it is the one where connections and similarities with the Zodiac case are explored more explicitly.

On the website https://www.mostrodifirenze.com/ , it is possible to download, as you may have already seen, the magazine Gente used by the Mostro di Firenze to create the envelope.

The site functions as a well-curated archive of the case: it aims to present the story as objectively as possible, giving space to the different investigative leads that have emerged over time, and above all providing an accessible database available to anyone.

To return, then, to your specific question, to derive a statistical viewpoint you might proceed as follows (programmed using some or other scripting language or something like Python, for ease):

1. scan a Roman latin dictionary—or perhaps even the Latin Vulgate Old Testament itself—for words of 7 letters firstly, but also including words of 8 and 9 letters and taking only the first 7, as in your example;
2. the resultant list could then be further scanned and compared against the letters of the text on the envelope, in sequence except for allowing a single pair swap in the words from the first list;
3. having thus produced this second list, it would be straightforward to apply shifts and anagramming, having retained only those examples that contain a redundant ‘O’ (for your ’14’), with comparison of the results against an English dictionary/text on 6-letter words.

The ultimate step of looking for the latter having “meaning” in the sense you require would need to be done by hand, being a rather subjective procedure.

I get the idea behind your reasoning, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I’m trying to figure out how to actually implement it, but since I’m not a programmer I’m kind of feeling my way through it 😅

Let’s see what I can come up with over the weekend… maybe something decent will come out of it!

Short of programming the whole thing—the fact that there are close to 10^⁸ combinations possible from the 50 letters on the envelope causes me to shy away from doing so—I thought I would come at it initially from the opposite direction: rather than test all of the possible variations, why not randomly select one and see where it goes. So:

From the first two letters of ‘DELLA’ and the first five letters of ‘MONICA’, I see (simply) ‘DEMONIC’. In Latin, this would be (I think) ‘DAEMONIUM’ and, if we contract this down to seven letters precisely, we get ‘DAEMONI’. Allowing one single swap in the ordering, I believe I am permitted to transpose this to ‘DEAMONI’ which, again, is clearly present (in this order) in ‘DELLA MONICA’.

Suppose next I take ‘DEAMONI’ and apply a shift of +14 (the number of canonical victims attributable to Il Mostro), I get ‘ROSACBW’ with the first six letters anagramming to ‘COBRAS’ and the final ‘W’ equating to 22, the calibre of the pistol used.

After which, a quick search on the internet produces (courtesy of the Archaeology Magazine):

“THE WORLD OF EGYPTIAN DEMONS: Thousands of supernatural beings, including protective cobra spirits and knife-wieldng turtles, guarded ancient Egyptians in life and death.”

Ciao @shaqmeister! From a probabilistic point of view, this is an interesting aspect and is directly related to the study I should develop in Python.

However, the method of character selection needs to be carefully justified, since it directly affects the result. In the case of IUBLI00E, for example, I selected characters individually from the “monster” and from a single page, as indicated in the summary: this choice also influences the outcome of the analysis.

For instance, V. Vecchione suggests that the sequence FIRN, linked to Florence, is not the result of a random coincidence: all the letters that compose it come from the same page, namely page 120.

The word FIRN refers to compacted snow, intermediate between snow and ice, and is therefore related to water. This connects to the water theory and reinforces the idea that the selection may not be random, especially considering that all the letters come from the same page.

Ciao @lendor-77! I have a few first thoughts about about the points you make here in seeking to counter the potential for randomness that I would argue even this one example alone illustrates.

Firstly, as the question of character selection, V. Vecchione makes the point that there are some apparent oddities in the selection of letters used from the magazine. She asks why, when it would have been easy to carry on taking the majority of the letters from one, perhaps two, pages (which would have been possible, as she shows), did Il Mostro select letters from a multitude of different pages? This, I would argue, is an important question, but it only suggests the potential for significance if we picture the author cutting and pasting letters in a specific manner.

If we imagine him to have been sitting with his bladed instrument, selecting and cutting one letter at a time and pasting these, as cut, straight onto the envelope, then it would be fair to consider more closely the question of specific letter selection. However, what she has not taken into consideration is the alternative possibility, that the author had already cut out a vast number of letters and had them all to hand in, say, a small box, and was merely picking them at random as they they came to hand.

As to our seven letter word being one that is identified as containing only letters that occur on a single page, as Vecchione has shown, had this be intentional then Il Mostro would have had equally the same opportunity of doing this with ‘DEAMONI’ as with ‘IUBLI00E’.

One further point I shall mention here, as regards my own personal assessment of Vecchione’s analysis. I simply cannot see any merit or meaning at all in the discussion around the “word” ‘FIRN’ having any significance whatsoever. This, to my view, is simply forcing a preferred analysis too far and reaching a specific conclusion only to fit a preconceived idea.

Perhaps this comes from already being in a mindset to associate Il Mostro and The Zodiac as being the same person and being distracted by having noticed that there have been ideas raised in the latter case to suggest some special importance to The Zodiac of the notion of ‘water’. The reality is, however, that there is absolutely no accepted indication of this having ever been the case. Equally, ‘FIRN’ as used in the online articles she presents is not even English, as she claims. The articles she has on screen all have Nordic focus whilst ‘FIRN’, as i understand it, is a Swiss-German word. That it may be then claimed to be of “Anglo-Saxon” origin is neither here nor there.

Posted by: @lendor-77

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For instance, V. Vecchione suggests that the sequence FIRN, linked to Florence, is not the result of a random coincidence: all the letters that compose it come from the same page, namely page 120.

The word FIRN refers to compacted snow, intermediate between snow and ice, and is therefore related to water.

Just to play devil’s advocate (fare l’avvocato del diavolo), I could likewise argue that the last two letters of ‘REPUB[B]LICA‘—both from page 42 and in a different font—together are intended to highlight the standard two-letter abbreviation for California in the United States and, thereby, suggest a relationship to “sunshine”. Certainly, The Zodiac drew the sun in at least one of his sketches, whereupon it would be surely possible to derive an associated “water sunshine theory,” wouldn’t it?

I’m not sure I’ll be able to give you a thorough answer tonight, since I have to work. But they’re great questions and definitely deserve a proper response, so we can validate the initial thesis! 😃😃

Posted by: @lendor-77

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From a probabilistic point of view, this is an interesting aspect and is directly related to the study I should develop in Python.

However, the method of character selection needs to be carefully justified, since it directly affects the result. In the case of IUBLI00E, for example, I selected characters individually from the “monster” and from a single page, as indicated in the summary: this choice also influences the outcome of the analysis.

To return to this particular point, for a moment, is it not the case that it is precisely the possibility of “intentional character selection” that we are wanting to examine in our probabilistic analysis?

The question before us is, in my view—and, again, I am not in any sense a skilled statistician—whether we can match the various criteria you have set in your outline through merely random character selection, as in the alternative example presented. That is, can we choose any seven letters from among the 50 or so available from the envelope, derive a near-latin word permitting one order-swap and then apply a shift so as to produce a meaningful word of six letters with the addition of a further letter representing something of relevance to the case.

If we can only do this in a sufficient number of instances such that the particular “character selection” that you cite remains statistically significant, then we would be justified in proposing that the choice shows elements of intentionality. If this is not the case, however, we have no reason to think otherwise than that the selection was random.

What interested me most about the one example that I offered above was the fact that it truly was chosen at random and was the only example I considered, whilst I was actually recording the steps here as I went along without any foresight as to whether they would lead to anything meaningful. Although not statistical proof, in any sense, this for me was sufficient in itself to render it unecessary, for my own satisfaction, to put the time and effort into any deeper analysis.

But that’s just me, and maybe I am merely too easily satisfied! 🤣 

Ciao @shaqmeister! I’m almost back up and running again.

Attention: your example is interesting, but the method of letter selection also needs to be clearly justified.

Here is a summary with the pages from which the letters were taken: it can be observed that the pages from which only a single character was cut, when considered together, form the sequence IUBLI00E (where “00” is a single cut-out, not two separate zeros).

Pag. 6 → B
Pag. 8 → I
Pag. 19 → O, D
Pag. 25 → T, T
Pag. 28 → D, A, V, L, L
Pag. 31 → L
Pag. 34 → O, N, A, O, L, I
Pag. 35 → M, I, C, P, L
Pag. 36 → E
Pag. 37 → (DELLA), Z
Pag. 42 → C, A, E
Pag. 44 → U
Pag. 45 → I, R, C, R, A, E
Pag. 47 → I
Pag. 57 → U, R, P, I
Pag. 78 → 5, 0
Pag. 89 → 00
Pag. 120 → F, I, R, N

Posted by: @lendor-77

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Attention: your example is interesting, but the method of letter selection also needs to be clearly justified.

Ciao, @lendor-77! Welcome back. 🙂

This ‘attention’ of yours has me wondering for a moment if we are perhaps not fully understanding each other at this point.

I can easily see it is your claim that the particular 7-letter selection you identify is intentional (i.e., non-random). Therefore, the way to test this is to statistically analyse whether other random selections of 7-letters, as being ones that the author could equally have selected as coming uniquely from a single page, could produce a result meeting the criteria of your given instance also. The example beginning from ‘DEAMONI’ is, therefore, offered as one such random selection. And, as it apparently is able to lead just such a result (broadly) meeting your initial criteria, we must indeed infer that there exists some indication that the “null hypothesis”—that the actual selection seen in wholly random—is not so easily refutable and may, in fact, be correct.

Does that make sense?

Of course, a full statistical analysis would be required to actually demonstrate randomness in this sense. However, this one example is at least enough to persuade me I can be fairly confident in predicting what that analysis would ultimately show.