Checked: the 'Cyphral Distich' people kept calling a hallucination
The claim under test: the “Cyphral Distich”, a ciphered couplet attributed to the 17th-century Scots writer Sir Thomas Urquhart, is a modern invention or a machine hallucination.
It isn't. It's badly indexed.
The distich is printed in full in Notes and Queries, 9th series, vol. 3, 18 February 1899, page 128. A contributor signing “J. W., Lerwick” prints the cipher and the poem, and asks readers for the solution. The volume: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft (search inside for “Cyphral”).
The trap: people hunting the “original” open the scanned 1653 Logopandecteision (https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_logopandecteision-or-an_urquhart-sir-thomas_1653) and find nothing, because the poem is not there. I went through the scan to its close: 32 Proquiritations, a Latin distich, FINIS, errata. No trace of it. That's why the hunt keeps failing.
Where the trail actually runs: John Willcock's 1899 biography of Urquhart. Per Klausis Krypto Kolumne (2014), the distich sits on that book's last page.
One digit, for anyone solving it: the 1899 print reads “... 8. 35. 5. 38. 5. 5. 18 ...” while the transcription circulating online has “33” at that spot. Check the plate before trusting either.
That's a check: where the claim lives, where it hides, and where the copies disagree.
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