Matching the Somerton Man
I often use the Betaface demo to search for a matching face. So when I (or you) search with the face of the Somerton Man one face will always appear.
If you don’t know about the Somerton Man it is best to read this account first:
But returning to the face that always appears in a Betaface search it is Rudolf Mons. The Somerton Man and Rudolf shared some other features such as manicured fingernails on very large hands and also their ears seem very similar. They also both have deep creases about their nose.
The Somerton Man “hands and nails that showed no signs of manual labour”
Betaface said they were alike:
Mons’ first appearance in newspapers in 1941
But as we now know from DNA the body is Carl (Charles) Webb I wanted to show how facial ID confirms it:
I am unable to get the body of Carl on the beach to match the plaster cast bust of Carl but that may be some technical detail. Sometimes it is a 65% mismatch and just 1% short of a match.
I was fascinated by Rudolf Mons because he appeared in 1934 from nowhere and Carl disappeared in 1933 to Monbulk. But the Somerton Man is now explained as a mystery but the life and death of Rudolf Mons is another one.
Rudolf Mons ‘supposedly’ from Vienna is also linked to another mystery the Rohna — the ship he was supposed to bomb.
The operation remained classified for many years likely because they used wireless guided glide bombs and it was not until the late 1940s America had caught up with this technology, perhaps because Hedy Lamarr had attended the meetings of her husband Mandl and in a sense acted like a spy for America and was a memory savant not a frequency shift genius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Mandl
Around the time Carl was in Adelaide guided bombs were being tested at Woomera in 1948.
Carl Webb (aka the Somerton Man) of German descent was working up to 1946 for William Sher’s Redpoint Tool Co. in Melbourne. Sher was a Viennese inventor who developed electrical hand drills but also made factory sirens during WW2 at Redpoint Tools.
The malleable zinc wrapping the scissors and knife in the Somerton man’s suitcase may have been off-cuts from Redpoint Tool Co that Carl Webb secretly accumulated. But again Viennese Sher and Mons would have been a good match to have worked together in Melbourne. So many coincidences. It also has to be considered that Mons is now the greater mystery. A man who appeared 1934 and died 1943 with no genealogy, no body to bury and no grave marker. The real Unknown Man.
But there is still an unexplained mystery — this person at Swinburne Technical College in the football team in 1922 isn’t named as Webb.
