EDLS stands for Equidistant Letter Sequences, the device used most famously in the book "The Bible Code" to extract supposedly meaningful phrases out of otherwise unrelated text.

An EDLS is formed by beginning at a specified letter in a book, (in the above case, the Bible), writing down that letter, moving x letters forward, writing down the next letter, and so on, where x remains constant. When the authors of the above book used a computer program to perform this analysis on the Bible, they apparently found many phrases relating to political & historical events from the past and present.

The problem with the above analysis is that the distance used in many of the cases was hundreds of letters in length, and with a whole Bible to work with, finding such 'messages' turns out to be a trivial task. In addition, the authors allow themselves to conveniently omit vowels, replace certain letters, etc, meaning that for example, the phrase "dlls knndy" could be perceived to be an indicator of the Kennedy assassination. (Ok the examples in the book are a little more lengthy and convincing, but it serves to illustrate the point.)

The author became tired with the ridicule directed at his book, and made the following statement: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." (Newsweek, Jun. 9, 1997). Shortly afterwards, researchers analysing EDLS's in Moby Dick found phrases such as "Kennedy ... shot", "Lincoln ... killed", "Trotsky ... executed", and even "Princess Di ... mortal in these jaws of death".

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