Cipher Mysteries

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough ...

On the one hand, "Linus' Law" asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple - hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library's scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse ...

My son likes to invent new toy stories formed out of other toys' favourite bits: and so you get an Alien Pirate Dinosaur Rocket Car 6000 with Laser-Powered Misher-Masher Crab Claws (and so on). Actually, I've met computer games designers who work in broadly the same way, so there's obviously some kind of pattern going on there. But now I've found ...

I recently mentioned an online Voynich-mentioning novel by Benjamin Kerstein called Josef6 (which you can read here), pointing out various parallels with the Dan Burisch story. I've since had a nice email from Benjamin, who mentions that he was more directly inspired by a real Internet story, known as the John Titor phenomenon. This concerned someone posting to ...

I've been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell's, but I keep coming back to the same problem - what angle should I take? For me, while its content is occulted ("hidden"), it's not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it's neither ...

It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits. Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone ...

As ever, the Dan Burisch story (which I blogged about here and then here) continues: in an earlier round of the RPG, Burisch apparently (according to Arizona-based "7Vials" in this post) revealed that the secret held by the Voynich Manuscript "detailed the spontaneous creation of DNA through the use of sound." OK... though I have to admit ...

A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch's claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called "#3-15" held by the secret organization known as "Majestic" (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the ...

Have you ever lifted up a stone in the woods and found something icky you really wished you hadn't seen? Or, in our modern 'armchair explorer' days, have you ever clicked confidently onto a website where, errrm, oh deary me, oh no, that's not, you can't... (you get the basic idea)? Unfortunately, the point of being a blogger (or indeed any kind ...