Cipher Mysteries

Do you sometimes find rationality soooo boring? Well, I think I might just have the perfect Voynich theory to fit your fickle mood: & it runs like this... "After destroying Atlantis, the alien Sauron changed his name to Jehovah [...] His most recent appearance was in Berlin where Adolf Hitler was brain washed into thinking he could conquer the world. Sauron ...

Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there's always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today's mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning ...

Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript's plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian? Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there's a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief ...

The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you'd expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as "Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues - by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf", and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples ...

It's a real-life Jurassic Park scenario: for decades, all most people have heard of Erich von Däniken is the occasional fossilized soundbite (such as "Chariots of the Gods"). But now, like a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex cloned from dinosaur DNA, von Däniken is back with a new (2009) book called "History Is Wrong" - it lives, it liiiives! ...OK, that's a bit of ...

In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my "The Curse of the Voynich" Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]'s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of ...

As far as theories of the Voynich Manuscript's linguistic origin go, people have over the years proposed proto-Russian, proto-German, proto-Dutch, in fact proto-just-about-every-European-language-going... yet it seemed that nobody had tried Swedish as a possible match for Voynichese. However, when I gave this a go, I found to my great surprise that the two meshed really well, particularly the unique "dinka-donka" (i.e. 'verbose') scansion ...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! Today's brief news is that 100 copies of "The Curse of the Voynich" have just arrived from the printers, so those 20-odd people who ordered one from Amazon this month should be receiving it by the New Year (post willing). Alternatively, if you'd like your own shiny signed copy, order one via PayPal using ...

I was sitting on a train trying to reconcile the Voynich Manuscript's vellum dating (1404-1438) with its art history dating (1450-1470), while also pondering the various layered aspects of its codicology (such as the pictures apparently behind some the water nymphs), when an unexpected thought popped into my head. Might the VMs have its (erased) plaintext as a palimpsest beneath its ...

For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...