Tonight a mysterious medieval book
written in a secret language so complex
that even the world’s best code breakers can’t crack it.
- No one has been able
to translate or read a single word,
a single letter.
Known as the "Voynich Manuscript,"
it’s obsessed everyone from scholars
to conspiracy theorists.
- They sincerely believe that this book
has something monumental to share.
Now we’ll uncover the top theories
surrounding the origins of this cryptic text.
- Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual
for the practice of alchemy.
- The "Voynich Manuscript" is written in glossolalia,
which is the language of tongues.
- Has he pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in history?
Can modern technology finally unlock
its impenetrable code?
- It’s the first definitive answer we have about this book
in 400 years.
What is the "Voynich Manuscript"?
Just outside Rome, famed Polish-American
rare bookseller Wilfrid Voynich
enters a centuries-old Jesuit college.
- Voynich operates what
is probably the world’s largest
rare books business at the time.
He’s got this incredible knack
for digging up the most valuable
and the most sought-after manuscripts on the planet.
His collection is worth millions.
Voynich hopes his next great find is here.
- The Jesuits need funds to support their college.
So what they decide to do is, they decide to sell
some of their most ancient texts very discreetly.
Voynich negotiates a shrewd deal as always,
and he adds 30 more books to his collection,
which he will try to sell for a significant profit
back at his shop in London.
One book in particular stands out.
- As with all of his purchases,
Voynich looks for elaborate bindings,
beautiful books,
heavily illustrated, illuminated manuscripts,
early printed books, really things--luxurious objects.
But among them his eye’s caught by what he later called
an ugly duckling.
- This particular manuscript is small.
It’s only about 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches,
and it’s bound in goatskin.
It’s about 230 pages long, but there is some evidence
that some of the pages are missing.
Also, some pages are foldable sheets of varying size,
and this book is filled with lines upon lines
of neatly handwritten text and elaborate drawings.
But here’s the thing.
None of it makes any sense.
There are a couple hundred
detailed drawings of plant species,
none of which can be identified.
There are astrological drawings of constellations
that don’t even exist.
There’s a section where nude, pregnant women
are engaging in these baths and rituals
with these seemingly interconnected tubes,
and then there are these strange hybrids,
these plants with human organs,
and some of these plants even sprout disembodied heads.
It’s--needless to say, it’s wild.
But it’s also indecipherable.
And as for that lovely handwritten text,
that entire thing is written in a language
that no one has ever seen before.
There are very clear and obvious words and letters,
but they’re totally unrecognizable.
So Voynich assumes that this is some type of code.
In addition to experience with codes,
Voynich speaks Polish, Russian, and English fluently
and has a working knowledge of 15 other languages.
- He was born to a noble family in the Russian Empire.
He was educated at three of the top universities,
and then he basically becomes an anti-Czarist revolutionary.
He’s arrested.
He’s sent to a Siberian prison.
He escapes the prison,
and then he heads to London
where he continues his revolutionary activities
for a while before a friend of his at the British Museum
suggested he get into the rare book trade.
- Voynich knows everything there is to know
about rare books.
He’s connected to all the top literary scholars.
He knows multiple languages.
He knows all about codes and code-breaking
from his years as a Russian revolutionary.
Point is, if anyone is gonna be able to make sense
out of this manuscript, it’s gonna be Wilfrid Voynich.
- Voynich spent years trying to decipher the code--
really the rest of his life--
and he reaches out to all of the top code breakers
at the time to help, and none of them can crack it.
He sticks with it, because he has a hunch
that this might be the most valuable book
he’s ever encountered,
and if he can figure this out it could be worth millions.
- Based on the materials used to create the book--
the parchment, the style of ink--
Voynich thinks it’s going to date to the 13th century.
So while he can’t decipher the words,
the images of plants
and other sorts of natural phenomena lead him to conclude
that it’s probably some sort of guide to a field
that used to be called natural philosophy.
And before there were modern scientists,
this is how people described the study of nature
in the physical universe.
From Aristotle to Isaac Newton, all of these "early scientists"
were actually natural philosophers.
- So because of that date
and the contents of the actual manuscript,
Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual
for the practice of alchemy.
Alchemy is this philosophical,
part-science, part-magic practice
that emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century,
and its practitioners tried to purify certain materials,
so turn lead into gold and to cure diseases.
Now, none of this stuff actually worked.
But it was strongly believed in,
and it was written about for centuries.
- Alchemists’ real objective is perfection of the soul,
and they’ll do this by creating something called
the "magnum opus," or "great work,"
which was the philosopher’s stone,
a mythical substance that was said to be able
to grant immortality among other things.
According to Voynich,
there is only one early alchemist brilliant enough
to have produced this book.
- Almost no one in Europe
was creating alchemy textbooks at the time.
They were just translating older works.
So Voynich thinks this is Roger Bacon.
- Voynich believes the book is written in code,
because he believes that whoever wrote it
needed to keep something secret.
- Roger Bacon, today he is incredibly well-respected.
He’s known as one of the early pioneers
of the scientific method.
He was the first person in Europe
to record the formula for gunpowder.
But here’s the problem, he’s also a monk
and a modest member of the clergy.
And the Church doesn’t take too kindly
to some of his more out-there alchemy practices.
In fact, some of Bacon’s contemporaries
accuse him of being a wizard.
- He has an automated, mechanical clockwork head
that he talks to and consults with,
and like all alchemists, he’s also obsessed with forging
the philosopher’s stone and granting immortality.
But in the Church, only God can grant eternal life.
So these are some very dangerous heretical ideas
that Bacon is toying with right under the watchful eye
of his Franciscan superiors.
But Bacon’s not entirely a crackpot.
- He thinks that there’s a way
to bring the Church and science together.
Not everyone agrees with him.
- He thinks these ideas can complement each other.
They don’t have to be antagonists.
- It’s very fortunate for Bacon that he has the protection
of a very high-placed patron and intellectual correspondent,
the pope, Clement IV.
But when Pope Clement dies in 1268,
Roger Bacon’s protection is gone,
and within a decade he’s arrested.
- Bacon is eventually allowed to return to his studies.
But he never puts forth any more of these so-called
"heretical texts."
He mostly sticks to theological writing.
Unless, of course, he continued
his alchemy research in secret
and wrote it all into a coded book.
- So if Voynich is right and this manuscript can be
definitively affiliated with Roger Bacon,
suddenly the manuscript itself
would be worth untold amounts of money.
First, Voynich must prove
Bacon truly authored the manuscript.
- Even though Voynich can’t crack the code,
he does find a letter dated back to 1665 that’s written
by a very important Czech scientist and doctor
named Jan Marek Marci.
He says he has a coded book
that fits precisely this description,
and he’s giving it to his friend,
a renowned code breaker, Athanasius Kircher.
Marci also gives a little bit of history on the book.
He says it was bought
by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Germany
about 100 years prior sometime in the late 1500s
for a large sum of gold.
The letter mentions Roger Bacon by name
as the potential author in the late 1200s.
How did the book go from Bacon to Emperor Rudolf?
- Wilfrid Voynich thinks the connection is Dr. John Dee.
Dr. Dee was born in 1527.
He’s a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I,
and he’s an avid astrologer
and an occult scientist who studies cipher,
and from a young age he has access to a lot
of Roger Bacon manuscripts.
An accomplished cryptologist himself,
Dee tries to decode the manuscript but fails.
- Eventually, John Dee brings the manuscript to Prague
where Emperor Rudolf would buy it from him for 600 ducats
or roughly $100,000 today.
- So Voynich has this fervent belief
that Roger Bacon wrote this book.
But all the evidence is circumstantial at this point.
If Voynich wants the world to believe
that this is a Bacon original and make a fortune,
he’s gotta decode this thing once and for all.
A mysterious manuscript
dating back centuries, one with a seemingly
unbreakable cipher.
When collector Wilfrid Voynich finds this book,
he spends years trying to prove who wrote it and why.
- Voynich showcases the book
at exhibitions and lecture tours
with the hope that somebody can figure it out.
And of course, he’s getting fame
and publicity all the while and hoping to make a sale.
- He’s trying to sell it for $100,000,
which would be the most anyone had ever gotten
for an old manuscript ever in history.
- Other top code breakers
are trying to decipher the book as well.
For example, you’ve got William Friedman,
the man who’s responsible for
breaking the Japanese code Purple during World War II.
He’s also one of the founders of the NSA,
one of its chief cryptologists.
He spent 30 years trying before declaring
that cracking the manuscript’s code was impossible.
Unfortunately, Voynich dies in 1930
before he can solve the mystery.
- When Voynich dies, he leaves the book to his wife, Ethel,
who lives until 1960.
Then after a couple of short-term owners,
the book ends up at the Yale Library in 1969,
where it remains today.
It’s an artifact that to this day
captures the public’s imagination,
because it’s both intriguing and infuriating.
I mean, we can see it. We can touch it.
We know this thing exists.
It’s not a figment of anyone’s imagination,
except no one knows exactly what it is.
It remains pure mystery,
and once we have the advent of the internet,
that mystery explodes.
When Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library
posts scanned pages of the manuscript online in 2004
the book gains even more attention.
- Suddenly, the "Voynich Manuscript"
is world-famous.
It’s attracting millions more people
who want to figure it out.
Every year brings multiple major news stories
about potential breakthroughs.
One of the biggest breakthroughs occurs in 2009
at the University of Arizona.
- Researchers realized that while the language of the book
might be impossible to understand,
the book’s physical materials aren’t.
They can be analyzed.
- The 234 pages of the book
are made up of calfskin parchment,
and because they are organic in nature,
they can be radiocarbon dated.
This is obviously a big deal.
This is a chance to finally get some answers
that have eluded scholars for generations.
They take samples from several sections of the book
just to be sure.
But the results aren’t
what anyone anticipated.
- Remember, Wilfrid Voynich thought
this was a 13th-century text by Roger Bacon.
But the pages date back to the early 15th century,
so about a 140 years after Roger Bacon’s death.
And just like that the primary theory
behind this strange book is shot down.
But this is still fantastic news.
It’s probably the first definitive answer
we have about this book in over 400 years.
So now that the parchment’s been dated,
scholars want to keep the momentum going.
- So Voynich’s hypothesis that this was a 13th-century book
led him to research what possible authors
there could’ve been in the 13th century
to write an alchemical text,
and that led him to Roger Bacon.
With this new dating of the manuscript,
scholars do the same thing again.
They wonder, "In the 1400s, who’s known to be an author
"and illustrator? Who’s writing in code?
Who has an interest in science and alchemy?"
And they think, "Who could’ve written the book?"
In 2017 one researcher announces
she might know the answer.
- Could this book actually have been written
by none other than Leonardo da Vinci?
Dr. Edith Sherwood is a retired biomedical scientist,
and these days she’s fascinated
by the "Voynich Manuscript,"
and she spent countless hours studying it,
and according to her,
there’s only one European author in the 1400s
that fits the bill.
- In 2002 she publishes an article
comparing the manuscript to the notebooks and other works
of Leonardo da Vinci.
So then, all of a sudden, she has this new evidence
of the carbon dating.
So now she really is convinced she’s onto something.
And she spends more time researching the manuscript.
15 years later, she publishes a new article
in much greater detail,
and the evidence she finds is actually pretty compelling.
Sherwood starts with a
detailed handwriting analysis.
- Both the anonymous author of the "Voynich Manuscript"
and Leonardo da Vinci use a type of writing
that’s called "humanist miniscule script."
It’s a style that was developed in Italy
in the early 1400s.
It’s different than a lot
of what was being written at the time.
Most scholarly texts were written
in something called gothic script, or black letter.
And it’s a pretty obvious difference
when you look at them side by side.
And not a lot of people were writing like this.
But Leonardo da Vinci was.
- Not only that, but Leonardo da Vinci
and the author of the "Voynich Manuscript"
have a lot of features that are very similar.
Neither writes with capital letters.
Neither punctuates.
There are no line breaks or paragraph breaks.
And also, they never connect their letters.
Dr. Sherwood then turns her attention
to the manuscript’s drawings.
- So we all know that Leonardo da Vinci was--
he’s an okay artist, to put it mildly.
No, obviously, he’s great.
All you have to do is look at his works,
like the "Mona Lisa," which show off
his otherworldly talent.
But in his notebooks, they’re just full
of these crude drawings and studies.
- Of course, no one would suggest
that the illustrations from the "Voynich Manuscript"
rise to the level of da Vinci’s greatest works or mature works.
Nevertheless, there are some similarities.
- The one thing that was very hard to do
in the 15th century, when drawing and writing,
was to create perfect circles.
Without modern drafting equipment,
only really, really talented artists
could create a perfect circle only using pen and ink.
But da Vinci could
and so could the author of the "Voynich Manuscript."
Dr. Sherwood believes
one page of circular drawings provides the best clue of all.
- There’s an astrological chart representing the sign of Aries
with 15 nude women sitting in birthing tubs.
The women appear to be pregnant,
and in one of the tubs there’s a baby,
and that mother no longer appears to be pregnant.
The woman is holding a striped string with a star on the end.
And all the other women are holding plain strings.
According to Dr. Sherwood, this page is a birth record.
- Aries the ram represents the month of April,
and because of the 15 women,
she believes that this birth took place on April 15th.
And the woman holding the baby is positioned
roughly at00, and guess what.
Leonardo da Vinci was born just around00 p.m.
on April 15, 1452.
- And of course, the final clue
is that the manuscript is written in code,
and Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote his notebooks in code
throughout his adult life,
and he typically used a mirror-image code
that also sometimes combined or separated certain words.
Could the "Voynich Manuscript"
be da Vinci’s first coded notebook?
- The mystery might be even bigger than that.
I mean, was Leonardo da Vinci writing in code to hide
some great secrets of alchemy
that he had discovered or medical cures?
Is the legacy of history’s greatest genius
even greater than we thought?
Until it’s deciphered, we just won’t know.
For over 100 years,
people have speculated on what the "Voynich Manuscript" is
and who created it.
After successfully carbon dating the book’s parchment
to the 15th century,
researcher seek other technology to help understand.
- Dating the book is a huge breakthrough,
but, of course, that still can’t help us
determine what it is.
We know the approximate date of its creation,
but that’s really about it.
And there’s really only one way to fully understand
this book, and that’s to decode the writing,
to figure out what language this is,
what cipher they used, and start to translate it.
Unfortunately, it’s a code no human
has ever been able to crack.
But could there be another way?
- In 2016 some computing scientists
at the University of Alberta in Canada
start doing something incredible
with the "Voynich Manuscript."
They work with artificial intelligence,
and they realize, "Hey, maybe our AI computer
can finally decipher this text where others have failed.
The project is led by Professor Greg Kondrak.
- Their exact field of study
is called natural language processing.
So it combines computer science and linguistics
and artificial intelligence,
and the goal is to improve interactions
between computers and human language.
- Basically, their ultimate goal
is to create a computer that you could give any document
in any language in the history of mankind,
and that computer would be able
to recognize it and understand and analyze it.
With the right inputs,
the computer might even be able to decipher
a complicated code in an unidentified language.
- It is a challenge.
But the computer is programmed
to recognize any and all patterns
and compare them with known languages,
and it can do this thousands and thousands of times
faster than a human can. So it’s worth a shot.
Kondrak starts by entering samples
of 400 different languages.
- The AI goes to work
comparing the "Voynich Manuscript"
to other languages.
It looks at individual characters.
It looks at groups of words.
It looks at how often they’re repeated
and in what combinations,
all the little nuances that could determine
what language this was written in.
- Honestly don’t know if this is going to work,
because this computer is not designed to read
the "Voynich Manuscript." However, they work on it
for weeks and weeks, and after a while,
lo and behold, the computer gives them an answer.
According to the artificial intelligence
at the University of Alberta in Canada,
the "Voynich Manuscript" is in Hebrew.
There had been speculation for quite some time
that the "Voynich Manuscript"
wasn’t written in a European language,
because had it been written in Italian or Greek or Latin,
somebody more than likely would’ve figured it out by now.
And the researchers actually went into this thinking
maybe the manuscript is written in Arabic,
but Hebrew presents an intriguing possibility.
Even if they’ve discovered
the language of origin,
the book may take years to translate.
- The team thinks that not only was it written in Hebrew,
it was written as an alphagram.
An alphagram is a way of coding language in which
you present the letters of a word in alphabetical order.
So for instance, the alphagram of the word "cat"
would be A-C-T.
The problem, of course, is that A-C-T
also is the alphagram for the word "act."
So you can see the challenges here.
- Compounding those challenges is the fact that Hebrew
isn’t typically written with vowels.
So researchers are left with the painstaking task
of going word by word
swapping in the Hebrew letters
and then rearranging those letters
for it to make some sort of sense.
Slowly the team makes progress.
- Once you think you’ve figured out a word,
you move onto the next word.
But if those two words don’t make sense together,
then you have to go back to the first word
and try again. So far, they think
they’ve come up with three grammatical phrases.
- Unfortunately, this AI was never designed
to spend its existence studying the mysteries
of the "Voynich Manuscript."
So the University of Alberta team
only brings its research so far.
All they know is, they think the book was written in Hebrew.
But we still don’t know what it says.
Then in 2017
another researcher picks up where the Canadians left off.
- There’s a German Egyptologist
named Ranier Hannig,
and he also thinks the book is in Hebrew,
and he spends three years studying it,
and he makes some progress in translating it,
and he publishes his findings in 2020.
Hannig manages to translate a number of paragraphs
on multiple pages, and according to his findings,
it looks like the "Voynich Manuscript"
might be a book of prophecy.
On one particular page, according to Hannig,
it says...
Is the "Voynich Manuscript" a Hebrew manual
for predicting the future?
- For quite a while now,
there have been two separate schools of thought
about the "Voynich Manuscript."
The first one, which is also the most popular,
is, what if it’s an encoded version of a known language?
There are a growing number of people who think
that could be entirely wrong.
For many decades, countless code breakers
and scholars have tried and failed
to decipher the mysterious "Voynich Manuscript."
Then in 2009 researchers posed a radical new question.
What if the book isn’t written in code at all?
- Since at least the 1500s people have assumed
the "Voynich Manuscript" is encoded.
But recently a new question has been introduced.
What if the reason no one’s been able to crack the code
is because it isn’t a code at all?
What if it’s an actual language
but a language that’s not human?
Think about what it takes to create a code,
especially one so complex
that it defies translation for centuries.
So first you have to think about what you want to write,
and then you have to convert it into code
letter by letter, word by word.
If you look at the case of another famous code,
the Zodiac Killer,
look at how the symbols are arranged:
spaced out and separate from each other.
Because Zodiac had to stop and think
every step of the way,
each letter sits on its own.
But in the "Voynich Manuscript" it really looks
like the author was writing continuously.
The writing is tightly formed.
It flows evenly from letter to letter.
It’s a swift and continuous movement of the pen.
They didn’t have to stop and think about anything.
So some say even the most ingenious human
couldn’t have pulled this off
while coming up with an unsolvable code.
- If someone is writing in this continuous style,
it’s obviously a language they understood,
and that has some theorists thinking,
"What if that language is extraterrestrial?"
- Did an alien create the "Voynich Manuscript"?
There are some exciting precedents for this.
- Erich von Daniken, well-known for his book,
"Chariots of the Gods," puts this theory
forward into his book in 1968,
and in that book von Daniken asserts
that many of our ancient technologies
were created by aliens,
such as Stonehenge, Pumapunku, all of these other places--
Easter Island--that we did not have the technology to create.
So it needed alien assistance.
He also cites a bunch of literary examples.
- There’s an early world map known as the Piri Reis map,
and von Daniken describes it as showing the Earth
as it would be seen from space,
which, of course, is an impossible viewpoint in 1513,
when the map was made.
When von Daniken applies the same logic
to the "Voynich Manuscript," he believes he’s finally
unlocked its mysterious origin.
- In his 2009 book "History is Wrong,"
von Daniken goes into great detail about his theory
about the "Voynich Manuscript."
He believes that it was written by an alien astronaut
who was stranded on Earth in the 1400s
and spent the rest of his life on planet Earth
recording his observations in the "Voynich Manuscript."
- Even though we don’t understand
the written language, the illustrations seem to indicate
that there was a crude understanding
perhaps riddled with inaccuracies.
Could it be that this alien astronaut
in cataloguing these things was writing about things,
drawing pictures of things he didn’t know anything about?
Are we being observed and studied
by somebody else out there?
- The alien theory is obviously pretty out there.
But the concept that the book is written in its own language
instead of a code, that definitely could be possible.
And, in fact, there’s another really
well-documented phenomenon that this could be.
In 2004 British researchers Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill
published a book on the "Voynich Manuscript."
- The theory they put forth
is that the "Voynich Manuscript"
is written in glossolalia,
which is the speaking of tongues
or the language of tongues,
in this case, the writing in tongues.
- There are thousands of examples of this
catalogued from antiquity to the present,
and it typically presents the same way.
Person generates unintelligible words
that appear to be a language but can’t be understood,
and in many cases this is thought to happen
while the person is possessed.
Could that be what’s happening in Voynich?
- Kennedy and Churchill are the first to notice
a potential parallel between the "Voynich Manuscript"
and the work of the 12th-century German saint
Hildegard von Bingen.
She wrote hundreds of pages in a language known as
Lingua Ignota, or the unknown language.
She had her own script. She had her own vocabulary.
Both manuscripts contain perplexing illustrations.
So you could see why the comparisons suggest itself.
- Hildegard claimed she was recording visions
that she was receiving thought to be from the divine.
Kennedy and Churchill
suggest the same phenomenon could have afflicted
the Voynich author causing what is known as
automatic or possessed writing.
- Historically, Judeo-Christianity expresses
possession as being a real thing
from demonic to angelic possessions.
Jesus has many examples of Him driving out demons.
For many years the Catholic Church
tried to downplay possession.
But now in current times especially
they admit that it exists, that it is out there,
and there are dozens if not hundreds
of exorcisms performed every month.
- Of course, there will probably never be any way
to prove this theory.
But it just goes to show how the "Voynich Manuscript"
has captured everybody’s imagination.
The possibilities are literally endless.
- If it turns out the book wasn’t written in code,
it wasn’t written by an alien, it wasn’t written by an angel,
a demon, it wasn’t written
by someone suffering from mental illness,
we may never be able to find out what it says.
Maybe this mystery is truly unsolvable.
One of history’s most infamous books
is a manuscript that no one can understand.
But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
- After all this time, no one can read it.
No one can understand it.
We all want to believe that the manuscript has meaning.
Someone spent a lot of time, a lot of effort,
and a lot of resources writing it and drawing on it.
The "Voynich Manuscript" must have a purpose.
How could it not?
- And that’s why so many people have dedicated their lives
trying to solve this so-called Voynich code,
because they sincerely and firmly believe
that this book has something monumental to share.
There’s got to be some sort of amazing secret
it wants to let us know.
But what if the answer
is something much more surprising?
- As researchers have hit dead end after dead end
after dead end trying to find patterns, substitutions,
translations, languages of origin,
there’s this one burning question that’s just sitting
in the back of their minds.
No one wants to admit it out loud.
But what if they’re just wasting their time?
In April 2007
Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner
completes his own computer analysis
of the "Voynich Manuscript."
Like everyone else, he’s been looking for patterns
that might crack the code.
But instead, his findings show
that the statistical properties of the text
are most consistent with meaningless gibberish.
If Schinner is correct,
then a lot of people have spent a lot of time
on a wild goose chase.
- In some ways a hoax might be the easiest explanation.
But if so, I mean...wow, what a hoax.
- Still, hoax or not, we’re still trying
to find proof of what this book is,
not just more speculation.
So is there any way to prove
that this book could have been faked?
- The material, the parchment on which the manuscript
has been written, is carbon dated
to the early 15th century. You can’t fake that.
The parchment is 600 years old.
If somebody in the early 15th century created the manuscript,
just gibberish, it will be extremely difficult
to identify who that was.
But there is one person with a possible motive.
- We’re talking about none other than
Wilfrid Voynich himself.
For starters, Voynich has a financial motive.
Think about this. Remember, he was going
around the world trying to convince everybody
that he’s found a long-lost encoded alchemy guide
written by Roger Bacon,
which, of course, he wants to sell for quite a lot of money.
Supporters of the hoax theory
also cite the book’s complete lack of provenance.
- People begin to realize,
"Wait, there’s actually no written evidence
"that proves the existence of the ’Voynich Manuscript’
before Wilfrid Voynich."
- Remember, Voynich offers proof
in the form of a 17th-century letter that he’s found.
But if you actually read the letter, all it really says
is that there’s this mysterious book
that we can’t seem to figure out
and that it was written by Roger Bacon.
It doesn’t mention any details
specific to the "Voynich Manuscript."
There’s no proof that they’re even talking
about the same book.
- In fact, some say maybe Voynich found the letter
and then he made the book so that he could claim it was
the lost Bacon manuscript they’re referring to.
Additionally, Voynich’s story
seems to change over the years.
- In 1912 he says he got it in a castle
in southern Europe.
In 1915 he says that the castle was in Austria.
When Voynich’s wife, Ethel, dies in 1960,
a letter’s discovered only to be opened posthumously
that says that he actually found the manuscript
in a Jesuit order in Frascati, Italy.
- It all adds up to suspicious behavior,
and one has to ask,
is Wilfrid Voynich just this celebrated and respected
antiquities dealer, or has he pulled off
one of the single greatest hoaxes in history?
Is it possible that the centuries-old mystery
of the "Voynich Manuscript" is a hoax?
- If it’s a fake, it’s an incredible fake.
For starters, it uses materials from the 1400s.
It’s got all of these writings and drawings and charts
and diagrams. It has different-sized pages
that fold out in every which way.
It would take a genius-level expert in antique books
to pull this off.
And some think that genius is none other
than Wilfrid Voynich himself.
- To some it’s not a question of how could it be Voynich?
It’s more a question of how could it not be Voynich?
At some point between 1908 and 1911
Voynich finds a letter by Jan Marek Marci
that talks about an encoded Roger Bacon manuscript.
And then, perhaps, he sets about forging a fake one.
- The problem with this hoax theory,
and it’s the one a lot of people cite,
is that it’s nearly impossible for anyone in the modern day
to have access to a lot of these ancient parchments
and inks and other materials to create such a thing.
But is it possible Voynich did?
- Shortly before the appearance of the manuscript,
Voynich purchases the entire collection
of the Libreria Franceschini in Italy.
It’s a private collection
that consists of over half a million books,
pamphlets, maps, and other manuscripts.
And we can’t say for sure, but it is likely that among
that treasure trove of materials that he purchased
was a large amount of blank 15th-century parchment.
- In any ancient library
you’re going to find blank parchment,
whether it’s sewn into a complete book
or some kind of a blank notebook
or empty parchment that just happens to be sitting around.
Many books and manuscripts have blank pages
at the beginning or at the end,
another place where you can find
ancient blank parchment.
- This would have been a jackpot for Voynich,
and from that moment on he probably had
everything he needed to pull this off.
What about the ink?
- In addition to being a Polish revolutionary,
a Siberian prison escapee,
and one of the world’s premier rare book dealers,
Voynich also has a training in chemistry
from when he was a student at the University of Moscow.
In his restoration work on his own collections
he sometimes uses that work to create inks and pigments
to restore books and manuscripts.
- He may have also had some help,
because it turns out he had a covert friendship
with a famous British secret agent
by the name of Sidney Reilly,
who was also known as the ace of spies.
Reilly allegedly goes into the British Museum Library
and takes out a book that’s called
"Some Observations on Ancient Inks."
- So according to this theory Voynich finds the letter,
buys the parchment,
creates the inks and the pigments,
forges the book, and there you have it.
If the manuscript is a forgery
it didn’t turn out the way Voynich hoped.
- The crazy thing is,
if Voynich was trying to create
a Roger Bacon masterpiece to sell, he failed.
Voynich was never able to sell the book.
- The problem is,
he created too good of a puzzle.
Everyone got so wrapped up in the story
in cracking the code and deciphering it
that they started finding patterns
that Voynich never intended,
clues that weren’t there.
People didn’t want to buy the thing.
They wanted to solve it.
But Wilfrid Voynich did successfully sell
at least one forgery that we know of.
It’s called the "Columbus Miniature."
It’s a painting of Columbus landing in the New World,
which was made by an anonymous Spanish forger in the 1800s.
And he sold it to the British Museum.
Whether he did this knowingly we’re not entirely sure,
but at least there is some precedent
for Voynich selling a fake.
Despite this evidence
most scholars still believe the "Voynich Manuscript"
is a genuine 15th-century article.
- The book has been tested and retested.
It’s been studied using some of the most advanced
scientific techniques, none of which even existed
when Voynich was alive.
So could he have made a forgery that good in the 1910s?
Maybe.
But is it likely?
Probably not.
- Besides, where’s the fun in that?
Where’s the mystery? Where’s the history?
We’re not all clamoring over this book
and studying it piece by piece
because we want it to be a fake.
We want it to be a revelation, the greatest code of all time,
which when unlocked
will reveal the greatest secrets
of the universe.
In 2016 Yale University’s Beinecke Library
scanned all 234 pages of the "Voynich Manuscript"
making it easily available to anyone
who wants to take a crack
at solving the 600-year-old puzzle.
I’m Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History’s Greatest Mysteries."