Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Our classic episode today is one that has
Speaker 1: been all over the news recently. On September, The Times
Speaker 1: Literary Supplement published an article called Voyage Manuscript The Solution
Speaker 1: by Nicholas Gibbs, which purportedly decoded the Voyage Manuscript. Okay,
Speaker 1: we were immediately skeptical for a few reasons. One is
Speaker 1: at the Times Literary Supplement builds itself as quote the
Speaker 1: leading international weekly for literary culture, but it's not an
Speaker 1: academic journal or otherwise subject to peer review, so that
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, it maybe lovely, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: always make it a scientifically representative publication. Great of salt time,
Speaker 1: sort of like when a discovery is announced as a
Speaker 1: press release for a TV show, just as an example, right.
Speaker 1: And another is that for a purported solution, it didn't
Speaker 1: really offer that much detail. The Atlantic has a good
Speaker 1: roundup of various other criticisms, and we're going to link
Speaker 1: to that in the show notes. Aside from all that,
Speaker 1: we were skeptical because we've been through all this before.
Speaker 1: Our classic episode today is actually update to our installment
Speaker 1: on the Voytage Manuscript, so at the start you will
Speaker 1: get to hear us kind of gleefully talk about two
Speaker 1: completely contradictory solutions in air quotes that had come out
Speaker 1: within just a few weeks of each other at that time.
Speaker 1: So let's go Welcome to Stuff you missed in history
Speaker 1: class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we are
Speaker 1: continuing and doing some updates because I am being a
Speaker 1: slacker and taking time to to not be at work
Speaker 1: for a little while, and so we're updating some of
Speaker 1: our previous episodes to keep things going in my absence. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is actually an update to an episode that
Speaker 1: Holly and I recorded together, which is that we you know,
Speaker 1: most of our stuff is within the last twelve months,
Speaker 1: and so there's not often a need to update things. Uh.
Speaker 1: Not so with the Voyage Manuscript, which has had multiple
Speaker 1: needs for updates since it originally came out. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: came out originally in March of which is a little
Speaker 1: more than a year ago. So the Voyage Manuscript, if
Speaker 1: you missed out on that episode, it's a two forty
Speaker 1: page book full of illustrations and a seemingly indecipherable text.
Speaker 1: Lots and lots of people wrote to us after that
Speaker 1: episode originally came out reminding us of the x K
Speaker 1: C D comic that implies that it was the equivalent
Speaker 1: of a fifth fifteenth century Dungeons and Dragons manual. I
Speaker 1: do love x K C D. I had just forgotten
Speaker 1: about it too, So Yeah, however, there have been other
Speaker 1: new developments. Yeah, and the first two months to completely
Speaker 1: different teams came up with two completely different theories about
Speaker 1: the manuscript, and both of them were kind of allegedly
Speaker 1: build as breakthroughs. Yes, we're both of them. We got many, many,
Speaker 1: many emails and tweets and Facebook notes from people saying
Speaker 1: they've cracked the Voyage manuscript and we were sort of like,
Speaker 1: which one are you talking about again? Yeah, didn't that
Speaker 1: just happen three weeks ago. The first of these is
Speaker 1: on January, and that's when the American Botanical Council published
Speaker 1: a paper and its peer reviewed journal, which is called
Speaker 1: Herbal Graham. This was written by botanist Dr Arthur O.
Speaker 1: Tucker as well as Rexford H. Talbert, and the paper
Speaker 1: focused on the manuscripts botanical illustrations instead of doing what
Speaker 1: a lot of people do, which is just straight up
Speaker 1: tin trying to decipher the text. The two compared the
Speaker 1: illustrations to ones from other manuscripts that had existed at
Speaker 1: about the same time that the Voyage Manuscript was first discovered,
Speaker 1: and they found an illustration that looked very similar to
Speaker 1: a soap ant that was shown in the Mexican codex
Speaker 1: Cruise Bodianas, so, using this as a starting point, they
Speaker 1: reportedly identified thirty seven plants, six animals, and one mineral
Speaker 1: from the Voyage Manuscript that also appeared in Central and
Speaker 1: South American texts, and from there they worked up a
Speaker 1: theory that this manuscript is in an extinct dialect of
Speaker 1: a Mexican indigenous language known as Natal. And then on
Speaker 1: February fourteenth, so we're talking about less than a month later,
Speaker 1: the University of Bedfordshire announced that Stephen Back's professor of
Speaker 1: Applied Linguistics, had cracked the code on the Voyage Manuscript.
Speaker 1: In his approach and conclusions were completely different, except that
Speaker 1: he had also started with the plants right. He looked
Speaker 1: at medieval manuscripts in Arabic and other languages and started
Speaker 1: trying to identify the plants and the Voyage Manuscript based
Speaker 1: on the plants in these other texts, and once he
Speaker 1: had pinned down some of the plant's probable names, he
Speaker 1: started working on deciphering the text, kind of using those
Speaker 1: plant names as the key I were like the Rosetta
Speaker 1: stone for his right thing. Uh. And based on this work,
Speaker 1: Bax claims that he decoded about ten words and fourteen
Speaker 1: signs and clusters, and he theorized that the manuscript is
Speaker 1: a coded version of a Near Eastern or Asian language.
Speaker 1: So again, too, they can't both be right. They could
Speaker 1: be both right if the text is not entirely in
Speaker 1: one language, like that's the only way they were. If
Speaker 1: it's one text written in multiple languages, that would work.
Speaker 1: But we got so many notes from people who were
Speaker 1: so excited and so hopeful, and I hate to burst
Speaker 1: the bubble, but at the same time, this definitely seemed
Speaker 1: like something we should take the opportunity to update. So
Speaker 1: let's take a moment for a word from our sponsor
Speaker 1: before we turn you back over to us to talk
Speaker 1: to you from the past about what we talked about
Speaker 1: with the Voindage manuscript before. Okay, here here's our original
Speaker 1: from back in marchisode on the Voyage Manuscript. They were
Speaker 1: going to talk about one of those great history mysteries
Speaker 1: that's persisted for hundreds of years, which I always love those,
Speaker 1: because you know, once it's it just remains a mystery
Speaker 1: for x amount of time. It's just probably always going
Speaker 1: to be a mystery. And even if it gets solved,
Speaker 1: I think there will always be detractors, which makes it
Speaker 1: kind of well and I it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that I always am a little bit annoyed at the
Speaker 1: unselved mystery because I want to know the real story.
Speaker 1: I don't know that we ever can, because there will
Speaker 1: never probably be an accepted version of the real story
Speaker 1: by every universally accepted. Yes, there would have to be
Speaker 1: some kind of new discovery on this one, I think so, Yes.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about today is a document called the
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript. You may or may not have heard of it.
Speaker 1: Some sort of code breaking fans have have done a
Speaker 1: lot of study on it. Some historians are really into it.
Speaker 1: But what it is is a book that no one
Speaker 1: can read. Yes, is in an unknown language. Yes. Most
Speaker 1: people consider it to be a cipher text of some sort. Perhaps, um,
Speaker 1: it could be that it could also be nonsense. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are the outliers that like to say aliens brought it,
Speaker 1: but there's some scientific evidence that that is not really
Speaker 1: the case. UM. So for some basic background on it,
Speaker 1: it's actually named after a fairly modern person, Wilfred Voynage,
Speaker 1: who was an anti Korean bookseller that acquired the text
Speaker 1: in um. He was Polish American and he found it
Speaker 1: in a Jesuit library near Rome and purchased it there.
Speaker 1: Two forty pages long and written an unknown text. It's
Speaker 1: kind of pretty and loopy to look at. It is
Speaker 1: a very curly, it's flowing script. It's very pretty um
Speaker 1: and colorful. Yes, it's currently housed at um Yale, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that a little bit later. But they
Speaker 1: have this great descriptor in their page about it, where
Speaker 1: it says is drawn in ink with vibrant washes in
Speaker 1: various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. It
Speaker 1: just sounds so sweet and quaint the way they describe
Speaker 1: it as this, And when you look at it, it's
Speaker 1: both quaint and weird because it's illustrated throughout. There are
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirteen unidentified plant species drawn in there,
Speaker 1: astronomical and astrological drawings. There are basically drawings of some
Speaker 1: sort of like the botanical slash scientific variety on almost
Speaker 1: every page of the thing, um, some of which is
Speaker 1: not immediately recognizable as no there. That's one of the
Speaker 1: ways that people have tried to approach it is by
Speaker 1: identifying some of the plant life that's drawn in it
Speaker 1: and trying to backwards engineer that way, but that hasn't
Speaker 1: really panned out. Um. There are also some interesting female
Speaker 1: nudes in it. Yes, Uh, it's interesting. I looked at
Speaker 1: some of these pictures and I couldn't tell. They all
Speaker 1: have swollen abdomens, But I can't tell if it's trying
Speaker 1: to depict pregnancy or just the more sort of round
Speaker 1: body type that has been popular throughout history at certain points.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit hard to know for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: I love the Yale description of it. Miniature female nudes,
Speaker 1: most with swelled abdomen's immersed or waiting in fluids and
Speaker 1: oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's part of what has caused people to want to
Speaker 1: attribute it to alien origin. It is a little bit
Speaker 1: it's odd, it's a little bit freaky. It's odd, and
Speaker 1: just from that description brings up sort of connotations of weird, fertility,
Speaker 1: something strangeness. Yeah, people being strung together. It's it's a
Speaker 1: little bit weird. There are also nine cosmological medallions and
Speaker 1: they're many of those are huge, and they're drawn across
Speaker 1: um folded folio pages and in some cases they may
Speaker 1: be depicting geographical elements, but it's not, again always clear.
Speaker 1: We haven't cracked this. And then medicinal herbs and roots,
Speaker 1: which are considered separate from the plant species, and there's
Speaker 1: no byline. No, we don't know who wrote it, which
Speaker 1: is part of the mystery. So it is currently housed
Speaker 1: at Yale University in the UH I believe it's pronounced
Speaker 1: by Nicki Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and it's listed
Speaker 1: as MS four oh eighty. There's a pretty cool page
Speaker 1: at Yale that that gives more information about it, and
Speaker 1: we will link to it from the show notes we
Speaker 1: have started doing with this podcast. We'd like to have
Speaker 1: a look at more detail about what it looks like
Speaker 1: and what's in there. Yeah, they did a wonderful job
Speaker 1: of breaking down and describing really every element of the
Speaker 1: book um from a you know, an unbiased, pretty neutral standpoint,
Speaker 1: just kind of I once worked in a library as
Speaker 1: doing equi usians and cataloging assistants. So they're perfect basically
Speaker 1: is what I'm saying. They're cataloging. UM is like an
Speaker 1: ideal version that you would catalog something that you don't understand,
Speaker 1: right it is. It is a very fascinating read. There
Speaker 1: is also linked from there a chemical analysis of the
Speaker 1: book itself and what the pages are made of and
Speaker 1: what the inks are made of. Yeah, which is what
Speaker 1: kind of uh squelches any of those alien origin theories
Speaker 1: because they're identified elements from our planet. Yes, and we
Speaker 1: have also scientifically, we being other researchers us identified the
Speaker 1: approximately when it was created. There was a two thousand
Speaker 1: nine University of Arizona project. Researchers carbendated it to the
Speaker 1: early half of the fifteenth century, so there's a probability
Speaker 1: that it was written between fourteen of four and fourteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight. I mean, that's the basic description of it.
Speaker 1: So then we're kind of onto what is this thing?
Speaker 1: I don't know? And everybody has theory reason because it's
Speaker 1: never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might be the
Speaker 1: right one. Um. Some people think it could be a
Speaker 1: book of secrets like it's alchemy or some other secret knowledge,
Speaker 1: and that it is in fact a medieval ciphertext that
Speaker 1: is intended to hide and prevent others from getting this
Speaker 1: secret knowledge. Uh. Some have even suggested that it's actually
Speaker 1: a record of inventions and discoveries of Roger Bacon, who
Speaker 1: was a friar and scholar in the d Um but
Speaker 1: that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah, that was a
Speaker 1: very circumstantial thing of there are things in here that
Speaker 1: he was interested in, so maybe he made this and
Speaker 1: that's Yeah, there's definitely a lot of circumstantial evidence around
Speaker 1: all of it. Every theory about it, the remnant of
Speaker 1: an ancient language theory doesn't really hold a lot of water.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that when you hear linguist
Speaker 1: experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when
Speaker 1: you first look at it, it looks like something we
Speaker 1: should be able to read. It looks like a text,
Speaker 1: it looks like, you know, an alphabet. But the deeper
Speaker 1: they get into it, the more they realize they can't.
Speaker 1: It becomes sort of more elusive the more they study it,
Speaker 1: which is kind of fascinat And that's one of those ideas.
Speaker 1: That's pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There are
Speaker 1: definitely written languages that we have not been able to
Speaker 1: decipher until we have found some other text that has
Speaker 1: led us decipher it. So I think that's one of
Speaker 1: those ideas that has an allure to it, but that
Speaker 1: has not really panned out. Yeah, And one of the
Speaker 1: one of the things that kind of discounts that theory
Speaker 1: is that normally, in any language, the most common words
Speaker 1: are normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just like
Speaker 1: in English it would be you know, your articles, articles, prepositions, etcetera.
Speaker 1: They tend to be compact, short little words, and in
Speaker 1: this particular document, the most common words tend to be
Speaker 1: very long and sort of complicated in comparison to the rest,
Speaker 1: which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
Speaker 1: one of the things that at UM people who are
Speaker 1: fond of the Gibberish theory like to site like this
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense as a language. It's probably not, and
Speaker 1: people have been trying to decrypt it since at least
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds we know, uh, even in World War
Speaker 1: Two Army codebreakers were just sort of taking a crack
Speaker 1: at it. On the side and they couldn't make heads
Speaker 1: nor tails of it. They couldn't really like even get
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a toe hold in to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: we think we might know, we have no idea. Again,
Speaker 1: that almost seems suspicious to me that nobody, in four
Speaker 1: hundred plus years of trying to analyze this document could
Speaker 1: really get any sort of positive affirmation that they were
Speaker 1: on the right track. They all kind of end up
Speaker 1: throwing up their hands and shaking their heads like, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
Speaker 1: hoax theory it is uh. John d in case anybody
Speaker 1: does not recognize that name was is kind of most
Speaker 1: famous as being the astrologer and an adviser to Queen
Speaker 1: Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
Speaker 1: to support the theory that it's actually a hoax that
Speaker 1: he perpetrated. At the time, I remember hearing a scholar
Speaker 1: on this particular text say, you know, it was very
Speaker 1: common for just as it's common now for people in
Speaker 1: business or people of wealth to purchase great art to
Speaker 1: show how cultured they are, at this time, it was
Speaker 1: similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text in
Speaker 1: their home to show that they were cultured, and so
Speaker 1: it could have been like a money making scheme, like
Speaker 1: a let's book to go there, a fake looking document
Speaker 1: that looks like a really cool illuminated text, and we'll
Speaker 1: just sell it to some businessman who wants people to
Speaker 1: think he's smart. Um. I kind of love that one.
Speaker 1: And another suspect implicated in that is Edward Kelly, who
Speaker 1: was a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one
Speaker 1: and became very close with John D. A lot of
Speaker 1: people dismissed him as a charlatan and a fake, but
Speaker 1: John D for some reason, really formed um an affinity
Speaker 1: and aloe friendship with him. One of the things that
Speaker 1: makes people think that maybe this theory is the right
Speaker 1: one is that there are no scratch outs or erasers,
Speaker 1: and in the whole entirety of the book, which even
Speaker 1: if you're copying, if you're making a copy of something
Speaker 1: you have already written out, like I will do that
Speaker 1: sometimes if I am writing a letter to somebody with
Speaker 1: a pen on paper, it will be copying out something
Speaker 1: that I've kind of drafted on another page. Even then,
Speaker 1: at some point you make a mistake and you have
Speaker 1: to either scratch it out or erase it, and there
Speaker 1: is none of that at all, so it does not
Speaker 1: seem like somebody was actually trying to make an accurate
Speaker 1: set of words on the paper. Yeah, you would eventually
Speaker 1: hit something where you would have to get rid of
Speaker 1: it or clarify in some way. The big proponent of
Speaker 1: the theory is Gordon rug And he's head of the
Speaker 1: Knowledge Modeling group at Keele University and Staffordshire, England. UH
Speaker 1: and he's done some interesting almost um sort of computer
Speaker 1: science approaches to analyzing and recreating similar documents where he
Speaker 1: lays out letter is on a grid and he's created
Speaker 1: this little UM like a card that you can lay
Speaker 1: on top of the grid and it has three cutouts
Speaker 1: and so in that grid he's put in, you know,
Speaker 1: character similar to the ones in this document. And just
Speaker 1: by moving that card around and writing out in order
Speaker 1: whatever characters happened to land in your open spaces, you
Speaker 1: can create this gibberish that looks really realistic and really
Speaker 1: like a language. UM. And he kind of believes this
Speaker 1: supports again the the gibberish theory rather than it being
Speaker 1: UM a cipher that's you know, well thought out. Another theory.
Speaker 1: So many theories about us. There are and I mean
Speaker 1: we could go on for days and days about all
Speaker 1: of the theories, so we're kind of hitting the high
Speaker 1: notes on this one. Yeah, there's there's a prayer book
Speaker 1: theory about, you know, in some kind of Germanic slash
Speaker 1: romance creole. Do you have you have? It was like,
Speaker 1: what what has led to the idea of the prayer book?
Speaker 1: You know? I think it's because it hasn't ever been decrypted.
Speaker 1: It kind of whole olds popularity with people that want
Speaker 1: to think it is a ciphertext and that it's a
Speaker 1: prayer book of the Cather's that somehow managed to survive
Speaker 1: the Inquisition when everything else was being burnt. Uh, because
Speaker 1: everything else was burnt, there's nothing else to possibly give
Speaker 1: us the key to decrypt this. So that's but that's
Speaker 1: not a very popular one. I just thought it was interesting,
Speaker 1: um And at one point people were even kind of
Speaker 1: suspicious that Voinache himself had assembled the book um to
Speaker 1: create a faux valuable for his antiquities collection. But carbon dating,
Speaker 1: because the paper is from and the inks are all
Speaker 1: dated further back, he would have to really be scientifically
Speaker 1: pretty magical to all that. So that if he had
Speaker 1: tried to. If that had been a forgery, it would
Speaker 1: have been a masterful forgery, using information he would not
Speaker 1: have had really at a time. And what's really interesting
Speaker 1: is that it's um has changed hands quite a number
Speaker 1: of times. The first one that will mention is actually
Speaker 1: one of those circumstantial things so allegedly owned by John D,
Speaker 1: who we talked about earlier, and it was bought from
Speaker 1: D we know, by Emperor Rudolph the second of Germany,
Speaker 1: so the Holy Roman Emperor, for six hundred gold dickets,
Speaker 1: which is roughly thirty thousand dollars in today's economy. That
Speaker 1: just makes me annoyed thinking that it was potentially the
Speaker 1: writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial evidence that supports
Speaker 1: this idea or that he bought it from D and
Speaker 1: not from someone else, is that there are accounts that
Speaker 1: mentioned D having come into a sum of money that's
Speaker 1: just a little bit bigger than this. I want to say,
Speaker 1: it's like six hundred and fifteen or six D eighteen,
Speaker 1: and I believe it's John D's son that wrote some
Speaker 1: of those at least, so it's kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: we know that it was purchased for this amount around
Speaker 1: this time, and we know that suddenly this guy had
Speaker 1: this amount of money in his pocket at this time
Speaker 1: that that reminds me of one of the police procedurals,
Speaker 1: and they have the person in the room and they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we know this guy bodies documents for for thirty thou
Speaker 1: dollars and you magically have a thirty thou dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's that is as as far as we can get
Speaker 1: in terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: it appears Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus Horse
Speaker 1: a key the tepanis and I may be mispronouncing any
Speaker 1: of that um And that exchange is based on an
Speaker 1: inscription that's visible in the document in the on folio
Speaker 1: one R. But you have to read it with ultraviolet light,
Speaker 1: so that's ink that it's faded off, and that's all
Speaker 1: that's sort of left is the chemical shadow, right. That
Speaker 1: was one of the things that they found and documented
Speaker 1: during the chemical analysis that we were talking about a
Speaker 1: little bit earlier. One of the things that I read
Speaker 1: in that analysis that I thought was pretty cool was
Speaker 1: that an acid wash had been used on the pages
Speaker 1: possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink, but
Speaker 1: that that may have been washed away other writing in
Speaker 1: the book. Uh, so it's it's not really that that
Speaker 1: was written in an ink that required ultra violet light
Speaker 1: to see at a time. It's ink that has faded
Speaker 1: to the point that that's the only way to see it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been destroyed through time and treatment through the ages.
Speaker 1: Not that does not in any way support the secret
Speaker 1: or alien theories. Uh, there's there are some gaps in
Speaker 1: the timeline of where it's been, but we do know
Speaker 1: that it was given to Athanasius Kircher in sixteen sixty
Speaker 1: six by Johannes Marcus Marcia of cromelind Uh. And then
Speaker 1: there's another little kind of we're not sure what happened
Speaker 1: or where the book was. We do know that during
Speaker 1: some of these tradeoffs, people were trying to get people
Speaker 1: to decrypt this text. So that's why we say for
Speaker 1: more than four years people have been trying to figure
Speaker 1: it out. And then it's suddenly, it seems said to
Speaker 1: us because it's the first time we hear about it again.
Speaker 1: But after there were many other things happening. After a
Speaker 1: gap of two years, yeah. Then Voynage found it in
Speaker 1: as I said, at Jesuit College near Rome, and then
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine it was given to the Benicky
Speaker 1: Library by an HP Krause who had purchased it from
Speaker 1: the estate of Voynage's widow. Uh. It had passed to
Speaker 1: her and then her executor ended up selling it to
Speaker 1: this person. Now we're basically up to today. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: December eleven, a finished businessman named vico let Valla I
Speaker 1: may have mispronounced that claimed that he was a prophet
Speaker 1: of God and that he had been given divine insight
Speaker 1: into the contents of this manuscript. Probably not true well,
Speaker 1: and people question his methods and they of course want
Speaker 1: some backup on this, and it never happens. He has
Speaker 1: um an associate named Ari Kitola who is pretty much
Speaker 1: handling pr for him UM and his statement in an
Speaker 1: interview was that Mr la Vala said that no, no
Speaker 1: one normal human can decode it because there is no
Speaker 1: code or method to read this text. It's a channel
Speaker 1: language of prophecy uh and that basically God had told
Speaker 1: him what it meant, and that there is no way
Speaker 1: to decrypt it. There is no cipher for it. You
Speaker 1: just have to trust him that God told him this
Speaker 1: um and he says it's a botany journal basically, which
Speaker 1: is kind of funny that that's kind of a mundane
Speaker 1: thing to say after God told me it's a botany journal,
Speaker 1: I had a divine revelation of this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's a website that's maintained around him, but he
Speaker 1: really this was, as Tracy mentioned in December, and then
Speaker 1: he really hasn't gotten much press passed then, like nobody's
Speaker 1: really paid a whole lot of attention to his claims anymore.
Speaker 1: So that's where it stands. It's still a mystery. It's
Speaker 1: still at Yale. I think to see it you would
Speaker 1: have to jump through some hoops part of special collection,
Speaker 1: often the case with special collections, and it can be
Speaker 1: really difficult to get actual physical access to the manuscript
Speaker 1: unless you have a reason to be there. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the good news is there are lots of scans and
Speaker 1: photos of it online, so if you're curious about it,
Speaker 1: you can really easily find pictures of it. We will
Speaker 1: put those in our share notes also, go find them.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because it's one of those things to
Speaker 1: me that even if it is a hoax. It's now
Speaker 1: become really historically significant in that one. Just the idea
Speaker 1: that it could be a hoax perpetrated by a fairly
Speaker 1: famous historical figure kind of makes it interesting in and
Speaker 1: of itself. Um, but also just that so many people
Speaker 1: have spent so many years trying to decipher it and
Speaker 1: reveal its meaning. That kind of has a meaning in
Speaker 1: and of itself for me, Like it says a lot
Speaker 1: about our desire to just crack unknowable things and sort
Speaker 1: of our our persistence in doing so. So, Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: see if there's someone who magically cracks it. I will
Speaker 1: be upfront and say I tend to favor favor the
Speaker 1: jibberish theories, but we don't know something. As you said,
Speaker 1: some other piece of evidence could come to light and
Speaker 1: all of that will change. That would have to be
Speaker 1: sort of a Rosetta Rosetta stone for the point, yes,
Speaker 1: to to really figure out if it says anything, which
Speaker 1: would be awfully cool. It would be both cool and sad,
Speaker 1: which is the opposite of what I said at the
Speaker 1: beginning of Unsolved Mystery is getting on my nerves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sort of the thing that I've noticed in doing
Speaker 1: research on this is that even when there are pretty solid,
Speaker 1: you know, pieces of I don't want to say evidence,
Speaker 1: but pretty solid supporting UM concepts. Uh, like the man
Speaker 1: who has been able to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts,
Speaker 1: people don't really want to accept it. There are entire
Speaker 1: message boards and online groups surrounding this manuscript because it
Speaker 1: is so sort of engrossing and engaging for people that
Speaker 1: love UM ciphertext and the idea of a mystery, and
Speaker 1: it's interesting to watch them debate. And some of them
Speaker 1: will be like, yeah, I see, and his methods are sound,
Speaker 1: and that all makes sense, but I don't believe it
Speaker 1: the end, Like they just don't want to believe it. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's just it's fascinating stuff because nobody wants to kind
Speaker 1: of lose the mystery. I think at this point, after
Speaker 1: it's after gone on for some years, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like giving up a good friend at that point. Hey,
Speaker 1: since these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we
Speaker 1: have some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff
Speaker 1: you've heard before. If you want to email us, our
Speaker 1: email address is History Podcast at house to works dot com,
Speaker 1: and you can find us across the spectrum of social
Speaker 1: media as Missed in History. You can also find us
Speaker 1: at Missed in History dot com, and you can visit
Speaker 1: our parent company house to works at how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how staff works dot com.