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Tonight, a mysterious, mid-evil book written in a secret language so complex that even

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the world's best code burgers can't crack it.

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No one has been able to translate or read a single word, a single letter.

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Known as the Voynich Manuscript, it's obsessed everyone from scholars to conspiracy theorists.

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They sincerely believe that this book has something monumental to share.

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Now we'll uncover the top theories surrounding the origins of this cryptic text.

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Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual for the practice of alchemy.

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The Voynich manuscript is written in Glossolalia, which is the language of tongues.

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Has he pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in history?

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Modern technology finally unlock its impenetrable code?

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It's the first definitive answer we have about this book in 400 years.

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What is the Voynich manuscript?

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Voynich operates what is probably the world's largest rare books business at the time.

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He's got this incredible knack for digging up the most valuable and the most sought after

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manuscripts on the planet.

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His collection is worth millions.

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Voynich hopes his next great find is here.

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The Jesuits need funds to support their college, so what they decide to do is they decide to

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sell some of their most ancient texts very discreetly.

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Voynich negotiates a shrewd deal as always and he adds 30 more books to his collection,

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which he will try to sell for a significant profit back at his shop in London.

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One book in particular stands out.

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As with all of his purchases, Voynich looks for elaborate bindings, beautiful books, heavily

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illustrated, illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, really things luxurious objects,

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but among them his eye is caught by what he later called an ugly ducklet.

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This particular manuscript is small.

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It's only about nine and a half by six and a half inches and it's bound in goat skin.

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It's about 230 pages long, but there is some evidence that some of the pages are missing.

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Also some pages are foldable sheets of varying size.

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This book is filled with lines upon lines of neatly handwritten text and elaborate drawings,

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but here's the thing, none of it makes any sense.

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There are a couple hundred detailed drawings of plant species, none of which can be identified.

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There are astrological drawings of constellations that don't even exist.

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There's a section where nude pregnant women are engaging in these baths and rituals with

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these seemingly interconnected tubes.

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And then there are these strange hybrids, these plants with human organs.

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And some of these plants even sprout disembodied heads.

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It's needless to say, it's wild, but it's also indecipherable.

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As for that lovely handwritten text, the entire thing is written in a language that no one has ever seen before.

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There are very clear and obvious words and letters, but they're totally unrecognizable.

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So Voynich assumes that this is some type of code.

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In addition to experience with codes, Voynich speaks Polish, Russian and English fluently

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and has a working knowledge of 15 other languages.

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He was born to a noble family in the Russian Empire.

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He was educated at three of the top universities.

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And then he basically becomes an anti-Zarist revolutionary.

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He's arrested, he's sent to a Siberian prison, he escapes the prison, and then he heads to London,

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where he continues his revolutionary activities for a while before a friend of his at the British Museum

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suggested he get into the rare book trade.

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Voynich knows everything there is to know about rare books.

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He's connected to all the top literary scholars.

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He knows multiple languages.

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He knows all about codes and code breaking from his years as a Russian revolutionary.

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Point is, if anyone is going to be able to make sense out of this manuscript,

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it's going to be Wilfred Voynich.

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Voynich spent years trying to decipher the code, really the rest of his life.

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And he reaches out to all of the top code breakers at the time to help, and none of them can crack it.

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He sticks with it, because he is a hunch that this might be the most valuable book he's ever encountered.

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And if he could figure this out, it could be worth millions.

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Based on the materials used to create the book, the parchment, the style of ink,

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Voynich thinks it's going to date to the 13th century.

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So while he can't decipher the words, the images of plants and other sorts of natural phenomena

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lead him to conclude that it's probably some sort of guide to a field that used to be called natural philosophy.

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And before there were modern scientists, this is how people describe the study of nature in the physical universe.

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From Aristotle to Isaac Newton, all of these early scientists were actually natural philosophers.

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So because of that date and the contents of the actual manuscript,

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Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual for the practice of alchemy.

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Alchemy is this philosophical part science, part magic practice that emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century.

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And its practitioners tried to purify certain materials, so turn lead into gold and to cure diseases.

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Now, none of this stuff actually worked, but it was strongly believed in and it was written about for centuries.

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Alchemist's real objective is perfection of the soul.

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And they'll do this by creating something called the magnum opus or great work, which was the philosopher's stone,

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a mythical substance that was said to be able to grant immortality among other things.

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According to Voynich, there is only one early alchemist brilliant enough to have produced this book.

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Almost no one in Europe was creating alchemy textbooks at the time.

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They were just translating older works.

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So Voynich thinks this is Roger Bacon.

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Voynich believes the book is written in code because he believes that whoever wrote it needed to keep something secret.

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Roger Bacon, today he's incredibly well respected.

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He's known as one of the early pioneers of the scientific method.

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He was the first person in Europe to record the formula for gunpowder.

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But here's the problem.

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He's also a monk and a modest member of the clergy.

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The church doesn't take too kindly to some of his more out-there alchemy practices.

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In fact, some of Bacon's contemporaries accuse him of being a wizard.

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He has an automated mechanical clockwork head that he talks to and consults with.

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And like all alchemists, he's also obsessed with forging the philosopher's stone and granting immortality.

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But in the church, only God can grant eternal life.

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So these are some very dangerous, heretical ideas that Bacon is toying with

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right under the watchful eye of his Franciscan superiors.

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But Bacon's not entirely a crackpot.

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He thinks that there's a way to bring the church and science together.

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Not everyone agrees with him.

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He thinks these ideas can complement each other.

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They don't have to be antagonists.

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It's very fortunate for Bacon that he has the protection of a very high-placed patron

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and intellectual correspondent.

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The Pope, Clement IV.

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But when Pope Clement dies in 1268, Roger Bacon's protection is gone.

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And within a decade, he's arrested.

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Bacon is eventually allowed to return to his studies.

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But he never puts forth any more of these so-called heretical texts.

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He mostly sticks to theological writing.

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Unless, of course, he continued his alchemy research in secret

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and wrote it all into a coded book.

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So if Voynich is right, and this manuscript can be definitively affiliated with Roger Bacon,

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suddenly the manuscript itself would be worth untold amounts of money.

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First, Voynich must prove Bacon truly authored the manuscript.

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Even though Voynich can't crack the code, he does find a letter dated back to 1665

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that's written by a very important Czech scientist and doctor named Jan Merrick Marci.

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He says he has a coded book that fits precisely this description,

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and he's giving it to his friend, a renowned code breaker at the Nassius Kircher.

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Marci also gives a little bit of history on the book.

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He says it was bought by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II of Germany

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about a hundred years prior, sometime in the late 1500s, for a large sum of gold.

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The letter mentions Roger Bacon by name as the potential author in the late 1200s.

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How did the book go from Bacon to Emperor Rudolph?

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Wilfred Voynich thinks the connection is Dr. John Dee.

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Dr. Dee was born in 1527.

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He's a member of the Court of Queen Elizabeth I,

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and he's an avid astrologer and an occult scientist who studies cipher.

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And from a young age, he has access to a lot of Roger Bacon manuscripts.

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An accomplished cryptologist himself,

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Dee tries to decode the manuscript, but fails.

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Eventually, John Dee brings the manuscript to Prague,

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where Emperor Rudolph would buy it from him for 600 dukats, or roughly $100,000 today.

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So Voynich has this fervent belief that Roger Bacon wrote this book,

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but all the evidence is circumstantial at this point.

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If Voynich wants the world to believe that this is a Bacon original and make a fortune,

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he's got to decode this thing once and for all.

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A mysterious manuscript, dating back centuries,

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one with a seemingly unbreakable cipher.

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When collector Wilfred Voynich finds this book,

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he spends years trying to prove who wrote it and why.

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Voynich showcases the book at exhibitions and lecture tours,

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with the hope that somebody can figure it out.

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And of course, he's getting fame and publicity all the while,

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and hoping to make a sale.

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He's trying to sell it for $100,000,

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which would be the most anyone had ever gotten for an old manuscript ever in history.

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Other top code breakers are trying to decipher the book as well.

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For example, you've got William Friedman,

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the man who's responsible for breaking the Japanese code purple during World War II.

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He's also one of the founders of the NSA, one of its chief cryptologists.

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He spent 30 years trying before declaring that cracking the manuscript's code was impossible.

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Unfortunately, Voynich dies in 1930, before he can solve the mystery.

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When Voynich dies, he leaves the book to his wife Ethel, who lives until 1960.

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And then after a couple of short-term owners,

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the book ends up at the Yale Library in 1969, where it remains today.

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It's an artifact that, to this day, captures the public's imagination,

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because it's both intriguing and infuriating.

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I mean, we can see it. We can touch it.

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We know this thing exists.

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It's not a figment of anyone's imagination,

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except no one knows exactly what it is.

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It remains pure mystery.

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And once we have the advent of the Internet, that mystery explodes.

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When Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library posts scanned pages of the manuscript online in 2004,

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the book gains even more attention.

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Suddenly, the Voynich manuscript is world-famous.

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It's attracting millions more people who want to figure it out.

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Every year brings multiple major news stories about potential breakthroughs.

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One of the biggest breakthroughs occurs in 2009 at the University of Arizona.

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Researchers realize that while the language of the book might be a possible to understand,

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the book's physical materials aren't.

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They can be analyzed.

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The 234 pages of the book are made up of calf-skinned parchment,

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and because they are organic in nature, they can be radiocarbon dated.

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This is obviously a big deal.

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This is a chance to finally get some answers that have eluded scholars for generations.

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They take samples from several sections of the book, just to be sure.

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But the results aren't what anyone anticipated.

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Remember, Wilfred Voynich thought this was a 13th-century text by Roger Bacon.

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But the pages date back to the early 15th century,

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so about 140 years after Roger Bacon's death.

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And just like that, the primary theory behind this strange book is shot down.

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But this is still fantastic news.

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It's probably the first definitive answer we have about this book in over 400 years.

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So now that the parchment's been dated, scholars want to keep the momentum going.

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So Voynich's hypothesis that this was a 13th-century book

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led him to research what possible authors there could have been in the 13th century

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to write an alchemical text.

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And that led him to Roger Bacon.

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With this new dating of the manuscript, scholars do the same thing again.

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They wonder, in the 1400s, who's known to be an author and illustrator?

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Who's writing in code?

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Who has an interest in science and alchemy?

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And they think, who could have written the book?

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In 2017, one researcher announces, she might know the answer.

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Could this book actually have been written by none other than Leonardo da Vinci?

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Dr. Edith Sherwood is a retired biomedical scientist.

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In these days, she's fascinated by the Voynich manuscript,

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and she's spent countless hours studying it.

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And according to her, there's only one European author in the 1400s that fits the bill.

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In 2002, she publishes an article comparing the manuscript to the notebooks

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and other works of Leonardo da Vinci.

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So then, all of a sudden, she has this new evidence of the carbon dating.

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So now she really is convinced she's onto something,

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and she spends more time researching the manuscript.

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15 years later, she publishes a new article in much greater detail.

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And the evidence she finds is actually pretty compelling.

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Sherwood starts with a detailed handwriting analysis.

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Both the anonymous author of the Voynich manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci

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use a type of writing that's called humanist minuscule script.

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It's a style that was developed in Italy in the early 1400s.

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It's different than a lot of what was being written at the time.

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Most scholarly texts were written in something called gothic script, or black letter.

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And it's a pretty obvious difference when you look at them side by side.

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And not a lot of people were writing like this.

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But Leonardo da Vinci was.

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Not only that, but Leonardo da Vinci and the author of the Voynich manuscript

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have a lot of features that are very similar.

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Neither writes with capital letters, neither punctuates.

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There are no line breaks or paragraph breaks.

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And also they never connect their letters.

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Dr. Sherwood then turns her attention to the manuscript's drawings.

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So we all know that Leonardo da Vinci was.

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He's an okay artist to put it mildly.

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No, obviously he's great.

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All you have to do is look at his works like the Mona Lisa

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would show off his otherworldly talent.

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But in his notebooks, they're just full of these crude drawings and studies.

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Of course, no one would suggest that the illustrations in the Voynich manuscript

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rise to the level of da Vinci's greatest works or mature works.

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Nevertheless, there are some similarities.

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But one thing that was very hard to do in the 15th century

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when drawing and writing was to create perfect circles.

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Without modern drafting equipment, only really, really talented artists.

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Could create a perfect circle only using pen and ink.

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But da Vinci could.

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And so could the author of the Voynich manuscript.

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Dr. Sherwood believes one page of circular drawings

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provides the best clue of all.

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There's an astrological chart representing the sign of Aries

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with 15 nude women sitting in birthing tubs.

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The women appear to be pregnant.

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And in one of the tubs, there's a baby.

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And that mother no longer appears to be pregnant.

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The woman is holding a striped string with a star on the end.

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But all the other women are holding plane strings.

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According to Dr. Sherwood, this page is a birth record.

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Aries the ram represents the month of April.

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And because of the 15 women, she believes that this birth took place on April 15th.

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And the woman holding the baby is positioned roughly at 10 o'clock.

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And guess what?

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Leonardo da Vinci was born just around 10 p.m. on April 15, 1452.

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And of course, the final clue is that the manuscript is written in code.

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And Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote his notebooks in code throughout his adult life.

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He typically used a mirror image code that also sometimes combined or separated certain words.

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Could the Voynich manuscript be da Vinci's first coded notebook?

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The mystery might be even bigger than that.

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I mean, was Leonardo da Vinci writing in code to hide some great secrets of alchemy that he had

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discovered or medical cures? Is the legacy of history's greatest genius even greater than we thought?

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Until it's deciphered, we just won't know.

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For over 100 years, people have speculated on what the Voynich manuscript is and who created it.

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After successfully carbon dating the book's parchment to the 15th century,

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researchers seek other technology to help understand it.

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Dating the book is a huge breakthrough. But of course, that still can't help us determine

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what it is. We know the approximate date of its creation, but that's really about it.

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There's really only one way to fully understand this book, and that's to decode the writing.

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To figure out what language this is, what cipher they used, and start to translate it.

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Unfortunately, it's a code no human has ever been able to crack. But could there be another way?

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In 2016, some computing scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada

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start doing something incredible with the Voynich manuscript.

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They work with artificial intelligence, and they realize, hey, maybe our AI computer

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can finally decipher this text where others have failed.

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Their exact field of study is called natural language processing.

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So it combines computer science and linguistics and artificial intelligence.

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And the goal is to improve interactions between computers and human language.

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Basically, their ultimate goal is to create a computer that you could give any document in

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any language in the history of mankind. And that computer would be able to recognize it

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and understand and analyze it. With the right inputs, the computer might even be able to decipher

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a complicated code in an unidentified language. It is a challenge, but the computer is programmed

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to recognize any and all patterns and compare them with known languages.

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And it can do this thousands and thousands of times faster than a human can. So it's worth a shot.

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Contract starts by entering samples of 400 different languages.

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The AI goes to work comparing the Voynich manuscript to other languages. It looks at

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individual characters. It looks at groups of words. It looks at how often they're repeated

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and in what combinations. All the little nuances that could determine what language this was written in.

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They honestly don't know if this is going to work because this computer is not designed to read

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the Voynich manuscript. However, they work on it for weeks and weeks. And after a while,

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lo and behold, the computer gives them an answer. According to the artificial intelligence at the

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University of Alberta in Canada, the Voynich manuscript is in Hebrew.

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There had been speculation for quite some time that the Voynich manuscript wasn't written in a European

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language because had it been written in Italian or Greek or Latin, somebody more than likely would

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have figured it out by now. And the researchers actually went into this thinking, maybe the

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manuscript was written in Arabic, but Hebrew presents an intriguing possibility.

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Even if they've discovered the language of origin, the book may take years to translate.

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The team thinks that not only was it written in Hebrew, it was written as an alfagram. An alfagram

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is a way of coding language in which you present the letters of a word in alphabetical order.

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So for instance, the alfagram of the word cat would be ACT. The problem of course is that ACT

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also is the alfagram for the word act. So you can see the challenges here. Compounding those

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challenges is the fact that Hebrew isn't typically written with vowels. So researchers are left with

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the painstaking task of going word by word, swapping in the Hebrew letters and then rearranging those

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letters for it to make some sort of sense. Slowly the team makes progress. Once you think you've

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figured out a word, you move on to the next word. But if those two words don't make sense together,

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then you have to go back to the first word and try again. So far they think they've come up with

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three grammatical phrases. She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house, and me and people.

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Unfortunately, this AI was never designed to spend its existence studying the mysteries of the

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Voynich manuscript. So the University of Alberta team only brings its research so far. All they know

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is they think the book was written in Hebrew, but we still don't know what it says.

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Then in 2017, another researcher picks up where the Canadians left off.

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There's a German Egyptologist named Rainer Hannig, and he also thinks the book is in Hebrew.

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And he spends three years studying it, and he makes some progress in translating it,

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and he publishes his findings in 2020. Hannig manages to translate a number of paragraphs on

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multiple pages, and according to his findings, it looks like the Voynich manuscript might be a book of prophecy.

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On one particular page, according to Hannig, it says,

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Drink carefully an elixir that delivers the mind. The elixir allows you to speak prophecy

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and counteract false prophets, but do not speak about the elixir.

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Is the Voynich manuscript a Hebrew manual for predicting the future?

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For quite a while now, there have been two separate schools of thought about the Voynich manuscript.

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The first one, which is also the most popular, is what if it's an encoded version of a known language?

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There are a growing number of people who think that could be entirely wrong.

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For many decades, countless code breakers and scholars have tried and failed to decipher the mysterious Voynich manuscript.

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Then in 2009, researchers pose a radical new question.

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What if the book isn't written encoded at all?

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Since at least the 1500s, people have assumed the Voynich manuscript

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is encoded, but recently a new question has been introduced.

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What if the reason no one's been able to crack the code is because it isn't a code at all?

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What if it's an actual language, but a language that's not human?

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Think about what it takes to create a code, especially one so complex that it defies translation for centuries.

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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.

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If you look at the case of another famous code, the Zodiac Killer,

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look at how the symbols are arranged, spaced out and separate from each other.

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Because Zodiac had to stop and think every step of the way,

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each letter sits on its own.

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But in the Voynich manuscript, it really looks like the author was writing continuously.

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The writing is tightly formed, it flows evenly from letter to letter,

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it's a swift and continuous movement of the pen. They didn't have to stop and think about anything.

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So some say even the most ingenious human couldn't have pulled this off while coming up with an unsolvable code.

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If someone is writing in this continuous style, it's obviously a language they understood,

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and that has some theorists thinking, what if that language is extraterrestrial?

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Did an alien create the Voynich manuscript? There are some exciting precedents for this.

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Eric Von Daniken, well known for his book, Chariots of the Gods, puts this theory forward in his book in 1968.

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And in that book, Von Daniken asserts that many of our ancient technologies were created by aliens,

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such as Stonehenge, Punta Puku, all of these other places, Easter Island, that we did not have the technology to create, so it needed alien assistance.

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He also cites a bunch of literary examples.

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There's an early world map known as the Piri Rees map, and Von Daniken describes it as showing the Earth as it would be seen from space,

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which of course is an impossible viewpoint in 1513 when the map was made.

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When Von Daniken applies the same logic to the Voynich manuscript, he believes he's finally unlocked its mysterious origin.

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In his 2009 book, History is Wrong, Von Daniken goes into great detail about his theory about the Voynich manuscript.

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He believes that it was written by an alien astronaut who was stranded on Earth in the 1400s

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and spent the rest of his life on planet Earth recording his observations in the Voynich manuscript.

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Even though we don't understand the written language, the illustrations seem to indicate that there was a crude understanding, perhaps riddled with inaccuracies.

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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?

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Are we being observed and studied by somebody else out there?

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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.

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And in fact, there's another really well-documented phenomenon that this could be.

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In 2004, the British researchers Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill published a book on the Voynich manuscript.

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The theory they put forth is that the Voynich manuscript is written in glasolalia, which is the speaking of tongues or the language of tongues, in this case the writing in tongues.

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There are thousands of examples of this, catalogued from antiquity to the present, and it typically presents the same way.

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A person generates unintelligible words that appear to be a language but can't be understood.

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In many cases, this is thought to happen while the person is possessed. Could that be what's happening in Voynich?

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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 Bynchen.

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She wrote hundreds of pages in a language known as lingua ignota or the unknown language.

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She had her own script, she had her own vocabulary. Both manuscripts contain perplexing illustrations, so you can see why the comparison suggests itself.

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Hildegard claims she was recording visions that she was receiving, thought to be from the divine.

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Kennedy and Churchill suggest the same phenomenon could have afflicted the Voynich author, causing what is known as automatic or possessed writing.

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Historically, Judeo-Christianity expresses possession as being a real thing, from demonic to angelic possessions.

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Jesus had many examples of him driving out demons.

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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.

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And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of exorcisms performed every month.

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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.

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The possibilities are literally endless.

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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.

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Maybe this mystery is truly unsolvable.

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One of history's most infamous books is a manuscript that no one can understand. But that hasn't stopped people from trying.

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After all this time, no one can read it, no one can understand it.

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We all want to believe that the manuscript has meaning.

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Someone spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of resources writing it, drawing on it.

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The Voynich manuscript must have a purpose. How could it not?

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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.

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There's got to be some sort of amazing secret it wants to let us know.

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But what if the answer is something much more surprising?

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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.

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No one wants to admit it out loud, but what if they're just wasting their time?

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In April 2007, Austrian researcher Andres Schinner completes his own computer analysis of the Voynich manuscript.

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Like everyone else, he's been looking for patterns that might crack the code.

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But instead, his findings show that the statistical properties of the text are most consistent with meaningless gibberish.

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If Schinner is correct, then a lot of people have spent a lot of time on a wild goose chase.

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In some ways, hoax might be the easiest explanation, but if so, I mean, wow, what a hoax.

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Still, hoax or not, we're still trying to find proof of what this book is, not just more speculation.

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So, is there any way to prove that this book could have been faked?

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The material, the parchment on which the manuscript has been written, is carbon dated to the early 15th century.

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You can't fake that. The parchment is 600 years old.

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Somebody in the early 15th century created the manuscript just gibberish.

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It will be extremely difficult to identify who that was.

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But there is one person with a possible motive.

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We're talking about none other than Wilfred Voynich himself.

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For starters, Voynich has a financial motive.

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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.

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Which, of course, he wants to sell for quite a lot of money.

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Supporters of the hoax theory also cite the book's complete lack of provenance.

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People begin to realize, wait, there's actually no written evidence that proves the existence of the Voynich manuscript before Wilfred Voynich.

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Remember, Voynich offers proof in the form of a 17th century letter that he's found.

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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.

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It doesn't mention any details specific to the Voynich manuscript. There's no proof that they're even talking about the same book.

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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.

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Additionally, Voynich's story seems to change over the years.

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In 1912, he says he got it in a castle in southern Europe. In 1915, he says that the castle was in Austria.

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When Voynich's wife Ethel dies in 1960, the letter is discovered only to be opened posthumously that says that he actually found the manuscript in the Jesuit order in Friscati, Italy.

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It all adds up to suspicious behavior. And one has to ask, is Wilfred Voynich just this celebrated and respected antiquities dealer, or has he pulled off one of the single greatest hoaxes in history?

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Is it possible that the centuries-old mystery of the Voynich manuscript is a hoax?

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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.

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It has different size pages that fold out in every which way. It would take a genius-level expert in antique books to pull this off.

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And some think that genius is none other than Wilfred Voynich himself.

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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?

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At some point between 1908 and 1911, Voynich finds a letter by Jan Merrick Marchi that talks about an encoded Roger Bacon manuscript.

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Then, perhaps, he sets about forging a fake one.

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The problem with this hoax theory, and it's the one that 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 parchment and inks and other materials to create such a thing.

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But is it possible Voynich did?

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Shortly before the appearance of the manuscript, Voynich purchases the entire collection of the Libereria Francescini in Italy.

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It's a private collection that consists of over half a million books, pamphlets, maps, and other manuscripts.

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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.

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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.

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Many books and manuscripts have blank pages at the beginning or at the end, another place where you can find ancient blank parchment.

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This would have been a jackpot for Voynich, and from that moment on, he probably had everything he needed to pull this off.

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What about the ink?

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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.

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In his restoration work on his own collections, he sometimes uses that work to create inks and pigments to restore books and manuscripts.

421
00:39:01,560 --> 00:39:12,560
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 Riley, who's also known as the Ace of Spies.

422
00:39:12,560 --> 00:39:20,560
Riley allegedly goes into the British Museum Library and takes out a book that's called Some Observations on Ancient Inks.

423
00:39:20,560 --> 00:39:32,560
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.

424
00:39:32,560 --> 00:39:38,560
If the manuscript is a forgery, it didn't turn out the way Voynich hoped.

425
00:39:38,560 --> 00:39:48,560
The crazy thing is, if Voynich was trying to create a Roger Bacon masterpiece to sell, he fails. Voynich was never able to sell the book.

426
00:39:48,560 --> 00:40:04,560
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.

427
00:40:04,560 --> 00:40:08,560
People didn't want to buy the thing. They wanted to solve it.

428
00:40:08,560 --> 00:40:15,560
But Wilford Voynich did successfully sell at least one forgery that we know of. It's called the Columbus Miniature.

429
00:40:15,560 --> 00:40:23,560
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.

430
00:40:23,560 --> 00:40:29,560
Whether he did this knowingly, we're not entirely sure, but at least there is some precedent for Voynich selling a fake.

431
00:40:29,560 --> 00:40:35,560
Despite this evidence, most scholars still believe the Voynich manuscript is a genuine 15th century article.

432
00:40:35,560 --> 00:40:45,560
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.

433
00:40:45,560 --> 00:40:55,560
So could he have made a forgery that good in the 1910s? Maybe. Is it likely? Probably not.

434
00:40:55,560 --> 00:41:05,560
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.

435
00:41:05,560 --> 00:41:16,560
We want it to be a revelation, the greatest code of all time, which when unlocked will reveal the greatest secrets of the universe.

436
00:41:17,560 --> 00:41:36,560
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.

437
00:41:36,560 --> 00:41:42,560
I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.