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You know what? I've been around for a while. I've traveled the world, met some interesting

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people, done some crazy things. So you might just think there's not much that could take

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me by surprise. You'd be wrong. The world is full of stories and science and things

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that amaze and confound me every single day. Incredible mysteries that keep me awake at

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night. Some I can answer. Others justify logic.

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Like in Germany where forensic scientists testing 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies make

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one of the most remarkable and controversial discoveries in history. All the thousands

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of sea lions that leave San Francisco before an earthquake, did they sense impending disaster?

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And in Rome, a mysterious medieval book is unearthed. Do its secrets hold the fate of

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all mankind?

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Yep. It's a weird world. And I love it.

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Elementary history tells us that in 1492, the great navigator and explorer Christopher

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Columbus traveled from Spain to the Bahamas and on to the Americas. We all know that Columbus

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was the first to bring back artifacts and treasure from the new world of the Americas

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to the old world of Europe. But it's a true. What if the historians are wrong and someone

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else did all this thousands of years before Senior Colon? This next weird tale suggests

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just that and the proof might be found in a guy like this.

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In 1992, a German forensic team makes an extraordinary discovery. Inside several 3,000-year-old Egyptian

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mummies, they find what appears to be evidence of a hardcore narcotic not present in Egypt

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until the late 19th century. Outrageous hoax? Or is the impossible true?

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The ancient Egyptians are a constant source of fascination, an extraordinary civilization

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that gave us the pyramids, sphinx, and the dark mysteries of the mummies. But new research

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has unearthed shocking evidence that may present them in a different light and leads us to

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ask what was really going on in the Valley of the Kings. It would open a big can of worms

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for the scientific community. Recent advances in forensic science have enabled us to dig

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deeper into our past than ever before. But what could it tell us about the lives of people

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who lived 3,000 years ago? Could forensics unlock the secrets of the ancient Egyptians?

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Searching for clues, the German forensic team began the chemical analysis of fragile and

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priceless ancient mummies. They're amazed by what they find. Inside hair and tissue samples,

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they discover evidence of cocaine. So how did these Egyptian mummies, some dating back

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to 300 centuries, get traces of cocaine inside them thousands of years before the substance

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was thought to have reached the Middle East? The only possible answer then, that ancient

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Egyptians had the coca leaf, in other words the pheros, made contact with the native South

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American several millennia before Columbus. Is that weird or what?

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Let's look for answers. The mystery begins with the cocoa plant from which cocaine derives,

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and only in South America. The plant is not native to Africa, so how did South American

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cocaine get into Egyptian mummies? Bernard Ortiz de Montelano is a medical anthropologist.

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Like many in the academic community, he questioned the findings.

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I was very skeptical and knew I would have to look at the original literature and do some

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research myself. Anthropologist Charlene Klingman is also baffled.

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The idea of it appearing in ancient Egyptian mummies is surprising.

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Examining the Egyptian and South American cultures might help solve this bizarre mystery. So

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could there be a connection? Both civilizations built pyramids and both mummified their dead.

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The Egyptians used salts and resins while the natives of Peru allowed their mummies to

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dry naturally. But were the Peruvians using cocaine 3,000 years ago?

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Larry Cartmel is a forensic pathologist. He has tested several mummies from Peru.

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The first few we tested were all negative, but then out of the eight samples, number five

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we tested was positive. We had no idea that cocaine metabolite would last a thousand years.

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And later on we found that actually our oldest one we've had is 3,000 years old.

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Cocaine is a very good local anesthetic and it's a good pain reliever. So they could have

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used it for medicinal purposes as well. And then we found that about half the population

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tested positive for coca leaf use. So it was probably used more frequently than a lot of

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anthropologists had speculated up until that time. Evidence of cocaine in Peruvian and

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Egyptian mummies poses an intriguing question. Did the cultures actually interact? Could

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the Egyptians have traveled to South America? If someone could prove the theory of transatlantic

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travel and back it up with a significant amount of evidence, it would open a big can of worms

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for the scientific community. Could the Egyptians have made the perilous

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Atlantic crossing before Columbus? So here's the problem for the Egyptians. A round trip

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to go pick up some cocaine would have been around 32,000 miles. Of course they would

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have had to endure the perils of an Atlantic crossing and they would need to sail around

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the tip of the Americas. This is an area known as Cape Horn, home to some of the world's

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most treacherous waters, with winds so fierce that even today's ships start to make headway.

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If they survived the Cape they would head north to Peru. Now for their time the ancient Egyptians

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were probably the most sophisticated civilization on earth. But did they really have the sailing

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technology to make such an epic voyage? The ancient Egyptians built many of their boats

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out of papyrus, a reed-like plant. Due to the boat's small size, primitive sails and

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rigging, it is highly unlikely a vessel like this could survive a voyage to South America

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and back. It just doesn't seem possible. It would be

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an amazing, amazing feat. And looking at what the ancient Egyptians have left behind, they

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wrote down all of their conquests, the heroic activities that they embarked upon and there

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is little to no evidence of that. There's evidence of maritime technology, but there's

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nothing that shows that they came and saw unconquered.

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And there's another problem. With the transatlantic theory of the Egyptians did go to South America,

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why didn't they leave a trace? No artifacts from South American have ever been found in

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ancient Egyptian sites. One would think that if they made contact with the South Americans,

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things like corn or other cultural commodities would have returned with them and that's just

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not appearing in the archaeological record. So you have no record in the new world, you

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have no record in the old world, there is no record in Egypt of a trip. And that's

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not true. You have no record in the old world. There is no record in Egypt of a trip that

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mentions cocaine or going to the new world or going in a re-boat in the world.

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There just hasn't been anything to support the theory that these ancient individuals were

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making contact. We're actually making successful journeys across the Atlantic.

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You have to be doing two, three hundred round trips a year to get that much coca leaf into

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the Egyptian population. So right there you have an enormous number of assumptions.

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The mystery deepens. If there was no way for cocaine to have crossed the ocean, why was

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it found in Egyptian mummies? It could have been a lab contamination, it could have been

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a transfer contamination. Any number of the mummies that you would see in a museum today

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have traveled beyond getting buried in their tombs. There's plenty of opportunities for

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contamination to occur. If it was housed in for say a crate that might have been used

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to hold something else at one point in time, there's opportunities for trace contamination there.

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So we know that there is no way the Egyptians made it all the way over to South America.

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Oh well, it was fun when it lasted. Columbus you can stop spinning in your grave now.

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But the question remains, how did cocaine get in the Egyptian mummies?

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The 19th century was a golden age in archeological exploration. The rediscovery of lost and ancient

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civilizations captured the public's imagination.

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The idea of ancient Egypt was a sensation. It was as popular as our blockbuster films

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today. People had an interest in it. They were reading about it. They were studying it.

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They had a vested interest in this culture. They wanted a part of it. They wanted it as close to

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them as in their own homes.

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For the European elite, owning an Egyptian mummy was a must have status symbol.

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And a lot of the ancient Egyptian collections that are out there have been housed in people's

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homes throughout the years. Coffins, mummies, funerary objects. A lot of it comes from

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private collections.

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Those days rich people in nobles and kings had collections of all kinds of things.

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They would collect strange animals and shells and minerals and weird things.

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And among one of the things they'd like to collect was Egyptian mummies. And they'd have these

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collections of their own private little museums, which they would use on social occasions to

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take people and show them their collection.

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The archeological methods of the time were very unsophisticated, often allowing modern

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debris to become trapped next to the mummified remains.

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By the late part of the 1800s, cocaine was introduced into Europe and commonly used as a medicine.

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Is it possible these mummies somehow became contaminated during this time?

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It's a conceivable situation.

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Hmm, conceivable but improbable.

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The evidence of cocaine found by the forensic team had been ingested into the body through

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eating or inhalation. These traces then became incorporated into body tissue and air while alive.

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Brief contact couldn't produce the same result, plus the team had carefully washed their samples to

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remove any contaminants.

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So the mystery lives on.

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How did these drugs end up inside these ancient bodies?

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Well, perhaps these mummies weren't from ancient Egypt at all.

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During the time period when ancient Egyptian mummies were being sold as a commodity, there is an

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opportunity for scam artists to get on board and create fake mummies in order to turn a profit.

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So fake mummies were being produced and sold abroad to individuals seeking something glamorous and

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interesting. What they got might have been something different than what they paid for.

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And so there's enormous demand for mummies.

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And like I said, in Egypt there weren't that many mummies available.

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And so what you would do is the enterprising people would go out there and get linen and they wrap up some

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cadaver.

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So a fake mummy is one that has been made in the 19th century and then sold as an authentic mummy.

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And the argument that some people would make is these fake mummies in fact were contaminated.

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But the mummies examined by the researchers aren't fake.

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They've been certified genuine by the museum where they reside.

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So for now, it seems unlikely, we will ever know the truth of the cocaine mummies.

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The researchers have never let anyone else test their samples and evidence of cocaine in other

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Egyptian mummies has yet to be found.

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At the end of the day, the scientific community is left with a lot of open-ended questions.

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There's a lot of things that have yet to be answered.

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For now, this is all we've got.

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Is that weird or what?

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All...

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It's common knowledge that we human beings have five senses.

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Touching, taste, smell, hearing, sight.

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But what about the animal kingdom?

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As it turns out, there are lots of animals out there that can sense things that we cannot.

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Bats use sonar to perceive objects and submarine life can sense subtle electrical impulses.

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But some creatures may even have more mysterious awareness.

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Be quiet!

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The ability to sense disaster.

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San Francisco, December 2009.

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A mysterious event shocks the city.

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Thousands of sea lions living on its docks suddenly disappear overnight.

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Days later, an earthquake rocks the region.

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Did the sea lions sense impending doom?

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Weird or what?

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San Francisco is one of the most popular tourist destinations in America.

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One of its leading attractions is the thousands of sea lions that live on Pier 39.

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They've made this their happy home for the past 20 years, but in December 2009, something remarkable happened.

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Suddenly, the sea lions were gone.

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They virtually disappeared overnight.

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Why?

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Can I ask you that one?

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That would be like the ravens leaving the Tower of London.

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All this dark used to be full of them.

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We were quite disappointed when we came and just saw one or two pontoons, you know.

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We really don't know why the animals left.

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Jim Oswald runs the Bay Area Marine Mammal Center.

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He witnessed the sea lions' disappearance.

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In November, that number went from 927 down to 20.

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And that really surprised people.

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Especially if you're expecting to see massive numbers of sea lions to only see 20, it's quite a shock.

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It's highly unusual behavior, but was there a darker side to this mystery?

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On January 9, 2010, soon after the sea lions left San Francisco, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the coast of northern California near the town of Eureka.

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The quake left thousands without power and cost damage, worth millions of dollars.

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The U.S. Geological Survey is responsible for monitoring seismic activity, but was unable to predict the earthquake.

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Is it possible? A sea lion sensed it and left?

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It's an intriguing theory.

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Jim Birkeland is a geologist and former U.S. Coast Guard advisor.

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He studied the ability of animals to sense disaster for more than 20 years.

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I know animals can predict earthquakes.

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It's clear to me that they left the Bay Area for good reason.

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And it wasn't because the tourists were failing to feed them or applaud.

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Jim has found an unusual way to test his theory.

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So I started keeping track of missing pets.

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In 1979, after four earthquakes rocked California, Jim checked the missing pet ads at the back of local newspapers.

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He was looking to see if the number of missing animals increased before the tremors.

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We had record numbers of missing pets just before local quakes.

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Never had seen more than 15 missing cat ads and there were 27.

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And there were 58 missing dog ads. These were record numbers.

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Something had to be going on that the animals were alert to.

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Remarkably, there have been similar reports of this type of animal behavior worldwide.

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In May 2008, residents of Taijum, China witnessed thousands of frogs cross a bridge.

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A few days later, an earthquake killed more than 60,000 people.

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Can animals sense something we can't?

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There are tremendous changes in the electromagnetic field in the area of earthquakes.

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Some scientists believe increased strain on the Earth's crust near earthquake fault lines produces electromagnetic signals, hours before an earthquake strikes.

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We know the electromagnetic field is troubled by changes in the solar flares, by stresses in the crust,

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and the animals have been using changes in the magnetic field for navigation for millions of years.

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But not everyone is convinced that the sea lions knew of the impending earthquake.

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Kim Ram Sariah is a marine biologist at the Marine Animal Institute at Oregon University.

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I'm sure that they have the ability to sense things that we don't,

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but there have been many earthquakes over the past 20 years and the sea lions have not left San Francisco.

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I don't think that they left because of an earthquake.

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So, if they didn't leave San Francisco because of an earthquake, why did so many sea lions leave their home so abruptly?

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Why don't we ask them?

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Why the sea lions left is still a mystery.

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But where they went would soon become clear thanks to a discovery in nearby Oregon.

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Dan Harkin runs the sea lion caves in Florence, Oregon, 500 miles up the coast from San Francisco.

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Just one week after the massed exodus from San Francisco, Dan noticed that the population of sea lions in Oregon had grown dramatically.

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Were these the sea lions from Pier 39?

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The stellar sea lions are the largest of the sea lion family.

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At this time of year in the winter we have around 500 stellar sea lions inside the cave.

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And then just before Thanksgiving we started getting reports that there were sea lions gathering about a quarter mile up the road here.

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The numbers were way above anything we'd ever seen.

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So we investigated and we find out that the beach was just completely clustered with sea lions.

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So when you have two or three thousand more than we normally do, people were bringing in cameras and showing us what they had taken and I just couldn't believe it.

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As the number of sea lions on the coast of Oregon grew it seemed likely they were the ones missing from Pier 39.

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But if it wasn't an earthquake, what had driven thousands of them 500 miles north of their home in San Francisco?

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Marine biologist Kim Ram Sariah has an incredible theory. She believes the answer could lie with changes to the ocean brought on by something called El Niño.

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The primary reason for them to travel is to find food. There is a strong El Niño going on and it's driving the prey to the north.

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The sea lions and the other fish eating birds are taking advantage of that.

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El Niño is a periodic change in climate that warms the subsurface of the Pacific Ocean by several degrees.

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It can dramatically affect weather around the world. But could El Niño be responsible for the sea lions' disappearance as well?

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Maybe.

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Kim believes the powerful El Niño of 2010 could have caused sardines and herring to be a huge threat to the ocean.

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Kim believes the powerful El Niño of 2010 could have caused sardines and herring to travel north in search of cooler, food-rich waters with the sea lions in close pursuit.

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So since sea lions can't order take out, is it possible? They just went out for dinner?

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The fact that we're seeing so many baitfish off of Oregon coast this year, we're seeing a lot of young sardines.

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We're seeing record numbers of gulls. We're seeing record numbers of brown pelicans.

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And they're staying here during the winter where they usually head south. Food is really good here right now and the sea lions are taking advantage of that.

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So my guess is that the reason that they left Pier 39 is just because there was a lack of food in that area. So they took off in search of food.

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So what is the answer to the mystery of San Francisco's disappearing sea lions? Did they predict an impending earthquake? Were they simply chasing food? Was it something else?

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Scientists may never know, but there is a happy ending.

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In February 2010, three months after the disappearance, the sea lions returned to their home on Pier 39.

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So the mystery remains, but perhaps now San Franciscans can rest easy. Is that weird or what?

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What would you say if I told you that there was a book containing the secrets of the dark arts, alchemy, and wizardry?

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A book that can literally reveal all the mysteries of the universe? A tome that threatens everything our entire civilization is founded upon?

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You'd say, yeah, right, but I bet you still want to see it.

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Throughout history, mysterious books and writings have caused panic and controversy. Some believe that in his book, The Prophecies of Nostradamus, predicted the rise of Hitler. The 9-11 attacks, the end of the world.

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But there is another mysterious book that many believe contains other cataclysmic predictions. Its dark secrets are yet to be revealed.

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Historians, linguists, and code breakers are attempting to decipher its meaning. What will they reveal?

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Experts worldwide are obsessed by this item, MS408, of the rare book and manuscript library at Yale University, its current home.

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First impression was that it's extraordinarily bizarre, but that it's also oddly familiar. On one level, it looks like something you've seen before.

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But the more you look at it, the more you realize that it's really like nothing you've seen before. So it only gradually do you become aware that this isn't a normal kind of manuscript at all.

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This mysterious book has been known as the Voynich Manuscript. It was discovered in 1912 by rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in a Jesuit library near Rome.

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Its author has never been revealed.

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Nearly a hundred years later, historians like Professor Nicholas Terpstra are still trying to decipher the manuscript's contents.

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Unidentifiable plants.

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Are these the plants from the Garden of Eden?

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Strange astrological symbols.

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Is this somehow the astrology of another level of the universe?

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And most mysterious of all, pages of text that 100 years later still remain undecypered.

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As you try to read the lettering, you realize that it's completely impossible to decipher. And if we can just break it out, we'll find the answer to everything.

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A manuscript that promises to change the world and no one can read the thing? And if that wasn't enough?

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No bio in the back cover, no one knows who wrote it?

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So is there anything we do know about the Voynich Manuscript?

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Well, in 2009, researchers at the University of Arizona carbon-dated it and discovered it may have been produced in the first half of the 15th century.

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And that fact opens up a whole world of theories.

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You won't believe what I'm saying here.

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What mysterious secrets does the Voynich manuscript contain? Could there be predictions like those of Nostradonis, prophesizing Arduan?

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To begin, investigators needed to find out when it was written. In 2009, they got a significant clue.

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Researchers at the University of Arizona carbon-dated the parchment. They discovered it might have been produced in the first half of the 15th century.

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Could this vital piece of evidence reveal the secrets of the Voynich manuscript?

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Medieval Europe was a continent emerging from the Dark Ages into a new dawn of innovation and discovery.

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The early 15th century is a time of extraordinary expansion, expansion of people's creativity, curiosity, people who are curious about all sorts of things in the world.

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There's a certain amount of political instability, but there's a lot of economic expansion and merchants are going to all different parts of the world.

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There's also a real curiosity about learning, about particularly finding out what the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans knew and trying to take that knowledge and bring it back into contemporary society.

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So everybody thought that the way to the future lay through the past.

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This new era of innovation fueled interest in more controversial beliefs like alchemy and other dark arts.

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Books were written which contained what many believed were ancient scientific or alchemical techniques.

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One of the most famous were Giammatista de la Porta's Magia Naturalis.

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Books of secrets were common at the time. The notion was that the only truths that are really important are the truths that aren't immediately apparent.

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So that true knowledge is secret knowledge and the way to get secret knowledge was usually by revelation of some kind.

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So there's a whole tradition that goes back to the Greeks of books of secrets that explain then the secret knowledge of the universe, the secret connections within the universe,

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and then the way to probe this, to understand it and normally then to try to work with it.

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So the whole idea of a book of secrets is that it's like a technical manual for controlling the powers of the universe.

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But for a time these ancient truths were heresy. To avoid persecution, many authors would find ways to disguise sensitive information in their writings.

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So it tended to be the kind of things they wanted to hide for political purposes.

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One of the most common forms of disguise was to compose in a language few people could read.

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What you do find, there's a whole range of languages that people are rediscovering. This is the time period, early 15th century,

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when people are reacquaining themselves with things like Egyptian hieroglyphics and believe that hieroglyphics are the answer to finding out what true Egyptian knowledge was.

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This is a time when people are trying to find out what Etruscan looked like, ancient Etruscan.

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This is a time when people actually invent languages and a hundred years later you'll find somebody who invents a language from,

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supposedly the language from the ancient biblical times that was spoken by the angels.

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There's also a real curiosity about learning, about particularly finding out what the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans knew

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and trying to take that knowledge and bring it back into contemporary society.

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So everybody thought that the way to the future lay through the past.

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They're looking for ancient knowledge anywhere they can get it. The more ancient the better.

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Have you ever heard of a language called Iac? Iac. No, no, Iac. See, I thought not.

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This was a language that was spoken by native Alaskans and let me emphasize was in 2008 the last person who could speak Iac died.

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Languages come and go, in fact, of the nearly 7,000 languages around the world today, 500 of them.

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That's 500 of them are teetering on the edge of extinction.

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Is it possible that the Voynich manuscript is the remnant of a forgotten extinct language?

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Is the Voynich manuscript a remnant of an ancient language rediscovered by a 15th century scholar?

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Stephen Chrissomalus is a linguistics expert.

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Throughout history there must have been tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of languages spoken, most of which are now long extinct.

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The Voynich manuscript is fascinating because it's so close to something that we could decipher and we could read.

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Many of the letters look like letters in the Roman alphabet and yet as soon as you get into it, it falls to pieces.

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Linguists call the text found in the Voynich manuscript, Voynichese.

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If it is indeed a language, its complex designs make Voynichese almost impossible to recognize.

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While it appears to have some familiar characters, what they mean and how they relate to each other has experts baffled.

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In most languages, if you look at a page of text, the most common words in that text will be short.

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So if you were to go to your shelf and pick out a book, I can absolutely tell you with 100% certainty that the common words will be nice short words, the, a, of, it, etc.

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In the Voynich manuscript, the most common words aren't short words and that's a mystery.

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That's one of the reasons why some scholars think that it in fact doesn't represent language at all because it doesn't have lots and lots of those little short words that we find again and again and again in languages across the world.

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This is not just about English, but it's in fact a property of human language.

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The Voynich manuscript seems as technically sophisticated as a real written language, but incredibly it bears no resemblance to any other language that we know of.

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But some historians believe that was the intention and the Voynich manuscripts unknown author didn't want its secrets revealed. Ever.

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Could the secret knowledge within the Voynich manuscript have been disguised with a code, perhaps a medieval cipher text?

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Oh, damn it.

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You know what a cipher is, right? It's a way you can encrypt or decrypt something.

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Yeah, jumble things up to hide sensitive information.

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Have you ever done a cryptogram? Well, that's a cipher. Simple, letter, substitution game.

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Not for me, I suck at it.

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The simplest type of code is a simple substitution cipher where you take one letter to the alphabet and replace it with another.

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So A would be encoded by BCD. So while a message encrypted by this cipher might look unintelligible, if you study it closely, you'll start to see patterns.

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If you're encrypting an English language, for example, E is the most common letter used in the English language, say.

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So when you look at the encrypted text, you might find that the letter L is the most encrypted letter in the text.

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So then you would suspect that maybe L represents E.

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The problem, as some of the greatest code breakers in history have discovered, is finding those patterns in the Voynich manuscript.

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By the Second World War, the art of encrypting documents had been nearly perfected by the Germans' enigma cipher machine.

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To crack the enigma's code, allied code breakers had to push their technology beyond its limits.

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The governments brought together teams of hundreds, if not thousands, of their brightest minds to try to figure out how these ciphers, how these substitutions were working.

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And in order to break the codes, they had to try thousands and thousands and thousands of different combinations to the point where they couldn't really be done by hand

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and they had to invent machines to break the codes for them.

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And they started with mechanical machines and eventually built up to electronic machines.

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Aided by Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, the Allies deciphered what was then the most complex code in history.

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But then, they tried to break the Voynich manuscript.

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So many of these cryptographers from the UK and the United States and elsewhere who'd broken these extremely difficult ciphers from the 20th century, tried to break this 15th century cipher.

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So why is it that they failed?

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Even to the world's best minds, the Voynich manuscript seems impenetrable.

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If it's a code, no one can break it.

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If it's a language, no one can understand it.

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Everything seen on its pages is a mystery.

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Gordon Rugge is a Voynich expert. He believes he might have the answer.

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He feels the mystery is not what we can see in the manuscript, but what we can't.

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Even the most perfectionist modern calligraphers still make some mistakes.

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They have to erase those mistakes, scratch the parchment clean and then write the correct text.

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There's no evidence of that happening in the Voynich manuscript.

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So the strong implication is that the content didn't matter.

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The person was just writing gibberish and they knew it.

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But the perfection found in the Voynich manuscript could reveal that it's a fake.

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Professor Gordon Rugge believes he has the answer.

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The simplest explanation for the Voynich manuscript is that it's a hoax.

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It's a brilliant hoax. It's an amazing hoax.

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A hoax that lasts for 500 years.

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Hoax? What? You mean all the secrets of the universe are not in this one book?

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That raises a kind of obvious question. Why would anyone do that?

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It must have taken years. Doesn't they have anything better to do? So what could it be?

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Well, let me think. Why do most people do anything usually because of this?

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Could it be that the manuscript was faked to make money?

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Could the Voynich manuscript be a perfect crime created by a medieval prankster?

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To investigate, experts would need to go back to the 15th century.

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Works like those of Nostradamus were hugely successful when they were first published.

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The educated classes revered any book that promised the secrets of the universe.

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There would be a big market for something like this, precisely because it's so strange and rare and because it's so secret.

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For a Renaissance banker owning a manuscript was like owning a van Gogh to a modern-day Wall Street banker.

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It shows that you're about more than money. You know what culture is and you're a culture intelligent individual.

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So it's a mark of status. It's a mark of conspicuous consumption.

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Even if there was a financial incentive to create the manuscript, how could its author make it appear as technically consistent as real language?

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Most people had previously assumed that to create something the size of the Voynich manuscript as meaningless gibberish would take decades.

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If you try making up gibberish out of your head, it's surprisingly difficult.

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You start repeating yourself over and over again. That would be easily detectable.

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There are cases of people doing things like automatic writing, but again, the record doesn't match what we see in the Voynich manuscript.

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There are things that you can do like randomly combining characters, but we know the combinations are not random.

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So all of the plausible, familiar ways of generating meaningless gibberish produce output, which is visibly different from what you see in the Voynich manuscript.

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But Professor Ragh has an incredible new theory. Creating the manuscript was actually easy, and today he's going to put his theory to the test.

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I think that what we'll see today is large quantities of text coming out, text which has got similar characteristics to Voynich cheese in different ways.

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I think another thing we'll see today is how quickly text can be produced using this method, whether or not it would be feasible to use this method to produce a meaningless hoax for profit.

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Gordon hopes his experiment will reveal how the author created an indecipherable manuscript quickly and easily.

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To begin, Gordon is using three world-class calligraphers. Working on a table consisting of 600 blank squares, the calligraphers copy random syllables from the Voynich manuscript into the squares, leaving some of them blank.

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Three squares are then cut in random positions from the heavy cardboard called a grill.

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The grill is then placed anywhere on the table. This simple technique reveals a Voynich cheese word.

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Finally, the word is copied onto a page of manuscript. The grill slides to the right and it's repeated.

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Using this method, the entire Voynich manuscript could be created in weeks.

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These people have produced text that looks like Voynich cheese. They've produced it fast.

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At this speed, you'd be able to produce the entire manuscript in a matter of weeks with a team like this.

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So I think this shows that my method is certainly feasible.

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The experiment suggests that the author could have created the Voynich manuscript quickly and out of greed.

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But until the truth is revealed, for many, the mystery remains.

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If this remarkable book does contain dark and mysterious secrets, we'll need to discover new ways of finding them.

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Weird or what?

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I can read this.

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You saw Tekema as ect. Go to now recovery.

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It's so close to what we know and yet it's so far from what we can decipher.

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So something that lies just outside our grasp. We need to find out what's in there because it is so intriguing.

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So there we have it. Three strange and mysterious stories.

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But each with many plausible theories to explain them.

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How did traces of cocaine end up on Egyptian mummies up to 3,000 years old?

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A 19th century scan? Or must history be rewritten?

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Did the ancient Egyptians travel to South America?

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Did thousands of sea lions suddenly leave San Francisco simply because they were following their source of food?

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Or do they have the power to sense earthquakes?

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And is the Voynich manuscript a meaningless hoax?

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Is it written in a forgotten tongue? Or does this medieval tome contain dark, coded secrets?

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You decide.

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Join me next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be... weird or what.