Original subtitles

[narrator] Can this golden disc answer the biggest mystery of all?

Are we alone in the universe?

[narrator] What secrets are hidden in a bizarre 600 year old book that nobody can read?

The Voynich manuscript is one enormous puzzle.

It could be a hidden key to unknown mysteries.

[narrator] And is this stone mirror a conduit to the supernatural?

This weird thing is encased in mystery.

Nobody knew how it worked or where this came from.

[narrator] These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on Earth.

Hidden away in museums, laboratories and storage units.

Now, new research and technology can get under their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them, pull them apart and zoom in

to reveal the unbelievable, the ancient

and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's strangest things.

[mysterious music playing]

[narrator] This is the most distant manmade object in the universe.

An eye catching gold disc.

It's already beyond the limits of our solar system, 14 billion miles from Earth.

Now, to reveal its secrets, we're bringing it back home virtually.

[dramatic music playing]

This is the Voyager Golden Record.

Just 12 inches in diameter.

Etched onto its outer casing are what appear to be

incomprehensible scientific hieroglyphs.

And what's inside is even more bizarre.

[Philip] It is a metal disc that is coated with gold

and engraved with these very fine grooves that preserve information.

[narrator] It looks like an LP record because that's exactly what it is.

A record of a very human planet.

Pictures, sounds, music and a message in 55 languages.

[Sascha] In essence, it's a time capsule giving us a glimpse of the human world.

[narrator] But this message is not designed for humanity.

[Maggie] The purpose of the disc was to explain what planet Earth is all about.

And the goal was to pass information on to aliens out there.

[narrator] But how do you create something that can be understood by an alien species

you don't even know exists?

What exactly is on the disc? And why send it in the first place?

By 1972, humans have put 12 men on the moon,

sent seven successful unmanned probes to Venus and four to Mars.

But NASA wants to explore further. Much further.

[man] Three, two, one...

[narrator] In 1977, NASA launches two state of the art space probes.

[man] And we have lift off.

The first of two Voyager spacecrafts to extend man's senses

farther into the solar system than ever before.

[pleasant music playing]

[narrator] Voyager 1...

and Voyager 2.

Their mission? To visit all the outer planets,

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune for the very first time.

But this will be a one way trip.

[Maggie] If you want to send a probe to the outer planets

it needs to be travelling stupidly fast, about ten miles per second.

But when you're travelling at that speed, you can't stop.

You sort of fly past all the planets grabbing pictures as you go

and then you keep on going.

That means after they'd finished their mission, they're just going to carry on

out into interstellar space.

[narrator] So NASA dreams up a plan for the probes to carry a message

out into the universe.

The Golden Record.

The idea was that if in some distant future, thousands or even millions of years hence

some alien civilization were to come across this bizarre artifact

floating in deep space

and then maybe decode information that's contained on it.

Find out something about the strange species that sent this time little traveler off

deep into interstellar space.

[narrator] It is a message in a bottle.

A message to a race of space-faring aliens.

To my mind the golden disc is, I guess a dream, a hope

that one day something out there might find it and realize that we're here.

We're alive and we want to make contact.

[narrator] But if NASA is really serious about making first contact with

an advanced alien species,

why on earth did they send something as old-fashioned as a record?

That decision falls to the man who NASA selects to produce their interstellar message.

Carl Sagan.

[Andrew] Carl Sagan was one of the most famous scientists and science communicators

of the 20th century.

At heart he was an astronomer. But he was also one of the world's first astrobiologists.

He was really interested in the nitty gritty science of

what aliens would actually look like.

[narrator] Whatever format Sagan chooses to carry his message to the stars

has to survive thousands of years.

And space is a brutal place.

Beyond the Earth atmosphere is a very harsh environment.

[Maggie] Radiation from the Sun blasts you.

Temperature ranges are suddenly huge.

[Philip] It's a very dangerous environment.

So it's actually very difficult to think about what sort of object

is going to be able to retain information in that environment.

[mystical music playing]

[narrator] Sagan ignores the magnetic tapes used in 70s computers.

The tape itself would disintegrate in space.

Instead, he goes old school. Vinyl.

[Maggie] The idea of using a phonograph, a record, to send information

seems bizarre. Even in the 70s it was dated a technology. But it was a good way to go.

It's a physical object, the information is stored on it

in these tiny little grooves.

They're carved into the material.

They're going to be able to withstand a bit of bombardment from high energy particles.

[narrator] They assume that any species capable of building spacecraft

will be able to work out how to play the disc.

And for good measure, they decide to include a record needle under the cover.

But actual vinyl, the material isn't space-proof.

So they pimp it up.

They decided they would make it out of metal.

In fact they made it out of engraved copper.

And then to make sure that it was going to last for a long time,

they coated the copper with gold.

Because gold is a very inert metal.

It doesn't corrode. It doesn't degrade easily.

[narrator] Sagan's next problem is what to put on his intergalactic record.

How can he sum up all of humanity and the world around us

on a 12 inch LP?

[narrator] NASA has given astronomer Carl Sagan

the job of sending a comprehensive message about us

to aliens.

But it's all got to squeeze on to a single 12 inch disc.

The challenge posed by this is immense.

You have got one record.

And on it, you somehow have to sum up

the nature of human civilization in all its many forms.

What do you put on the record?

[narrator] NASA gives Sagan just eight months to complete and deliver the entire project

He builds a team from scientists, musicologist and artists

It includes SETI pioneer, Frank Drake.

And author Ann Druyan, Sagan's future wife.

The first thing the disc does is say, "Hi from everyone on Earth."

The beginning of the record has a greeting from the UN Secretary General

and greetings in 55 different languages.

One of the weirdest things is that uh...

Two of those greetings, one of them is Sumerian,

and another is ancient Greek,

neither of which have been spoken for quite some time.

[narrator] Greetings done, the aliens can relax with 90 minutes of eclectic tunes.

The greatest hits of an entire planet.

You've got Mozart's Magic Flute opera.

A Georgian folk song.

Johann Sebastian Bach, of course.

Songs from Navajo Indians.

-The Brandenburg Concertos. -Indonesian gamelan music.

A Japanese song about cranes.

And of course, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode.

[Sascha] Sagan is a pioneer here in that he's

put together a collection of world music

before the term or concept "World Music" was really in common usage.

[narrator] Then, there's the sounds of the Earth.

A rousing compilation of wind,

thunder, an erupting volcano,

animal noises,

Morse code,

a train, a tractor, a moon rocket,

and a kiss.

Sagan wants this to be a truly multimedia experience for our new alien friends.

So, it gets a photo album too.

By an incredibly fortunate coincidence, the technology had just been developed

to allow images to be recorded to vinyl discs.

[narrator] But there is space for just 115 pictures.

Surprisingly, Sagan wastes the first one on a plain circle.

The thinking being that circles are universal structures.

There will be circles anywhere in the universe.

And any alien civilization intelligent enough to start decoding this message

will figure out pretty quickly that this was a circle.

[narrator] So aliens can use this to tell if the pictures are the correct shape.

That leaves space for just 114 more pictures to show to the aliens.

[Andrew] When we look at a photograph,

you have a much better idea of what you're looking at than an alien might.

So, the picture of a couple of people holding hands...

Would an alien even recognize that those are separate organisms

or would they think that's just one giant creature?

[narrator] The pictures they choose cover biology

animals, plants, our planet

our behavior, our civilizations,

and our accomplishments.

All in just 115 images.

The final addition to the disc is a one hour recording of human brain waves.

Just in case aliens can read our minds.

[Andrew] The Voyager Golden Record is a pretty good answer

to a frankly ridiculous question.

Which is how can you encapsulate the entire works,

the entire history of a species

life on a planet, a planet, a solar system

on basically two sides of a long playing record?

[narrator] The content is the easy bit.

The tricky part is the instructions.

These will be engraved on the disc's cover.

But how do you create instructions that the aliens will understand?

[amusing music playing]

The team's only assumption is that anyone who finds the disc

will already have made it into space.

But they won't speak or read any human language.

And their measurements for time and distance will be totally, well, alien.

So what unit of measure could possibly be considered literally universal?

The genius answer comes from Frank Drake.

If you listen to the universe with the right radio at the right frequency

you can hear a signal. And it's a signal that pervades throughout the universe.

It's a signal created by the most common element in the universe.

Hydrogen.

[narrator] This signal is known as the Hydrogen Hyperfine transition.

Drake's choice of using the hydrogen frequency was a brilliant one.

Any intelligent beings out there would be aware of this frequency.

[narrator] Its wavelength is 8.28 inches long.

And the time it takes for a single oscillation

is seven tenths of a billionth of a second.

And those measurements are the same everywhere in the universe.

Frequency of the oscillation gives you a universal unit of time.

The wavelength of that oscillation gives you a universal unit of distance.

[narrator] To explain this to aliens, Sagan engraves on the cover

a tiny drawing of two hydrogen atoms representing the hyperfine transition.

So imagine you're an alien, you find this disc

you can use it to explain how tall a human being is or how big the solar system is

in terms of hydrogen hyperfine wavelengths.

Or you can use it to explain time.

How long it takes a human baby to be born or even how fast you have to play this record.

[narrator] The next problem is numbers.

How exactly does an alien count?

Now most of us work in base 10 what that means is you've got digits from 0 to 9 which is

ten digits in total.

And that makes big numbers easier to write in a small space.

But essentially, it's completely arbitrary.

[narrator] Sagan can't rely on aliens counting in tens.

But there is one system that any intelligent being should recognize.

The numerical information on the Golden Record is encoded in binary.

So just using ones and zeroes.

And the reason is that binary is perhaps the most fundamental numerical system.

If they're advanced enough to be space-faring,

hopefully, they'll be able to understand the mathematics that we've used.

[narrator] At high magnification you can see a picture of the record itself

on the cover.

And engraved around it in binary is the speed it should rotate at.

16 and 2/3rd rpm.

And a diagram of nearby stars with their distances also marked in binary

gives directions to Earth.

There's one last unplanned but very human addition to the record.

Under extreme magnification

there's a faint inscription

scratched into the surface

by the men that cut the master disk.

It reads, "To the makers of music

all worlds all times."

And there you have it.

A snapshot of human life on Earth,

and the means for ET to read it.

All contained in one LP.

So what has become of these interstellar messengers?

[narrator] The Voyager space probes

are carrying a message from Earth

and are now over 11 billion miles away from our planet.

The Voyager spacecraft transformed our understanding

of bodies that are out there.

As the probes went through space,

we get these images back.

Saw close-ups of Jupiter.

We can just about make the red spot out

from Earth using telescopes.

But now, we could see

a dynamic weather system

churning around this amazingly huge planet.

We went out to Saturn

and saw close-up of the rings.

It just transformed our understanding.

Neptune and Uranus,

had been just points of light from Earth.

And now we could see them

as of a beautiful, sort of aqua marine bodies.

[narrator] Incredibly, more than 40 years after launch,

both Voyagers are still working.

They have left the solar system,

carrying our message on a golden disk,

out into the Universe.

It will be 40,000 years

before either of them passes close to another star.

The golden record is a beautiful, hopeful message

about a bountiful, amazing planet that it comes from.

A huge mixture

of different cultures and languages

and even emotions have gone into making this record.

[narrator] The question is will anyone or anything

ever find them?

In a locked cabinet at Yale University,

is a strange medieval book

that has confounded historians

for a hundred years.

There is just one copy in existence,

we have no idea who wrote it

and we have no idea what it's about.

It's one enormous mystery.

[narrator] This is the Voynich manuscript.

It measures nine by six inches

and it's pages are made of cat skin parchment.

It has 240 pages.

Sometimes with inked illustrations.

[narrator] It's pages are covered

with incomprehensible writing.

It really looks like a language.

[narrator] But is it?

We can't really make sense of the letters.

[narrator] Why would anyone create such a detailed book

and then make it impossible to understand?

The text is a riddle

but the drawings aren't much better.

[narrator] It's packed with arcane symbols

and bizarre illustrations.

Like naked ladies bathing, plants and castles.

Now recent research may finally have uncovered

hidden clues in these drawings

that could help explain this mystery.

Despite that, the Voynich manuscript remains an enigma.

Where does it come from?

How old is it?

And what is it trying to tell us?

It could still be a hidden key

to unknown mysteries.

[narrator] Even a brief glance at this bizarre document

raises one very obvious possibility.

[Mark] When you take everything together,

the illegible alphabet, the weird drawings,

sooner or later you have to consider that

it might be a relatively modern hoax.

[narrator] For decades, the Voynich manuscript

has been tainted by accusations

that it is a modern fake

created for the lucrative antiquarian book market.

If it is, the prime suspect

has to be the man who discovered it in 1912,

Wilfrid Voynich.

[Kevin] Voynich spent his life

looking for rare books and lost manuscripts.

If you were looking for a character

who would have had the correct mental equipment

to construct such a fake,

he would certainly be a candidate.

[narrator] But it is also possible Voynich

was the victim of a scam

perpetrated by the people

he bought the manuscript from.

[Mark] He bought it from a monastery

that was in dire need of money.

So maybe they just made something up,

gave it to him, sold it,

and got some money for it.

[narrator] To find the truth,

experts have turned to science.

[Andrew] In 2009, scientists at the University of Arizona,

managed to use carbon dating

to work out that the manuscript date

as from somewhere between 1404 and 1438.

So the vellum it's made from at least days from the appropriate time.

[narrator] But that doesn't mean

it's written in the Middle Ages.

Using old vellum

or reusing pages from an old manuscript

is a common forger's trick.

To test this, scientists analyze the ink

searching for synthetic modern chemicals.

The ink that was used on the manuscript

is very similar to the inks that were used in other

medieval manuscripts.

They're made of things like hematite or iron,

naturally occurring simple substances,

rather than the complex hydrocarbons

that are often used as pigments in modern inks.

[narrator] The combination of different ancient materials

is enough to convince experts.

If you look at the vellum and the ink,

and the dating of both,

then you know that

this is something that is really old.

[narrator] Which means if it's a fake,

it's not a modern fake.

So could it be real?

And if it is, what does it say?

[narrator] For decades, code breakers and linguists

have been trying to decipher

the extraordinary Voynich manuscript.

[Mark] When we look at the possible alphabet,

we see more than 20 letters, maybe 22, 25,

we see something that could be vowels,

we see something that could be numbers,

but beyond that nobody knows

what this alphabet consists of.

[narrator] Which suggests an obvious possibility.

Perhaps, it's not normal writing at all.

Perhaps, it's a code.

[Andrew] One idea is the manuscript

could have been written with what's called

a substitution cipher.

And this is a code where you simply take a given letter

of the alphabet or a given symbol

and replace it directly with another one.

So A becomes B, B becomes C and so on.

And that means you can write things

that look very difficult to read just at first glance.

[narrator] But substitution ciphers are relatively easy

for mathematicians to spot.

You look at the text

and you see which letters occur most frequently.

So, for example, in written English,

the most common letter is the letter E.

So say you were to find a Z

as the most common letter

in the text that you're looking at,

you could guess that maybe

that Z corresponded to the letter E.

And then you can go down

looking at less and less frequent letters

and slowly but surely build up a picture of the words.

[narrator] Experts have tested

this approach on the enigmatic writing.

[Andrew] When you're trying to do this with the Voynich manuscript,

you don't come up with anything.

Even when you compare it

to loads and loads of different languages,

there's just nothing that seems to work

with this technique.

[narrator] If it's not a code,

maybe the Voynich manuscript

is simply written in an unknown language.

In 2013, mathematicians and computer scientists

at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil,

test the Voynich language to see if it displays

the same kind of patterns as known languages.

Scientists have tried to compare objectively

things like word length, and the number of letters

with English and Portuguese in the Voynich manuscript

to get some idea of whether or not,

even the kind of word groupings

would make any sense.

And generally speaking, it does kind of fit,

it doesn't fit perfectly,

but it's not outside of what we would expect.

[Andrew] What's bizarre is that you look at the Voynich manuscript

and even though we don't know what any of the symbols are

or what they mean,

they still seem to have these same kinds of patterns.

This isn't just random gibberish.

It really looks like a language.

[narrator] So the Voynich writing

seems to fit the pattern of a real language.

But knowing it's a language

is a long way from being able to translate it.

[Abigail] We can identify words through two routes,

that we've seen that word before,

and that we've heard that word before.

But the fact that we can't make out

what any of the letters are,

leaves you in a kind of no man's land.

Cause not only do we not know what these words are

but we've no idea how they sounded either.

[narrator] Decades of analysis by code breakers and linguists

have failed to unlock the manuscript's writing

which just leaves the illustrations.

Could they crack the secrets of the Voynich manuscript?

[Abigail] The images on this text

are some of the strangest things I've seen.

[narrator] The manuscript is a riot of colorful

and baffling illustrations.

It's a bit like a list of classes at Hogwarts.

You've got kind of Herbology,

all these beautiful pictures of plants

and then you have things like images of naked women bathing

and then very detailed images of a castle.

[narrator] Now new research claims these drawings

could finally answer the puzzle

of the Voynich manuscript.

In 2013, the manuscript's bizarre illustrations

catch the eye of two US scholars.

They think they've seen some of the plants in it before.

[Abigail] A couple of American botanists

have looked at these images

and they've seen similarities

between the plants depicted in this manuscript

and plants that are native

and indigenous to Central America.

[narrator] They identify nearly 60 plants

in the Voynich manuscript

that they believe show a striking correlation

with Mexican plants.

Agave, Dioscorea,

Cylin, Eryngium,

and the Viola

and many more.

It certainly seems convincing at first glance.

[Abigail] The idea of identifying this manuscript

and connecting it to scholarship from Central America,

is an interesting idea

and it's quite creative and innovative.

[narrator] The botanists have also noted similarities

between the Voynich manuscript

and a well-known ancient manuscript

on Central American herbology,

called the Codex Cruz-Badianus.

So has this new research

finally begun to crack the secrets

of the Voynich manuscript.

Can its origins be traced to Central America?

Is it a Mexican herbology of plants?

Indigenous cultures certainly have writing

and a sophisticated knowledge of the natural world.

But there are problems with this idea.

For one thing, the timing seems off.

The vellum in the Voynich manuscript has been dated

to around 1404 to 1438.

The problem is, and it's a big one,

at this date Europeans won't discover the Americas

for another 50 years.

And the Codex Cruz-Badianus,

that it's been compared with,

isn't written for a 100 years after the vellum's dating.

Is it possible that after someone made this valuable vellum

it sat unused for a 100 years?

It's not completely out of the question

but it does seem pretty unlikely.

And even if you ignore the dating issues,

other illustrations point towards an origin

much closer to home.

There's an intricate drawing of a castle

and there are aspects of the architecture that are

identifiable as what they would call

Ghibelline architecture.

It's particularly I think

the crenellations on the turrets

and they are in kind of Central Northern Italy

around that kind of northern border.

[narrator] So is it a book on Mexico

or some unknown text on Europe

or something else entirely?

No one seems certain.

But there is one final clue.

A clue that might at last

tell us the origins of the Voynich manuscript.

[narrator] The Voynich manuscript

is a 500 year-old document.

Written in an untranslatable text and covered in strange images,

it has baffled scholars for centuries.

But there is one final clue to its origins.

A letter dating to 1639

that mentions the manuscript.

According to the letter,

the book was owned by an alchemist in Prague

by the name of Georg Baresch.

[narrator] Almost nobody had ever heard of Baresch.

But there is a second clue

that also ties the manuscript to Prague.

But it's only visible under UV light.

Another tantalizing detail

is that a signature

was found on the title page of the volume

of a man named Tepenec

who was a herbalist in the court of Rudolf II.

[narrator] Rudolf II, the holy Roman emperor,

one of the most colorful characters in renaissance Europe.

Rudolf II was exactly the sort of person

who would want to acquire a manuscript like this.

He had the money, he had the interest,

and he necessarily need to understand it himself.

He just needed enough people around him telling him,

that it was fascinating and important.

[narrator] So could Prague and Rudolf II explain the manuscript's origins?

If you were looking to sell something for a high price,

something which featured an untranslatable text

and mysterious illustrations,

which seemed to cross continents and cultures,

what better place to try to shop this

than in the court of Rudolf II?

[narrator] Is this the real truth

behind this strange book?

Unfortunately, there seemed to be as many explanations

as there are experts.

I personally see a lot of drawings and scripts

and very, very long texts of people who have psychosis.

[narrator] People with psychosis

can construct their own reality

unconnected to the outside world.

So maybe our basic assumption is wrong,

that this is a language that we can ever understand,

comprehend and decode.

So maybe, for everybody else except of that person

it will never make any sense.

[narrator] So, could it be the result of psychosis

or could it simply be and ancient fraud?

I don't think the Voynich manuscript was created

ultimately to be understood.

But to puzzle, to deceive, to fascinate

and perhaps to get a sack of gold

from Rudolf II.

[narrator] Maybe the real secret of the Voynich manuscript

is that it will always remain an unsolvable puzzle.

[Abigail] I kind of love how it remains a mystery

and it remains something

that we can continue to speculate

because we don't know what it says.

[narrator] In 1966, the British Museum in London

acquires one of its eeriest artifacts.

It appears to be a very plain black disc.

It's a great deal more than that.

It is a macabre supernatural device

whose origins have perplexed experts for centuries.

[Ruth] This weird thing is encased in mystery.

Nobody knew how it worked or where this came from.

[narrator] Now using the latest graphics technology,

we can shed new light on the Obsidian Mirror.

Roughly seven inches across and a half an inch thick,

it is made from a single slab of obsidian.

A stone born in the heart of a volcano.

It's a natural form of glass, but it's very nature,

it has this glassy, black sheen to it.

[narrator] But in the mirror, these natural properties

have been taken to unnatural extremes.

It's clearly been very, very worked

and polished into this final form.

And it shines like a mirror.

[narrator] But this isn't a mirror intended for the human world.

It has a much more macabre purpose.

Now, new research can finally reveal

the incredible origins of the Obsidian Mirror.

So where does it come from?

Who made it?

What is it?

When the British Museum acquired this object

it came with a little note

The claim, "This was the stone

with which Doctor Dee called his spirits."

[narrator] There is only one famous Doctor Dee in history.

John Dee, a shadowy enigmatic figure

from Tudor Britain 500 years ago.

So who was Doctor Dee?

Well, that's actually quite hard to pin down.

He's a kind of slippery character.

Was he a magician?

Was he a scientist?

Was he a philosopher?

Was he an astrologer?

He sort of, sat on the boundary

between what we now think of as science

and what we now think of as magic.

[narrator] Dee's reputation as a man of knowledge,

sees him rise to the position of astrologer

and personal advisor to Queen Elizabeth the First.

She, on occasions, actually visited him in his house.

They had consultations about the future,

about the nature of the universe,

about how she should run the country.

This is a man who had his finger right in the middle

of the political heart of the nation.

A man with influence.

[narrator] But the volcanic mirror isn't part of his cultured life

in the Elizabethan court.

John Dee uses it to speak to the dead.

[narrator] This Obsidian Mirror

was one of the strangest possessions

of Elizabethan alchemist, John Dee.

[Ruth] Many of us think of alchemists

as people who try to turn lead into gold,

but actually, they were much more interested

in finding something called the philosopher's stone.

And what they meant by that,

was something that would prolong life

and give you the answers to the meaning of life.

So in searching for this philosopher's stone,

he became convinced

that he could seek the assistance of angels.

[narrator] The Obsidian Mirror is central

to this obsession with the occult.

A note attached to its case claims

Dee uses it for calling spirits.

He is known to have attempted to raise spirits to speak with them

in a search for more knowledge

to try and speak with other worldly beings.

[narrator] The Obsidian Mirror is Dee's supernatural gateway

to the other side.

In order to communicate with these angels,

he began to use something that he called a scrying stone

or a seeing stone.

And it may well be that this object

is that stone.

[narrator] So, it appears John Dee uses this object to summon spirits.

And that's not as surprising as it sounds

because this connection between mirrors and spirits

is very old indeed.

Looking into a glass or mirror

in order to try and see something more

is a very ancient idea.

People have been doing it for a long time.

[narrator] More than 1,500 years before John Dee,

the Celts in the British Isles are already using

bronze mirrors and pools of water

to connect with their Gods and spirits.

Could this ancient British mystical connection

between spirits and mirrors

explain why this strange obsidian object

turns up in Tudor England?

Unfortunately, there's one big problem with that theory.

[Dougal] We don't have obsidian in the UK.

There's a very small ancient volcanic rocks

which have some glassy bits,

but nothing that would give you

such a beautiful object that we see in this mirror.

So it must've come from somewhere else.

[narrator] So where on earth does it come from?

And who made it?

Whoever is responsible

for this supernatural spirit mirror

went to great lengths to craft it.

It's made out of one piece of obsidian which is quite hard to find

'cause often it's fractured in many places.

They must've really looked hard

to find a natural example that they could work up

into this wonderful mirror.

[narrator] But to produce this mirror-like finish,

out of rock as hard as obsidian,

would mean weeks of grinding and polishing by hand.

It must've been something very special to the people that made it.

[narrator] For hundreds of years,

the origin of the mirror remains a mystery.

But in 2019,

the University of Manchester in England

analyzes the mirror's chemical fingerprint

using a cutting edge technique

called X-Ray Fluorescence.

[Dougal] Different magma bodies in different parts of the earth

have different chemical fingerprints.

And so, if you can analyze what the mirror is made up of

and you can work out which volcano,

or which area that your fingerprints too,

bingo, you could find out where it came from.

[narrator] The results are astonishing.

[Dougal] They trace the composition of this obsidian

back to the jungles

in the Sierra de Las Navajas in Mexico.

And there they found ancient quarries

that have been worked for over 3,000 years

where they were taking obsidian

from a two million year old volcano.

And that's the actual birthplace

of this beautiful Obsidian Mirror.

[narrator] But this doesn't tell us when it was made.

You can date

the age of the rock that made the mirror,

but it's actually impossible to date

exactly when this mirror was manufactured by human hands.

So it could well have been hundreds of years old

when Doctor Dee got his hands on it.

It's difficult to know.

[narrator] So, chemistry doesn't hold the answer,

but maybe archaeology does.

Over 700 years ago,

when these quarries were being mined for obsidian,

the area was ruled by the Aztecs.

And the mirror fits into the Aztecs story

like a missing puzzle piece.

Because the Aztecs religion

is known to involve Obsidian Mirrors.

In fact, the name of one of their Gods

is Tezcatlipoca, meaning, smoking mirror.

And he is shown in some images clutching an Obsidian Mirror.

And this is where things get very strange.

Because some Aztec rulers possessed a mirror

known as a Tezcatl

that they used to travel to the underworld

and talk to the dead.

Which is an astonishing coincidence given

that is exactly what John Dee uses it for.

The mirror probably reaches Dee

via the Spanish conquistadors

who invade Aztec, Mexico, in 1519

and carry it's treasures away to Europe.

[Ruth] There's no real surprise

that somebody like Doctor Dee might get his hands on it.

It's going to be encased in mystery.

And that's absolutely his bag.

He is Mister Mystery.

[narrator] This strange inky, black object

connects two different cultures

separated by thousands of miles of ocean

Both identified it

as a supernatural doorway to the spirit world.

Who knows? Maybe John Dee now sits

on the other side of the mirror

next to its Aztec owners

looking out at us.