Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

Fishburne: Tonight a mysterious medieval book

written in a secret language so complex

that even the world’s best code breakers can’t crack it.

♪ ♪

- No one has been able

to translate or read a single word,

a single letter.

Fishburne: Known as the "Voynich Manuscript,"

it’s obsessed everyone from scholars

to conspiracy theorists.

- They sincerely believe that this book

has something monumental to share.

Fishburne: Now we’ll uncover the top theories

surrounding the origins of this cryptic text.

- Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual

for the practice of alchemy.

- The "Voynich Manuscript" is written in glossolalia,

which is the language of tongues.

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

Fishburne: Can modern technology finally unlock

its impenetrable code?

- It’s the first definitive answer we have about this book

in 400 years.

Fishburne: What is the "Voynich Manuscript"?

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

Just outside Rome, famed Polish-American

rare bookseller Wilfrid Voynich

enters a centuries-old Jesuit college.

- Voynich operates what

is probably the world’s largest

rare books business at the time.

He’s got this incredible knack

for digging up the most valuable

and the most sought-after manuscripts on the planet.

His collection is worth millions.

Fishburne: Voynich hopes his next great find is here.

- The Jesuits need funds to support their college.

So what they decide to do is, they decide to sell

some of their most ancient texts very discreetly.

Voynich negotiates a shrewd deal as always,

and he adds 30 more books to his collection,

which he will try to sell for a significant profit

back at his shop in London.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: One book in particular stands out.

- As with all of his purchases,

Voynich looks for elaborate bindings,

beautiful books,

heavily illustrated, illuminated manuscripts,

early printed books, really things--luxurious objects.

But among them his eye’s caught by what he later called

an ugly duckling.

- This particular manuscript is small.

It’s only about 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches,

and it’s bound in goatskin.

It’s about 230 pages long, but there is some evidence

that some of the pages are missing.

Also, some pages are foldable sheets of varying size,

and this book is filled with lines upon lines

of neatly handwritten text and elaborate drawings.

But here’s the thing.

None of it makes any sense.

♪ ♪

There are a couple hundred

detailed drawings of plant species,

none of which can be identified.

There are astrological drawings of constellations

that don’t even exist.

There’s a section where nude, pregnant women

are engaging in these baths and rituals

with these seemingly interconnected tubes,

and then there are these strange hybrids,

these plants with human organs,

and some of these plants even sprout disembodied heads.

It’s--needless to say, it’s wild.

But it’s also indecipherable.

♪ ♪

And as for that lovely handwritten text,

that entire thing is written in a language

that no one has ever seen before.

There are very clear and obvious words and letters,

but they’re totally unrecognizable.

So Voynich assumes that this is some type of code.

Fishburne: In addition to experience with codes,

Voynich speaks Polish, Russian, and English fluently

and has a working knowledge of 15 other languages.

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

He was educated at three of the top universities,

and then he basically becomes an anti-Czarist revolutionary.

He’s arrested.

He’s sent to a Siberian prison.

He escapes the prison,

and then he heads to London

where he continues his revolutionary activities

for a while before a friend of his at the British Museum

suggested he get into the rare book trade.

♪ ♪

- Voynich knows everything there is to know

about rare books.

He’s connected to all the top literary scholars.

He knows multiple languages.

He knows all about codes and code-breaking

from his years as a Russian revolutionary.

Point is, if anyone is gonna be able to make sense

out of this manuscript, it’s gonna be Wilfrid Voynich.

- Voynich spent years trying to decipher the code--

really the rest of his life--

and he reaches out to all of the top code breakers

at the time to help, and none of them can crack it.

He sticks with it, because he has a hunch

that this might be the most valuable book

he’s ever encountered,

and if he can figure this out it could be worth millions.

♪ ♪

- Based on the materials used to create the book--

the parchment, the style of ink--

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

So while he can’t decipher the words,

the images of plants

and other sorts of natural phenomena lead him to conclude

that it’s probably some sort of guide to a field

that used to be called natural philosophy.

♪ ♪

And before there were modern scientists,

this is how people described the study of nature

in the physical universe.

From Aristotle to Isaac Newton, all of these "early scientists"

were actually natural philosophers.

♪ ♪

- So because of that date

and the contents of the actual manuscript,

Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual

for the practice of alchemy.

Alchemy is this philosophical,

part-science, part-magic practice

that emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century,

and its practitioners tried to purify certain materials,

so turn lead into gold and to cure diseases.

Now, none of this stuff actually worked.

But it was strongly believed in,

and it was written about for centuries.

- Alchemists’ real objective is perfection of the soul,

and they’ll do this by creating something called

the "magnum opus," or "great work,"

which was the philosopher’s stone,

a mythical substance that was said to be able

to grant immortality among other things.

Fishburne: According to Voynich,

there is only one early alchemist brilliant enough

to have produced this book.

- Almost no one in Europe

was creating alchemy textbooks at the time.

They were just translating older works.

So Voynich thinks this is Roger Bacon.

♪ ♪

- Voynich believes the book is written in code,

because he believes that whoever wrote it

needed to keep something secret.

- Roger Bacon, today he is incredibly well-respected.

He’s known as one of the early pioneers

of the scientific method.

He was the first person in Europe

to record the formula for gunpowder.

But here’s the problem, he’s also a monk

and a modest member of the clergy.

And the Church doesn’t take too kindly

to some of his more out-there alchemy practices.

Fishburne: In fact, some of Bacon’s contemporaries

accuse him of being a wizard.

- He has an automated, mechanical clockwork head

that he talks to and consults with,

and like all alchemists, he’s also obsessed with forging

the philosopher’s stone and granting immortality.

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

So these are some very dangerous heretical ideas

that Bacon is toying with right under the watchful eye

of his Franciscan superiors.

But Bacon’s not entirely a crackpot.

♪ ♪

- He thinks that there’s a way

to bring the Church and science together.

Not everyone agrees with him.

- He thinks these ideas can complement each other.

They don’t have to be antagonists.

- It’s very fortunate for Bacon that he has the protection

of a very high-placed patron and intellectual correspondent,

the pope, Clement IV.

Fishburne: But when Pope Clement dies in 1268,

Roger Bacon’s protection is gone,

and within a decade he’s arrested.

- Bacon is eventually allowed to return to his studies.

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

"heretical texts."

He mostly sticks to theological writing.

♪ ♪

Unless, of course, he continued

his alchemy research in secret

and wrote it all into a coded book.

- So if Voynich is right and this manuscript can be

definitively affiliated with Roger Bacon,

suddenly the manuscript itself

would be worth untold amounts of money.

Fishburne: First, Voynich must prove

Bacon truly authored the manuscript.

- Even though Voynich can’t crack the code,

he does find a letter dated back to 1665 that’s written

by a very important Czech scientist and doctor

named Jan Marek Marci.

He says he has a coded book

that fits precisely this description,

and he’s giving it to his friend,

a renowned code breaker, Athanasius Kircher.

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

He says it was bought

by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Germany

about 100 years prior sometime in the late 1500s

for a large sum of gold.

The letter mentions Roger Bacon by name

as the potential author in the late 1200s.

Fishburne: How did the book go from Bacon to Emperor Rudolf?

- Wilfrid Voynich thinks the connection is Dr. John Dee.

Dr. Dee was born in 1527.

He’s a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I,

and he’s an avid astrologer

and an occult scientist who studies cipher,

and from a young age he has access to a lot

of Roger Bacon manuscripts.

Fishburne: An accomplished cryptologist himself,

Dee tries to decode the manuscript but fails.

♪ ♪

- Eventually, John Dee brings the manuscript to Prague

where Emperor Rudolf would buy it from him for 600 ducats

or roughly $100,000 today.

- So Voynich has this fervent belief

that Roger Bacon wrote this book.

But all the evidence is circumstantial at this point.

♪ ♪

If Voynich wants the world to believe

that this is a Bacon original and make a fortune,

he’s gotta decode this thing once and for all.

Fishburne: A mysterious manuscript

dating back centuries, one with a seemingly

unbreakable cipher.

When collector Wilfrid Voynich finds this book,

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

- Voynich showcases the book

at exhibitions and lecture tours

with the hope that somebody can figure it out.

And of course, he’s getting fame

and publicity all the while and hoping to make a sale.

- He’s trying to sell it for $100,000,

which would be the most anyone had ever gotten

for an old manuscript ever in history.

[dramatic music]

- Other top code breakers

are trying to decipher the book as well.

For example, you’ve got William Friedman,

the man who’s responsible for

breaking the Japanese code Purple during World War II.

He’s also one of the founders of the NSA,

one of its chief cryptologists.

He spent 30 years trying before declaring

that cracking the manuscript’s code was impossible.

Fishburne: Unfortunately, Voynich dies in 1930

before he can solve the mystery.

- When Voynich dies, he leaves the book to his wife, Ethel,

who lives until 1960.

Then after a couple of short-term owners,

the book ends up at the Yale Library in 1969,

where it remains today.

It’s an artifact that to this day

captures the public’s imagination,

because it’s both intriguing and infuriating.

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

We know this thing exists.

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

except no one knows exactly what it is.

It remains pure mystery,

and once we have the advent of the internet,

that mystery explodes.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: When Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library

posts scanned pages of the manuscript online in 2004

the book gains even more attention.

- Suddenly, the "Voynich Manuscript"

is world-famous.

It’s attracting millions more people

who want to figure it out.

Every year brings multiple major news stories

about potential breakthroughs.

Fishburne: One of the biggest breakthroughs occurs in 2009

at the University of Arizona.

- Researchers realized that while the language of the book

might be impossible to understand,

the book’s physical materials aren’t.

They can be analyzed.

- The 234 pages of the book

are made up of calfskin parchment,

and because they are organic in nature,

they can be radiocarbon dated.

This is obviously a big deal.

This is a chance to finally get some answers

that have eluded scholars for generations.

They take samples from several sections of the book

just to be sure.

Fishburne: But the results aren’t

what anyone anticipated.

- Remember, Wilfrid Voynich thought

this was a 13th-century text by Roger Bacon.

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

so about a 140 years after Roger Bacon’s death.

And just like that the primary theory

behind this strange book is shot down.

But this is still fantastic news.

It’s probably the first definitive answer

we have about this book in over 400 years.

So now that the parchment’s been dated,

scholars want to keep the momentum going.

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

led him to research what possible authors

there could’ve been in the 13th century

to write an alchemical text,

and that led him to Roger Bacon.

♪ ♪

With this new dating of the manuscript,

scholars do the same thing again.

They wonder, "In the 1400s, who’s known to be an author

"and illustrator? Who’s writing in code?

Who has an interest in science and alchemy?"

And they think, "Who could’ve written the book?"

Fishburne: In 2017 one researcher announces

she might know the answer.

- Could this book actually have been written

by none other than Leonardo da Vinci?

♪ ♪

Dr. Edith Sherwood is a retired biomedical scientist,

and these days she’s fascinated

by the "Voynich Manuscript,"

and she spent countless hours studying it,

and according to her,

there’s only one European author in the 1400s

that fits the bill.

- In 2002 she publishes an article

comparing the manuscript to the notebooks and other works

of Leonardo da Vinci.

So then, all of a sudden, she has this new evidence

of the carbon dating.

So now she really is convinced she’s onto something.

And she spends more time researching the manuscript.

15 years later, she publishes a new article

in much greater detail,

and the evidence she finds is actually pretty compelling.

Fishburne: Sherwood starts with a

detailed handwriting analysis.

- Both the anonymous author of the "Voynich Manuscript"

and Leonardo da Vinci use a type of writing

that’s called "humanist miniscule script."

It’s a style that was developed in Italy

in the early 1400s.

It’s different than a lot

of what was being written at the time.

Most scholarly texts were written

in something called gothic script, or black letter.

And it’s a pretty obvious difference

when you look at them side by side.

And not a lot of people were writing like this.

But Leonardo da Vinci was.

- Not only that, but Leonardo da Vinci

and the author of the "Voynich Manuscript"

have a lot of features that are very similar.

Neither writes with capital letters.

Neither punctuates.

There are no line breaks or paragraph breaks.

And also, they never connect their letters.

Fishburne: Dr. Sherwood then turns her attention

to the manuscript’s drawings.

- So we all know that Leonardo da Vinci was--

he’s an okay artist, to put it mildly.

No, obviously, he’s great.

All you have to do is look at his works,

like the "Mona Lisa," which show off

his otherworldly talent.

But in his notebooks, they’re just full

of these crude drawings and studies.

- Of course, no one would suggest

that the illustrations from the "Voynich Manuscript"

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

Nevertheless, there are some similarities.

- The one thing that was very hard to do

in the 15th century, when drawing and writing,

was to create perfect circles.

Without modern drafting equipment,

only really, really talented artists

could create a perfect circle only using pen and ink.

But da Vinci could

and so could the author of the "Voynich Manuscript."

Fishburne: Dr. Sherwood believes

one page of circular drawings provides the best clue of all.

- There’s an astrological chart representing the sign of Aries

with 15 nude women sitting in birthing tubs.

The women appear to be pregnant,

and in one of the tubs there’s a baby,

and that mother no longer appears to be pregnant.

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

And all the other women are holding plain strings.

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

- Aries the ram represents the month of April,

and because of the 15 women,

she believes that this birth took place on April 15th.

And the woman holding the baby is positioned

roughly at 10:00, and guess what.

Leonardo da Vinci was born just around 10:00 p.m.

on April 15, 1452.

- And of course, the final clue

is that the manuscript is written in code,

and Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote his notebooks in code

throughout his adult life,

and he typically used a mirror-image code

that also sometimes combined or separated certain words.

Fishburne: Could the "Voynich Manuscript"

be da Vinci’s first coded notebook?

- The mystery might be even bigger than that.

I mean, was Leonardo da Vinci writing in code to hide

some great secrets of alchemy

that he had discovered or medical cures?

Is the legacy of history’s greatest genius

even greater than we thought?

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

Fishburne: For over 100 years,

people have speculated on what the "Voynich Manuscript" is

and who created it.

After successfully carbon dating the book’s parchment

to the 15th century,

researcher seek other technology to help understand.

- Dating the book is a huge breakthrough,

but, of course, that still can’t help us

determine what it is.

We know the approximate date of its creation,

but that’s really about it.

[dramatic music]

And there’s really only one way to fully understand

this book, and that’s to decode the writing,

to figure out what language this is,

what cipher they used, and start to translate it.

Fishburne: Unfortunately, it’s a code no human

has ever been able to crack.

But could there be another way?

♪ ♪

- In 2016 some computing scientists

at the University of Alberta in Canada

start doing something incredible

with the "Voynich Manuscript."

♪ ♪

They work with artificial intelligence,

and they realize, "Hey, maybe our AI computer

can finally decipher this text where others have failed.

Fishburne: The project is led by Professor Greg Kondrak.

- Their exact field of study

is called natural language processing.

So it combines computer science and linguistics

and artificial intelligence,

and the goal is to improve interactions

between computers and human language.

♪ ♪

- Basically, their ultimate goal

is to create a computer that you could give any document

in any language in the history of mankind,

and that computer would be able

to recognize it and understand and analyze it.

Fishburne: With the right inputs,

the computer might even be able to decipher

a complicated code in an unidentified language.

- It is a challenge.

But the computer is programmed

to recognize any and all patterns

and compare them with known languages,

and it can do this thousands and thousands of times

faster than a human can. So it’s worth a shot.

Fishburne: Kondrak starts by entering samples

of 400 different languages.

- The AI goes to work

comparing the "Voynich Manuscript"

to other languages.

It looks at individual characters.

It looks at groups of words.

It looks at how often they’re repeated

and in what combinations,

all the little nuances that could determine

what language this was written in.

- Honestly don’t know if this is going to work,

because this computer is not designed to read

the "Voynich Manuscript." However, they work on it

for weeks and weeks, and after a while,

lo and behold, the computer gives them an answer.

According to the artificial intelligence

at the University of Alberta in Canada,

the "Voynich Manuscript" is in Hebrew.

♪ ♪

There had been speculation for quite some time

that the "Voynich Manuscript"

wasn’t written in a European language,

because had it been written in Italian or Greek or Latin,

somebody more than likely would’ve figured it out by now.

♪ ♪

And the researchers actually went into this thinking

maybe the manuscript is written in Arabic,

but Hebrew presents an intriguing possibility.

Fishburne: Even if they’ve discovered

the language of origin,

the book may take years to translate.

- The team thinks that not only was it written in Hebrew,

it was written as an alphagram.

An alphagram is a way of coding language in which

you present the letters of a word in alphabetical order.

So for instance, the alphagram of the word "cat"

would be A-C-T.

The problem, of course, is that A-C-T

also is the alphagram for the word "act."

So you can see the challenges here.

- Compounding those challenges is the fact that Hebrew

isn’t typically written with vowels.

So researchers are left with the painstaking task

of going word by word

swapping in the Hebrew letters

and then rearranging those letters

for it to make some sort of sense.

Fishburne: Slowly the team makes progress.

- Once you think you’ve figured out a word,

you move onto the next word.

But if those two words don’t make sense together,

then you have to go back to the first word

and try again. So far, they think

they’ve come up with three grammatical phrases.

♪ ♪

- Unfortunately, this AI was never designed

to spend its existence studying the mysteries

of the "Voynich Manuscript."

So the University of Alberta team

only brings its research so far.

All they know is, they think the book was written in Hebrew.

But we still don’t know what it says.

Fishburne: Then in 2017

another researcher picks up where the Canadians left off.

- There’s a German Egyptologist

named Ranier Hannig,

and he also thinks the book is in Hebrew,

and he spends three years studying it,

and he makes some progress in translating it,

and he publishes his findings in 2020.

Hannig manages to translate a number of paragraphs

on multiple pages, and according to his findings,

it looks like the "Voynich Manuscript"

might be a book of prophecy.

♪ ♪

On one particular page, according to Hannig,

it says...

Fishburne: Is the "Voynich Manuscript" a Hebrew manual

for predicting the future?

- For quite a while now,

there have been two separate schools of thought

about the "Voynich Manuscript."

The first one, which is also the most popular,

is, what if it’s an encoded version of a known language?

There are a growing number of people who think

that could be entirely wrong.

Fishburne: For many decades, countless code breakers

and scholars have tried and failed

to decipher the mysterious "Voynich Manuscript."

Then in 2009 researchers posed a radical new question.

What if the book isn’t written in code at all?

[dramatic music]

- Since at least the 1500s people have assumed

the "Voynich Manuscript" is encoded.

But recently a new question has been introduced.

♪ ♪

What if the reason no one’s been able to crack the code

is because it isn’t a code at all?

What if it’s an actual language

but a language that’s not human?

Think about what it takes to create a code,

especially one so complex

that it defies translation for centuries.

So first you have to think about what you want to write,

and then you have to convert it into code

letter by letter, word by word.

If you look at the case of another famous code,

the Zodiac Killer,

look at how the symbols are arranged:

spaced out and separate from each other.

Because Zodiac had to stop and think

every step of the way,

each letter sits on its own.

But in the "Voynich Manuscript" it really looks

like the author was writing continuously.

The writing is tightly formed.

It flows evenly from letter to letter.

It’s a swift and continuous movement of the pen.

They didn’t have to stop and think about anything.

So some say even the most ingenious human

couldn’t have pulled this off

while coming up with an unsolvable code.

- If someone is writing in this continuous style,

it’s obviously a language they understood,

and that has some theorists thinking,

"What if that language is extraterrestrial?"

♪ ♪

- Did an alien create the "Voynich Manuscript"?

There are some exciting precedents for this.

♪ ♪

- Erich von Daniken, well-known for his book,

"Chariots of the Gods," puts this theory

forward into his book in 1968,

and in that book von Daniken asserts

that many of our ancient technologies

were created by aliens,

such as Stonehenge, Pumapunku, all of these other places--

Easter Island--that we did not have the technology to create.

So it needed alien assistance.

He also cites a bunch of literary examples.

- There’s an early world map known as the Piri Reis map,

and von Daniken describes it as showing the Earth

as it would be seen from space,

which, of course, is an impossible viewpoint in 1513,

when the map was made.

Fishburne: When von Daniken applies the same logic

to the "Voynich Manuscript," he believes he’s finally

unlocked its mysterious origin.

- In his 2009 book "History is Wrong,"

von Daniken goes into great detail about his theory

about the "Voynich Manuscript."

He believes that it was written by an alien astronaut

who was stranded on Earth in the 1400s

and spent the rest of his life on planet Earth

recording his observations in the "Voynich Manuscript."

- Even though we don’t understand

the written language, the illustrations seem to indicate

that there was a crude understanding

perhaps riddled with inaccuracies.

Could it be that this alien astronaut

in cataloguing these things was writing about things,

drawing pictures of things he didn’t know anything about?

Are we being observed and studied

by somebody else out there?

♪ ♪

- The alien theory is obviously pretty out there.

But the concept that the book is written in its own language

instead of a code, that definitely could be possible.

And, in fact, there’s another really

well-documented phenomenon that this could be.

In 2004 British researchers Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill

published a book on the "Voynich Manuscript."

- The theory they put forth

is that the "Voynich Manuscript"

is written in glossolalia,

which is the speaking of tongues

or the language of tongues,

in this case, the writing in tongues.

- There are thousands of examples of this

catalogued from antiquity to the present,

and it typically presents the same way.

Person generates unintelligible words

that appear to be a language but can’t be understood,

and in many cases this is thought to happen

while the person is possessed.

Could that be what’s happening in Voynich?

♪ ♪

- Kennedy and Churchill are the first to notice

a potential parallel between the "Voynich Manuscript"

and the work of the 12th-century German saint

Hildegard von Bingen.

She wrote hundreds of pages in a language known as

Lingua Ignota, or the unknown language.

She had her own script. She had her own vocabulary.

Both manuscripts contain perplexing illustrations.

So you could see why the comparisons suggest itself.

- Hildegard claimed she was recording visions

that she was receiving thought to be from the divine.

Fishburne: Kennedy and Churchill

suggest the same phenomenon could have afflicted

the Voynich author causing what is known as

automatic or possessed writing.

- Historically, Judeo-Christianity expresses

possession as being a real thing

from demonic to angelic possessions.

Jesus has many examples of Him driving out demons.

For many years the Catholic Church

tried to downplay possession.

But now in current times especially

they admit that it exists, that it is out there,

and there are dozens if not hundreds

of exorcisms performed every month.

♪ ♪

- Of course, there will probably never be any way

to prove this theory.

But it just goes to show how the "Voynich Manuscript"

has captured everybody’s imagination.

The possibilities are literally endless.

- If it turns out the book wasn’t written in code,

it wasn’t written by an alien, it wasn’t written by an angel,

a demon, it wasn’t written

by someone suffering from mental illness,

we may never be able to find out what it says.

Maybe this mystery is truly unsolvable.

Fishburne: One of history’s most infamous books

is a manuscript that no one can understand.

But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

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

No one can understand it.

We all want to believe that the manuscript has meaning.

Someone spent a lot of time, a lot of effort,

and a lot of resources writing it and drawing on it.

The "Voynich Manuscript" must have a purpose.

How could it not?

- And that’s why so many people have dedicated their lives

trying to solve this so-called Voynich code,

because they sincerely and firmly believe

that this book has something monumental to share.

There’s got to be some sort of amazing secret

it wants to let us know.

Fishburne: But what if the answer

is something much more surprising?

[dramatic music]

- As researchers have hit dead end after dead end

after dead end trying to find patterns, substitutions,

translations, languages of origin,

there’s this one burning question that’s just sitting

in the back of their minds.

No one wants to admit it out loud.

But what if they’re just wasting their time?

♪ ♪

In April 2007

Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner

completes his own computer analysis

of the "Voynich Manuscript."

Like everyone else, he’s been looking for patterns

that might crack the code.

But instead, his findings show

that the statistical properties of the text

are most consistent with meaningless gibberish.

♪ ♪

If Schinner is correct,

then a lot of people have spent a lot of time

on a wild goose chase.

♪ ♪

- In some ways a hoax might be the easiest explanation.

But if so, I mean...wow, what a hoax.

- Still, hoax or not, we’re still trying

to find proof of what this book is,

not just more speculation.

So is there any way to prove

that this book could have been faked?

- The material, the parchment on which the manuscript

has been written, is carbon dated

to the early 15th century. You can’t fake that.

The parchment is 600 years old.

If somebody in the early 15th century created the manuscript,

just gibberish, it will be extremely difficult

to identify who that was.

Fishburne: But there is one person with a possible motive.

- We’re talking about none other than

Wilfrid Voynich himself.

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For starters, Voynich has a financial motive.

Think about this. Remember, he was going

around the world trying to convince everybody

that he’s found a long-lost encoded alchemy guide

written by Roger Bacon,

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

Fishburne: Supporters of the hoax theory

also cite the book’s complete lack of provenance.

- People begin to realize,

"Wait, there’s actually no written evidence

"that proves the existence of the ’Voynich Manuscript’

before Wilfrid Voynich."

♪ ♪

- Remember, Voynich offers proof

in the form of a 17th-century letter that he’s found.

But if you actually read the letter, all it really says

is that there’s this mysterious book

that we can’t seem to figure out

and that it was written by Roger Bacon.

♪ ♪

It doesn’t mention any details

specific to the "Voynich Manuscript."

There’s no proof that they’re even talking

about the same book.

♪ ♪

- In fact, some say maybe Voynich found the letter

and then he made the book so that he could claim it was

the lost Bacon manuscript they’re referring to.

Fishburne: Additionally, Voynich’s story

seems to change over the years.

- In 1912 he says he got it in a castle

in southern Europe.

In 1915 he says that the castle was in Austria.

When Voynich’s wife, Ethel, dies in 1960,

a letter’s discovered only to be opened posthumously

that says that he actually found the manuscript

in a Jesuit order in Frascati, Italy.

♪ ♪

- It all adds up to suspicious behavior,

and one has to ask,

is Wilfrid Voynich just this celebrated and respected

antiquities dealer, or has he pulled off

one of the single greatest hoaxes in history?

Fishburne: Is it possible that the centuries-old mystery

of the "Voynich Manuscript" is a hoax?

- If it’s a fake, it’s an incredible fake.

For starters, it uses materials from the 1400s.

It’s got all of these writings and drawings and charts

and diagrams. It has different-sized pages

that fold out in every which way.

It would take a genius-level expert in antique books

to pull this off.

Fishburne: And some think that genius is none other

than Wilfrid Voynich himself.

- To some it’s not a question of how could it be Voynich?

It’s more a question of how could it not be Voynich?

At some point between 1908 and 1911

Voynich finds a letter by Jan Marek Marci

that talks about an encoded Roger Bacon manuscript.

And then, perhaps, he sets about forging a fake one.

♪ ♪

- The problem with this hoax theory,

and it’s the one a lot of people cite,

is that it’s nearly impossible for anyone in the modern day

to have access to a lot of these ancient parchments

and inks and other materials to create such a thing.

Fishburne: But is it possible Voynich did?

- Shortly before the appearance of the manuscript,

Voynich purchases the entire collection

of the Libreria Franceschini in Italy.

It’s a private collection

that consists of over half a million books,

pamphlets, maps, and other manuscripts.

And we can’t say for sure, but it is likely that among

that treasure trove of materials that he purchased

was a large amount of blank 15th-century parchment.

- In any ancient library

you’re going to find blank parchment,

whether it’s sewn into a complete book

or some kind of a blank notebook

or empty parchment that just happens to be sitting around.

Many books and manuscripts have blank pages

at the beginning or at the end,

another place where you can find

ancient blank parchment.

- This would have been a jackpot for Voynich,

and from that moment on he probably had

everything he needed to pull this off.

Fishburne: What about the ink?

- In addition to being a Polish revolutionary,

a Siberian prison escapee,

and one of the world’s premier rare book dealers,

Voynich also has a training in chemistry

from when he was a student at the University of Moscow.

In his restoration work on his own collections

he sometimes uses that work to create inks and pigments

to restore books and manuscripts.

- He may have also had some help,

because it turns out he had a covert friendship

with a famous British secret agent

by the name of Sidney Reilly,

who was also known as the ace of spies.

Reilly allegedly goes into the British Museum Library

and takes out a book that’s called

"Some Observations on Ancient Inks."

- So according to this theory Voynich finds the letter,

buys the parchment,

creates the inks and the pigments,

forges the book, and there you have it.

Fishburne: If the manuscript is a forgery

it didn’t turn out the way Voynich hoped.

- The crazy thing is,

if Voynich was trying to create

a Roger Bacon masterpiece to sell, he failed.

Voynich was never able to sell the book.

- The problem is,

he created too good of a puzzle.

Everyone got so wrapped up in the story

in cracking the code and deciphering it

that they started finding patterns

that Voynich never intended,

clues that weren’t there.

People didn’t want to buy the thing.

They wanted to solve it.

But Wilfrid Voynich did successfully sell

at least one forgery that we know of.

It’s called the "Columbus Miniature."

It’s a painting of Columbus landing in the New World,

which was made by an anonymous Spanish forger in the 1800s.

And he sold it to the British Museum.

Whether he did this knowingly we’re not entirely sure,

but at least there is some precedent

for Voynich selling a fake.

Fishburne: Despite this evidence

most scholars still believe the "Voynich Manuscript"

is a genuine 15th-century article.

- The book has been tested and retested.

It’s been studied using some of the most advanced

scientific techniques, none of which even existed

when Voynich was alive.

So could he have made a forgery that good in the 1910s?

Maybe.

But is it likely?

Probably not.

- Besides, where’s the fun in that?

Where’s the mystery? Where’s the history?

We’re not all clamoring over this book

and studying it piece by piece

because we want it to be a fake.

We want it to be a revelation, the greatest code of all time,

which when unlocked

will reveal the greatest secrets

of the universe.

Fishburne: In 2016 Yale University’s Beinecke Library

scanned all 234 pages of the "Voynich Manuscript"

making it easily available to anyone

who wants to take a crack

at solving the 600-year-old puzzle.

I’m Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History’s Greatest Mysteries."

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