The Book No One on Earth Can Read

In a vault at Yale sits a 600-year-old book full of impossible plants, star charts and tiny bathing figures — and every page is written in an alphabet that appears nowhere else in history. Wartime codebreakers, linguists and computers have all tried to read it. All of them failed. In this video we open up the Voynich Manuscript: what's inside, how it passed from a Prague alchemist to an emperor's court to a rare book dealer in 1912, and the century of failed attempts to crack it, from a professor who read "secret shorthand" into cracked ink to the codebreaker who broke Japan's Purple code. Then we put the big hoax theory on trial, see what carbon dating revealed in 2009, and look at the hidden margin writing that 2024 scans uncovered on the very first page. 0:00 The book no one can read 0:36 What's inside? 2:08 Where did it come from? 4:15 The codebreakers 5:23 Real or fake? 7:07 The suspects 7:30 The test 8:19 The hidden clue 8:55 So what is it? Subscribe to Curio for more of history's and science's coolest mysteries, explained simply. Sources: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale), MS 408; Lisa Fagin Davis, Manuscript Road Trip (2024); Stefan Guzy, International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript (2022). #VoynichManuscript #Mystery #History #UnsolvedMysteries #Codebreaking #Cryptography #MedievalHistory #Yale #Explained #Curio