The Brilliant Killjoy

A UK psychologist named Gordon Rugg is making headlines for unraveling the mystery of “one of the world’s great oddities: the Voynich manuscript, a hand-lettered book written in an unknown code that has frustrated cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912. How impregnable is the Voynich? During World War II, US Army code breakers – the guys who blew away Nazi ciphers – grappled with the manuscript in their spare time and came up empty. Since then, decoding the book’s contents has become an obsession for geeks and puzzle nuts everywhere.” Rugg’s ironclad conclusion, after only a few months of work: the Voynich isn’t a code at all. It’s a hoax.