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In this paper, we present our comparative statistical-linguistic analyses both on the Voynich manuscript and on the magical Tables of Liber Loagaeth created by Dr. John Dee and his scryer Edward Ke...

This article documents the author's attempt to solve Beale Cipher Number Two using a transcript of the original Declaration of Independence. This was a much more difficult task than suggested in The Beale Papers . Based on discoveries learned in this process, the author concludes that the Beale ciphers are likely a hoax.

The Codex of Rohonc is a lengthy handwritten book filled with unknown sign-strings and more than 80 seemingly biblical illustrations. Nothing is known about the provenance of the manuscript; its Hungarian or even East-Central European origin is possible but not certain. The initial enthusiasm of nineteenth-century Hungarian scholars for the supposedly Early Hungarian script was soon followed by disappointment, and late nineteenth-century scholarship came to the conclusion that the codex was a forgery. This conclusion, however, seems fairly implausible today in light of historical evidence. If the text of the Rohonc codex is not a hoax, it must be a consciously encoded or enciphered text. In theory, it may be (1) a cipher, (2) a shorthand system, or (3) an artificial language, and these possibilities are systematically assessed in the article with the help of historical analogies.

In this article, I analyze the Voynich manuscript, using random walk mapping and token/syllable repetition statistics. The results significantly tighten the boundaries for possible interpretations; they suggest that the text has been generated by a stochastic process rather than by encoding or encryption of language. In particular, the so-called Chinese theory now appears less convincing.

The Voynich manuscript is a substantial document in what appears to be ciphertext, which has resisted decipherment since its appearance around 1600. It has long been suspected that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax; however, the linguistic complexity of the manuscript has previously been considered good reason for rejecting the hoax hypothesis. The manuscript also contains many unusual linguistic features, and previous research has failed to produce a plausible mechanism for generating substantial bodies of text with these features. This article describes how sixteenth century cryptographic techniques can be adapted to generate text similar to that in the Voynich manuscript. This method can be used either to generate gibberish for a hoax, or to encode plaintext in a decodable cipher. Preliminary results suggest that a document the size of the Voynich manuscript could be produced by a single hoaxer in two or three months. It is concluded that the hoax hypothesis is now a plausible explanation for the Voynic...

Based on inconsistencies in the J. B. Ward pamphlet, The Beale Paper, statistical stylistic comparisons of the writings of Ward and T. J. Beale, and other analyses, the author concludes that the story of a Beale treasure is a hoax.

In a recent paper, James J. Gillogly [1] asserts that Beale Cipher No. 1 is spurious. We take no issue with his statistics but wish to point out that he has missed an important alternative: Higher—Order Homophonics. We provide here an overview of second – and higher-order homophonic enciphering/deciphering principles and apply this concept to a further analysis of the Beale Ciphers. We shall finally suggest that the Beale Ciphers should not readily be dismissed as a hoax, as J. J. Gillogly, Greg Mellen [2,3] and others would have us do.