The Voynich manuscript

The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. Here are only a few of them:

Herbal - The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

Sunflowers - Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family - which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other species from all over the world.

Alchemy - The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed, etc.) or standard textual symbols (circle with cross, etc.); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Astrological herbal - Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise).

Microscopes and telescopes - A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable: on close inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like a pool of water.

Found Here: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages of handwritten text,^[1] of which the majority have illustrations.^[2] The text of the manuscript has never been deciphered, and the author, script, and language remain unknown.

Since its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and Britishcodebreakers of World War II fame, all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text. This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University as item "MS 408". The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.^[3]

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain—specifically, a philosophical or a priori language. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would name a color: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the Library of Congress Classification used by many libraries—in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.)

This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.

In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintext^[25] This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read." His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of Middle Dutch with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words. transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue".

According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.

This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in any way associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is several centuries earlier than most experts believe based on internal evidence. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Q3-85 - CARET Program - Isaac

The Technology

A lot of the technology we worked on was what you would expect, namely antigravity. Most of the researchers on the staff with backgrounds in propulsion and rocketry were military men, but the technology we were dealing with was so out of this world that it didn’t really matter all that much what your background was because none of it applied. All we could hope to do was use the vocabulary of our respective fields as a way to model the extremely bizarre new concepts we were very slowly beginning to understand as best we could. A rocket engineer doesn’t usually rub elbows much with a computer scientist, but inside PACL, we were all equally mystified and were ready to entertain any and all ideas.

The physicists made the most headway initially because out of all of our skills, theirs overlapped the most with the concepts behind this technology (although that isn’t saying much!) Once they got the ball rolling though, we began to find that many of the concepts found in computer science were applicable as well, albeit in very vague ways. While I didn’t do a lot of work with the antigrav hardware myself, I was occasionally involved in the assessment of how that technology was meant to interface with its user.

The antigrav was amazing, of course, as were the advances we were making with materials engineering and so on. But what interested me most then, and still amazes me most to this day, was something completely unrelated. In fact, it was this technology that immediately jumped out at me when I saw the Chad and Rajman photos, and even moreso in the Big Basin photos.

The “Language”

I put the word Language in quotes because calling what I am about to describe a “language” is a misnomer, although it is an easy mistake to make.

Their hardware wasn’t operated in quite the same way as ours. In our technology, even today, we have a combination of hardware and software running almost everything on the planet. Software is more abstract than hardware, but ultimately it needs hardware to run it. In other words, there’s no way to write a computer program on a piece of paper, set that piece of paper on a table or something, and expect it to actually do something. The most powerful code in the world still doesn’t actually do anything until a piece of hardware interprets it and translates its commands into actions.

But their technology is different. It really did operate like the magical piece of paper sitting on a table, in a manner of speaking. They had something akin to a language, that could quite literally execute itself, at least in the presence of a very specific type of field. The language, a term I am still using very loosely, is a system of symbols (which does admittedly very much resemble a written language) along with geometric forms and patterns that fit together to form diagrams that are themselves functional. Once they are drawn, so to speak, on a suitable surface made of a suitable material and in the presence of a certain type of field, they immediately begin performing the desired tasks. It really did seem like magic to us, even after we began to understand the principles behind it.

I worked with these symbols more than anything during my time at PACL, and recognized them the moment I saw them in the photos. They appear in a very simple form on Chad’s craft, but appear in the more complex diagram form on the underside of the Big Basin craft as well. Both are unmistakable, even at the small size of the Big Basin photos. An example of a diagram in the style of the Big Basin craft is included with this in a series of scanned pages from the [mistitled] "Linguistic Analysis Primer". We needed a copy of that diagram to be utterly precise, and it took about a month for a team of six to copy that diagram into our drafting program!

Explaining everything I learned about this technology would fill up several volumes, but I will do my best to explain at least some of the concepts as long as I am taking the time to write all this down.

First of all, you wouldn't open up their hardware to find a CPU here, and a data bus there, and some kind of memory over there. Their hardware appeared to be perfectly solid and consistent in terms of material from one side to the other. Like a rock or a hunk of metal. But upon [much] closer inspection, we began to learn that it was actually one big holographic computational substrate - each "computational element" (essentially individual particles) can function independently, but are designed to function together in tremendously large clusters. I say its holographic because you can divide it up into the smallest chunks you want and still find a scaled-down but complete representation of the whole system. They produce a nonlinear computational output when grouped. So 4 elements working together is actually more than 4 times more powerful than 1. Most of the internal "matter" in their crafts (usually everything but the outermost housing) is actually this substrate and can contribute to computation at any time and in any state. The shape of these "chunks" of substrate also had a profound effect on its functionality, and often served as a "shortcut" to achieve a goal that might otherwise be more complex.

So back to the language. The language is actually a "functional blueprint". The forms of the shapes, symbols and arrangements thereof is itself functional. What makes it all especially difficult to grasp is that every element of each "diagram" is dependant on and related to every other element, which means no single detail can be created, removed or modified independently. Humans like written language because each element of the language can be understood on its own, and from this, complex expressions can be built. However, their "language" is entirely context-sensitive, which means that a given symbol could mean as little as a 1-bit flag in one context, or, quite literally, contain the entire human genome or a galaxy star map in another. The ability for a single, small symbol to contain, not just represent, tremendous amounts of data is another counter-intuitive aspect of this concept. We quickly realized that even working in groups of 10 or more on the simplest of diagrams, we found it virtually impossible to get anything done. As each new feature was added, the complexity of the diagram exponentially grew to unmanageable proportions. For this reason we began to develop computer-based systems to manage these details and achieved some success, although again we found that a threshold was quickly reached beyond which even the supercomputers of the day were unable to keep up. Word was that the extra-terrestrials could design these diagrams as quickly and easily as a human programmer could write a Fortran program. It's humbling to think that even a network of supercomputers wasn't able to duplicate what they could do in their own heads. Our entire system of language is based on the idea of assigning meaning to symbols. Their technology, however, somehow merges the symbol and the meaning, so a subjective audience is not needed. You can put whatever meaning you want on the symbols, but their behavior and functionality will not change, any more than a transistor will function differently if you give it another name.

Here's an example of how complex the process is. Imagine I ask you to incrementally add random words to a list such that no two words use any of the same letters, and you must perform this exercise entirely in your head, so you can't rely on a computer or even a pen and paper. If the first in the list was, say, "fox", the second item excludes all words with the letters F, O and X. If the next word you choose is "tree", then the third word in the list can't have the letters F, O, X, T, R, or E in it. As you can imagine, coming up with even a third word might start to get just a bit tricky, especially since you can't easily visualize the excluded letters by writing down the words. By the time you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth words, the problem has spiraled out of control. Now imagine trying to add the billionth word to the list (imagine also that we're working with an infinite alphabet so you don't run out of letters) and you can imagine how difficult it is for even a computer to keep up. Needless to say, writing this kind of thing "by hand" is orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of the brain.

My background lent itself well to this kind of work though. I'd spent years writing code and designing both analog and digital circuits, a process that at least visually resembled these diagrams in some way. I also had a personal affinity for combinatorics, which served me well as I helped with the design of software running on supercomputers that could juggle the often trillions of rules necessary to create a valid diagram of any reasonable complexity. This overlapped quite a bit with compiler theory as well, a subject I always found fascinating, and in particular compiler optimization, a field that wasn't half of what it is today back then. A running joke among the linguistics team was that Big-O notation couldn't adequately describe the scale of the task, so we'd substitute other words for "big". By the time I left I remember the consensus was "Astronomical-O" finally did it justice.

Like I said, I could go on for hours about this subject, and would love to write at least an introductory book on the subject if it wasn't still completely classified, but that's not the point of this letter so I'll try to get back on track.

The last thing I'd like to discuss is how I got copies of this material, what else I have in my possession, and what I plan to do with it in the future.

Found Here: http://isaaccaret.fortunecity.com/

Judaculla Rock - Tsul'kalu'

The meaning of the Judaculla petroglyphs remain a mystery to us. In the late 1800's ethnologist James Mooney documented the Cherokee legend of Tsul'kalu', a slant eyed giant. Tsul'kalu' was considered a great hunter who lived in nearby mountains. As legend describes, the giant leaped down off his mountain to a creek below where he scratched the rock with his 7 fingered hands. Other versions say he scraped it with his toes. Over time the name Tsul'kalu' evolved to Judaculla.

Outcropping soapstone boulders behind Judaculla Rock show evidence of prehistoric quarrying scars where stone bowls were carved from the soft stone. A limited archaeological excavation in 1993 revealed quarrying tools as well. In the Southeastern U.S., soapstone bowls were being manufactured between the Late Archaic Period (3000 -1000 BC) to the early Woodland Period (Sassaman et al), (1000-200 BC), and so by association the glyphs may date to this period.

Found Here: http://www.cs.unca.edu/nfsnc/rock_art/judaculla.html

Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record included in the two Voyager spacecraftextraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, that may find it. The Voyager spacecrafts are not heading towards any particular star, but in about 40,000 years Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation.^[1] launched in 1977. It contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent

As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they will ever be accidentally encountered. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will most likely be far in the future, and thus the record is best seen as a time capsule or a symbolic statement rather than an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Mark McCandlish / Brad Sorenson - Alien Reproduction Vehicle Diagram

Mark McCandlish, who is part of the Disclosure Project, is an accomplished aerospace illustrator and has worked for many of the top aerospace corporations in the United States. His colleague, Brad Sorenson, with whom he studied, has been inside a facility at Norton Air Force Base, where he witnessed alien reproduction vehicles, or ARVs, that were fully operational and hovering. In his full testimony, you learn that the US not only has operational antigravity propulsion devices, but they have had them for many, many years, and they have been developed through the study, in part, of extraterrestrial vehicles over the past fifty years. In addition, we have the drawing from aerospace inventor Brad Sorenson of the devices that he saw, as well as a schematic of one of these alien reproduction vehicles - in some remarkable detail.

Paul Laffoley

As of 2004, Laffoley claims to have executed over 800 works. His work over the last forty years is a dizzying mix of precise architectural-quality painting and ideas (both societally accepted and far on the fringe) from ancient times to the present. Laffoley has called his work a blend of the purely rational, Apollonian impulse and the purely emotional, Dionysian impulse.

British writer Michael Bracewell, in his collection of essays, when surface was depth, has made some particularly eloquent observations about his work, such as:

"If Laffoley's work within the Boston Visionary Cell can be said to have one principal preoccupation - a common denominator of his eclectic scholarship and practice - then that preoccupation would be to understand the process by which one goes from becoming to being."

And:

"The Boston Visionary Cell, as a concretized manifestation of its inhabitant's work and preoccupations, describes the way in which a chaos of data - no less than a chaos of marble - can be sculpted by research to release the perfect forms within it."

He works in many types of media, including oil, acrylic, silkscreen, and pen and ink, and include both images and text. Lately he has concentrated on large paintings with sculptural and mixed media elements.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Laffoley