The Voynich manuscript is an ancient book that has thwarted all attempts at deciphering its contents. And it's not like some idiot just scribbled a bunch of nonsense on paper and went, "Figure THIS out, f**kwads." It is actually an organized book with a consistent script, discernible organization and detailed illustrations.
It appears to be a real language--just one that nobody has seen before. And it really does appear to mean something. But nobody knows what.
Expert military code-breakers, cryptographers, mathematicians, linguists, people who get paid to find and decipher patterns, have all been left unable to decipher a single word.
As you can imagine, proposed solutions have been all over the board, from reasonable to completely clowns**t. Some say it's an unbreakable code that requires a key to solve. Some say it's a hoax, and a damned fine one if we do say ourselves. Some say it's glossolalia, which is the fine art of speaking or writing something you don't understand but that is being channeled to you by God or aliens or whatever.
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient, intricate machine found in a shipwreck near Greece that dates back to about 100 BC. The Antikythera mechanism contains gears and structures that were not found in devices again for 1000 years, and only then when the Muslims and Chinese were busy inventing s**t while the Europeans were busy killing each other.
Why Can't They Solve It?
First, no one can agree on where the Antikythera mechanism was made or who designed it. Popular belief was that it was made by the Greeks due to its instructions all being in Greek (about a million of our tax dollars were probably spent arriving at that genius conclusion) but serious research published in serious places suggested the design came from Sicily. The mechanism, aside from placing you at serious risk for severing a finger, was supposedly used to figure out astronomical positions. The problem with that is that at the time this thing was made, no one had yet discovered laws of gravity or how heavenly bodies moved.
In other words, the Antikythera mechanism appears to have functions that no one alive at that time would have understood, and no single mechanical purpose of that era (such as navigating ships) explains the crazy number of functions and settings this machine has.
The Baigong Pipes
In an area of China not known to ever contain people, let alone industry, there are three mysterious triangular openings on top of a mountain containing hundreds of ancient rusty iron pipes of unknown origin. Some of the pipes go deep into the mountain. Some of them go into a nearby salt water lake. There are more pipes in the lake, and more still running east-west along the lake shore. Some of the larger pipes are 40 cm in diameter, are of uniform size and are placed in what seems like purposeful patterns.
So what's the big deal? Well, archaeologists have dated the pipes to a time when people were still trying to figure out how to cook meat without setting their back-hair on fire, let alone casting iron.
Why Can't They Solve It?
Oddly, the pipes are clean of debris despite being older than Zeus. This suggests that they were not simply shoved into the ground for the hell of it, but actually used for something. Oh, and did we mention the mountain is completely inhospitable to human life?
As usual, a faction of nutjobs believes the Baigong Pipes to be an ancient astronomy lab or even spacecraft launching site left by extraterrestrials. This is possible, since the pipes contain a proportion of silica close to what occurs on Mars. Of course, the manhole cover outside your house does also, so take that with a grain of salt.
Some say they are a hoax. We must politely remind those people that you can't wipe your ass in China without the government knowing, let alone set up a f**king iron forge and start burying pipes in the ground for the purpose of confusing passers-by.
The Bloop
Tired of having its mind blown by the guys in the archeology department, in 1997 modern science's mind pulled itself up off the mat and triumphantly blew itself.
In that year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded a strange sound in the ocean. Strange and LOUD. So loud that it was picked up by two separate microphones 3,000 f**king miles apart. The sound, dubbed "The Bloop," doesn't sound like anything at normal speed. However, the NOAA did us the favor of speeding up the recording to 16 times the normal speed, causing it to sound like a turd dropping into the toilet. Bloop! Except, you know, awesomely loud.
Scientists determined that its wave pattern indicates it was made by an animal, and not a giant electromagnet sucking a plane out of the sky, as the creators of Lost were no doubt hoping.
Why Can't They Solve It?
There is no animal big enough or loud enough to make that kind of noise, not by a long shot. Not a blue whale, not a howler monkey, not a startled teenage girl.
Not long after the NOAA posted the sound to their web site, some HP Lovecraft fans on the internet quite reasonably decided that The Bloop must have been made by Lovecraft's Cthulhu, a giant, murderous squid-dragon-thing.
The Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica
Costa Rica and a few surrounding areas are scattered with giant stone balls. They are smooth and perfectly spherical, or nearly so. Some of them are quite small, a few inches in diameter, but some of them are as large as eight feet in diameter weighing several tons.
They have been chiseled to perfection by persons unknown, despite the fact that Costa Rica is still not scheduled to enter the Bronze Age until 2013. The are balls everywhere and serve no apparent purpose, like a swing club on Gentlemen's Night.
Some of the balls have been blasted apart by locals hoping to find gold, coffee beans, or even babies. Some have been rolled around, but some are too heavy to move even with a bulldozer. Not that they have bulldozers in Costa Rica.
Why Can't They Solve It?
About the most useful information anyone has gotten is that there are not, under any circumstance, any quarries anywhere near the balls. This information is actually useless considering the balls are carved from volcanic rock.
Animal Suicides
One of the major things that separate humans from animals is that most lower life forms have an intense will to live. Unless they are defending their babies or food, most animals will prefer to run off than fight, because life is precious. Plus, given the fact that most don't really appear to be all that self aware, the likelihood of goth hamsters and emo pigeons seems pretty thin.Then why do some animals just up and decide to off themselves sometimes? We've already shown you a bridge that seems to drive dogs into a suicidal frenzy, but that kind of thing doesn't happen often, does it? Well, recently (and by recently we mean 2009) there were a couple of major animal suicides; in Switzerland, 28 cows decided to leap off a cliff over the course of three days, and in California, dozens of monstrous squids beached themselves.And lets not forget Jatinga, India, where hundreds of birds from several species dive into the ground to kill themselves every year.
How Long Has This Been Going On?
That's a tough one. People don't typically record animal suicides unless it is really bizarre or a mass suicide, but studies were conducted as far back as the 1800s to try and figure out why.
But, They Must Have a Theory For This...
They do, and very few of them have anything to do with being jilted or members of a cult. Indian scientists believe that atmospheric conditions confused the birds in Jatinga, causing them to lose their sense of direction and crash into the earth, though evolutionarily speaking, that doesn't make a s**t-lick of sense. There's also the old "follow the leader" theory, where they suggest that a tightly packed group is following one lost animal that is a bit sick to accidental deaths, similar to the way that some animals get lost during migration and end up leading a massive amount of birds in the wrong direction.
Still, that might explain one mass suicide, but those cows offed themselves during the span of three days. There wasn't just one line of cows lead by some misguided leader; several gangs of cows separately jumped off on their own accord.
Finally, there is the matter of the mass squid suicide. They all beached themselves around the time of an earthquake, so some figure there might be a connection. But scientists point out that squid are basically aggressive water balloons, and don't have any of the structures in them that cause fish and whales to become disoriented during quakes. Additionally, the squids started beaching themselves three days before the quake, which either means that the two events are unrelated or that squids a) can predict earthquakes (more on that later) and b) are using the earthquake as an opportunity to come on land and attack us at our most vulnerable and disoriented. Granted, that was probably the most poorly thought out invasion ever but still, it's scary to know they're planning something.
