Mystery text's language-like patterns may be an elaborate hoax

A simple cryptography method can produce the unusual language-like features of a mysterious manuscript from the Middle Ages. The finding suggests that the famous Voynich manuscript may be an elaborate hoax, not a secret language to be decoded. The manuscript has baffled cryptographers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains hundreds of pages of fine calfskin parchment, which scientists have dated to the first half of the 15th century. Pages of indecipherable text are accompanied by illustrations of exotic unidentified plants, naked nymphs and plant-based pharmaceuticals, astrological diagrams, and other material that no one has been able to identify.