Top 5 Mysterious Texts

5. The Beale Ciphers

The story behind the Beale Ciphers, which have foiled would-be code breakers for over 100 years, is the kind of old-fashioned buried treasure yarn that Hollywood screenwriters would be proud to come up with. The story begins in Virginia in 1820, when a man named Thomas Beale supposedly entrusted a box containing three pages of coded text to an innkeeper, with instructions that the box should only be opened if Beale did not return to claim it within ten years. Beale subsequently disappeared without a trace, and the innkeeper, named Robert Morriss, later spent several years trying to decode the pages. One of them was finally cracked by one of Morriss’ friends, who used the Declaration of Independence as a key. It was then that it was discovered that the pages were a map to the location of a cache of buried treasure. According to the document, Beale and some accomplices had discovered thousands of pounds of gold and silver in New Mexico and later buried it in Bedford County, VA. Unfortunately, Morriss and his friend were unable to decode the other two pages, which give the treasure’s exact location and the names of its owners, and Beale’s bizarre method of encryption has managed to confound anyone who’s tried to decipher it since.
Possible Explanations
The Beale Ciphers have since become their own mini-phenomenon (hundreds of would-be treasure hunters have been arrested for trespassing in Bedford County), but Beale’s gold and jewels have never been found. Many have since claimed that ciphers are nothing but an elaborate hoax, and many of the story’s details—like certain words in the documents that were not in popular usage until years later—seem to back this up. Still, this hasn’t stopped people from trying to unlock Beale’s secrets, especially since the treasure would now be valued at roughly $40 million.
4. Kryptos

Artist Jim Sanborn’s sculpture Kryptos might not be a document, but it’s included here because the text inscribed on it has created a mystery that even the best code-breakers in the CIA have not been able to
unravel. The sculpture was commissioned by the CIA as a monument to the intelligence gathering work that made the agency famous, and it was installed at their headquarters in Langley, VA in 1990. Rather than just make a beautiful work of art, Sanborn took things a step further. He collaborated with Ed Scheidt, a top CIA cryptographer, and inscribed a coded series of letters and question marks on the sculpture, which resembles a scroll. The codes are made up of 869 characters, and can be broken into four separate parts, each one of which is supposedly a partial key to the answer of the others. Together they serve as the building blocks of what Sanborn calls “a riddle within a riddle” that can only be solved by using sophisticated decoding techniques. Photo: thekryptosproject.com.
Possible Explanations
Sanborn and Scheidt’s cipher has since become an obsession for amateur and professional cryptographers alike. Members of the CIA and the NSA have all tried their hand at cracking it, and there is even an online group devoted to it that has thousands of members. Twenty years later, these enthusiasts have succeeded in cracking three of the four parts of the cipher, but the fourth and most important continues to have them stumped. Sanborn has hinted that the contents of the other three parts—which give the longitude and latitude of a point 200 feet southeast of the sculpture and include quotations relating to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen—offer the best clues. As of yet, though, no one has succeeded in getting to the bottom of the mystery.
3. The Urantia Book

The Urantia Book is a pseudo-religious text that claims to “expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception” through its discussions of philosophy, cosmology, and the life of Jesus. The book supposedly originated in Chicago, Illinois sometime in the early-to-mid twentieth century, and today it has become its own kind of phenomenon, having inspired a great deal of study and even a foundation that seeks to promote the book and its teachings. The over 2,000-page text has no known author, and the story of its origin is particularly bizarre: in 1925, a doctor named William Sadler (pictured above) supposedly came in contact with a sickly man who would often drift in trances and speak aloud at length. Sadler and a stenographer recorded these monologues, which the doctor claimed were later added to by some kind of celestial, supernatural process. The Urantia Book supposedly shares many common characteristics with major religions, particularly Christianity, but it also spends a great deal of time discussing scientific theories. Most notable are the book’s descriptions of the geography of the universe, which it splits up into “superuniverses” and the “local universe,” which it says is composed of around 1,000 inhabited planets.
Possible Explanations
This all may sound like science fiction, and indeed the idea that the Urantia Book is a clever piece of literature is a popular explanation of the mystery behind it. Skeptics, among them science writer Martin Gardner, argue that Sadler and a group of confidants most likely composed the book themselves sometime during the 1920s. Recent research, including an essay that claims the Urantia Book plagiarized a number of academic texts on religion, seems to back up this assertion, but there has yet to be any definitive proof of who was really behind it all.
2. The Gnostic Gospels

Also known as the Nag Hammadi library, the Gnostic Gospels are a collection of leather-bound books that date back to the 4th century. They make up the major texts of Gnosticism, an offshoot of Christianity that existed around the time of the 2nd century, whose adherents are said to have believed that true salvation came through deep self-knowledge and an understanding of a “higher reality.” The Gnostic Gospels, which feature such volumes as “The Gospel of Thomas,” “The Gospel of Mary,” and even “The Gospel of Judas,” were discovered in 1945 by a pair of farmers in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. They had been buried in a protective jar centuries earlier, most likely by a priest hoping to hide them from the orthodox Christian church, which regarded the Gnostics as heretics. The books went through many different owners, at one point even being sold on the black market, and it was not until the 1970s that they were finally translated into English. They’ve since become a popular philosophical text, and have even figured prominently in a number of different movies and novels. They’re also quite controversial, not just for their overlap with the Bible, but for the ways in which they attribute sayings to Jesus that don’t appear in the New Testament.
Possible Explanations
Unlike some of the other entries on this list, scholars generally understand the Gnostic Gospels, and the texts have been successfully translated into a number of languages. Still, the books are notable because of the place they hold in helping to develop the study and history of Gnosticism as a belief system. More importantly, the discovery of ancient texts that claim to offer previously undiscovered background stories about Jesus has sparked a fierce debate in religious and academic circles. Some have claimed that the books are nothing more than heretical fabrications, while others have argued that the Gnostic Gospels should be considered on the same terms as the Bible.
1. The Voynich Manuscript

Of all the bizarre and mysterious texts that have been uncovered over the years, perhaps none is as famous as the Voynich Manuscript, a book written by an anonymous author in an unknown language that has baffled nearly every cryptographer that’s ever tried to translate it. From what researchers have been able to uncover, the 15th century manuscript was part of a Jesuit library in the 1800s, and from there it passed through several hands before falling into the possession of a Polish book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich in 1909. After Voynich’s death, the manuscript became a subject of fascination for linguists and cryptographers, many of whom spent years studying the book’s mysterious language and alphabet. There are numerous theories about the text of the Voynich Manuscript, including that it is some kind of encoded puzzle; that it’s written in a heretofore undiscovered language; that it is meant to be read under a microscope; and even that it’s some kind of divinely inspired religious document that was written in a trance. But these are all just theories, and even after some fifty years of examination by the world’s top code-breakers, nothing is known for sure. Crude drawings of plants and jars in the book’s margins have led many to claim that it must be a manual on medicine or alchemy, but this too is just conjecture.
Possible Explanations
Because it has proven so resistant to translation, the Voynich Manuscript has inevitably been written off by many as a hoax. Critics of this theory argue that the book’s syntax is too sophisticated to have been faked, but others have shown that the technology of the time—particularly an encoding device called a “Cardan Grille”—would have made it possible for someone to fabricate the Voynich as a hoax. Still, none of these arguments have fully convinced Voynich scholars, who are either unwilling or unable to admit that the document might be a fake. Carbon dating has recently proven that the manuscript does indeed date back to the 1400s, but beyond that its origin and purpose still remain an enigma.
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