1913-02-17 — The Monastery Register — Archivist ████████ / BAR-OBP-00316

The holdings of the Imperial Commission that passed to the Bureau at its chartering include a register kept by the monastery in which ████████ was held, continued in the Commission's hand from the sixteenth century. The entries concerning ████████'s writings are translated below from the Latin. Entries concerning the monastery's other holdings are filed with the cases to which they relate.

13██. On the Wednesday after Michaelmas a carter of ████ came to the gate with a leaf he had found on the road. He said that he had read it, and that he must be let down into the undercroft, for a great wrong was done there. He was not let in. He would take no bread, and sat by the gate until his brother came for him on the eleventh day. The leaf was burnt.

13██. In the week before Advent two women of ████ came to the gate, each with a leaf. Neither knew the other. Both asked for ████████ by name. The leaves were burnt.

13██. Brother ████, porter, read a leaf that he found in the cloister, and went down with the keys at Matins. He was taken at the second door. Henceforth no brother is to carry the keys alone.

13██. By order of the abbot, no word is to be spoken in the hearing of ████████, nor any written thing brought within its sight, nor any book read where it can see. The brothers who serve it are to speak with their hands.

13██. Leaves are found as before, but the Latin is broken and the hand is worse. Two came to the gate this year.

13██. A leaf found at the mill. Some of the letters are ours. The words are not.

14██. Since the feast of ███ a great quantity of leaves has been found within the walls, written and painted, in letters not known to us. The prior has had them kept together in the press. No one could read them, and no one came.

14██. The leaves are not in the press, nor anywhere within the walls.

The register does not record how ████████ came by vellum and pigments, or by whom the leaves were sewn into a book.

1971-05-11 — Assessment of the Script — Dr. ████████ / BAR-OPM-14072, Aberrant Linguistics Sector

Civilian researchers have treated the text as a cipher, a shorthand, or a known language in disguise. OPM's assessment is that it is a language in its own right, with a single speaker. It is written in the manner of a writer using a language they know well, fluently and with few corrections, and its word frequencies are those of a language in use. Its short, repeated words are unlike those of any language OPM has examined.

Several characters resemble abbreviation marks used in Latin manuscripts of the period. The register records that no written thing was brought within ████████'s sight after the abbot's order (Note 1913-02-17). OPM's working position is that the resemblances are what remained of the Latin that ████████ had learned before the order, and that the language they record is either ████████'s own or one it devised after its Latin was lost. The question has not been resolved.

If the assessment is correct, there is no key to find, and cryptanalysis will not produce a reading. The language could still be learned from the text by matching its words to the things they name. The labels are the obvious place to begin, since each stands beside the figure it presumably names.

Of the civilian assessments, the nearest to OPM's is that of W. F. Friedman, who concluded that the text was an early attempt at an artificial language of the a priori type. He concealed the conclusion in an anagram published in 1959, and its solution was released only after his death.

1974-02-04 — Memorandum: Constitution of Program "BABEL" — Supervisor ████████ / BAR-DAI-16530

TO: OPM, CASE-0408 file

FROM: DAI, Supervisor ████████

RE: Constitution of Program PG-0408-800-01 "BABEL"

CASE-0408 is self-normalizing. Civilians regard it as an unsolved puzzle, and REG-800-12 §3 forbids the Bureau to act against those who try to solve it.

The Division Director's directive of 1973-11-26 authorizes Civilian Communication under the §3 precautionary exception, which permits the Bureau only to supply an ordinary explanation. The directive treats a reading of the text as such an explanation.

The Program will therefore publish readings under civilian cover. Each is to be plausible enough to attract study and to fail under it. The reading announced by W. R. Newbold in 1921 held the field for ten years before J. M. Manly refuted it.

1988-02-15 — Objection to Diversion — Dr. ████████ / BAR-OPM-21966

Incident CASE-0408-3 was resolved by offering the civilian concerned a post that took her away from the study of the manuscript. REG-800-12 §3 prohibits enforcement action against civilian discussion. OPM submits that removing a civilian from the discussion is such an action, whatever the means.

DAI's reply is reproduced in full:

TO: Dr. ████████, OPM

FROM: DAI, Supervisor ████████

RE: Your memorandum of 1988-02-15

REG-800-12 §3 prohibits the Bureau from seeking the removal, suppression, or modification of civilian-produced material. The Program offered a civilian paid work, which she accepted. Nothing she wrote was removed, and her notebooks are where she left them.

Addendum, 1988-09-20. Referred to the Ministerial Subcommittee on Civilian Conduct, which found that the offer did not constitute enforcement action and directed that diversion be used only after a supplied reading has failed to redirect an inquiry.

2026-10-02 — Program Record since 1974 — Dr. Ilse Varga / BAR-OPM-29847

Program "BABEL" has issued ██ readings since 1974, CC-0408-01 to CC-0408-██, against ███ civilian readings recorded by OPM over the same period. Civilian literature cites the supplied readings alongside civilian ones and does not tell them apart.

OPM has assessed ██ civilian lines of inquiry as meeting the threshold. Supplied readings redirected all but four, which were resolved by diversion under the ruling of 1988-09-20.

The explanation that the text has no meaning has been supplied ██ times. It is now among the most common civilian views of the manuscript.

1912-10-03 – Incident CASE-0408-1: The Jesuit Sale

In 1911 Investigator ████████ / BAR-ACD-00141 traced CASE-0408 to a Jesuit holding at Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome, where the Society of Jesus had kept part of the library of the Collegio Romano since the confiscations that followed the capture of Rome in 1870. The holding was not catalogued, and the Society did not acknowledge it. In March 1912 the Bureau opened negotiations, through an intermediary in Rome, to buy the manuscript alone.

While the offer was under consideration, the Society sold a large part of the holding, CASE-0408 included, to Wilfrid Voynich, an antiquarian bookseller in London. The sale was completed in July 1912 under a promise of secrecy. The intermediary was not told, and the Investigator learned of the sale on 1912-10-03. It has not been determined whether the Bureau's approach prompted the Society to sell.

Voynich took the manuscript to London and, in 1914, to New York. He exhibited it at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1915 and sent photostatic copies to scholars in the hope that one of them could read it.

1972-03-08 – Incident CASE-0408-2: Placement at Yale

Hans P. Kraus bought CASE-0408 in 1961 and offered it for sale. The Bureau opened negotiations through a cover buyer, ████████, in 1963. It broke them off in 1964 on a directorate decision that the manuscript was not to pass into private hands again, since no private custodian in its record had kept it.

The Bureau then looked for an institutional custodian whose access restrictions it judged sufficient. It chose the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, opened in 1963, for its closed stacks and supervised reading room. Kraus was persuaded through ████████ to give the manuscript to the library, and did so in 1969. It was catalogued as MS 408.

The library admitted researchers to the manuscript on ordinary application, as it did for any item in its collection, and the Bureau had no part in that policy. The photostats that Voynich had sent to scholars were still in circulation and were still being copied. Closed stacks restricted access to the manuscript and to nothing else. On 1972-03-08 the Bureau closed its interest in custody of CASE-0408 and withdrew the officer it had placed on the library's staff.

1987-04-21 – Incident CASE-0408-3: The Pharmacist

A retired pharmacist in ████ had studied CASE-0408 alone, from photographic copies, since 1976. She compared the labels with plant names in the regional herbals of her own country, and in 1986 submitted a paper to the journal of a botanical society proposing values for eleven characters. OPM obtained a copy through ████████ and tested her values by computer against labels she had not used. They gave consistent results on ██ of ██, which met the threshold.

Later in 1986 the Program issued CC-0408-0█, a reading of the labels by her method against the herbals of another region, which was refuted within the year. The pharmacist never saw it. She did not follow the civilian literature on the manuscript and discussed her work with no one outside the society. When a member of the society told her that the manuscript was generally thought to be a hoax, she replied in a letter later obtained by DAI:

Nobody puts labels on a hoax.

On 1987-04-21 DAI offered her a paid post compiling a flora of ████ for a regional botanical survey operating under cover. She accepted and withdrew her paper. The work occupied her until her death in 1999, and she did not return to the manuscript.

Her notebooks remain with her family. Under REG-800-12 §3 the Bureau has not sought them, and OPM confirms their location annually.

2011-08-16 – Incident CASE-0408-4: The Fitted Reading

Program author ████████ / BAR-DAI-38842 was preparing a supplied reading of the labels in the pharmaceutical section, fitting character values to a fifteenth-century ████ dialect. Under the procedure then in force, authors checked each reading against other folios to confirm that it failed there.

On 2011-08-16 she stopped work and reported to her supervisor. Her statement was taken the same afternoon:

I fitted eleven characters to the labels on the jar pages. That's the job. Then I ran them across the bathing pages to make sure they'd come apart, and they didn't. Three words came out that I didn't put in. I stopped there. I don't know what they say, and I'd like to keep it that way.

She was withdrawn from the Program, her worksheets were destroyed without examination, and she received a Class II amnestic covering the work. The reading was not issued. In 2012 the Program issued CC-0408-██ in its place, prepared by another author using a different method. The procedure for Program authors was revised to its present form on 2011-09-30. OPM did not attempt to determine whether her values were close to correct, and the three words have not been reconstructed.