Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[RenegadeHealer]

Seriously, why are they physically travelling to a location to get a hold of an "expert", as if they were in a fantasy movie? I don't consider this scientific at all.

It’s possible Ahmet Ardic was conducting fieldwork in Azerbaijan, related to the VMS, as part of his work. If the VMS really was written in a medieval Turkic language, and Mr Ardic was able to translate some of it, it’s not all that far-fetched that what he translated led him to people, places, and/or artifacts in modern-day Azerbaijan. It’s exciting to imagine that when the grand reveal happens, we’ll get not only a transition of the text, but also a connection to a specific place and group of people. I want to believe.

It’s also very plausible that the Ardics have friends, family, and professional connections in the Caucasus region, and weren’t traveling there only to show their work to a local scholar in an Indiana Jones flavored publicity stunt. If I was in the middle of a serious research project, and I was in touch with an academic interested in my work who lived in a place I was traveling to anyway, I’d certainly rather meet and share my work in person if convenient for both of us.

What raises my eyebrow about this update, is that despite going on for paragraphs, Prof Celilov’s letter adds no new information that the Ardics and their spokespeople haven’t already presented. There are no new examples, and the claims are all vague in exactly the same way as the corresponding claims in the Ardics’ announcements thus far. The words of Ardic and Celilov read like the works of two different journalists who used the exact same primary sources. That’s very suspicious to me. The most charitable interpretation of this I can think of, is that Ardic told and showed Celilov no more like he has shown his YouTube audience, and/or heavily censored Celilov’s letter so as not to reveal anything new. It just doesn’t make sense for a researcher who’s truly on the verge of a big discovery, and just needs a bit of expert verification to establish his credibility, to do either of these things. It does make sense, however, for a crank who’s bluffing to do something like this, to stall for time to placate an increasingly skeptical fan base, whether to execute some sort of endgame, or just prolong their five minutes in the limelight as long as possible. I’m getting whiffs of fraudulent inventor John Ernst Worrell Keely, or the Duke and the Dauphin, traveling con artists in Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, and their Royal Nonesuch.

I’m fascinated to see how this theory plays out, after such an unusually big and lengthy buildup. The Ardics stand to either gain or lose an incredible amount of face.