Are there any VMS-type hoaxes?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The Book of Soyga (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). “The Book of Soyga contains thirty-six tables; each table is a square grid of 36 rows and columns; each grid cell contains a letter of the Latin alphabet. These tables turn out to be formed by a completely deterministic calculation method, or algorithm, starting from an arbitrary ‘code word’ for each table.” (36*36*36=46656 characters, almost one fourth of Voynichese).

Given its contents and size, I don't think this was a hoax.  My understanding is that the author invented an algorithm (which we now could call "cellular automaton") that,  from a single 6-letter "seed" word, would generate row by row some intriguing patterns of letters -- some repeating, some converging to a fixed string, some apparently random.  It would seem that he was so intrigued by the results that he filled a book with 36 runs of this algorithm. 

Stephen Wolfram, creator of the algebraic computatioal tool Mathematica, wrote a ~1200-page book modestly called A New Kind of Science that can be described as an expanded version of the Book of Soyga.  Critics say that its contribution to human knowledge has been about the same as that of the original version. 

The two You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Dee and Kelley. The first language was presented in tabular form, and Dee was likely inspired by Soyga (of which he owned a copy which greatly puzzled him). The second language comes with an English translation, but the general consensus is that the English cannot correspond to the original, which could be a meaningless pseudo-language.

I always understood that these were definitely hoaxes, created by Kelley to fool Dee, as part of his running scam of pretending to see and converse with "angels" through Dee's crystal ball -- while Dee himself, to his great disappointment, was never able to see anything in it.  Dee had hoped that the "angels" would reveal to him the secret of the Book of Soyga, but the "angels" (guess why) always said that Dee was not "yet" spiritually prepared for it.  

Dee's account of the Conversations with Angels that he had through Kelley is available online (sorry but I cannot find a good link now) and makes a great read.  From his telling of their dealings, especially of the last episode that resulted in Dee breaking their society, it is very clear that the doctor totally believed Kelley to the end.

All the best, --stolfi