Many people, past and present, have been greatly interested in finding explanations or translations of the text of the Voynich MS. In no few cases, these people were actually quite convinced that they were on the right track.
One of the reasons why they were so convinced may be (have been) what I would call the 'unexpected confirmation'.
Basically it means that one unexpectedly learns about something that one did not know before, but would seem to confirm what one has been thinking. This is better explained with a few examples.
Probably the best known is Newbold. He was translating the text of one of the pages of the MS, and came up with: "in a concave mirror I saw a star in the form of a snail ... between the navel of Pegasus, the girdle of Andromeda and the head of Cassiopeia" (text from Kahn: the Codebreakers). This is where the Andromeda galaxy is found, and Newbold stated that he did not know of that before. It seemed like the perfect confirmation that he was right.
A second example is given by Stephen Bax. When he was considering that the plant on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. could be Hellebore, and he transcribed the word that should give the name, he came up with Ka(e)ur. Searching the web, he found that Hellebore was called "Kaur" in Kashmir. This is the sort of striking discovery that seemed to be beyond coincidence.
I have often wondered if the same thing did not happed to Wilfrid Voynich. His complete conviction that the Voynich MS was a Roger Bacon work was not even completely understood by ELV and Anne Nill after his death.
But what if he had indeed formed the idea of (Albertus Magnus or) Roger Bacon, and only after that saw the name of Bacon in the Marci letter? This would be such a case of unexpected confirmation. However, this is clearly speculation and we may not know for sure. (Even though he wrote that this was the order of events in his 1921 paper, we may be skeptical about it).
I don't doubt that such striking confirmation must be happening on some scale to many people working on theories, and it will be hard to be truly critical whether a confirmation is real, or could simply be a coincidence.