Lurking Fear

For a few brief seconds of the 2001 IMAX film “Great North” a dark figure is seen on the far side of a river. The figure, which went unnoticed for 9 years, seems to startle part of caribou heard that the crew was filming crossing the river. While the figure is currently unidentifiable in copies of the film available online, big foot researchers are currently attempting to track down the filmmakers in the hopes of being able to find a print of the film at the full IMAX quality for further analysis. If they are able to find a high quality version of film, the researchers should be able to tell whether or not the film crew inadvertently documented the existence of an undocumented North American hominid. Until that happens we are left to ponder over lower resolution versions of the clip, like this one taken from Youtube:

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book written in an undeciphered text. It is thought to have been written between 1450 and 1520. The author, script, and language of the manuscript remain unknown.

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book-dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. As of 2005, the Voynich manuscript is item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.