] In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book
] dealer, made the find of a lifetime: a manuscript
] some 230 pages long, written in an unusual script
] and richly illustrated with bizarre images of
] plants, heavenly spheres and bathing women. Despite
] 90 years of effort by some of the world's best
] code breakers, no one has been able to decipher the
] script. The failure of the code-breaking attempts
] has raised the suspicion that it may simply be an
] elaborate hoax.

Scientific American has a writeup by Gordon Rugg
on how the manuscript may have been faked.