What initially sparked your interest in Voynich research?

[Emma May Smith]

I had read about the Voynich manuscript in the 1990s, in a magazine which my brothers bought which featured unsolved mysteries. I dismissed it as probably a forgery, or even simply made up to sell magazines to teen boys.

Then the anniversary of the Wow! signal in 2012 made me wonder how we would even decipher a xenolanguage. Given the current lack of such language examples, I looked for undeciphered documents to consider. I was pleased to learn that the Voynich manuscript had been carbon-dated to the early-1400s and was therefore not the forgery I assumed it to be. Hence my interest.