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10 of the world's biggest unsolved mysteries

terça-feira, 10 de março de 2015
Poucas histórias têm o poder de nos cativar mais do que aqueles que continuam por resolver. Códigos e enigmas e arte pública enigmática importunar-nos com a sua intriga: Por que a sua mensagem codificada? Que segredos grande eles podem esconder? Apesar dos esforços dos nossos historiadores mais reverenciados, mais inteligentes criptógrafos e caçadores de tesouros mais determinados, a história está repleta de enigmas que continuam a nos confundir hoje. Contos ficcionais, como aqueles apresentados em "O Código Da Vinci" e do filme "National Treasure" não tem nada sobre estes enigmas da vida real. Aqui está a nossa lista de 10 dos mistérios não resolvidos mais enigmáticas do mundo e códigos.




Manuscrito Voynich


Nomeado após o alfarrabista polonês-americano Wilfrid M. Voynich, que a adquiriu em 1912, o Manuscrito Voynich é um livro de 240 páginas detalhadas escrito em uma linguagem ou script que é completamente desconhecido. Suas páginas também estão cheias de desenhos coloridos de diagramas de estranhos, eventos estranhos e plantas que parecem não coincidir com nenhuma das espécies conhecidas, somando-se a intriga do documento e da dificuldade de decifrá-lo. O autor original do manuscrito permanece desconhecida, mas a datação por carbono revelou que suas páginas foram feitas em algum momento entre 1404 e 1438. Ele foi chamado de "manuscrito mais misterioso do mundo."

Há várias teorias sobre a origem ea natureza do manuscrito. Alguns acreditam que ele estava destinado a ser uma farmacopeia, para tratar de temas da medicina moderna medieval ou início. Muitas das imagens de ervas e plantas sugerem que muitos têm sido uma espécie de livro-texto para um alquimista. O fato de que muitos diagramas parecem ser de origem astronômica, combinado com os desenhos biológicos não identificáveis, até levou alguns teóricos fantasiosas de propor que o livro pode ter uma origem extraterrestre.

Uma coisa que a maioria dos teóricos concordam é que o livro é pouco provável que seja uma farsa, dada a quantidade de tempo, dinheiro e detalhes que teriam sido obrigados a fazê-lo.

Kryptos

KRYPTOS SLEUTHS MAY finally get some help cracking the CIA sculpture that has confounded amateur and professional cryptographers for two decades.
Artist Jim Sanborn, who created the cipher sculpture in 1990 for CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, plans to release a new clue to help puzzle detectives solve the last 97 characters of his masterpiece. The new clue is to be revealed in a New York Times article this weekend, to mark the 20th anniversary of the sculpture, which was dedicated Nov. 3, 1990.
It will be the first clue Sanborn has revealed in four years, after he corrected a typo in his sculpture in 2006 to keep crypto detectives from being derailed in their search for solutions.
Sanborn wouldn’t disclose the clue to Threat Level but said only cryptically that it will “globalize” the sculpture. Asked if this meant it would take the sculpture off the CIA grounds and out of the United States, he conceded it would.
“I personally think it’s a significant clue,” he said. “I’m throwing it out there. It just makes that many fewer characters people have to figure out.”
Sanborn said he’d been thinking about revealing a clue for a long time but couldn’t decide on the right occasion until the 20th anniversary and his birthday coincided in the same month.

Beale Ciphers


The Beale Ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts that supposedly reveal the location of one of the grandest buried treasures in U.S. history: thousands of pounds of gold, silver and jewels. The treasure was originally obtained by a mysterious man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in 1818 while prospecting in Colorado.
 
Of the three ciphertexts, only the second one has been cracked. Interestingly, the U.S. Declaration of Independence turned out to be the key — a curious fact given that Beale shares his name with the author of the Declaration of Independence.
 
The cracked text does reveal the county where the treasure was buried: Bedford County, Va., but its exact location is likely encrypted in one of the other uncracked ciphers. To this day, treasure hunters scour the Bedford County hillsides digging (often illegally) for the loot.

Phaistos Disc


The mystery of the Phaistos Disc is a story that sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. Discovered by Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in 1908 in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, the disc is made of fired clay and contains mysterious symbols that may represent an unknown form of hieroglyphics. It is believed that it was designed sometime in the second millennium BC.
 
Some scholars believe that the hieroglyphs resemble symbols of Linear A and Linear B, scripts once used in ancient Crete. The only problem? Linear A also eludes decipherment. 
 
Today the disc remains one of the most famous puzzles of archaeology.

Shugborough inscription


Look from afar at the 18th-century Shepherd's Monument in Staffordshire, England, and you might take it as nothing more than a sculpted re-creation of Nicolas Poussin's famous painting, “Arcadian Shepherds.” Look closer, though, and you'll notice a curious sequence of letters: DOUOSVAVVM — a code that has eluded decipherment for over 250 years.
 
Though the identity of the code carver remains a mystery, some have speculated that the code could be a clue left behind by the Knights Templar about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
 
Many of the world's greatest minds have tried to crack the code and failed, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.

Tamam Shud case


The Americans, he would begin, had a small metal flag on their mailboxes, one the mailman would raise whenever he delivered letters. Mother would only have to look out of the bedroom window.
‘The chalk mark is your small metal flag,’ he said to the class,  ‘and after the three days, when you return, it’s absence will mean one thing, and it’s presence another.
Yes Franklin, I can see that your hand is raised.’
Delongue insisted that questions be delivered standing up. Franklin stood, and like a fool, put his large hands into his pockets once before withdrawing them.
‘What if the book is sold?
‘When?’
‘The day he put it there, whenever it was on the shelf.’
Delongue held no compassion for the asker of an un-researched question.
‘You are a fool Franklin, and unsuited for this work.
The bookshop has three shelves of rubaiyats, they represent copies from over forty publications, over thirty are in languages other than the King’s English. Some are hardcover, others soft. They can be richly illustrated, or published in rough paper bound in Indian cardboard .
The seller buys, on average, three a week, and sells two. He, like many others, is a collector of the work.
There were three hundred and fifty eight rubaiyats on his bookshelf the last time I visited Franklin, because I too, am a collector, otherwise why would I visit the shop so often.’
He looked at Franklin with great distaste, ‘the only method by which your question could be correctly formulated, would be by calculating the mathematical chance of one particular copy being sold in three days. One particular copy that is not visible on the shelf, placed properly, which I doubt you will ever have the opportunity to do, Frankin.

The Wow! Signal


One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one that might be sent by intelligent aliens, when he saw his measurements spike.
 
The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before: in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light-years away.
 
Ehman wrote the words "Wow!" on the original printout of the signal, thus its title as the "Wow! Signal."
 
All attempts to locate the signal again have failed, leading to much controversy and mystery about its origins and its meaning.


The Zodiac letters


The Zodiac letters are a series of four encrypted messages believed to have been written by the famous Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who terrorized residents of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The letters were likely written as a way to taunt journalists and police, and though one of the messages has been deciphered, the three others remain uncracked.
 
The identity of the Zodiac Killer also remains a mystery, though no Zodiac murders have been identified since 1970.

Georgia Guidestones


The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes referred to as the "American Stonehenge," is a granite monument erected in Elbert County, Ga., in 1979. The stones are engraved in eight languages — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian — each relaying 10 "new" commandments for "an Age of Reason." The stones also line up with certain astronomical features.
 
Though the monument contains no encrypted messages, its purpose and origin remain shrouded in mystery. They were commissioned by a man who has yet to be properly identified, who went by the pseudonym of R.C. Christian.
 
Of the 10 commandments, the first one is perhaps the most controversial: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Many have taken it to be a license to cull the human population down to the specified number, and critics of the stones have called for them to be destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists even believe they may have been designed by a "Luciferian secret society" calling for a new world order.

Rongorongo

Rongorongo is a system of mysterious glyphs discovered written on various artifacts on Easter Island. Many believe they represent a lost system of writing or proto-writing and could be one of just three or four independent inventions of writing in human history.
 
The glyphs remain undecipherable, and their true messages — which some believe could offer hints about the perplexing collapse of the statue-building Easter Island civilization — may be lost forever.

Information sources: 
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/photos/10-of-the-worlds-biggest-unsolved-mysteries/related-photos
http://tomsbytwo.com/2014/07/14/chapter-2-the-mailbox/
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/kryptos-clue/



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