Experts Finally Crack An Ancient Code, But Others Urge Extreme Caution
A book filled with strange symbols from hundreds of years ago is every codebreaker’s dream — or nightmare, depending on how long it takes to crack the code. Such was the case with Christiane Schaefer, whose bizarre going-away present kicked off a decade-long mystery involving ancient ciphers, eccentric professors, and maybe even brushes with the devil. Schaefer was desperate for an answer, but she never thought her curiosity would end up revealing sinister secrets from the past...
"Top secret"
It was 1998 when the German-born Schaefer took the package and found herself face to face with a warning: “TOP SECRET.” But that wasn’t even the part of the package that interested Schaefer the most. Instead, it was the collection of symbols scrawled across the outside of the gift that piqued her interest.
Something's different
As a philologist, or an expert in the history of languages, Schaefer dedicated her career to the study of languages living and dead. She’d seen, studied, and cracked all kinds of ancient runes and codes, but there was something about this one that made her hair stand on end.
A mess of symbols
The gift itself was around 100 pages of symbols, obviously dating back hundreds of years. Her first instinct — to parse out any recognizable characters — was immediately a bust, since the code seemed to be a mess of mathematical symbols, Roman letters, ancient runes, and shapes, none of which connected.
Collecting dust
But Schaefer’s gut told her that these pages weren’t a mess — on the contrary. She deduced that it was a cipher, or a secret code written to purposely throw the reader off. Well, it worked: after a few unsuccessful attempts at cracking the code, Schaefer put the manuscript on a shelf for 13 years.
