Did you ever fantasize about being a codebreaker?

Did you write letters and lemon juice for your friends to hold over candlelight to read?

Did you love getting secret messages or long for a little orphan Annie Decoder ring like a real-life spy or double agent would surely have?

Welcome to strange and unexplained with me, Daisy Egan.

When I was little, I wanted to be a spy in the fashion of Harriet the Spy.

I loved those spy activity books you could pick up at freeway rest stops,

and I was absolutely Gaga over the old computer game where in the world is Carmen

San Diego. These days, I like escape rooms and still go for video games that involve puzzle

solving. But when it comes to code breaking, I need that shit to not have more symbols than there

are letters in the English alphabet. My brain can only keep track of so much before it starts to wander and think about when

I can take a nap.

Plus, the decoded message better be clear and straightforward.

I spend all that time decoding only to find a weird message I still can't really understand.

I'm going to be pissed.

Fortunately, for everyone, I did not become a spy or any kind of master decoder.

I became the guy who tells the stories of the spy and the master decoder.

Today's story is about a coded message whose answers seem to mostly reveal more questions.

Music mostly reveal more questions. The Kopiali-ali cipher is a codex, that is a whole book written in code, that dates back to the 1730s.

It is a small volume with an ornate green cover, inside which the handwritten text consists of 75,000 characters filling 105 pages.

The script inside the book is virtually unintelligible.

It includes abstract symbols and letters from both the Greek and Roman alphabets. The only easily readable part of the book is the cover where Philip 1866 appears and Copialis 3 at the end, from which the title has been taken. Copialis is a Latin

word relating to the modern word code, and it is thought that the number three refers to the

...