Sometimes I troll uselessly through Wikipedia, killing time and filling my head with what may, at best, help me win Jeopardy some day. Other times, I come up with a truly strange mystery worthy of DaVinci Code treatment. A six hundred year old book completely undecipherable to modern methods, yet elaborate and sophisticated enough to be quite resistant to hoax hypotheses, is the stuff of science fiction. This is the sort of book SF authors use to allow their time-traveling heroes to communicate with their handlers in the future.

The difference, of course, is that this thing is quite real.

Paging Rod Serling, White Courtesy Phone Please...