How to get rid of bagpipe-playing ghosts

One of the downsides of writing about nonsense is that you become the target for more nonsense.  Recently I have received email links for Spirit Rescue International, and also had ads show up for it on Skeptophilia and on my Facebook page.  The link showed a picture of a scared-looking woman, looking over her shoulder, and had the tagline, "Escape the Fear."  So of course I clicked on the link, which undoubtedly explains how these people find me.

Spirit Rescue International is apparently sort of an SPCA for ghosts.  Its leader, Irene Block, is "in touch with the spirit world:"

Irene's compassion not only lies with the spirit but also with the client. The technique she uses comes to her directly from her spiritual helpers/guides, so no one clearing is alike.  Everything Irene knows has been taught to her since an early age by the spirit world. She refuses to learn from people or from books, believing this would contaminate her knowledge.

Who are these spirits, you might ask?  Apparently, they can be demons ("malevolent non-human energies") or earthbound human spirits.  About the latter, Irene explains:

You may call it a ghost, but that is not so. A ghost is a memory or residual energy that replays itself over and over, like a battle taking place in a field or a Scottish piper playing his bagpipes on the battlement of some Scottish castle. An earthbound spirit was a person who is now deceased. A spirit whose mind and consciousness have moved to a different vibration to that of ours. For some reason they have not moved on to the next stage after death, and need to be led to the light. Most of us believe that when we die we will automatically go to what some call Heaven or the next stage in the spirit world. This is not always so, we all have free will and have three choices of what we do next.

So, a ghost and a spirit are different because ghosts play the bagpipes and spirits don't?  If he tried to bring his pipes with him, at least it's clear why he didn't end up in heaven.

What evidence does she have that all this is true?  Well you should ask.  On her "SRI Evidence" link (here) we hear some garbled sound recordings, and see some blurred photographs with fuzzy light blobs on them.  That's enough for me!  Ghosts exist!  Bagpipes and all!

So, now that we've accepted the existence of ghosts and spirits, what do we do about it?  Irene recommends a three-pronged approach; (1) assuring the spirit that it is loved; (2) convincing the spirit that its business here on Earth is concluded; and (3) telling the spirit that it is causing problems by attaching to a place, or a person who is still living.  If that doesn't work, it's time to bring out the big guns, and chant, "St. Michael the Archangel, Prince of Light, wield the Sword of Truth and cut those etheric cords void of love and veneration."  At that point, the spirit will have no choice but to pack up and move on to "a higher dimension."

Upon reading further, one finds that she doesn't even have to enter your house in order to perform "spirit clearing:"

Irene has an astounding ability to clear hauntings and attachments from her location in the UK, either using her abilities to remote view or visualize in any part of the world. Her furthest distance yet was evident with a client in New Zealand - 11,500 miles away! The people she has helped have never met Irene in person; merely, she has been the supportive voice at the other end of the telephone.

Fortunately, with such a strenuous job, she doesn't work alone.  She has help from Alswell and GreenMother in the US, from Bella in New Zealand, and from Elven in Australia.   (Elven is described as a "psychic artist," whatever that means.)  I don't know about  you, but I'm feeling relieved just knowing that GreenMother is on the job.

I tried to find out on the website how much all this would cost, but it's not mentioned anywhere.  I suspect that crass topics such as money would not come up until much later, until you had registered with SRI, filled out the "Client Information Form," and so on.  But I can say with some confidence that the great likelihood is that you'd pay hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars to avail yourself of SRI's services.

I know that heaping scorn on hucksters like the "SRI research team" is probably pointless, that anyone who seeks out their services is extremely unlikely to read Skeptophilia.  I know that there have always been, and always will be, gullible people who will spend large quantities of money on charlatans, scams, and quack cures, and nothing I say will stop that.  However, when I receive links like this one, I just have to respond.  It may be an exercise in futility, but I can't help myself.  Like the bagpipe-playing ghost on the battlement in Scotland, I just have to keep playing the same tune, over and over.

I feel pretty

A friend of mine recently sent me a link about beauty treatments.  She wasn't, I think, trying to give me any sort of unsubtle suggestion about my need to use such products.  The reason she thought of me was that the world of cosmetics is no longer a simple matter of cleansers, scents, and body paints of various sorts.  It's now its own little mini-universe of pseudoscience, filled with jargon, half-truths, and outright lies.

The link my friend sent me, which you can view here, is only a small sampling of the types of beauty products that the gullible can spend lots of money on.  If you'd rather not peruse the whole list, I present below a few of the most egregious examples, along with the prices, which I am not making up.

1)  Ina White Gold Detoxifying Crystal Salt ($85).  The advertisement says, "This bathing treat uses Himalayan crystals to draw out toxins lurking in the body.  In fact, a 30-minute soak is equivalent to a three-day detox!"

First of all, you don't have any toxins "lurking in your body" that your kidneys and liver aren't perfectly well equipped to deal with.  Anything toxic your body produces isn't excreted through the skin in any case, so I don't care what you put in your bath water, you're not going to draw much out through your skin except for water.

Which brings me to the next claim:  that this stuff "leaves your skin feeling firmer."  I'll just bet it does.  It's... salt.  Plain old sodium chloride, which is the same regardless of whether it comes from the Himalayas or from the shaker on your dinner table.  ("Ina White Gold" does have some herbal extracts in it to make it smell nice, though.)  And the reason it leaves your skin feeling firmer is because you've dehydrated your upper skin layer -- same as when you've gone swimming in the ocean and not showered off afterwards.  Your lower epidermis has lost water and shrunk a little, and your skin will feel a little too tight for a while afterwards.  It has nothing to do with toxins, toning, or the Himalayas.

2)  The Energy Muse "Miracle Bead" Wearable Scents bracelet ($25).  This one combines energy field nonsense with magic bracelet nonsense and aromatherapy nonsense to create a woo-woo trifecta.  It is a little bracelet with a "natural seed" that emits "positive vibrations," treated with a perfume that will give you "movement, vitality, and confidence."  All I can say is that if spending $25 of your hard-earned cash for a seed on a string gives you confidence, you must come by your confidence a different way than I do.

3)  Origins "For Men" Skin Diver Active Charcoal Body Wash ($19).  Charcoal, as we all know because it's barbecuing season, has purifying properties.  So we're supposed to slather charcoal glop all over our bodies to "draw out pore-clogging toxins."  I'll stick with soap, thanks.

4)  The Organic Pharmacy Detox Cellulite Body Oil ($58).  More detox stuff, this one scented with grapefruit and rose oil.  This one, in addition to "drawing out toxins" again, is supposed to get rid of "cellulite."  What is cellulite, you may ask?  Sit down, children, for a brief biology lesson.

Cellulite is fat.  No different than any other fat.  Why, then, does it look dimply?  Because the distribution of connective tissue on the upper legs and butt is different from that on the stomach.  The skin layers on the lower torso are "pegged down" by heavy collagen fibers, similar to the stitching on a mattress, so when you gain weight there, it creates a puckery appearance.  No diet, no vitamins or herbal extracts, and certainly no "detox body oil" is going to "get rid of cellulite."  The only way to get rid of cellulite is to do what gets rid of every other kind of fat in the body, to wit:  eat less and exercise more.


And if you haven't already blown enough money on stuff like the above, you can go to the Shizuka Day Spa in New York City ($180) and have them paint nightingale poop extract on your face, the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel Reliquary Spa ($225) and have them drum on you with bamboo reeds to "balance your energy flow," or The Peninsula Spa of Beverly Hills ($275 and up) to have a massage with "gem oils," which is massage oil colored to look like emeralds, rubies, or sapphires.

I wish I was making this stuff up.  Even the cheap beauty products, the kind you can find on grocery store shelves, are advertised using pseudoscience; look at the shampoos which are "enriched with protein and vitamins," as if humans are some kind of alien life form that can somehow absorb nutrients through our hair.  I suppose the drive to look youthful and vibrant is strong enough to induce people to drop serious quantities of money on whatever they think will work -- but besides the lamentable gullibility factor here, there's the sheer greed of the manufacturers for misleading these people about what these products do.  The gullibility is unfortunate; the lying should be outright illegal.

The pseudoscience that wouldn't die

I was chatting with a couple of students yesterday, and the subject turned to aliens.  Conversations seem to get steered that way when I'm around.  It's odd.

Anyhow, one of the students said, "Let's say humans developed interstellar space flight.  And we went to another star system.  And let's say that on one of the planets in that star system there was intelligent, but non-technologically advanced, life.  Don't you think that humans would appear like gods to them?"

I said that was probably so, and quoted the line from Arthur C. Clarke, that "To the primitive mind, any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic."

"So," the student said, "if advanced aliens had come to Earth, thousands of years ago, wouldn't they have appeared like gods?  And become the focal points of religions?"

A little more hesitantly, I said, "Well, yes, probably."

And then he said, "Don't you think it's hard to believe that a bunch of primitive humans were able to build the pyramids, and Stonehenge, and all?"

And at that point, I said, "Good lord, you haven't been reading Chariots of the Gods, have you?"

This book, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, is like the Creature That Wouldn't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, all claiming that the Earth had been visited by Ancient Astronauts.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with repeated riffs on the same theme, to wit:  Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 76 is still blithering on about the Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow!  The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis.

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken claims it is of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken's theory, human sailors were quite good at drawing maps, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what you can accomplish with a lot of slave labor.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it was covered with?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

In fact, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  In fact, von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

So, sad to say, my student's faith in the Ancient Gods is ill-founded.  A shame, really, because I would like nothing better than concrete evidence of alien civilizations.  But if you want me to accept the extraordinary claim of alien visitations in Earth's distant past, you're going to have to give me evidence a little more extraordinary than a rusty post, a map, and some big stone statues.

The problem with satire

It's an odd thing, satire.  The literary practice of pretending to take the side of those with whom you disagree, and exaggerating their views ever-so-slightly to point out their foolishness, has been around for millenia.  Aristophanes' play The Birds satirized prominent politicians and philosophers of his time, without once coming out and saying "these people are morons."  The Roman poet Juvenal ruthlessly lampooned just about everyone in power -- from emperor to senator to high priest.  In a later age, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" neatly poniarded British policies on Ireland by the mock-serious suggestion that both the Irish famine and the Irish "troubles" could be fixed simultaneously by instituting a policy requiring that the Irish eat their own children.

There are a variety of problems with satire.  One, of course, is that being a particularly sharp-edged form of criticism, it can get you into serious trouble.  Dictators tend to particularly loathe satirists -- in the early days of the Nazi regime, a comedian had a routine in which he'd snap into a Nazi salute, and say "Heil...  um."  Then he'd do it again.  Finally he'd scratch his head, and say, "What was that guy's name, again?"  It was a simple little thing, harmless enough, you'd think -- but it so effectively pointed up the lunacy of requiring that people greet each other by saying "praise Hitler" that no one was really surprised when the comedian disappeared, permanently.

The other problem with satire is that it straddles a very fine line.  On the one hand, it can't be too far over the line, or it is either too obvious or it becomes offensive (or both).  Witness the brouhaha over the cover of the New Yorker which showed the Obamas in the Oval Office, dressed up like terrorists.  The whole thing, of course, was supposed to lampoon the ridiculous ideas that the Obamas were (1) Muslims, and (2) anti-American.  The satire was so over-the-top that it actually offended a lot of people, because they felt that the allegations against the Obamas already were being taken seriously enough that you couldn't even joke about it.

The opposite problem, of course, occurs when the satire is so subtle that people fall for it.  Amazingly enough, there are people who think that Stephen Colbert is an actual conservative; many of you probably remember the extraordinary Presidential Press Dinner during George W. Bush's last term when a staffer (who probably disappeared as fast as the German comedian did) hired Colbert to be the keynote speaker, and Colbert proceeded to skewer everyone in the room, without once breaking out of his ultra-right-wing persona.  (After that performance, no one made that mistake about Colbert again, I'll bet.)  More recently, we have the people who've taken various stories in The Onion seriously, including:

• A story in which J. K. Rowling was alleged to have been responsible for the induction of over a million children into the Church of Satan.  This prompted an angry letter to Reader's Digest after they interviewed Rowling -- a reader was outraged that a nice conservative magazine like Reader's Digest would interview a horrible evil pagan devil-worshiper like Rowling, and she had proof of Rowling's wicked ways, because she'd "read it in The Onion."  The editor, showing admirable restraint, responded only with, "The Onion is a satirical news website, and is not intended to be taken seriously."
• A recent story called "Prince William Divorces Kate Middleton After Five Weeks," which caused a firestorm of angst on Facebook and Twitter.  One poster, illustrating perhaps the reason why she took the story seriously, ended her screed against Prince William with the statement, "What will he say when he's crowned king?  Probably 'London is a horrible country and I don't want to be king anyway.'"
• A story headlined "Final Minutes of the Last Harry Potter Movie to be Split Into Seven Separate Films."  You can just imagine how the people who took this one seriously reacted.
• However, not only the gullible and unintelligent get hoodwinked.  In the most famous instance of The Onion scoring a satirical win, a 2002 article which described how the US was moving governmental offices out of the Capitol Building because it was "dilapidated," and "didn't have enough bathrooms," was picked up by the Beijing Evening News.  The embarrassed editors of BEN apologized for the error the following day, and said that the writer of the story, Huang Ke, had been told to "be more careful next time."

Carol and I were discussing satire over dinner last night, and we concluded that it when it works, it's extremely effective... but that it requires a certain level of discernment for it to work.  And the pitfall, of course, is that if you're doing it convincingly enough, people will be... convinced.  And being that I sometimes lapse into satire, let me go on record as saying that I don't believe in Bigfoot, UFOs, Mothman, appearances of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, psychics, ghosts, gods (all of them), and most of the other things I blog about.  Please refer to this paragraph if you're ever in doubt on any of that.  Thank you.

Not Finding Bigfoot

New from the "Well, I'm Just Shocked" Department come allegations that Animal Planet's latest series, "Finding Bigfoot," includes faked segments and stories that are hoaxes.

The show, which is billed as a riveting adventure about "four eccentric but passionate members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers," was supposed to be a skeptical look at the whole weird pastime of Bigfoot-hunting.  But as I know all too well, skepticism doesn't sell, but sensationalism does.  And it's damn hard to sensationalize something for which you have no hard evidence at all.  So faced with having hour-long riveting footage of nothing, and doing a little creative editing, guess what the makers of "Finding Bigfoot" did?

The first episode included a segment on the alleged "signalling technique" used by Bigfoots to communicate with each other, in which they knock on trees.  So, we are treated to video footage of a wooded area at night, and lo and behold, we hear knocks.  And then the "researchers" tell us about loud, eerie Bigfoot vocalizations, called "call blasting," and back we go to the woods at night, and egad! we hear a howl.

The knocks and the howl, of course, were added in later.  They are, in fact, some people knocking on wood and a guy going "Awoo."  Of course, nowhere does it say "video recreation" on the show; you're led to believe that it's all real, that the "researchers" actually got good recordings of Bigfoot howls.

Not only was the audio faked; some of the video was, too.  A video clip taken in Lumpkin County, Georgia using a car dashboard camera, alleged to be of a Bigfoot, turned out to be a college kid in a gorilla suit.  Even so, the intrepid "researchers" went to northern Georgia, and the video was used in the show -- without any mention of the fakery.

Of course, now the "researchers" are doing handstands trying to convince us that they knew nothing about all of the hocus-pocus.  The leader of the "researchers," who is named (I am not making this up) Matt Moneymaker, said, "We heard both the scream and knocks in the field, but they didn’t get a good recording of either so they inserted their own simulations during editing, apparently.  We didn’t know what they were going to do in that regard. They wouldn’t tell us whether they actually recorded the sounds we heard, and they wouldn’t let us see the finished episodes either."  Um, sure.  Right.  You recorded a segment about how you had an audio track you didn't have, and you didn't know it?  Allow me, at this juncture, to remind you how well lying about altered tapes worked for Richard Nixon.

As far as the college kids in the gorilla suit, Moneymaker accuses Sheriff Stacy Jarrard of making up the hoax story to "quell any fear that local people might have about a monster in the woods."   "No one from the sheriff’s department went out to speak with any of the neighbors after the incident," Moneymaker told reporters.  "We spoke with the neighbors though when we were shooting the episode.  There was never any college students living in the area, and there was no photo of college kids with a gorilla costume."

Moneymaker stopped just short of saying, "I am not a crook."

Allow me to state for the record, as I've done before, that I don't think that it's impossible that Bigfoot exists.  Of all the cryptids reported, I think it's the one that has the greatest likelihood of being true, certainly better than the Loch Ness Monster, El Chupacabra, or "Mothman."  The lack of any shred of hard evidence is troublesome, but I'm still hoping some will turn up eventually.  Until then, the jury's still out.

On the other hand, no one should be surprised that on increasingly sensationalized networks such as Animal Planet, Syfy, and The Not Actually History Channel, producers rely on cheesy editing to convince the viewers that the "Ghost Hunters" have seen ghosts, the "MonsterQuest" people have seen monsters, and now, that the "Finding Bigfoot" people have found Bigfoot.  Given that no one would watch a show in which nothing happens, we shouldn't expect these programs to be anything but fiction.  If we believe them, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

The enemy of my enemy is... um...

The members of the Westboro Baptist Church have been having a hard time lately.

You probably already know that these folks are the followers of the ultra-religious Fred Phelps, who preaches that every bad thing that happens to an American anywhere, any time, happens because we support gays and lesbians.  So they show up at the funerals for soldiers killed in Afghanistan with charming signs like "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God For Dead Soldiers."  You'd think, if god was so vehemently opposed to homosexuality, he'd smite the homosexuals directly instead of smiting soldiers and hoping we'd get the message.  Maybe god has bad aim, or something.

A suit against Phelps made it all the way to the Supreme Court last year, trying to block him from picketing -- and Phelps won.  The decision was made on the basis of the right to free speech.  This infuriated almost everyone.  Even though most of us grudgingly recognize that the right to free speech has to include free speech we disagree with, I suspect that a lot of us would have been secretly thrilled if the Supreme Court had passed down a decision mandating that Every Time Fred Phelps Pickets At A Funeral, A Homosexual Gets To Punch Him In The Mouth.

Of course, where there's a will there's a way.  People have been getting increasingly fed up with the antics of these hate-filled lunatics, and have been finding ways to stop them from harassing mourning families at the funerals of their loved ones.  In one case, in Mississippi, Phelps and his people showed up in a small town to picket at a funeral, and got up in the morning to find all of their cars mysteriously blocked into parking places by other cars.  The police were called, and promised to find the owners or get tow trucks.  But you know how hard it is to get anything done quickly.  The owners of the cars showed up, apologizing profusely, and moved their cars... after the funeral was over.

So now, Phelps decided to move his sideshow to a venue even more in the public eye -- Arlington National Cemetery.  On Memorial Day.

The guy's got balls, you gotta admit.  It takes a peculiar kind of guts to show up at an event attended by large numbers of tough, muscular, heavily armed military men and women with a sign saying "I'm Praying For Soldiers to Die."  But that's what he did.  And his protest generated a counter-protest by...

... wait for it...

... the KKK.

I'm not nearly creative enough to make this up.  Members of the Knights of the Southern Cross, a Virginia-based branch of the KKK, showed up to give Phelps and his crew what-for.  Which they did.

"It's the soldier that fought and died and gave them that right to free speech," said Dennis LaBonte, the "Imperial Wizard" of the Knights of the Southern Cross.   Which made a lot of us shout "Right on!" and then immediately wince because we just agreed with a KKK member.  And then LaBonte made it even worse, because he couldn't resist taking the opportunity to trumpet his own brand of craziness.  He told reporters that he believes that the white race is "slowly being degraded."

Abigail Phelps, Fred Phelps' daughter, responded that the KKK "had no moral authority."  "People like them say it's white power, white supremacy," she told reporters.  "The Bible doesn't say anywhere that it's an abomination to be born of a certain gender or race."

Police were on site to keep the two groups of hate-filled wingnuts from getting violent, but you have to wonder if it might not have been better for humanity if the police had simply handed them sharp sticks and told them to go at it.

Me, I just watched the whole thing with my jaw hanging open slightly.  I would think that anyone who rejects Phelps' brand of vitriolic homophobia would have to have something going for him, but here's a group who rejects Phelps and espouses violent racism.  "Hating homosexuals is obviously immoral!" they seem to be saying.  "You should spend your time and effort hating people who aren't white!"

The whole thing is more than a little baffling.  It brings to mind the African saying, "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of good sense."

Meaning, nonsense, and the Voynich Manuscript

Walter Miller's post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz begins with the discovery by monks of a precious and holy relic; a piece of paper with a message from the Blessed St. Leibowitz.  The relic is brought back to the monastery, where it is ensconced in a reliquary and becomes the object of great devotion.  Furthermore, the writing on the paper is analyzed, discussed, and prayed over, because surely any message from the Blessed Saint must have some deep meaning.

The message, in its entirety, was:  "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma."

Humans have a tendency to confuse the words "mysterious" and "deep."  If we don't understand something, especially something to which we have attached an aura of religion, intrigue, or romance, we seem to conclude automatically that it has great significance.  While some texts that have yet to be deciphered are likely to contain interesting information, just by the law of averages we'd expect that some of them... don't.

My sense is that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the latter.  It is a bound volume, allegedly from the 15th century, with colored drawings of plants, astronomical objects, mythical animals, and a host of other fanciful items.  (You can see images of it, and read more about it, here.)  The writing is in a set of characters that has yet to be deciphered, and has been the source of much speculation, from the ridiculous (that it is an alchemical manual whose contents contain magical knowledge of such power that it had to be hidden) to the pragmatic (it's a hoax).

The manuscript itself was named for Wilfred Voynich, who owned it in the early 20th century.  After his widow's death in 1960, it was donated to Yale University, where it currently resides.

Recently, scientists were allowed to snip tiny pieces off of four different pages in the manuscript, and it was conclusively carbon-14 dated to between 1400 and 1438.  Note that this only tells us the age of the parchment, not the age of the writing.  The antiquity of the parchment has reawakened interest in the manuscript, both by legitimate scholars and by woo-woos who think that they'll be the one to translate it -- and acquire its secret knowledge.

Of the many hypotheses of its origins, the one that seems to be the likeliest is that it was produced by Edward Kelley.   Kelley was a self-styled alchemist during the reign of Elizabeth I, who became friends with the famous alchemist and mystic John Dee.  Dee was apparently duped by Kelley's fantastic claims, which included a purported ability to transmute copper into gold using a powder he'd obtained by grave-robbing a Welsh bishop's tomb.  Apparently finding this scientifically plausible, Dee invited Kelley to accompany him to Prague, and Kelley became Dee's "scryer" -- Kelley would stare into a "shewstone" (the Elizabethan ancestor of the crystal ball) and have conversations with angels.  The angels spoke a language that Kelley called "Enochian," but Kelley translated what they said, and Dee dutifully wrote it all down.  Many scholars suspect that Kelley, in order to make his story more convincing (and probably to make money by selling the manuscript), turned out the Voynich Manuscript in "Enochian" to make his story more plausible.

But how do we know it isn't a cipher, or an actual language?  There are a few features of the Voynich Manuscript that seem to indicate that it's nonsense.  The first is that the best cryptographers in the world have been unable to crack it, even using computer algorithms designed for the purpose.  Writing in ciphers was a common practice in medieval and Renaissance times, especially among the alchemists, and all of these passages have quickly fallen to cipher-breaking techniques.  Given the length of the Voynich Manuscript (240 pages), it's extremely unlikely that these techniques wouldn't have cracked the code -- if there was anything sensible there in the first place.

Second, there are some very "un-language-like" features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript.  There are a number of places where words are repeated two or even three times in a row -- something that is not at all common in written language.  The distribution of word lengths is also suspect -- most of the words are between five and eight characters long, and there are very few extremely short words.  This, again, is unlike virtually every written language currently in existence.  Given the success of linguists in decoding written languages for which they had no spoken referent (e.g. Linear B in Crete), I'd say they're pretty good at recognizing what a real language looks like -- and, by extension, what a non-language would look like.

Most damning is a statistical study done in 2003 by Gordon Rugg, followed up by a 2007 study by Andreas Schinner, which showed that the frequency and patterns of syllables in the Voynich Manuscript was consistent with gibberish -- i.e., they were random.  Schinner used a computerized analysis of the text from the Voynich Manuscript and showed that it could have been produced by a completely stochastic method -- one in which syllables were chosen in a non-meaningful manner, to give the appearance of language. 

Of course, none of this will stop the woo-woos from claiming that the Voynich Manuscript contains the Secrets of the Ancients.  As Casaubon found out in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum, the more you deny that there is any meaning in something, the more the true believers become convinced that there must be -- otherwise, why would you be so desperate to deny it?  It's hard for us to accept the possibility that there is no meaning in something as fanciful, and stirring to the imagination, as the Voynich Manuscript.  Given that Miller's monks tried to find meaning in "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home to Emma," we shouldn't be surprised if the controversy over the Voynich Manuscript is not over any time soon.