Sometime in the early 1400s, someone sat down with a quill, iron-gall ink, and 102 leaves of high-quality calfskin vellum and wrote 240 pages in a language that has never been read. Not by anyone. Not once. In six hundred years. The manuscript is carbon-dated to the early 15th century. Someone in medieval Europe made this by hand, with extraordinary care, over what must have been months or years of work. The pages contain flowing, elegant script in an alphabet that matches no

June 30, 1908. 7:17 AM. Central Siberia. Something exploded above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River with a force estimated at 12 megatons - 800 times the Hiroshima bomb. 80 million trees flattened. Radially. Pushed outward from a central point like matchsticks blown by a breath. 830 square miles of forest laid flat in a butterfly-shaped pattern. No crater. The shockwave circled the Earth twice. Barometric stations in England recorded it. For three nights afterward, the skies ov