Mysteries Department
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About us

Mysteries Department is an open research platform for the world's unsolved mysteries. We want every one of them studied in the open, with the sources, data and tools to test any idea about it.

Old mysteries tend to attract confident answers and very few tests. A book no one can read gets a new “solution” every year; each one starts from scratch, uses its own transcription, and is judged by how convincing it sounds. We think they'd move faster if the groundwork were shared: one set of sources, datasets anyone can download, methods anyone can rerun, and a public record of what has already failed.

How it works

MysteryAn article on what's known, with every claim sourced.
QuestionsThe mystery split into things evidence could settle.
AnswersAnyone in the beta can propose one.
TestsMethods run on shared datasets, with controls.
ReviewTwo people check a result before it counts.

An answer that fails its test is marked ruled out and stays on the site with the reason, so nobody has to test it again. Findings that change an answer are written up in News.

What we hold ourselves to

Show the sourceEvery statement in an article points to where it came from.
Test on what you didn't fitA reading has to work on pages it wasn't built from.
Keep the failuresRuled-out answers stay visible, with the evidence against them.
Open by defaultText, data and code are free to reuse. See Terms and licences.

Who runs it

apolloFounder and editor. Leads the Voynich research and wrote Reading Without a Key.
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Editors wantedWe're looking for editors for the other mysteries. Get in touch.

Get involved

Everything here is free to read. Contributing is by invitation while we're in beta. These are the ways people help:

ResearchPropose answers, run methods on the shared data, and write up what you find.
ReviewCheck other people's results before they go live. Reviewers are credited by name.
Add sourcesPapers, archive records, images and transcriptions, with where they came from.
Build methodsWrite or improve analysis modules. Each method is versioned and credited to its authors.
Bring a mysteryKnow one well? Help us set it up: the article, the first questions and the sources.
Follow alongSubscribe to News by RSS, or follow a mystery to hear when its answers change.
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