And they, especially HAVE NO IDEA of what they are looking for! Beale, of course, never came back. Morriss was supposed to have received an envelope from Beales unknown friend in ten years, which provided the key to the treasure. The only thing I know to be fact concerning the tricky cipher is, that at least part of it is based on Jeffersons United States Declaration of Independence, which was of itself inked for the Continental Congress of 4th July, 1776, on only the very finest pre birth, bovine velum parchment. This indicates that the ciphers are fraudulent. Words 509 and 510 of the modified text ("mean time") are counted as two words, despite being shown as one word. The site has nopictures from inside the vault. I dont know any of the Gentlemen mentioned previously. Your email address will not be published. Thanks for your post, u/Elisha_Dushku! We are talking about a rarely ever attempted western trek of the greatest potential peril here, well before Santa Fe trail discovery by white intending settlers, thirty years before the Suttors Mill gold strike in 1849, and only a dozen years after the U.S. Army, at Jeffersons behest, sent Captains Lewis and Clarke off on their two year arduous journey of western discoveryThey say that gold is where you find it, and so the Beale team were unlikely to have found any in the Rockies, because they didnt likely go there; it follows that there is also not likely to be any treasure secreted somewhere near Burfords tavern in Virginia. Your email address will not be published. Raised eyebrow. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Please remember to review the rules and frequently asked questions. The story has been the subject of multiple television documentaries, such as the UK's Mysteries series, a segment in the seventh special of Unsolved Mysteries; and the 2011 Declaration of Independence episode of the History Channel TV show Brad Meltzer's Decoded. Website! For those interested in further information on DeeCiphers and what else was hidden by Mr. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) and The Beale Cipher we invite you to review r/DeeCiphers and r/MapTheory (Algebraic Map Theory evolved from our break of the Beale Cipher) - both of which, unfortunately, are partially masked and occasionally thread introduction or comment -corrupted/hacked by various . To decrypt it, one finds the word corresponding to the number (e.g., the first number is 115, and the 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is "instituted"), and takes the first letter of that word (in the case of the example, "I"). The Complex Ciphers Have Been Decoded And Reveal Much More Than Many Thought Possible! Words 78 and 79 ("self-evident"), shown hyphenated, are counted as 2 words. But the Beale Ciphers still fascinate people interested in cryptography, and the story still prompts amateur treasure hunters to head to Virginia in hopes of striking it rich. Nickell also presents linguistic evidence demonstrating that the documents could not have been written at the time alleged (words such as "stampeding", for instance, are of later vintage). I didnt mean that I thought it was the same Thomas Beall, I was thinking maybe the guy was using that as a clue to find a 2nd book to decipher other ciphers with just like the 2nd one is solved with the Declaration of Indepence, I think the 1st and 3rd have the exact same system but the hard part is finding what literature was being used to code them. This would involve seeking out texts of the time period and comparing them to the ciphers. Beale then disappeared. -CAD4TeamBeale, We note that Tunis is where St. Louis died, that the Beale Cipher was written by Mark Twain (reasons given in other threads: short note is that Samuel L. Clemens was the Spymaster in the West for the CSA, first biography notes his boast he was a Lt. in the CSA which he recanted later, but that was due to the fact the General Amnesty for the Civil War did not apply to spies, and that the Beale Cipher hid "The Richmond Stores" (other biographers note that he visited a known CSA spy in San Francisco if you need additional evidence, that many of his journals from the War are mentioned, and that he disappeared for Months and Months at a time - supposedly 'prospecting')- The Phoenix mentioned by Mr. Paul G. Stewart in his book referred to the Confederacy's future use of The Richmond Stores. [20], Additionally, a Cheyenne legend exists about gold and silver being taken from the West and buried in mountains in the East, dating from roughly 1820. The description of the vault says that it is not very big (seven feet at one point), and the site writers claim that it is empty. One reason that the mystery still attracts treasure hunters is that if the buried fortune exists, by now it has grown to approximately $93 million in value, as journalist Buzz McClain calculated in a 2020 article in Northern Virginia magazine. On the outside chance that the two ciphers really havent been cracked, lets devote some serious mind power during this horrific global pandemic / stay home order and find the hidden treasure. Modern Day Hauntings of Sleepy Hollow & The Old Dutch Church, Let's Finally Crack the Beale Ciphers While We're Stuck at Home | Find the Gold, Deciphering Symbols & Messages On Old Tombstones, Cracking the Cryptic Beale Ciphers | PartII, Lets Finally Crack the Beale Ciphers While Were Stuck at Home | Find theGold, Modern Day Hauntings of Sleepy Hollow & The Old DutchChurch, Spooky Connections that Include the Mysterious Van Tassels of SleepyHollow. Answer: "If the numbers above mean anything to you, congratulations:2921 pounds of gold, 5100 pounds of silver, and $1.5 million of precious jewelstogether valued at approximately $60 millionare yours for the taking, because you just cracked a cipher purported to reveal the location of the trea. In addition, the original sale price of the pamphlet, 50cents, was a high price for the time (adjusted for. Chisum: that particular Thomas Beale (1807-1849) spent almost all his life in London, apart from the two-year trip on a whaling ship in 1830 he described in his book. 179-201. . There is no indicationof anything other than hand tools (sledgehammer, pick axes, etc) on the site or in the pictures. So What Was The Point Of It All? Im not leaning towards it being real or a hoax I am considering anything possible pre the publishing of the Beall Papers 1885ish. The story of the three ciphertexts originates from an 1885 pamphlet called The Beale Papers, detailing treasure being buried by a man named Thomas J. Beale in a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia, in about 1820. This indicates a complex behaviour in the solved cipher as one might expect from an encoded message, while the unsolved ciphers have a simpler behaviour. The man who claimed to have ultimately obtained the documents published them for the public to see, including one of the documents which had been broken usingthe Declaration of Independence as the key. There is a reference at the end of the Beale Papers which points the would be treasure hunter to the next text to use to decode one of the cyphers. Ward, whose 1885 pamphlet brought the Beale Papers to light. Morriss received a few letters from Beale, the last one in 1832. -CAD, For those interested in further information on DeeCiphers and what else was hidden by Mr. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) and The Beale Cipher we invite you to review r/DeeCiphers and r/MapTheory (Algebraic Map Theory evolved from our break of the Beale Cipher) - both of which, unfortunately, are partially masked and occasionally thread introduction or comment -corrupted/hacked by various agencies and groups that find it funny to do so, or in their interest (and not yours) to do so. The page of cipher with 700+ characters starts with the number 115. Before 1850 the U.S. Census recorded the names of only the heads of households; others in the household were only counted. Instead of replacing each word in the secret message with a number, you replace each letter in the secret message with a number. Really, it does look and feel basically how a home-cooked Victorian code-text ought to, with an emphasis towards lowish numbers (up to 350) plus a sprinkling of higher numbers (possibly for rare or awkward letters): Jim Gilloglys observation (in October 1980 Cryptologia) of an alphabet-like pattern in part 1 (if you apply part 2s codebook) seems to me more like a clue than a reason to reject the whole object as a hoax. The Complex Ciphers Have Been Decoded And Reveal Much More Than Many Thought Possible! The contentsarequite valuable. First, these are enciphered documents which have stumped the world for almost 200 years. No. However, if one considers a base that is relatively prime to 10, then the last digits of the numbers in the unsolved ciphers turn uniform each digit is equally common. But language experts who've examined the texts of the letters and compared them to the pamphlet have concluded that "it all seems to have been written by the same person," Dunin explains. Well done Thomas J. The 26th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Technology is so SaaS-y, it's not modeling the real world. This content claimed to be from the deciphered Residence document is the most critical one for outside sources to validate. The story goes that they were left by a man named Thomas Beale in the care of an innkeeper, Robert Morriss, with instructions to hold them and to whom he should give them in case he (Beale) did not return. The Famas First Draft. [20], Several digs were completed at the top of Porter's Mountain, one in the late 1980s with the land owner's permission as long as any treasure found was split 50/50. Most attempts have tried other historical texts as keys (e.g., Magna Carta, various books of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the Virginia Royal Charter), assuming the ciphertexts were produced with some book cipher, but none have been recognized as successful to date. So, its basically a kind of Wild West bandit take on a pirate treasure map (which to me sounds like an Alias Smith and Jones script, oh well) but made obscure with some kind of dictionary code: all of which is reassuringly familiar if youve just read PopCo. The Beale Ciphers are unique because they have never been solved. Ward spent 40 years racking his brain trying to decrypt. A beale cipher is a modified Book Cipher. During the period of their ascendency, the huge herds ranged across the great plains where prairie grasses were in abundance. No longer hide information about the treasure and take action to legally claim and protect it. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Required fields are marked *. Whats the chance the eleven kept quiet about the treasure? No chance at all. And of course the brainiac rented a truck in the dead of night, bee-lined it down to Montvale, VA, collected the loot and has been living large in a clandestine sort of way, ever since. Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: Patrick J. Kiger It makes no sense to even put up a web site like that if they found treasure there. In 1845, Morriss finally broke the lock on the container, found the mysterious papers with nothing but numbers, and passed them off to his friend James Ward. The men abandoned their recreation and worked the mine, extracting a fortune in gold "as well as silver, which had likewise been found," according to the letter. Learn how your comment data is processed. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2001 SWN Breaking the cipher(s) may depend on random chance (as, for instance, stumbling upon a book key if the two remaining ciphertexts are actually book ciphers); so far, even the most skilled cryptanalysts who have attempted them have been defeated. A quick check of the first page of Coles version of part 3 reveals that he didnt read it as a simple cipher or codebook, because repeated code-numbers only rarely get decoded as the same letter (for example, the five instances of 96 get decoded as s / e / r / h / n). They've studied the Beale Ciphers mystery in detail, even traveling to Bedford County to scrutinize the area around the former site of Buford's tavern, where Beale supposedly buried the riches. I DO NOT!!!. Bizarrely, the person who 60 years later solved the cipher just happened to have exactly the same rare version. As they like to tell us Let your fingers do the walking ie. According to the story, the innkeeper opened the box 23years later, and then decades after that gave the three encrypted ciphertexts to a friend before he died. The solved cipher (2) differs wildly from the uniform distribution in all bases, but this is only true for the unsolved ones in base 10. 1 is decoded with a key constructed from a correctly numbered doi (a.k.a. The Beale ciphers are a set of ciphertexts (3 ciphers) that supposedly discloses the location of a buried treasure of gold and silver valued at more than $80 million. but i still claim to be the only published logicle key to the treasure location code, and time will prove im correct stan clayton. Yes the codes are broken! So I strongly hope that the creators of the site can either take the time and post the information on the site, or solicit some help from others to do it. The number 115 the household were only counted texts of the Beall Papers 1885ish it not! 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