Beale ciphers


The Beale ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts, one of which allegedly states the location of a buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels estimated to be worth over US$43 million as of 2018 Comprising three ciphertexts, the first text describes the location, the second ciphertext the content of the treasure, and the third lists the names of the treasure's owners and their next of kin.
The story of the three ciphertexts originates from an 1885 pamphlet detailing treasure being buried by a man named Thomas J. Beale in a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia, in the 1820s. Beale entrusted a box containing the encrypted messages to a local innkeeper named Robert Morriss and then disappeared, never to be seen again. According to the story, the innkeeper opened the box 23 years later, and then decades after that gave the three encrypted ciphertexts to a friend before he died. The friend then spent the next twenty years of his life trying to decode the messages, and was able to solve only one of them which gave details of the treasure buried and the general location of the treasure. The unnamed friend then published all three ciphertexts in a pamphlet which was advertised for sale in the 1880s.
Since the publication of the pamphlet, a number of attempts have been made to decode the two remaining ciphertexts and to locate the treasure, but all efforts have resulted in failure.
There are many arguments that the entire story is a hoax, including the 1980 article "A Dissenting Opinion" by cryptographer Jim Gillogly, and a 1982 scholarly analysis of the Beale Papers and their related story by Joe Nickell, using historical records that cast doubt on the existence of Thomas J. Beale. Nickell also presents linguistic evidence demonstrating that the documents could not have been written at the time alleged. His analysis of the writing style showed that Beale was almost certainly James B. Ward, whose 1885 pamphlet brought the Beale Papers to light. Nickell argues that the tale is thus a work of fiction; specifically, a "secret vault" allegory of the Freemasons; James B. Ward was a Mason himself.

Background

A single pamphlet published in 1885, entitled The Beale Papers, is the only source of this story. The treasure was said to have been obtained by an American named Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s, from a mine to the north of Nuevo México, at that time in the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. According to the pamphlet, Beale was the leader of a group of 30 gentlemen adventurers from Virginia who stumbled upon the rich mine of gold and silver while hunting buffalo. They spent 18 months mining thousands of pounds of precious metals, which they then charged Beale with transporting to Virginia and burying in a secure location. After Beale made multiple trips to stock the hiding place, he then encrypted three messages: the location, a description of the treasure, and the names of its owners and their relatives. The treasure location is traditionally linked to Montvale in Bedford County, Virginia.
Beale placed the ciphertexts and some other papers in an iron box. In 1822 he entrusted the box to a Lynchburg innkeeper named Robert Morriss. Beale told Morriss not to open the box unless he or one of his men failed to return from their journey within 10 years. Sending a letter from St. Louis a few months later, Beale promised Morriss that a friend in St. Louis would mail the key to the cryptograms, however, it never arrived. It was not until 1845 that Morriss opened the box. Inside he found two plaintext letters from Beale, and several pages of ciphertext separated into Papers "1", "2", and "3". Morriss had no luck in solving the ciphers, and decades later left the box and its contents to an unnamed friend.
The friend, then using an edition of the United States Declaration of Independence as the key for a modified book cipher, successfully deciphered the second ciphertext which gave a description of the buried treasure. Unable to solve the other two ciphertexts, the friend ultimately made the letters and ciphertexts public in a pamphlet entitled The Beale Papers, which was published by yet another friend, James B. Ward, in 1885.
Ward is thus not "the friend". Ward himself is almost untraceable in local records except that a man with that name owned the home in which a Sarah Morriss, identified as the spouse of Robert Morriss, died at age 77, in 1863. He also is recorded as becoming a Master Mason in 1863.

Deciphered message

The plaintext of Paper #2 reads:
I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three, herewith:
The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen nineteen. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange to save transportation, and valued at thirteen thousand dollars.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.

The second cipher can be decrypted fairly easily using any copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, but some editing for spelling is necessary. To decrypt it, one finds the word corresponding to the number, and takes the first letter of that word.
Beale used a version of United States Declaration of Independence different from the original. To extract the hidden message, the following 5 modifications must be applied to the original text:
Furthermore:
Finally, in the decoded text there are 4 errors, probably due to wrong transcription of the original paper:
The treasure's total weight is about 3 tons as described in inventory of the second cryptogram. This includes approximately 35,052 troy oz gold, 61,200 troy oz silver and jewels worth around US$220,000 in 2017.

Authenticity

There has been considerable debate over whether the remaining two ciphertexts are real or hoaxes. An early researcher, Carl Hammer of Sperry UNIVAC, used supercomputers of the late 1960s to analyze the ciphers and found that while the ciphers were poorly encoded, the two undeciphered ones did not show the patterns one would expect of randomly chosen numbers and probably encoded an intelligible text. Other questions remain about the authenticity of the pamphlet's account. In the words of one researcher "To me, the pamphlet story has all the earmarks of a fake. . . no evidence save the word of the unknown author of the pamphlet that he ever had the papers."
The pamphlet's background story has several implausibilities, and is based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence and hearsay.
There have been many attempts to break the remaining cipher. Most attempts have tried other historical texts as keys, assuming the ciphertexts were produced with some book cipher, but none have been recognized as successful to date. Breaking the cipher may depend on random chance ; so far, even the most skilled cryptanalysts who have attempted them have been defeated. Of course, Beale could have used a document that he had written himself for either or both of the remaining keys or either a document of his own or randomly selected characters for the third source, in either case rendering any further attempts to crack the codes useless.

Existence of Thomas J. Beale

A survey of U.S. Census records in 1810 shows two persons named Thomas Beale, in Connecticut and New Hampshire. However, the population schedules from the 1810 U.S. Census are completely missing for seven states, one territory, the District of Columbia, and 18 of the counties of Virginia. The 1820 U.S. Census has two persons named Thomas Beale, Captain Thomas Beale of the battle of New Orleans 1815 in Louisiana originally from Virginia Botetourt County – Fincastle area 12 miles from Bedford County and one in Tennessee, and a Thomas K. Beale in Virginia, but the population schedules are completely missing for three states and one territory.
Before 1850 the U.S. Census recorded the names of only the heads of households; others in the household were only counted. Beale, if he existed, may have been living in someone else's household.
In addition, a man named "Thomas Beall" appears in the customer lists of St. Louis Post Department in 1820. According to the pamphlet, Beale sent a letter from St. Louis in 1822.
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.

Poe's alleged authorship

has been suggested as the pamphlet's real author because he had an interest in cryptography. It was well known he placed notices of his abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly Messenger, inviting submissions of ciphers which he proceeded to solve. In 1843 he used a cryptogram as plot device in his short story "The Gold-Bug". From 1820, he was also living in Richmond, Virginia at the time of Beale's alleged encounters with Morriss. In February 1826 Poe enrolled as a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But with mounting debts, Poe left for Boston in April 1827.
However, research and facts debunk Poe's authorship. He died in 1849 well before The Beale Papers were first published in 1885. The pamphlet also mentions the American Civil War that started in 1861. William Poundstone, an American author and skeptic, had stylometric analysis performed on the pamphlet for his 1983 book Biggest Secrets, and found that Poe's prose is significantly different from the grammatical structure used by the author who wrote The Beale Papers.

Search attempts

Despite the Beale Papers' unproven veracity, treasure hunters have not been deterred from trying to find the vault. The "information" that there is buried treasure in Bedford County has stimulated many expeditions with shovels, and other implements of discovery, looking for likely spots. For more than a hundred years, people have been arrested for trespassing and unauthorized digging; some of them in groups as in the case of people from Pennsylvania in the 1990s.
Several digs were completed at the top of Porter's Mountain, one in late 1980s with the land owner's permission as long as any treasure found was split 50/50. However, the treasure hunters only found Civil War artifacts. As the value of these artifacts paid for time and equipment rental, the expedition broke even.

Media attention

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. There are also several books, and considerable Internet activity. In 2014, the National Geographic TV show The Numbers Game referred to the Beale ciphers as one of the strongest passwords ever created. In 2015 the UKTV series Myth Hunters devoted one of its season 3 episodes to the topic. Also in 2015, the Josh Gates series Expedition Unknown visited Bedford to investigate the Beale Ciphers and search for the treasure.
Simon Singh's 1999 book The Code Book explains the Beale cipher mystery in one of its chapters.
In 2010, an award-winning animated short film was made concerning the ciphers called The Thomas Beale Cipher.
Various information related to the incident has been described on social media as well.