Beale ciphers

Cover of The Beale Papers

The Beale ciphers, also referred to as the Beale Papers, 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$63 million as of September 2011. Comprising three ciphertexts, the first (unsolved) text describes the location, the second (solved) ciphertext the content of the treasure, and the third (unsolved) 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.^[1][2][3][4]

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 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 (words such as "stampeding", for instance, are of later vintage). 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.^[1]

The story

It is important to note that all of the following information originates from one source — a single pamphlet published in 1885, entitled "The Beale Papers."

The treasure was said to have been obtained by an American man named Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s, from a mine to the north of Santa Fe, at that time part of a Spanish province, in an area that today would most likely be part of Colorado. According to the pamphlet, Beale was the chosen 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 back home to Virginia and burying in a secure location. Beale made multiple trips to stock the hiding place, and then encrypted three messages with the location of the treasure, a description of it, and the names of the owners and their relatives.

Beale placed the ciphertexts and some other papers in an iron box, which he gave in 1822 to a reliable person, the Lynchburg innkeeper Robert Morriss. The treasure was supposed to be buried near Montvale in Bedford County, Virginia. Beale asked Morriss not to open the box unless Beale 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, but it never arrived. 23 years later, in 1845, Morriss opened the box, finding 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.

Using an edition of the United States Declaration of Independence as the key for a modified book cipher, the story tells how the friend 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, published by 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 consort of Robert Morriss, died in at 77 (Lynchburg Virginian newspaper, May 21, 1865). He also is recorded as becoming a Master Mason in 1863.^[1]

• 

  Beale's first cryptogram

• 

  Beale's second cryptogram (the deciphered one)

• 

  Beale's third cryptogram.

The 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 for silver 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 (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").

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 DOI text:

• after word 154 ("institute") and before word 157 ("laying") one word must be added (probably "a")
• after word 240 ("invariably") and before word 246 ("design") one word must be removed
• after word 467 ("houses") and before word 495 ("be") ten words must be removed
• after word 630 ("eat") and before word 654 ("to") one word must be removed
• after word 677 ("foreign") and before word 819 ("valuable") one word must be removed

Furthermore:

• The first letter of the 811th word of the modified text ("fundamentally") is always used by Beale as a "y"
• The first letter of the 1005th word of the modified text ("have") is always used by Beale as an "x"

Finally, in the decoded text there are 4 errors, probably due to wrong transcription of the original paper:

• 84 (should be 85) 63 43 131 29 ... consistcd ("consisted")
• 53 (should be 54) 20 125 371 38 ... rhousand ("thousand")
• ... 84 (should be 85) 575 1005 150 200 ... thc ("the")
• ... 96 (should be 95) 405 41 600 136 ... varlt ("vault")

Size of the treasure

The treasure described in the second cryptogram calculates to approximately 35,052 troy oz gold (worth about US $63m in September 2011), 61,200 troy oz silver (worth about US $1m in 2010) and jewels which were worth US $13,000 in 1818: this sum is worth around $180,000 in 2010 terms. The treasure would weigh about three tons.

Truth or hoax?

There has been considerable debate over whether the remaining two ciphertexts are real or hoaxes. An early researcher, Carl Hammer of Sperry UNIVAC,^[5] 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.^[6] Other questions remain about the authenticity of the pamphlet's account. In 1934, Dr. Clarence Williams, a researcher at the Library of Congress, said, "To me, the pamphlet story has all the earmarks of a fake . . . [There was] 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.

• Later cryptographers have claimed that the two remaining ciphertexts have statistical characteristics which suggest that they are not actually encryptions of an English plaintext.^[7][8] Alphabetical sequences such as abfdefghiijklmmnohpp are both non-random, as indicated by Carl Hammer,^[6] and not words in English.

• Others have also questioned why Beale would have bothered writing three different ciphertexts (with at least two keys, if not ciphers) for what is essentially a single message in the first place,^[9] particularly if he wanted to ensure that the next of kin received their share (as it is, with the treasure described, there is no incentive to decode the third cipher).^[6]

• Analysis of the language used by the author of the pamphlet (the uses of punctuation, relative clauses, infinitives, conjunctives, and so on) has detected significant correlations between it and Beale's letters, including the plaintext of the second cipher, suggesting that they may have been written by the same person.^[1]

• The letters also contain several English words, such as "improvise", not otherwise recorded before the 1840s in English, but from French improvisation used from 1786 New Orleans area and "stampede" Spanish, "an uproar," from estamper "1823 (intransitive); implying composition no earlier than twenty years after their purported date; Beale's "stampeding" apparently first appears in print in the English Language before 1883, but were used from 1786-1823 in New Orleans in French and Spanish.^[1]

• The second message, describing the treasure, has been deciphered, but the others have not, suggesting a deliberate ploy to encourage interest in deciphering the other two texts only to discover that they are hoaxes. In addition, the original sale price of the pamphlet, 50 cents, was a high price for the time (adjusted for inflation, it is equivalent to $13.17 today^[10]), and the author says he expects "a wide circulation".

• The third cipher appears to be too short to list thirty individuals' next of kin.^[6]

• If the Declaration of Independence is used as a key for the first cipher, it yields alphabetical sequences such as abfdefghiijklmmnohpp^[11] and others. According to the American Cryptogram Association, the chances of such sequences appearing multiple times in the one ciphertext by chance are less than one in a hundred million million.^[11] Although it is conceivable that the first cipher was intended as a proof of concept letting decoders know that they were "on the right track" for one or more of the subsequent ciphers, such a proof would be redundant, as the success of the key with respect to the second document would provide the same evidence on its own.

• Robert Morriss, as represented in the pamphlet, says he was running the Washington Hotel in 1820. Yet contemporary records show he did not start in that position until at least 1823.^[12]

There have been many attempts to break the remaining cipher(s). Most attempts have tried other historical texts as keys (e.g., the 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. 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. 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.

Did Thomas J. Beale exist?

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.^[13] 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.^[14]

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.^[11]

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.^[11]

Alleged Edgar Allan Poe authorship

Edgar Allan Poe has sometimes been suggested to be the real author of the pamphlet. He had an interest in cryptography and used it as a plot device in several of his works, most notably his short story "The Gold-Bug." He is also known to have lived nearby at the time of Beale's encounters with Morriss; in the 1820s he was a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.^[15]

However, Poe died in 1849, long before the pamphlets were published. The references in the narrative to the Civil War, which occurred in the 1860s, also cast doubt on the Poe claims. Writer William Poundstone's stylometric analysis in his book Biggest Secrets found that Poe's prose is significantly different from the pamphleteer's.^[16]

Digging for treasure in Bedford County

Doubts have not deterred many treasure hunters, however. The 'information' that there is buried treasure in Bedford County has stimulated many an expedition 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.^[11]

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. The value of these artifacts paid for time and equipment rental; these hunters broke even.^[11]

Media attention

The story has been the subject of multiple television documentaries, such as the UK's Mysteries series; 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 (in the United States, airing on the American Heroes Channel) devoted one of its season 3 episodes to the topic.^[17] 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.^[11]

In 2010, an award-winning animated short film was made concerning the ciphers called The Thomas Beale Cipher.^[18]

See also

• List of famous ciphertexts
• Rennes-le-Château – a similar case where encrypted documents, discovered in a church in France, allegedly refer to a hidden treasure
• Peralta Stones
• James Reavis - Peralta Land Claim
• Business Plot
• National Treasure (film), in which the original Declaration of Independence contains a treasure map drawn on its reverse side

References

Further reading

• Viemeister, Peter. The Beale Treasure: New History of a Mystery, 1997. Published by Hamilton's, Bedford, Virginia
• Gillogly, James J.. "The Beale Cipher: A Dissenting Opinion April 1980 Cryptologia, Volume 4, Number 2
• Easterling, E.J. In Search Of A Golden Vault: The Beale Treasure Mystery ( CD/AUDIO BOOK 70 min. ) copyright 1995/ Revised In 2011 . Avenel Publishing 1170 Easter Lane Blue Ridge, VA 24064.

External links

• Beale Cipher Decoded
• A copy of the Beale Papers, easily captured as text for offline use. A transcription, not an image. A copy of the key text, numbered, included in the original Beale Papers. Also, as text, the numbers in the unbroken ciphertexts.
• The Legendary Beale Treasure
• Overview of some of the literature on the Beale ciphers
• The Beale Papers Hoax
• The Making of "Mysteries"
• A rare copy of the 1885 original paper reporting the story
• The Thomas Beale Cipher at the Internet Movie Database
• Skeptoid #301: The Beale Ciphers at Skeptoid
• The Beale Papers