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 43 million US dollars as of January 2018.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[citation needed] 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.
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 a modified copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, but some editing is necessary.
Beale used a version of the United States Declaration of Independence slightly different from the original, and made mistakes in numbering it.
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.
[19] 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.
[23] Poe had an interest in cryptography and placed notices of his deciphering abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger that invited submissions of ciphers for him to solve.
[26] One theory is that he left the Beale papers with his sister Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, who gave out pieces of it along with other memorabilia related to her brother until her death in 1874.
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.
[19] 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.
In 2014, the National Geographic TV show The Numbers Game referred to the Beale ciphers as one of the strongest passwords ever created.
[citation needed] Also in 2015, the Josh Gates series Expedition Unknown visited Bedford to investigate the Beale Ciphers and search for the treasure.
[30] In 2024, Dave Howard from Popular Mechanics wrote an article with interviews from a number of researchers who have been working to break the Beale Ciphers.
The Ciphers exposed the details behind the Peralta Land Grab, and the author James Reavis in a relay of information sent to JP Morgan, with a message added from Albert Pike, in a communique of the Knights of the Golden Circle.
