That detail isn’t as fanciful as it may sound. The Beale Ciphers have challenged treasure hunters for almost 200 years. For these treasure hunters, a survey of the past 70 years of newspaper headlines shows a bleak pattern: MAN HOT ON THE TRAIL OF THOMAS BEALE’S TREASURE. When he arrived in Virginia, he buried the haul not in a cave as intended, but in a grave-sized plot about four miles from Buford's tavern. They reburied it in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. [25], Despite the Beale Papers' unproven veracity, treasure hunters have not been deterred from trying to find the vault. You may wonder, then, why Bedford, Virginia has been cited as the source of the treasure. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. However, the treasure hunters only found Civil War artifacts. Beale used a version of United States Declaration of Independence substantially different from the original. Ward who would later help publish "The Beale Papers.". Further attempts at decoding are indeed warranted.”. He knew his men were in hostile territory and eventually “decided that it should be sent to Virginia under my charge, and securely buried in a cave near Buford’s tavern, in the county of Bedford,” he wrote. For people like Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer who runs the website Cipher Mysteries, the speculation makes his eyes roll. The medium shielded his eyes and shrieked. Friedman’s wife Elizebeth, also an accomplished cryptanalyst, dubbed them as a lost cause with a “diabolical ingenuity specifically designed to lure the unwary reader …. In February 1974, after an an auto mechanic alleged he had solved the ciphers, the Roanoke World-News published two contradicting headlines on the same day. Ward was a Mason himself.[1]. Few people know as much about the Beale mystery as Easterling. “Discussions about the Beale have lost a lot of focus, lapsed into argumentation based on the minutiae of the pamphlet.”. Gillogly published his discovery in a Cryptologia essay called “A Dissenting Opinion" and calculated the chance it could occur randomly was 1 in 10,000,000,000,000. He pointed to the roots of an oak tree just feet away and exclaimed: “There it is! (“[I]t has long since been removed by an N.S.A. The Zodiac-408 cipher, created by the eponymous serial killer in 1969, is the easiest of the four Zodiac codes. Morriss had no luck in solving the ciphers, and decades later left the box and its contents to an unnamed friend. The original story of the ciphers is the stuff of legend – the treasure was claimed to have been found by one Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s when he and a group of 30 men found a mine full of gold and silver while hunting buffalo. Beale researchers have always been a solitary, if not paranoid, bunch. After resting at Buford's, Beale and his men buried that gold, silver, and jewels deep in the Virginia woods, approximately four miles from the tavern. In 1972, The Washington Post reported that local landowners regularly fired warning shots at strangers tip-toeing on their property. “Most people here have resented it.”, The federal government owns swaths of land near Montvale—the Blue Ridge Parkway and Appalachian Trail weave through the peaks near town—and it doesn’t take kindly to unpermitted treasure-digging either. But for those who still cared about the treasure, the B.C.A. “Why give away secrets only to find that someone else has found the treasure using your information?” Stephen Matyas once said. Two men were sent to get Beale and the rest of the group while the others were gathering up as much gold as they could find. was an organized attempt to overcome this atmosphere of distrust and streamline the search. Beale's use of landmarks, the location of the excavation site and his method of concealement for both the treasure and the … “There are people who want to solve the historical part of it—just to see if it’s accurate—and most of them are good, normal people just trying to solve a mystery.”. For the B.C.A., the news was deflating. To reduce the weight, Beale traded some of the gold and silver for jewels, and in 1820 he travelled to Lynchburg, found a suitable location, and buried the treasure. It is said hat only the second code has been broken. The materials held at the Bedford Genealogical library near Montvale, Virginia are a mixed bag of serious historical research and total crackpottery: There are copies of ancient maps, genealogies of people related to the treasure story, unpublished academic papers, handwritten letters, manifestos alleging the National Forest Service is engaged in conspiracy, “solutions” to the ciphers, and tortured sketches that evoke A Beautiful Mind. The treasure was claimed to have been found by one Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s. Oak Island Mystery. One week later, Clayton returned to that same spot with dynamite. Have you ever heard of an editor? grew to boast more than 200 members from places as close as Michigan and as far as Holland. “I think it is fair to say that this effort has engaged at least 10 percent of the best cryptanalytic minds in the country, and represents much more than the value of the treasure even if it should be just as described,” Hammer told The Washington Post in 1979. Two: Beale died, and his fellow shareholders cleaned out the hoard without contacting Morriss. “And these ... Oh, and these ... Ahhh, yes! Beale left behind three coded messages: The first told the exact location of the treasure; the second told the contents; the third told who owned the treasure. Named after Thomas J. Beale, who purportedly buried the trove, the Beale Treasure of gold and silver and jewels has languished in the ground for two centuries. Dutch Schultz. Other presentations included a talk on inductive geodetic reasoning—a fancy way of saying, “If I hid treasure, where would I bury it?”—and a lecture on how to improve your dowsing rod accuracy. Each number represents a letter of the alphabet, which can be found by numbering the words in a “key” text. They come motivated by a quirky Virginia state law that says buried treasure is finder’s-keepers (even if it’s discovered on private property). For the past two centuries, attempts to solve the Beale codes have been a guessing game. Any centralized attempt to decode the Beale ciphers has faded with them. The repetition narrows our options. He's studied brittle, yellowing maps and has wandered the woods looking for the overgrown stagecoach roads that Beale would have traveled upon. Clayton dug frantically. It was not until 1845 that Morriss opened the box. Ward, whose 1885 pamphlet brought the Beale Papers to light. Joining them—reluctantly—was their trusty medium. waned. That's been the opinion of cryptanalysts for nearly a century. [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 Beale Papers and their related story by Joe Nickell, using historical records that cast doubt on the existence of Thomas J. Beale. It’s all a cover-up! Easterling patiently listened, contacted the appropriate landowner, and secured the man permission to dig. T. Beall” and an 1820 notice for a “Thomas Beall” in The Franklin Intelligencer. The U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, which used the Beale ciphers as a training exercise, in front of their vault in 1935. But unlike most riddles, solving them could make you a millionaire. 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"). In addition, the Beale treasure was apparently found by accident. The medium (who had refused to help all night, opting instead to lounge on a bed of dead leaves) was re-hypnotized and told to explain himself. In 1969, an organization he kickstarted—later called the Beale Cipher Association, or B.C.A.—hosted a symposium in Washington, D.C. in an attempt to pool the best minds to tackle it. Guided by lanterns and moonbeams, the Hart brothers dug. In fact, when they first encountered these anachronisms, few dropped their shovels or chucked their maps; rather they picked up books and dove into special archives rooms to start a new hunt—a search to find counter-evidence in the historical record that would pile doubt on the doubters. 2 with the original Declaration of Independence, you don’t get: I have deposited in the county of Bedford about four miles from Buford’s ... A haie deposoted tn ttt eointt oa itdstrrs aboap thrr miles troa baaotts ... Beale’s letters are suspicious, too. [8] Other questions remain about the authenticity of the pamphlet's account. There’s the Texas man who drove to Virginia, wife and kids in tow, simply to borrow a local roadmap that he believed would lead to the treasure. Like all good riddles, the Beale codes have an addictive quality that curious people can’t resist. She recedes to a back room, and I begin leafing through the books—only to be startled by a sudden plop. "Even if it does all the work, we still have to find the type of work for it to do.”. Friedman lamented: “[T]he application of scientific principles is impossible.”. First, repetition. 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. “And when one of the most respected historical codebreakers in the world says, ‘Pffft, don’t even try,’ a lot of codebreakers will say, 'You know, I trust Jim on this one.'”. The researcher Richard Greaves, who investigated the Beale story for decades, called it “possibly the worst decision I ever made. For the geographic code classification system, see, Dr. Clarence Williams, a researcher at the Library of Congress, in 1934. The guy who cracked the second Beale cipher is among them. Because when you don’t find what you’re looking for, you might keep looking … and keep looking … and keep looking … until you can no longer afford to stop. Description: The Beale's treasure is $21 million of gold and silver stuffed in iron pots, believed to be hidden somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia. In the early 1800s, one of them dueled a Lynchburg, Virginia man named James Risque. 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. I look down. I believe however that this part of the story is not true. (“The treasure has been moved!” he reportedly grumbled.) By 1999, the Beale Cipher Association had dissolved. If you believe the lore, Beale found a … Beale, if he existed, may have been living in someone else's household. “I think if Jesus ever tells somebody where the treasure is buried, then that’s where it would be!”. This problem is called unicity distance: When a cipher is too short, we might find multiple solutions. agent, combed through old newspapers from St. Louis—what would have been Beale’s last checkpoint before the frontier—and discovered a postmaster’s notice in an October 1817 copy of The Missouri Gazette for an “S. Then the landowner has to go and put their land back.”. The treasure location is traditionally linked to Montvale in Bedford County, Virginia. Stephen Matyas researched this discrepancy and compiled one of the world's most complete collections of Declaration of Independence copies. A mule train plodded east to St. Louis, where Beale exchanged some ore for jewels. On Monday, I posted the second installment. It was apparently found by Beale and a team of twenty-nine other individuals, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “The Gillogly strings are evidence that there is something going on. The medium pointed to the dirt. 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. The room was dark. The Hart brothers, exhausted and annoyed, left. More than a century ago, a small pamphlet was published titled "The Beale Papers," which contained three cipher texts. Months later, under the cover of nightfall, Clayton and George steered a buggy full of shovels, ropes, and lanterns into Montvale. While hunting, they accidentally discovered gold near Pike's Peak, in present-day Colorado. Somewhere in the green hills of Bedford County in southwestern Virginia, lies a buried treasure worth over an estimated 60 million dollars. (Ward’s children denied this. Was located by decoding secretly hidden directions located within Cipher One of the Locality Cipher. The B.C.A. Some of their most remarkable work is genealogical. Which raises the question: Are the ciphers and the treasure even real? “Maybe the algorithm is still not good enough,” Nuhn says. 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. Legend says Thomas jefferson Beale found the treasure out West, brought it home to Virginia, buried it and left behind three ciphers that will lead you to the precise location of a treasure that could be worth close to $60 million dollars. He's lived near Montvale since his boyhood. He was never heard from again, leaving in his wake a mystery that continues today. In the early '80s, one treasure hunter bankrupted himself after blasting rocks for six months. So far, it’s been nothing but difficulty. “Beale Cyphers 1 and 3 are ‘for real,’” Hammer concluded. The club attracted big names in the intelligence community such as Carl Nelson Jr., who had helped the C.I.A. In April 1817, Thomas J. Beale and a party of about 30 men reportedly left Virginia and moseyed west with the goal of hunting buffalo, grizzlies, and other critters frolicking in the wild frontier. As the story goes, before leaving, Beale handed Morriss a iron lockbox and advised him to open the box if he failed to return. Date: 1821. 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. Cryptanalysts. In 1818, a band of 30 Virginians were on a hunting expedition in the great western plains when they discovered gold and silver somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. In a letter, Friedman wrote: “So far as my attempts to produce an authentic reading is concerned, I can most earnestly say I have tried to the best of my ability and now must confess myself beaten.”, But Friedman never quit. symposiums presented a delicate balance of serious academic theories and New Age hocus pocus. Two trips were made to deposit the treasure; one in 1819 and the other in 1821. (They were caught and forced to re-fill the pits. Treasure Games and Other Fun Ideas. The light receded. Researchers discovered that there was not one, but at least two Thomas Beales living within 20 miles of Montvale, Virginia during the early 19th century—and there’s a curious wrinkle in their stories. There has been considerable debate over whether the remaining two ciphertexts are real or hoaxes. I believe that Thomas Jefferson himself had hidden the gold in Bedford County Virginia. Pelling belongs to the third species of Beale hunter. In 2014, the National Geographic TV show The Numbers Game referred to the Beale ciphers as one of the strongest passwords ever created. There are hundreds of supercomputers in the United States. He was leading a group of 30 men from Virginia on an adventurous expedition when they found a mine full of gold and silver while hunting buffalo. The treasure was elsewhere. “And not a dime of it should be begrudged; the work—even the lines that have led into blind alleys—has more than paid for itself in advancing and refining computer research.”. [21], In addition, a man named "Thomas Beall" appears in the customer lists of St. Louis Post Department in 1820. Many of these researchers believe the inconsistencies can be explained away. Meanwhile, the Beale Cipher No. intercept communist signals in a secret tunnel under Berlin; big names in data processing such as Per Holst, the Chief of Research at Massachusetts Foxboro Laboratories; and big names in government, including a U.S. District Judge and the Governor of Minnesota. Before 1850 the U.S. Census recorded the names of only the heads of households; others in the household were only counted. If that whole story sounds fishy, that's because it is. With the aroma of Sanka wafting through hotel conference rooms, the B.C.A. Clayton Hart thrust his pick into the red, iron-rich dirt and heard a hollow thud. Morriss didn’t know it, but that box contained the three ciphers. Earlier, a 19-year-old high school graduate phoned journalists to tell them he had dug up the treasure and sent it to South America for smelting. Ward is thus not "the friend". Herbert O. Yardley, whose 1931 tell-all book The American Black Chamber revealed the workings of America’s cryptography units, believed the Beale ciphers could be solved—but also admitted they looked “a bit fishey.”. Presenters raved about confusion matrices, 10x10 Hogg-Hugerman networks, and the application of neural networks to computer algorithms. headquarters, the National Cryptologic Museum library holds a printout of Hammer’s computer analyses from 1965 [PDF]. The man explained that Jesus had revealed the location of the treasure in a dream. According to the pamphlet, Beale sent a letter from St. Louis in 1822. They were developing an algorithm intended to improve the accuracy of machine translations, and they occasionally tested the strength of their program by feeding it ciphers such as the Zodiac-408 and the Beale Cipher No. Some people wave off Beale-ievers as nutters, but, looking at these materials, I think that’s lazy. (He wrote a 700-plus page two-part book; one section was entitled The Hoax Theory Deflated.) notes in a 2013 paper for the journal Cryptologia, if you decrypt Cipher No. For the past century, the quest to break these codes has attracted the military, computer scientists, and conspiracy theorists. Inside he found two plaintext letters from Beale, and several pages of ciphertext separated into Papers "1", "2", and "3". If the numbers above mean anything to you, congratulations: 2921 pounds of gold, 5100 pounds of silver, and $1.5 million of precious jewels—together valued at approximately $60 million—are … Beale would repeat that trip once more before returning west for good in 1821. The Beale Treasure. Yet contemporary records show he did not start in that position until at least 1823. Beale Ciphers and the Lost Treasure in Bedford County. Collectible Treasures. For 200 years, treasure hunters have traveled to a Virginia community hoping to find one of the largest buried treasures in America. Gillogly offered two interpretations: that the message is buried under a second level of encryption; or that this measly string of text was the intelligent pattern Hammer's computer had detected. The lack of evidence that Beale went west? [18], 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. As Dr. Todd Mateer of the N.S.A. Nothing intelligible appeared. 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. Ward; the same James B. “The people who think they know for sure where something is, they are the most likely not to dig at all because they don’t want to burst their dream,” Beale expert Ed Easterling says. It was well known he placed notices of his abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger, inviting submissions of ciphers which he proceeded to solve. The trouble with Thomas J. Beale’s ciphers, however, is that we don’t have the keys. A single pamphlet published in 1885, entitled The Beale Papers, is the only source of this story. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it. “Can’t you see it?”. [18], 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. Then Beale created three ciphers now known as the Beale Codes.Only one of the Beale Codes – the second one – has ever been decoded. And perhaps it explains why most Beale hunters never dig at all. One Pennsylvania steelworker made 36 trips to Bedford County before asserting that he found an empty treasure vault under an abandoned icehouse. Hammer could not deny Gillogly’s discovery but disagreed with his conclusion. Various information related to the incident has been described on social media as well. . It didn’t matter. If you decode Beale's first cipher with some versions of the Declaration of Independence, as James Gillogly tried in 1980, you'll get gobbledygook—with the exception of this pseudo-alphabetical string in the middle of the code. The pursuit, after all, is more than a hobby or preoccupation—it's an obsession ingrained within one's identity. Can the puzzle of the ciphers be solved? A 9-inch stack of manila folders stuffed with papers has materialized on my desk. “They are not random doodles but do contain intelligence and messages of some sort. “The computer is not the answer," Hammer said at a Beale Cipher Association Symposium in 1979. Upon breaking the code, the anonymous cryptanalyst rode a wave of adrenaline that, according to one 19th century author, compelled him “to neglect family, friends, and all legitimate pursuits for what has proved, so far, the veriest illusion.” Peter Viemeister, a Bedford-based author who wrote the book The Beale Treasure: A History of a Mystery, said, “Once you get the Beale treasure in your system, it is hard to get it out. Beale treasure hunters are overwhelmingly male, though locals still chatter about one Pennsylvania woman, Marilyn Parsons, who cashed a disability check in 1983 and rented a backhoe to test her theory that the treasure was buried in an unmarked plot of a church graveyard. Courtesy of National Cryptologic Museum, National Security Agency. The press has breathlessly reported countless claims of the codes being broken, sometimes with head-spinning results. The treasure is that of Thomas Beale, supposedly buried in Bedford County, Virginia sometime in the 1820s. 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