Beale ciphers

thumb|250px|Cover of The Beale Papers

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 $60 million . Comprising three ciphertexts, the first (unsolved) text describes the location, the second (solved) ciphertext accounts 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 1867 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. 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 20 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 presented linguistic evidence demonstrating anachronisms—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 ciphers 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 pamphlet published in 1885, entitled The Beale Papers, is the 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 (New Mexico), at that time in the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (an area that today would most likely be part of Colorado). According to the pamphlet, Beale was the leader of a group of 30 gentleman 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.

after word 240 ("invariably") and before word 246 ("design"), one word must be removed (probably "a"). The pamphlet's numbering has eleven words between the labels for 240 and 250.
after word 630 ("eat") and before word 654 ("to"), one word must be removed (probably "the"). The pamphlet's numbering has eleven words between the labels for 630 and 640. and jewels worth around 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, and its background story has several implausibilities, being based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence and hearsay.

Items that raise doubt about the ciphers include:

The second message, describing the treasure, has been deciphered, but the others have not, suggesting a deliberate ploy to encourage sustained interest in deciphering the other two texts, which would prove to be impossible. The second message even cross-references first one, despite Beale supposedly wanted to send Morris a key to all of the three ciphers altogether. 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. Alphabetical sequences such as are both non-random, as indicated by Carl Hammer, 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). but used from French from 1786 in the New Orleans area, and stampede (Spanish) "an uproar". Beale's "stampeding" apparently first appears in print in the English language in 1832 but was used from 1786 to 1823 in New Orleans in French and Spanish.
A common literary device of fiction is the story of finding a treasure map or other information that will, purportedly, lead to buried treasure, from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island to Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates.

There have been many attempts to break the remaining cipher(s). 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. 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.

Existence of Thomas J. Beale

A survey of records in the 1810 United States census shows two persons named Thomas Beale, one in Connecticut and one in New Hampshire. However, the population schedules from this census are missing for seven states, one territory, the District of Columbia, and 18 of the counties of Virginia. However, the population schedules from this census are 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 St. Louis postmaster's list of 1820; according to The Beale Papers, Beale sent a letter from St. Louis in 1822.

Poe's alleged authorship

Researcher Robert Ward and others have suggested Edgar Allan Poe as the pamphlet's real author. 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. In 1843, he used a cryptogram as a 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, he left for Boston in April 1827. 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.

Statistical analysis

Another method to check the validity of the ciphers is to investigate some statistical aspects in different number bases. For example, one can investigate the frequency of the last digit in each number in the ciphers. These frequencies are not uniformly distributed—some digits are more common than others. This is true for all three ciphers.

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. The frequency of the solved cipher stays non-uniform. 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. One explanation for the difference between base 10 and other bases is that the unsolved ciphers' numbers were manufactured by a human in base 10, which would strongly suggest that the unsolved ciphers are fraudulent. Simon Singh's 1999 book The Code Book discusses the Beale cipher mystery in one of its chapters. 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 (also known as Raiders of the Lost Past) devoted one of its season three episodes to the topic. A February 2015 episode of the series Expedition Unknown saw host Josh Gates visit Bedford to investigate the Beale ciphers and search for the treasure. In 2024, Dave Howard from Popular Mechanics wrote an article with interviews from a number of researchers who had been working to break the Beale ciphers.

In the film, The Imitation Game, John Cairncross uses a Beale cipher to encode messages he sends to the Soviet Union about Enigma intercepts at Bletchley Park. Hugh Alexander finds that the key is based on Matthew 7:7: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

References

External links

, as text in separate pages, shown alongside images of the original.

have been made in video format with audio for the whole pamphlet.
"Historical and Analytical Studies in Relation to the Beale Ciphers"