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 USD$63 million. The other two ciphertexts allegedly describe the content of the treasure, and list the names of the treasure's owners' next of kin, respectively.

The story of the three ciphertexts originates from an 1885 pamphlet detailing treasure being buried by a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in a secret location in 1820. Beale entrusted the box containing the encrypted messages with a local innkeeper named Robert Morriss and then disappeared, never to be seen again.

The innkeeper 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. He published all three ciphertexts in a pamphlet, although most of the originals were destroyed in a warehouse fire.

However, in 1982 Joe Nickell published a scholarly analysis of the papers, using historical records that cast doubt on the existence of "Beale" and linguistic evidence showing they were not written at the time alleged. Evidence from 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 fiction—specifically a "secret vault" allegory of the Freemasons; Ward was, in fact, a Mason.

Since the publication of the pamphlet, a number of attempts have been made to decode the two remaining ciphertexts and to find the treasure, but all have resulted in failure.

Beale's Treasure
The treasure was said to have been obtained by an American man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in 1818, to the north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what would now be Colorado. Beale supposedly led about 29 adventurers on the discovery, but no solid proof of Beale's existence, or that of any of his companions, has yet been found in any public or private record.

It is claimed that Beale placed the ciphertexts in an iron box, and left it with a reliable person in 1822, a Lynchburg innkeeper, Robert Morriss. The treasure was supposedly buried near Montvale in Bedford County, Virginia. Beale asked Morriss not to open the box, unless he failed to return within 10 years. Beale promised to have a friend in St. Louis mail Morriss the key(s) to the cryptograms, but they were never received. In 1843 Morriss opened the box and unsuccessfully attempted to solve the ciphers on his own but, decades later, passed the box and contents (three letters and three ciphertexts), and the story, to one of his friends.

Cipher Decoded
Using the United States Declaration of Independence a key, the friend successfully deciphered the second ciphertext, which gave descriptions of the buried treasure. The friend ultimately made the letters and ciphertexts public.

The plaintext 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 totals given in the second cryptogram come to 35,052 troy oz. gold (worth about US $63m), 61,200 troy oz. silver (worth about US $1m) 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.

Authenticity Debate
There has been considerable debate over whether the remaining two ciphertexts are real or hoaxes. An early researcher used supercomputers 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 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 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), but none have been successful. Breaking the cipher(s) may depend on random chance; so far, even the most skilled cryptanalysts who have attempted them have been defeated.

Beale could have used a document that he had written himself for either or both of the remaining keys, thus rendering any further attempts to crack the codes useless.