Hey, Thoughty2 here.
Do these numbers mean anything to you?
If so, congratulations, you’re a millionaire. The internet’s full of people offering to make
you rich. But, however much that ‘single mother’ made in ‘just 3 months online’,’
or whatever that ‘Nigerian Prince’ is offering you ‘as soon as you wire him
your investment’ – I guarantee it won’t be a patch on what this simple set of numbers could net you.
Because cracking this code is estimated to be worth a cool $93m.
The numbers are one of three coded messages that make up what are known as
the ‘Beale Ciphers’ which, once cracked, contain detailed instructions as to the
exact whereabouts of – and I do know how this sounds – actual buried treasure.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story of the Beale Ciphers starts in
the America of 1817, a young nation where a person could find their fortune by…well…finding it. All
you had to do was gather a band of like-minded adventurers, pick a direction - usually
west - and head out in search of that most precious of earth-bound booty - gold.
One such detectorist was a man by the name of Thomas J Beale, who set out from Virginia in
1817 with a group of 30 hunters and opportunists. When they reached the outskirts of Santa Fe (now
in modern-day New Mexico, but at the time Spanish territory) they struck gold. Oh, and silver.
‘They struck gold, and a little bit of silver’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Anyway, after 18 months of mining Beale and his crew had amassed a huge stockpile of precious
metals, all of which were transported back across the country to Virginia
and hidden in a secret location by Beale himself. But this hiding place - which is
rumoured to be somewhere within 4 miles of a small town called Montvale - was so well
concealed that Beale and his companions began to worry it might never be found should something
untoward happen to them. To ensure their relatives would profit even if the adventurers perished,
Beale wrote three encrypted messages, one detailing the location of the treasure,
another the contents, and a third the names and addresses of the crew and their close relatives.
Beale placed these precious clues in an iron lockbox that he entrusted to
the care of Virginia innkeeper Robert Morriss. Morriss was given strict instructions only to open
the box if, in ten years, neither Beale nor any of his crew had returned to claim it. Now, I’ve known
a fair few innkeepers in my time, and every single one of them would have had that lockbox open
before Beale had even left the building. But it seems Robert Morriss was a man of strict
morals. Perhaps a little too strict even, because for some reason he left the lockbox untouched
for 23 years before opening it. Whether he was forgetful, pathologically incurious,
or just really needed to stand on it to reach that one high shelf…I guess we’ll never know.
What we do know is that, being an innkeeper with understandably limited cryptography skills,
Morriss himself had no luck decoding the riddles, despite spending the final two decades of his life
trying. Beale had been supposed to mail Morriss the key to the ciphers, but he never did, and,
by the 1860s, Morriss was beginning to realise he’d missed his chance to find the fortune.
Instead of letting the secret of the ciphers die with him, he passed them on to a brainy friend.
The identity of this arch puzzler has been lost to the sands of time, but whoever he was,
before long he made a breakthrough - a big one. He solved the second cipher. It turned out to be
a straightforward substitution cipher that used the US Declaration of Independence as its key.
When each number in the cipher was replaced with the first letter of the corresponding
word in the famous 1776 pronouncement, the true meaning of the text revealed itself.
The secret message contained information about the amount of hidden treasure,
about how it was hidden, and even a few intriguing teasers about the other ciphers.
But not, unfortunately, the all-important location.
It was certainly progress, but frustrating progress. Especially since the two remaining
ciphers remained impenetrable. But it seems Robert Morriss’ mystery friend was good at more
than just cryptography. Because rather than bang his head up against a wall for decades
as Morriss had, he found a new way to profit from the ciphers - he sold them. You might
be picturing some kind of grand auction with rich types offering crazy money for the codes.
But Morriss’ friend didn’t sell the ciphers to the highest bidder. He sold them to everyone.
In 1885 he published a pamphlet called the ‘Beale Papers’ that contained everything he knew about
both the treasure and the ciphers, selling it for 50 cents - about $15 in today’s money.
The document was an immediate success and copies of the Beale Papers flew off the shelves
in stores across Virginia. It was a genius move really.We humans are hard-wired to want to solve
mysteries - that’s why we have science and space exploration and Wordle. We also love
the idea that we’re special, fated somehow to score big where others have failed. But perhaps
most importantly of all, people just really want to get rich. And they want to do it quick.
Unsolved, Beale’s ciphers were essentially worthless. But the
elusive dream they represented - well, that was something people would pay for.
Nobody knows exactly how many would-be adventurers have spent serious time searching
for the treasure, but it’s most certainly hundreds, and very probably many thousands.
Some people hired mediums and spiritualists in an attempt to divine the location of the loot,
others tried their luck with dowsing rods or by consulting their inner eyes.
In more recent years, well-financed treasure hunters have descended on Montvale with
bulldozers and explosives. People have dug up graves, trespassed on private property,
and made a load of giant holes in the ground. And
of course, untold numbers of manhours have been spent trying to solve the ciphers themselves.
Assuming the unsolved codes are likely substitution ciphers too, all manner of
different source texts have been tested, including but not limited to: The Louisiana Purchase,
most of Shakespeare’s plays, the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the Lord’s Prayer,
the Book of Psalms, and the page-turner that is the Molasses Act of 1733…despite all this effort,
the solutions to the first and third ciphers have never been revealed.
UNTIL NOW… Just kidding. Sorry.
As of today, more than 130 years since the publication of the Beale Papers,
the ciphers remain as ‘indecipherable’ as ever, and the treasure is still out there
somewhere, unclaimed. But, before you grab yourself a copy of ‘The Virginia Gazette:
1821 Edition’ and settle in for a night of word-counting, I should probably point out that
there’s reason to believe this story of buried treasure may be a little too good to be true.
For starters, it’s very hard to find any evidence that Beale and his merry band of explorers
actually existed in the first place. Which is odd given the size of the party and the fact that
where they were headed – the Western frontier - was highly likely to get them arrested for
trespassing on foreign soil. You’d have thought a journey like that would have left a footprint,
but from what historians have been able to tell… well, it didn’t.
Then there’s the linguistic analysis of the surviving documents. Experts have compared
the writing in several letters purportedly written by Beale to that found in the Beale Papers - which
were of course written decades after his death - and found remarkable similarities.
Both authors made near-identical grammatical errors and wrote in a very similar style,
suggesting they may in fact have been one and the same person.
Beale’s letters also contain several words - including ‘stampede’ and ‘improvise’ - that don’t
seem to have been in use in the 1820s. Even more evidence that this pamphlet, published more than
60 years after the events it supposedly describes, is nothing but a fiction designed to sell copies.
OK, so the Beale Ciphers were just one big hoax designed to sell a few expensive pamphlets.
Well… maybe. But also… maybe not.
The trouble is, the evidence that suggests the Beale Papers were a hoax isn’t exactly cast iron
- sure, you’d have thought some record of Beale and his crew’s expedition would have survived, but
hey, this did all happen 200 years ago. And while the linguistic analysis is certainly interesting,
it also doesn’t really prove anything. Nobody knows exactly which words were in use in the
1820s. We can map the introduction of new ones by seeing when they crop up in historical texts,
but that’s only ever going to give us a rough approximation of the true timelines.
And for every piece of evidence casting doubt on the veracity of the Beale Papers,
there’s a tantalising hint that the whole story might just be real. While no record of
the expedition itself has survived, a certain ‘Thomas Beall’ was listed among the customers
of the St Louis postmaster in 1820. St Louis is located in Missouri, which would almost certainly
have been on Beale’s route from Virginia to the frontier. There’s even a Native American legend
dating to the 1820s that speaks of gold being discovered in the west and buried in the east.
Of course, none of this is remotely cast iron either,
but so long as there’s the tiniest reason to believe the ciphers might hold the key to
unimaginable wealth, people will continue to try and solve them. And we aren’t just talking about
deluded dreamers hoping for a miracle - plenty of perfectly sane people have gone in search
of the treasure over the years, including several genuine cryptology heavyweights.
In the 1930s, William Friedman, leader of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service
(which would later become the N.S.A.), spent his spare time trying to solve the ciphers.
You might recognise his name from my video on the mysterious Voynich manuscript,
so it’s fair to say Friedman had a habit of trying to solve the potentially unsolvable. But at one
point he believed himself close enough to cracking the Beale ciphers that he got his lawyer to write
up an agreement in case he succeeded. He didn’t.
But Friedman never quit. Instead, he included the ciphers in the Signal
Intelligence Service’s training program. One S.I.S. cryptologist who helped crack
Japan’s PURPLE cipher machine in World War II decided the ciphers were phoney, but Friedman
himself was a little more Jekyll and Hyde on the subject. He once famously said that on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays, he thought the whole thing was real, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays,
and Saturdays, he thought it was a hoax.” I imagine he was a hard man to live with.
In 1970, renowned computing pioneer Dr. Carl Hammer ran a statistical analysis on
the two unsolved Beale ciphers and found signs that they contained an intelligent pattern.
He was so excited by the discovery that went on to found the Beale Cipher Association,
or B.C.A., an organisation dedicated to solving the mystery of the Beale Papers.
For almost 3 decades, the BCA counted a large number of seriously brilliant cryptologists
among its number, including several from the CIA. But as the decades rolled by without any sort of
meaningful breakthrough, the BCA seem to have decided they CBA after all.
Not that interest in the mystery has ever totally gone away. But even as similar high-profile
ciphers from years past - like those left by the zodiac killer - have begun to be solved,
the Beale Ciphers have proven themselves to be unbreakable. Whether that’s because they’re just
a random bunch of numbers dreamed up by some guy as a genius way to make some fast cash,
or because we simply haven’t found the right key yet, well, nobody knows for sure.
The smart money’s probably on ‘hoax’ in this case, but while an element of doubt exists, there will
always be a chance a huge stash of gold is buried out there somewhere, right beneath our feet.
Thanks for watching.