Treasure legend: Beale Cryptography (Part 3)

Beale code consists of 3 codes about a treasure buried in gold and silver and jewelry worth about 63 million USD. So far, it has solved the second ciphertext that talks about the value of treasure, but the other two ciphers, a description of the treasure of a treasure, is a list of relatives of treasure owners, still not decoded yet.

Talk 3 codes

The story of the 3 ciphertext derives from the book "Beale 's Documents " , published in 1885. The treasure is given by an American named Thomas Beale collected during his 29 adventures, buried near Montvale in Bedford County, Virginia state.

Before starting another adventure, Beale recorded details of the treasures in three codes, placed them in an iron box and handed them to a trusted person in 1822, the innkeeper Robert Morriss at Lynchburg. Beale told Morriss not to open the box for 10 years.

Beale also promised to tell her friend in St. Louis sent a letter to Morriss to provide the decryption key, but Morriss never received the letter. In 1845, Morriss opened the box but completely blocked the code. Several dozen years later, before he died, Morriss handed the box with the ciphertext to a friend.

He spent nearly 20 years to solve the second code, talking about treasure details. Because he could not solve the rest of the ciphertext, in 1885 he decided to publish the story of the three codes in the booklet "The Beale Papers".

The book contains the content of the original 3 codes and the decoding of the 2nd cipher. The author of the book is James B Ward. Searching in the local demographic books at the time, people only discovered one person named Ward. This man owned the house in Mrs. Sarah Morriss, Robert Morriss's wife, after she died in 1865.

As explained in the book, Morriss's friend used the American Declaration of Independence to solve the second code, in a way that collated the numbers on the code with the number of words in the manifesto, Get the first letter of the word.

It is worth noting that the Beale manifesto has some differences compared to the current popular manifesto. It is still not known why this friend discovered the United States manifesto as the key to the second ciphertext.

Truth or joke?

The content of the second code can be summarized as follows: "I have left the treasure 4 miles away from Budford, in a pit or deep underground tunnel 6 feet, the following, owned by the same people The name on the third paper includes: 1,024 pounds of solid gold and 3,812 pounds of silver buried in November 19819.

The second time the gold was hidden in December 1883, including 1,907 pounds of gold, 1,288 pounds of silver, accompanied by jewels converted from silver in St. Louis to circulate for a safe value of $ 13,000. All of the wealth is left in an iron box, iron lid. The pits are paved with stones, the containers are placed on stones and placed on top of each other. Paper number 1 describes the exact location of the vault, so it is not difficult to find it. "

Based on the second code, it is calculated that a 35,052oz gold treasure (worth about US $ 63 million calculated in September 2011), 61,200oz of silver (worth about US $ 1 million in 2010) and jewelry $ 13,000 in 1818, or about $ 180,000 in 2010. The entire treasure is 3 tons.

The first code, believed to be where the treasure Beale was hiding.

So far there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the real problem of 3 Beale codes. In the late 1960s, Sperry researcher Carl Hammer UNIVAC used computer algorithms to analyze the ciphertext and concluded that they were poorly coded. Later, cryptanalysts assumed that the other two ciphertexts (versions 1 and 3) were not coded in English characters.

Others question why Beale complicates the problem with 3 different ciphertext, especially with the 3rd code (the divisions) because people will not be motivated to solve that code. Analyzing the behavior of the language used by the author of the booklet and the second ciphertext, it is thought that it could be the same writer. The third code is also said to be too short to list a list of 30 beneficiaries of the treasure.

According to the book, Robert Morriss said he was the owner of the Washington Hotel in 1820. But the documents still showed that at least until 1823 he opened the hotel. But in the customer list of St. Petersburg Post Office. Louis, 1820, has a customer named Thomas Beall. Meanwhile, the book that recorded Beale sent a letter from St. Louis 1822.

Anyway, doubts do not discourage many treasure hunters. Rumors of treasure buried in Bedford County have stimulated many people to make expeditions in order to discover and search for treasures in potential locations.

There is a record of a woman digging a Mountain View church cemetery in February 1983 believing that Beale hid the treasure there. The cemetery location is at the top of Mount Porter, 4 miles east of the Tavern. Many other excavations have also been carried out at the top of Mount Porter. Another suspicious point is Otter's nose, though it is more than 4 miles from Tavern.