The Beale Ciphers – Clue To The Largest Treasure In The US
What would you do if you happened upon a treasure worth over $63 million? Would you buy a house? Would you start a business? Would you go on a vacation? Would you become the greatest user that www.pcasinos.co.uk has ever seen? Of course, for most people, such a sum of money is nothing but a pipe dream. The majority of us will never even see a fraction of it in our lifetimes, let alone all in one place, and unless you’re Donald Trump and get a small loan of a million dollars from your father, the only way you can possibly get a sum that big is if you win the lottery. But what if I told you that there is another way? Indeed, there’s currently a treasure hidden somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia, just waiting to be found? Of course, you’re not going to just stumble upon it. Only the person who’s able to solve the cipher can gain the treasure.
The story goes that, in the early 1800s, a man by the name of Thomas J. Beale buried two wagons full of treasure (gold, money and gems, mostly) estimated to be worth about $63 million in today’s money, somewhere in Bedford County. Afterwards, he visited a local inn and left a small box with the innkeeper, one Robert Morriss, never to be seen again. Within that box were three pieces of paper containing ciphers (like the one you see on the picture) which, when deciphered, would supposedly lead whoever was smart enough to solve them straight to the buried treasure. Out of all three, one has been solved using the US Declaration of Independence as a decoding device, proving that the ciphers are not random and can, in fact, be decoded. The translated page reads the following:
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 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.
That’s all the progress that has been made on deciphering the Beale Ciphers in two centuries. Nobody has been able to decipher the other two pages yet, which is unsurprising considering the fact that we have no clue what the decoding device is. Without it, it’d take even a supercomputer hundreds of years to crack the code. If someone does manage to figure it out, though, it’s highly likely that they’re going to be able to find the fabled treasure that Thomas Beale is talking about. If that sounds like the plot of an “Uncharted” game to you, I assure you you’re not alone! Now all we need is a master adventurer/archeologist/cryptoanalyst and we’re all set!