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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 as of January 2025.

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. His analysis of the writing style showed that Beale was almost certainly James B. Ward, whose 1885 pamphlet brought the Beale ciphers to light.

A pamphlet published in 1885, entitled The Beale Papers, is the source of this story. Beale placed the ciphertexts and some other papers in an iron box. 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.

The first letter of the 811th word of the modified text ("fundamentally") is always used by Beale as a "y".

The second message even cross-references the first one, despite Beale supposedly wanting to send Morris a key to all of the three ciphers altogether. Others have also questioned why Beale would have bothered writing three different ciphertexts (with at least two keys, if not ciphers) for what is essentially a single message in the first place, 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). The 1820 United States census has three persons named Thomas Beale, one each in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia—the one living in Virginia is listed with "K" as a middle initial. Louis postmaster's list of 1820; according to The Beale Papers, Beale sent a letter from St.

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.

In 2010, an award-winning animated short film was made concerning the ciphers called The Thomas Beale Cipher. 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.

Quick Facts

• 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.
• Ward, whose 1885 pamphlet brought the Beale ciphers to light.
• 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.
• His analysis of the writing style showed that Beale was almost certainly James B.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Beale ciphers". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.