- The Beale ciphers, also referred to as the Beale Papers, 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 US$63 million as of September 2011.
- Comprising three ciphertexts, the first (unsolved) text describes the location, the second (solved) ciphertext the content of the treasure, and the third (unsolved) lists the names of the treasure's owners and their next of kin.
Beale's-first-cryptogram
Beale's-second-cryptogram
Beale's-third-cryptogram
- The story of the three ciphertexts originates from an 1885 pamphlet detailing, treasure being buried by a man named Thomas J. Beale in a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia, in the 1820's.
- Beale placed the ciphertexts and some other papers in an iron box, which he gave in 1822 to a reliable person, the Lynchburg innkeeper Robert Morriss.
- Beale asked Morriss not to open the box unless Beale or one of his men failed to return from their journey within 10 years.
- Sending a letter from St. Louis a few months later, Beale promised Morriss that a friend in St. Louis would mail the key to the cryptograms, but it never arrived.
- Twenty-three years later, in 1845, Morriss opened the box, finding two plaintext letters from Beale, and several pages of ciphertext separated into Papers "1", "2", and "3".
- Morriss had no luck in solving the ciphers, and decades later left the box and its contents to an unnamed friend.
- 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. 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 has been considerable debate over whether the remaining two ciphertexts are real or hoaxes.
