ed@oakhill.UUCP (Ed Rupp) (07/06/84)
I'd like to start some discussion about the Beale Ciphers. If you haven't heard of them, here's a quick description: About 1817 a group of 30 Virginian's went west on a hunting expedition. They unexpectedly discovered gold and silver somewhere north of Santa Fe, NM. After digging it up for a few years they carried two loads of it back to Virginia and buried it. Not wanting their fortune to be lost in case they were killed (by Indians, etc.) their leader Thomas J. Beale made up a set of 3 ciphers and gave them to an innkeeper, promising to send the key along in 10 years if they didn't return..... They never returned. The key never appeared. The innkeeper (Robert Morriss) waited 32 years, opened the box containing the ciphers and some letters, spent many years trying to break the ciphers, failed and gave them to a friend. His friend also tried to break the ciphers, and was successful in breaking one of them (#2). The cleartext to #2 reads: > I have deposited in the county of Bedford about four miles from Bufords > 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. The other 2 ciphers are unbroken as far as is known. All 3 ciphers consist of numbers. The key to #2 is the Declaration of Independence. One takes the DOI, numbers the words then substitutes the first letter of each word for the numbers in the cipher. Doing this for the other 2 ciphers gives mostly garbage except for partial strings of the alphabet in #1 (named Gillogly Strings for their discoverer). The above description is based on a document "The Beale Papers" published in 1885 by J.B.Ward. I got interested in this about 2 years ago, but have run out of things to try. The 'clearing-house' for the ciphers is: The Beale Cypher Association P.O. Box 216 Medfield, Mass 02052 Send $1.00 and a large SASE to them for basic info. (Newsletter is $25/year) I have (on-line): All 3 ciphers, the DOI, the 1885 Ward pamphlet, the obvious programs to apply keytexts to the ciphers and a (meager) list of oddities and observations. So.... Is it a hoax? Is the treasure still there (est. $18 Million)? What method was used for B1 and/or B3? Any experts out there willing to venture an opinion? Replies to my mailbox or net.crypt please. Ed Rupp {ihnp4,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!oakhill!ed
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (07/07/84)
I am convinced that the Beale ciphers are real, although who knows what the undeciphered ones say. They do have similar statistical characteristics to the one that has been deciphered. I did a bit of research years ago to try to find the key document for the cipher that supposedly tells where the treasure is (after all, why decipher the one that tells who is legitimately entitled to the treasure?). My premise was that some other writing of Thomas Jefferson was most likely the key document. However, Jefferson wrote few documents that have enough words in them. The one I found most promising was also the one that T. J. considered his most important, something like "A Bill to Repeal Slavery in Virginia". I never could get it to work, though. Maybe there was a misnumbering or something.
cbspt002@abnjh.UUCP (Marc E. Kenig ) (07/08/84)
<Beale's first two names are Thomas Jefferson...hmmm sort of obvious, no?> The owners of the land would only be abe to stake a claim if they KNEW that the treasure was there when they acquired the land, or if they are direct descendants to TJ Beale and/or company. Also, come into play the laws of slavage in W. Virginia (and W. Va. Lawyers out there?). You'd pay tax immediately to the feds on those articles on which could be placed immediate value (i.e. the gold and silver). Fortunately, the 3rd cipher (giving relatives names of those in Beales expedition) can not be considered a will or title. Personally, I think it's a hoax. Why put the most expository narrative in the second, rather than the first cipher?? Also, if one is encoding a message, you tend to write in a dry 'telegram' style. TJ Beale not only repeats himself, but uses qualifiers like 'vault or excavation', etc. How about the ability to haul all that weight thousands of miles given 1820's wangons and a distinct lack of roads through tough terrain? Or the fact that it was only buried six-feet deep (I'd of buried it a lot deeper myself). And why use such a popular document such as the Declaration for one cipher key and then turn around and use far less obvious keys for the others? How come there are absolutely no Spanish records on such a party ever visiting New Mexico (which had pretty thoroughly been picked clean by the Spanish for over two centuries)? And Mr. Morriss was either very honest or had absolutely no curiosity to hold a lockbox for over 20 years and not peek inside. Proving the ciphers to be hoaxes can only be done by indirect evidence and hostorical analysis - which is as much part of cryptanalysis as codebreaking. The Beale Cipher Society has some good collections of papers along this line. M. Kenig "Of course, somebody could've already dug it up and not told ...abnjh!cbspt002 anybody. That's what I'd do!"
jim@randvax.UUCP (07/09/84)
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As the discoverer of the so-called "Gillogly strings" referred to in
the article to which this is a followup, I ought to enlarge on the
description of my discovery and give my opinion on the Beale Ciphers
in general.
My article was published in _Cryptologia_, vol 4 # 2 (Apr 1980),
titled "The Beale Cypher: A Dissenting Opinion."
To recap, the cipher algorithm of Paper #2 consists of numbering the
words in the Declaration of Independence (DOI) and replacing each plaintext
letter in the message with the number of a word in the DOI which begins
with that number. I applied the DOI to Paper #1 and discovered garbage at
the beginning of the cipher, but significant patches of non-garbage a ways
into it. The most striking sequence is "ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP". The
first F is encrypted as 195, and letter 194 of the DOI is a C. The last
H is 301, and letter 302 of the DOI is an O. Carl Hammer, a strong
defender of the legitimacy of the Beale Cyphers, did a thorough analysis
of Paper #2 and discovered 23 examples where the encryptor made errors
of this type, or about one every 33 letters. There are several other
sequences that look non-random, such as AABBCCACDD.
The point of all this is that if one of the papers is decrypted with the
wrong document, the result should be a random assortment of initial letters
from the document being tried, and all sequences occurring in it must be
the result of random processes. In the paper I computed the odds against
that sequence occurring randomly, but that was a bit silly since anyone
can see that it's totally out of the question.
So any explanation of the Beale as a legitimate cipher must explain how
that sequence could legitimately come about. Hammer suggests that the
first paper could be encrypted as a "pun", where this sequence is there
intentionally, but if one used the right document a real message would
appear again. He attempted to construct an example using two documents,
but could not achieve such a long sequence, nor use such small numbers
(one needs to go farther in the documents to find an initial letter that
fits both your intended message and the "pun"). I think this is
unlikely, if only because the writer was unlikely to have the kind of
time necessary to find two documents which would allow this extended
pun, nor any particular reason to do it. (I discount Hammer's theory
that it was put there as a signal that the decryptor is on the right
track, because the original story assumed that the legitimate recipient
would have the keys and method for all three papers.)
My opinion is that a hoaxer made up the second message, then produced
two sets of garbage numbers. While making up the first set of garbage
numbers, he picked numbers from the DOI that he had numbered in front
of him that ran in patterns (Hammer calls this my "doodle" hypothesis).
This opinion is supported by a number of internal and external clues.
One is alluded to by another writer in the followup: why give a synopsis
of papers #1 and #3, since the expected legitimate recipient will know
exactly what is in them as soon as he deciphers them! The numerous
errors made in the encryption testify that it was a painful process for
the writer, so why add extra verbiage to it? Second, Paper #3 is supposed
to contain the names and addresses of all 30 members of the party (or
their heirs). Paper #3 has only 600 or 700 numbers, so that each name
and address can have only about 20 characters. A little sparse.
Greg Mellen discusses at some length the fact that the originals are
missing and that there are odd discrepancies in the different versions
of the ciphers that are still intact (BCA Newsletter, March 1980).
He also gives further examples that another net.crypt writer noticed about
Paper #2:
The "vault" is "an excavation or vault". It is not someplace,
but has an "exact locality." It is not "six feet down," but
"six feet below the surface of the ground." It is not "lined",
but "roughly lined." Things are not "packed", but "securely
packed." Vessels rest not on "stone," but on "solid stone".
A number of other points have been made by other authors, but this should
be plenty to convince those who haven't yet decided one way or the other...
(Was that a little snotty? I apologize for any offense taken...)
Jim Gillogly
{vortex, decvax}!randvax!jim