Roll Up, Roll Up,

for free money!

 how does $60 million sound? Or put another way, 2921 pounds of gold, 5100 pounds of silver, and $1.5 million of precious jewels, all you have to do is solve three ciphers, well two in fact, as one has already been solved, it is getting easier by the second! the picture above by Flicker user Virginia Hill/Flickr, is of Old Cemetery,Virginia, and that is where the story begins, or may be ends? essentially, 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, comprising three ciphertexts, the first (unsolved) text describes the location, 

the second, above, (solved) ciphertext 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 1885 pamphlet detailing treasure being buried by a man named Thomas J. Beale in a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia, in the 1820s, 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 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 and the rest as they say is history, for a fascinating read, definitely a mug of coffee, here is one of the many on the subject, but be warned, for the past century, the quest to break these codes has attracted the military, computer scientists, and conspiracy theorists, all have failed to decipher the remaining two, but you never know, you might get lucky!