kaitlynnn's blogg

In 1885, a pamplet was published supposedly telling where to find a bunch of gold and silver. The instructions were encrypted. The pamplet told the story of Thomas Jefferson Beale, who made a fortune out west, and buried it in Bedford County, Virginia. Three separate messages were encrypted in the pamplet, and consist of pages of numbers, separated by commas. He gave the solution to the second message.

The key to decrypting the second message was the Declaration of Independence. Every number in the message refers to the first letter of a word in it. The third message is relatively uninteresting to treasure hunters, as it tells who the treasure belongs to. Apparently, no one has ever decrypted the first or third message.

There are a few good reasons to think that the pamplet is a hoax. For example, the first message would seem to use the same message of encryption as the second, but with a few much larger numbers, implying that the key document is much longer than the Declaration of Independence. But no matter how long a text is, you probably would not have to search 2000 words deep to find any letter you wanted. Besides, there is internal evidence that the key is actually the Declaration of Independence, and that the original message is mostly meaningless letters with no words, and with a few large numbers