The Beale Ciphers have been around for over one hundred years and only the second one has been solved. The Beale Ciphers are a set of three Cipher texts that were made by Thomas J. Beale later to be published by an unnamed friend. According to the story, Beale was chosen to be the leader of a group of thirty men going on a buffalo hunt. They were surprised to find that they had stumbled on a huge gold and silver mine. They mined for 18 months while hunting moose before they decided to head back. Beale was entrusted with the treasure and told to take it back to Virginia where he would bury it in a secure location. He made three ciphers, the first showing the location of the treasure, the second saying what it consists of, and the third with
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If the Beale ciphers were fake, there would be two possible sub-theories. They were either all fake and made to make money for the publisher or some people acquired the treasure illegally and were using the ciphers as a cover story so they could "find" the treasure in the future. Experts think that the Beale Treasure may have been looted from the Mexican government or be the lost confederate treasure from the civil war. This doesn't make sense because it has been a very long time and nobody has uncovered the treasure. Another reason why the Beale Ciphers are fake is the letter strings in the first cipher (b1). When the key for cipher 2 (b2) is run on b1, very long letter strings appear like, ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPPP or AABBCCCCDDE, which are extremely unlikely to appear in a cipher. Some say that these strings were put in because the Hoaxer was getting board and Ronald Gervais claims that the author put them in to say "Don't take this too seriously, it's just for fun." I disagree and think these theories aren't very likely because I don't understand how ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPPP means, "Don't take this too seriously, it's just for …show more content…
This is because if b1 and b3 are real, the whole thing is real, and b1 and b3 are likely to be genuine ciphers. A hoaxer would not go through all of the effort to make two very difficult ciphers if the story was false. Also, if he were planning on recovering the treasure, there would've been no point in making real ciphers for someone else to solve. The tests that were performed on the first and third ciphers show similarities between them that mean it is likely that they are genuine. More tests were performed on real and bogus ciphers to prove that B1 and 3 are either both real or both fake. Finally, B1 is probably real because it doesn't make sense for the author to try and relieve boredom by making complicated letter strings. They would take a very long time to make and he would want to get it over with. He could've actually been doing something called double encipherment. Double encipherment is a process in which the coder encodes a document twice making it even more difficult to crack. The writer could've been experimenting with this technique until he made a letter string of sufficient length. I strongly agree with this theory because it counters every argument against it and provides arguments of its
If the Beale ciphers were fake, there would be two possible sub-theories. They were either all fake and made to make money for the publisher or some people acquired the treasure illegally and were using the ciphers as a cover story so they could "find" the treasure in the future. Experts think that the Beale Treasure may have been looted from the Mexican government or be the lost confederate treasure from the civil war. This doesn't make sense because it has been a very long time and nobody has uncovered the treasure. Another reason why the Beale Ciphers are fake is the letter strings in the first cipher (b1). When the key for cipher 2 (b2) is run on b1, very long letter strings appear like, ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPPP or AABBCCCCDDE, which are extremely unlikely to appear in a cipher. Some say that these strings were put in because the Hoaxer was getting board and Ronald Gervais claims that the author put them in to say "Don't take this too seriously, it's just for fun." I disagree and think these theories aren't very likely because I don't understand how ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPPP means, "Don't take this too seriously, it's just for …show more content…
This is because if b1 and b3 are real, the whole thing is real, and b1 and b3 are likely to be genuine ciphers. A hoaxer would not go through all of the effort to make two very difficult ciphers if the story was false. Also, if he were planning on recovering the treasure, there would've been no point in making real ciphers for someone else to solve. The tests that were performed on the first and third ciphers show similarities between them that mean it is likely that they are genuine. More tests were performed on real and bogus ciphers to prove that B1 and 3 are either both real or both fake. Finally, B1 is probably real because it doesn't make sense for the author to try and relieve boredom by making complicated letter strings. They would take a very long time to make and he would want to get it over with. He could've actually been doing something called double encipherment. Double encipherment is a process in which the coder encodes a document twice making it even more difficult to crack. The writer could've been experimenting with this technique until he made a letter string of sufficient length. I strongly agree with this theory because it counters every argument against it and provides arguments of its