
89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480 - ca98am79
http://www.damninteresting.com/89-263-201-500-337-480/
======
acqq
[https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4301](https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4301)

"Indeed, the name Thomas Jefferson Beale suggests an inside joke. Thomas
Jefferson was, of course, the author of the Declaration of Independence, the
very document Ward claimed to have stumbled upon "by accident" (in his words)
as the key to the cipher. The name Beale suggests Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who
became famous when he crossed what was then Mexican territory in disguise to
transport the first samples of California gold from the west to the east, 37
years before Ward's book."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fitzgerald_Beale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fitzgerald_Beale)

"In the late 1850s, Beale surveyed and built _Beale 's Wagon Road_, which many
settlers used to move to the West, and which became part of _Route 66_ and the
route for the Transcontinental railroad."

Sounds like today naming the author of the code "Michael Jackson Gates" and
giving for the second key the lyrics of "Beat it"?

But the wish for treasure was blinder. Skeptoid concludes:

"After (the pamphlet's) publication, Ward tried to downplay the tale, claiming
that all remaining copies of the pamphlet had been destroyed in a print shop
fire, despite researchers finding no newspaper records of any such fire. Only
the first few pamphlets ever got out, and once they did, it appears that Ward
realized he'd created a monster with a greater effect than he'd anticipated.
Ward had been friends with the Buford and Morriss families, and it's perhaps
most probable that the unexpected attention changed his mind about promoting
his fictional story at the expense of his friends."

But the wish is warmed up again and again.

~~~
acqq
Now checking the sources (ha!) the transcript of the original book has only
"Thomas J. Beale" and nowhere Jefferson. Bad, bad Skeptoid! The transcript
here appears to match the images of the book (in the second link) except for
the Declaration, which doesn't match the one in the book (the numbering in the
book has the same numbering for two ten word runs, and that is apparently
necessary for the correct decoding):

[http://www.unmuseum.org/bealepap.htm](http://www.unmuseum.org/bealepap.htm)

So if the joke exists it's not so obvious as Skeptoid writes, we just have
Thomas J. and the Declaration of Independence in the book.

Still the conclusion that using the known key for 2 on the code 1 gives the
substrings "abbbccccdde" and "abcdefghiijklmmnoh" seems symptomatic:

[http://rogergrambihler.tripod.com/BealeHoax.htm](http://rogergrambihler.tripod.com/BealeHoax.htm)
(a)

( (a) nicely fitting for the subject, the investigation is on Tripod, and it
still exists! Yay, Tripod!)

------
tribune
Incongruences in the back story? The alphabet appearing in the deciphered
message? Words used before they entered the English language? The author
selling his pamphlets for profit?!

Occam's four-bladed razor cuts right through my hopes of finding this
treasure.

~~~
Houshalter
Oh yeah it's obviously a hoax. I just wonder if there is actually a message
that can be decoded, or if the numbers are just random and made up.

------
rflrob
> Hammer did not get especially far, but concluded that the patterns in the
> two undeciphered notes seemed to be non-random.

I wonder if there's any research into the kinds of sequences that feel random,
as opposed to those that actually are. There's an old story of a stats
professor who assigns students to either flip a coin 100 times or just make up
a sequence of 100 heads or tails, and invariably the two are distinguishable
based on, for example, run lengths. Similarly, I could imagine that "Beale"
just made up numbers, rather than randomizing them well.

------
ChuckMcM
I don't know about anyone else here but it sounds like a nominally legal, if
morally dubious, startup idea. Each month put a 'treasure' somewhere, and sell
a description for $10 on how to find it, once a year do a "big" treasure ($100
ticket) for people who have participated in 6 or more of the previous months.

The barrier to entry would be the ability to make reasonably challenging
ciphers. The harder the cipher the more hard core the participant, but you
need to sell enough "tickets" to cover the cost of the item and operating
overhead.

Sort of a variation on puzzle rooms.

~~~
Retra
There would quickly be established a small number of customers who win all the
prizes, and then it'd be stupid to compete against them without their tools
and expertise.

~~~
jerf
Proof: That's exactly what happens with Augmented Reality Games.

(Probably why they fell out of favor as a marketing vehicle. You think you're
marketing to millions, but after a couple of weeks it becomes clear you poured
all this money into this bizarre marketing attempt for dozens.)

~~~
tricolon
I'm glad they've fallen out of favor. Every time I come across one, it's a
year after the fact and there's already a full-fledged community with a forum,
mailing list, and meetups run by people who quit their day job to devote all
their time to it. Talk about intimidating.

------
32bitkid
My first exposure to the Beale Ciphers was thanks to this animation short:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMxtfMSPTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMxtfMSPTM)

An aside about the short:

> The film contains 16 hidden messages that hold clues to the characters'
> secrets. Eight are fairly easy requiring only a close eye. Six are
> moderately difficult using various encryption methods. Two are extremely
> difficult requiring a genius mind to decrypt.

To be honest, I still haven't found all of them.

------
diarmuidie
This is similar to the Oak Island treasure pit
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island)

------
kencausey
A transcription for anyone interested in crunching on this:
[http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-
papers/beale...](http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-papers/beale-
papers-transcription/)

------
ank_the_elder
Did they try using Benjamin Franklin's spectacles?

------
gregmac
I think this is particularly interesting and timely among the current calls
from certain segments of US law enforcement and politicians to "ban
encryption" or for vendors to add backdoors.

~~~
Jtsummers
Indeed. If a legitimate cryptosystem had been used, with the keys held in
escrow in a secure facility, the matter of authenticity could at least be
resolved, even if we decided not to cheat and use the stored keys to determine
the location of the treasure.

------
frogpelt
That title though.

Has anyone figured it out yet?

~~~
chatmasta
I tried for a while but am having trouble with the offsets (and possibly the
correct edition of the DOI). The smartest way to get the offsets correct would
be to copy the numbers from the image and cross reference them with the
decrypted text. But who's got time for that? :)

Some Python code if anyone wants to play with it:

    
    
         words = doi.replace(',', ' ').replace('\n', ' ').replace('  ', ' ').replace(':', ' ').replace('.', ' ').replace("'", ' ').replace('"', ' ').replace(';', ' ').split(' ')
         words = filter(None, words)
    
         def getcode(w, i, offset):
              print w[i-offset][0],
    
         for code in [89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480]:
              getcode(words, code, 0)
    

I used
[http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.txt](http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.txt)
and deleted the header and title.

~~~
frogpelt
I tried that and got nothing.

The numbers and text are here: ([http://cipherfoundation.org/older-
ciphers/beale-papers/beale...](http://cipherfoundation.org/older-
ciphers/beale-papers/beale-papers-transcription/)) Credit to kencausey

~~~
chatmasta
I think you're probably right on your lucky guess (I see you edited it out, so
I'll suppress the spoiler alert as well :)).

I was able to get something fairly close to that with variable offsets.

~~~
frogpelt
What text did you find it in?

~~~
chatmasta
I "roughly" got it using the DOI txt I linked above.

I tried again with the pre-mapped text you linked to, and got `e o a p s p`
which is an anagram for `appose`... perhaps that is the word? "Appose" means
"to place (something) in proximity to or juxtaposition with something else."
Maybe I'm grasping at straws here...

Offset of +1 yields `b s a i t h` which is an anagram for habits.

Offset of -1 yields `a t a l b t` which is an anagram for Alt-Tab (which is
roughly what I'm doing right now to get out of this :p)

I also tried all offsets within 0-7 for each character, to see if "CIPHER"
could fit in that range. CI_H_R is possible but there is no P or E within +/\-
7 offset of 201 or 337.

Here's the python:

    
    
        txt="""<<Pasted from http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-papers/beale-papers-transcription/>>"""
    
        import re
    
        codes = txt.split(' ')
        codes = filter(None, codes)
    
        code2word = {}
    
        words = []
        for code in codes[0:-1]:
            try:
                index = re.search(re.compile(ur'\((\d+)\)'), code).group(1)
            except:
                index = index + 1
    
            word = code.replace('(%d)' % int(index), '')
    
            code2word[int(index)] = word
    
            print index, word
    
        for code in [89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480]:
            word = code2word[code]
            print word[0],
    

Good luck

------
plusquamperfekt
Don't forget to support them if you like their stuff - I just remember several
posts from that site on HN:

[https://www.damninteresting.com/damnload/](https://www.damninteresting.com/damnload/)

------
defiblep
> ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’

I'm surprised anyone had any doubts after that.

~~~
shmageggy
Actually that's the one thing that makes me think that, hoax or not, there's
something encrypted there. That string definitely has structure, indicating it
was engineered, but it isn't perfectly sequential or linear, indicating that
there may be undecoded information in it, perhaps another layer deeper. And
why would the author go through so much trouble just to lead to nonsense
cypher? Why not just skip that step?

~~~
colanderman
Probably the differences from the alphabet are just mistakes. Ward meant to
just encrypt the alphabet, but just copied down a couple numbers wrong, and
did a couple twice.

~~~
shmageggy
Perhaps, but I think it equally or even more likely that it was intentional.
This is someone who went through immense trouble to set up a system that is
otherwise rather elaborate and detailed. Maybe he just hacked together the
last bit and botched it with a ~25% error rate, or maybe there's more to the
story that we've yet to figure out.

