[UA] THE BEALE CIPHERS

[Eric Baker]

Hey --

This came up on a different list.  Beyond its obvious UAness, it is real?  I mean, it just screams "Hoax!" but does anyone take it seriously?

-- Eric, whose copy of Suppressed Transmissions is at home


                                THE BEALE CIPHERS, by E.E.REMINGTON

Jeffrey A. Hill
1661 W. Republic #20
Salina, Kansas 67401

May 29, 1989

The Beale Papers

In the Spring of 1885, James B. Ward [7], acting as the agent for an
anonymous author, began selling copies of a pamphlet entitled, THE BEALE PAPERS, which purported to tell the true story of a fortune in gold, silver,and jewels buried in the Virginia hills. The only clues as to the location of that treasure were three letters from a Mr. Thomas J. Beale to a Mr. Robert Morriss, together with three messages in cipher that were reprinted in the pamphlet. The letters from Beale tell the story of a party of thirty men who went West on a hunting trip in 1817. As luck would have it, while tracking a herd of buffalo in northern New Mexico, they discovered a rich
vein of gold. Abandoning the buffalo hunt for a more lucrative occupation,they began to accumulate a sizable hoard of gold and silver. In 1819, the accumulated store of treasure was transported to Virginia, where it was buried for safe keeping about four miles from Buford's Tavern (modern day Montvale). A second shipment followed in 1821. According to the Ward pamphlet, the entire party of thiry men disappeared without a trace before a third shipment could be made.

That would have been the end of the story except that before returning to New Mexico in 1822, Beale had decided to entrust Robert Morriss, a Lynchburg innkeeper of high moral repute, with a strongbox containing two letters and three ciphers. A third letter was mailed to Morriss from St. Louis, instructing him to wait ten years before opening the box and then, if Beale had not returned before then to claim it, to read the papers inside. At that
time (in 1832), a fourth letter was supposed to reach Morriss from someone in St. Louis who had been entrusted with the key to the ciphers. Morriss would then have been able to decipher the messages and learn the location of the treasure vault, its contents, and the names of the Beale party's next of kin to whom he was to deliver the treasure (after deducting an amount specified by Beale as a fee for these services). Unfortunately, the letter bearing the key never arrived and Morriss was unable to comply with Beale's final request.

In 1862, one year before his death, Morriss passed the contents of the strongbox to the unknown person who was later to become the author of the Beale pamphlet. This person made the discovery that the Declaration of Independence is the key to Cipher #2, which describes the contents of the treasure vault. But after twenty years of effort, Cipher #1, which gives the location of the treasure, and Cipher #3, which names the Beale Party's next
of kin, remained unbroken. The author explains that he has been forced to abandon his own attempt to break the ciphers, and is offering the pamphlet to the public for a small fee, in order to recover some of the personal wealth that he has lost by devoting twenty years of his life to the Beale mystery.


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua