WHERE IS BEALE'S TREASURE?

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 23, June 10, 2018, Article 24

Hidden hoards and treasure hunts are always fun topics, although they usually end in heartache for the treasure seekers. A few years back we discussed the Beale Ciphers, codes purported to hold the key to the location of a treasure buried in Virginia. On June 4, 2018 Mental Floss published a great article by Lucas Reilly discussing the long history of the mystery. Here's a short excerpt, but please see the complete article for a great read. -Editor

They come with metal detectors and magnetometers, Geiger counters and dowsing rods, backhoes and pickaxes, psychic mediums on speed dial and sticks of dynamite stuffed into their back pockets. They come motivated by a quirky Virginia state law that says buried treasure is finder’s-keepers (even if it’s discovered on private property). They come gripped by a monomaniacal belief that they—and only they—know where Beale’s treasure hides: the foothills, a farm, a cave, a grave, a cistern, a creek, an abandoned road. One treasure hunter insists it's buried at a local visitors’ center, right under the ladies room.

For these treasure hunters, a survey of the past 70 years of newspaper headlines shows a bleak pattern:

There’s the Chicago refrigeration contractor, certain he had broken the ciphers in five days, who convinced local officials to dig up a graveless patch of a cemetery, only to find clothes hangers (metal) and horseshoes (unlucky). There’s the Texas man who drove to Virginia, wife and kids in tow, simply to borrow a local roadmap that he believed would lead to the treasure. (It didn’t.) There’s the Massachusetts man who jumped out of bed, jolted by a dream, and drove bleary-eyed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains to test his prophecy. There’s the Oklahoma psychic who surveyed the Goose Creek Valley from a helicopter. There’s the Virginia Supreme Court Justice who scouted the location by bicycle; the Washington state man who hired armed guards; the anonymous man who kept an armored truck idling on a nearby road.

Beale treasure hunters are overwhelmingly male, though locals still chatter about one Pennsylvania woman, Marilyn Parsons, who cashed a disability check in 1983 and rented a backhoe to test her theory that the treasure was buried in an unmarked plot of a church graveyard. When she unearthed a coffin handle and human bones, she was arrested and advised to never step foot in Virginia again.

Like the Hart brothers, many treasure hunters trespass under starlight. In 1972, The Washington Post reported that local landowners regularly fired warning shots at strangers tip-toeing on their property. “People would sneak onto their land and blow big holes out of the ground and leave them that way. Cows would step in and break their legs,” Ed Easterling, a local Beale expert, says. “Most people here have resented it.”

Families have crumbled, bank accounts have evaporated, and jobs have disappeared. One man, Stan Czanowski, spent $70,000 over seven years on dynamite and bulldozers. In the early '80s, one treasure hunter bankrupted himself after blasting rocks for six months. (He abandoned town still owing the local motel money.) An editor at the American Cryptograph Association spent so much time focused on the ciphers that he was fired. The researcher Richard Greaves, who investigated the Beale story for decades, called it “possibly the worst decision I ever made. If I would have devoted all the hours spent pursuing this treasure legend to the study of medicine, I would easily have become an accomplished neurosurgeon.”

Which makes it all the more painful to consider that Beale’s treasure—the ciphers, the story, the gold, the silver, and the jewels, even Thomas J. Beale himself—might all be a big, fat hoax.

Aspiring codebreakers cut their teeth on the Beale Ciphers. The article describes the efforts of William and Elizebeth Friedman, early pioneers of cryptanalysis at the National Security Agency. -Editor

William F. Friedman, leader of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, or S.I.S.—the forerunner to the N.S.A.—spent his leisure hours attempting to untangle the Beale codes. He took them so seriously that his legal counselor drafted an agreement in case he solved them.

He never did, of course. In a letter, Friedman wrote: “So far as my attempts to produce an authentic reading is concerned, I can most earnestly say I have tried to the best of my ability and now must confess myself beaten.”

But Friedman never quit. Instead, he included the ciphers in the S.I.S training program. According to Frank Rowlett, an S.I.S. cryptologist who helped crack Japan’s PURPLE cipher machine during World War II, the trainees concluded the ciphers were phony. Friedman’s wife Elizebeth, also an accomplished cryptanalyst, dubbed them as a lost cause with a “diabolical ingenuity specifically designed to lure the unwary reader …. In fruitless research … or searching for a key book.” Friedman himself shrugged: “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I think it is real,” he said. “On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I think it is a hoax.” (Sunday, it appears, was a day of rest.)

By the way, if you enjoyed the book or film "Hidden Figures" about NASA's women computers, you'll also like a great book I'm reading now - Code Girls by Liza Mundy about the women who cracked enemy codes in WWII. -Editor