Please bin yesterday’s Cipher Mysteries post on the Beale Papers – a lesson in what happens when you try to write both code and a blog post in the middle of the night. Here are the corrected stats:-
Declaration of Independence: initial letter distribution
(A,12.82%) (B,3.66%) (C,4.05%) (D,2.82%) (E,2.75%) (F,4.73%) (G,1.45%)
(H,5.88%) (I,5.11%) (J,0.76%) (K,0.31%) (L,2.60%) (M,2.14%) (N,1.45%)
(O,10.92%) (P,4.50%) (Q,0.08%) (R,3.05%) (S,4.81%) (T,19.16%) (U,2.14%)
(V,0.15%) (W,4.50%) (X,0.08%) (Y,0.08%) (Z,0.00%)
Beale 1 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution
(A,14.15%) (B,5.30%) (C,5.50%) (D,3.54%) (E,4.13%) (F,4.32%) (G,1.18%)
(H,3.73%) (I,4.72%) (J,0.79%) (K,0.79%) (L,2.95%) (M,1.77%) (N,2.36%)
(O,9.23%) (P,3.73%) (Q,0.00%) (R,1.77%) (S,6.09%) (T,18.27%) (U,0.98%)
(V,0.00%) (W,4.72%) (X,0.00%) (Y,0.00%) (Z,0.00%)
Beale 2 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution
(A,5.64%) (B,1.44%) (C,2.49%) (D,6.42%) (E,13.50%) (F,2.75%) (G,1.97%)
(H,4.85%) (I,7.21%) (J,0.26%) (K,0.13%) (L,4.19%) (M,0.79%) (N,9.04%)
(O,8.26%) (P,1.57%) (Q,0.00%) (R,5.24%) (S,6.29%) (T,9.04%) (U,3.15%)
(V,2.36%) (W,1.70%) (X,0.52%) (Y,1.18%) (Z,0.00%)
Beale 3 + modified DOI: initial letter distribution
(A,12.62%) (B,4.53%) (C,5.18%) (D,3.40%) (E,5.99%) (F,2.43%) (G,2.10%)
(H,3.88%) (I,3.07%) (J,0.49%) (K,0.16%) (L,2.27%) (M,2.43%) (N,2.10%)
(O,8.25%) (P,2.27%) (Q,0.16%) (R,5.02%) (S,5.34%) (T,21.68%) (U,0.49%)
(V,0.00%) (W,6.15%) (X,0.00%) (Y,0.00%) (Z,0.00%)
I didn’t see the original post. Was there more commentary there? I’ve reviewed the info you have on the Beale Ciphers elsewhere on the site and I’m probably a bit dense. What were you trying to work out here? And your conclusions?
Nick: Your readers may want to check out a new discovery which reports on the identification of hundreds of words from the Declaration of Independence embedded into the text of The Beale Papers. The monograph, Hiding In Plain Sight: Observations Concerning the Text of The Beale Papers, suggests that an alternative to the ciphers may exist within the text.
See monograph here:
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/bealeciphers/Graphics/Observations.pdf
Robert: thanks for posting a link to your monograph. However, I think that if you wish you convince a skeptical audience that what you have found is as significant a result as you believe, then you ought to find some comparable plaintexts from broadly the place and period and run your same word correlation analysis on them. Statistical analysis is hard to do properly, and I’m not yet sure that you’ve presented is statistically significant.
Thanks Nick. I agree, there is no statistical analysis in this monograph, merely an observation that so many words from the Declaration appear in the text. I admit that I can not overcome an argument that these DOI words appear in the text by accident. My purpose was more to shine a spotlight on a possibly fruitful area of research that, apparently, has not previously been noticed. Each Beale researcher can choose for himself or herself whether to pursue the phenomenon any further. Thanks for the forum, great website!