I know, I know: this is the same Mental Floss that also publishes articles like 10 Things You Might Not Know About Jeff Goldblum (sample fact: “My first wife and I would bring our juicer on planes, and we’d do a carrot cleanse for a week, until I’d turn orange and all my poop would be orange”).
But bear with me on this, because the long-form article by Lucas Reilly on the Beale Ciphers / Papers / Treasure that just came out is really good. No, it’s really good.
And I’m not just saying that because Reilly quotes me a few times: he covers all the important ground at a nice even pace without getting overly technical. As part of his research, he even tried to walk the Beale walk a bit (though without actually hiring a backhoe), and even got the desk-full-of-documents Beale treatment when he visited the Bedford County Museum and Genealogical Library in Montvale. Which is nice.
Reilly also managed to dig up a couple of Beale decryptions I can’t remember seeing before, including this one mentioned in a Washington Post article from 1984, attributed to an “M.C.D.”:
ONE RAN TO COVER THE TOP / HIT THE
RAM NUB ON THE TOP OF THE NEST /
BEST I TRY HEAT / SEE CALL TO FIT
TOY SO HAT NOD IF FULL / I WILL BE
IN THE CUT FIND AND DIG IT … GO WIN
YOUR SLICE AND BE LONG IN LOVE
…as well as this one:
LEND AN EAR / I LEARNED A
TRADE TO READ FINE ART OF ROTE
… / I FEEL GREAT / I FIND TEN
TON ORE IT IS STORED ON NORA,
NORMAN, BROWN FARM / ROAD RUN
AROUND RED BARN.
Incidentally, the Washington Post article (“Legendary Treasure Quests” by Hank Burchard, 5th October 1984) also give this decryption:
CEMETERY OFF GAP / TOOK RIDGE / PINEWOOD 4 M /
NORTH TOP OF HOLCOMBS ROCK / RIGGED A BOOM OF LOGS /
GOLD ORE HID / BARGE HOLDING TUBS /
CABOCHONS FACE LIDS / BUFORD VA /
VAULT CACHE OF GOLD / TB.
Is there no end to the fun people can have staring at a blank wall? Apparently not, it would seem.
But all the same, you can now tell all your friends the important life lesson you learned from the Beale Ciphers: Go Win Your Slice And Be Long In Love. Enjoy! 😉
Just noticed this post. I recently came across a Beale result I didn’t know of, namely that William Poundstone has made a stylometric comparison of the Beale pamphlet with Edgar Allen Poe and found that they are significantly different. (I had thought of the same idea myself, but Wikipedia shows that it has already been tried.)
Poundstone once wrote about the Voynich manuscript but said nothing very new. However (off topic) he is one of very few people to say something original about Donald Trump. An analysis of Trump’s various reports of his own wealth over the years shows that the numbers deviate markedly from randomness. He was bumping them up.