Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from “Fred Jones / Will Smith” about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: “Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com ”
As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the words in the Declaration of Independence text have caused a fair few modern cryptologists to suspect the whole thing might be some kind of hoax): but what of Parts 1 and 3? You know, the bits that say where the treasure is hidden. 🙂
If you hack through all the foliage (Jefferson? Templars? What?), Jones/Smith’s claim is that if you apply a modified part of the plaintext of Part 2 to the first few lines of Part 1 (so that “71, 194, 38, 1701, 89, 76, 11, …” maps to “INTHECOUNTYOFBEDFORDABOUTFOURMILESAQUADRANTAWAYFROMBUFORD” you get some kind of cunning mix of French and English fragments in the remainder, which (once he’s filled in the gaps) he claims reads as follows:-
In the county of bedford about four miles a quadrant away from buford then here by ahan need ban o tug de a tac foam ruth ci in en but heath narrow mount tut by aire aid t blockade utterly the lentuer stagnation defunt having hag note aerial sa middle ninth bar …
Ohhhhkayyyy… it’s at this point I throw my hands up in the air and simply point out that this looks not entirely dissimilar to Levitov’s VMs descryption (and, though GC will disagree, to Leonell Strong’s claimed VMs decryption too) – a kind of polyglot mishmash of language-like fragments, not unlike hurling a bowl’s worth of Alphabetti Spaghetti at a wall and trying to piece together the resultant letter gloop into sentence-like things. Oh well…
Smith/Jones has put up two (quite big) pages already with more planned over the next few days/weeks: perhaps he/she will have plenty of surprises for us for Part 3. We shall see!