Cipher Mysteries readers in the US may well have watched Brad Meltzer’s recent “Decoded” episode on the Declaration of Independence. Though you might well think that the description listed below doesn’t sound particularly promising…
The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of American Democracy. Could it contain hidden messages from our nation’s forefathers intended to be discovered years later? Buddy, Mac and Scott travel across America to try and uncover the mysteries behind our nation’s most prized document.
…it turns out that this episode was in fact largely about the Beale Papers, which (in my opinion, at least) is a proper cipher mystery. I’ve blogged about these a fair few times, such as here: summing up, I conclude that the statistical improbability of the Gillogly strings strongly implies that these are real ciphers (not hoaxes); that they were enciphered using a two-stage combo of codebook and monoalphabetic substitution; and that the Gillogly strings are in fact no more than the keyphrase somehow falling through the system as a set of ABCDE…-style indices.
And just for all those armchair treasure hunters out there eager to crack B1 and B3 for themselves, my predictions are (a) that the B1 key string will turn out to be painfully close to “THOMASJEFFERSONBEALE”, and (b) that though B1 (and probably B3) also used the Declaration of Independence, it had its own slightly different set of counting mistakes as compared to B2. As normal, 15% of the bounty should cover my fee, thanks. 🙂
All of which means that when the Beale Papers finally do get cracked, Jim Gillogly will probably kick himself into the next state for missing what, to a supersmart codebreaker such as him, should be utterly obvious. Unless it’s him that ultimately gets to crack it? We shall see!
Anyway, the nice thing about Brad Meltzer’s show is that it has hugely stimulated interest in the Beale Papers, even creating its own mini-traffic-spike in Google Trends. I’m guessing the linking that’s going on is happening in treasure hunter mailing lists, but to be honest there’s not a lot out there worth reading on the subject. People are finally realising that stories linking the Beale Papers to (for example) famous pirate / privateer Jean Lafitte [Jean Laffite] are probably outright fakes. As with the Voynich Manuscript, all the properly good evidence is embedded right in the text itself: it’s everything else surrounding it that is the hoax!