Beale Ciphers Analyses by Ron Gervais
Freeware, analyses, and links to websites presenting hypotheses of the Beale Ciphers, including a summary of their arguments.
Created: February 25, 2003 - Last Update: May 27, 2008
Bulletin! The Beale mystery is now solved. For a summary, click here. For the full story see Pages 20, 24, 27, and 28. below. |
| Preface An amateur cryptanalyst, retired from the computer and telecom industries, with a background in math, I am intrigued by this story. The objective of this website is to fill a void: a repository of serious efforts to study and analyse the ciphers. Also included are some personal observations, and free text-analysis software. If you are not familiar with this story, you should start by reading The Beale Papers booklet. It is here in text form, and here as a photographic reproduction. |
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Page 1 : BEALE CODES -- WERE THEY A HOAX?
Page 2 : Dr. Carl Hammer
Page 3 : THE BEALE CIPHER: A DISSENTING OPINION
Page 4 : The Last Haunting of Edgar Allan Poe
Page 5 : Free text analysis software - A cryptanalysis tool for the Beale enthusiast
Page 6 : An interesting crypto observation on the codes
Page 7: Main proofs that The Beale Papers is fiction
Page 8 : Notes on the Beale Ciphers
Page 9 : James Beverly Ward's application for copyright
Page 10 : David Mason's Analysis
Page 11 : The Hart Papers
Page 12 : Suggestion for attacking C3
Page 13 : C3 and the signatures of the Declaration of Independence
Page 14: Special Acknowledgements
Page 15 : Links between The Beale Papers and The Declaration of Independence
Page 16 : The Freemasons and The Confederate Treasury
Page 17 : TREASURE magazine claims codes solved, treasure found
Page 18 : The Beale Cypher Association
Page 19 : What if... ? A collection of Beale code ideas
Page 20 : The Lynchburg fire of 1883 and The Beale Papers personalities genealogy
Page 21 : Benford's Law - A clue to the Beale ciphers?
Page 22 : Beale as Bamboozlement
Page 23 : The genuine booklet: The Beale Papers
Page 24 : The author of The Beale Papers
Page 25 : Jean Laffite, Privateer, and the Beale treasure
Page 26 : Solutions! We have cipher solutions!
Page 27 : How Sherman created C1
Page 28 : The smoking gun
Final comments
Statistics are very important in cryptanalysis, but they have also been very misleading. Every cryptographer in history believed his code was unbreakable because of the statistical probabilities. Yet, one by one, they have fallen to the cryptanalysts. In the pages above, we have a statistically-based theory that C1 is a hoax because the numbers are random (Page 1), and another that C1 is a hoax because the numbers are not random (Page 3).
We have a theory (Page 1) that The Beale Papers is a hoax because the C2 solution only works with the Paper's DOI text. We also have a very logical explanation (Page 8) of how the errors may have occured. Page 8 also presents a reasonable explanation of how, in the pen and paper days, the Gillogly strings may have been created while encoding C1.
Circumstantial evidence (Page 4) points to Edgar Allan Poe as the author of The Beale Papers, but Poe scholars don't mention it, and Poe's cryptographic abilities may have been too limited. The "Beale Monograph" is a new high water mark in the search for the author of The Beale Papers. The links to Poe are too many, too detailed, and too precise to be dismissed summarily.
There is substantial evidence that The Beale Papers was written later than claimed and that they and the Morriss letters were written by the same person (Pages 1 and 4). This is bad news for treasure hunters, but supports Poe advocates and Ward/hoax theorists.
As a result of my work on this website, I have come to believe the following:
If you have or know of any analytical information of a statistical or cryptanalytical nature, or freeware, related to the Beale ciphers, I would like to add it to this site. Please email me the details.
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