6 Homophonic ciphers
Among the best-known cryptograms in the world are three ciphertexts published in an 1885 pamphlet titled The Beale Papers.1 Referred to as the “Beale ciphers,” they were allegedly created by a Virginian buffalo hunter named Thomas Beale in the 1820s to conceal the location of a gold treasure buried somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia.
Although we and many other crypto experts believe that the whole Beale story is a mere hoax (Thomas Beale, let alone his treasure, probably never existed), the three ciphertexts are interesting to study. Messages #1 and #3 are unsolved and, therefore, covered in the “Unsolved cryptograms ...
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