The Beale Ciphers are three typed pages of nothing but numbers, a code that supposedly details the location of a vast treasure hidden by a mysterious figure named Thomas J. Beale. But was the entire mystery just an elaborate hoax? Wikimedia Commons (CC By-SA 3.0)/HowStuffWorks
The story of the Beale Ciphers is a particularly peculiar mystery, to be sure, and many people who ve researched it have concluded that it s probably just an elaborate 19th-century hoax. After all, who would bring back a fortune in gold, silver and jewels from New Mexico and bury it somewhere in the rolling hills and ridges of central Virginia? And why would the person who hid that treasure one Thomas J. Beale write down instructions on how to find the treasure in code on three sheets of paper, entrust a box containing those papers to an innkeeper and then never return for it?