This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommended.

In 1885, an author named James B. Ward published a pamphlet telling of a long-lost

treasure available to anyone clever enough to solve the puzzle associated

with it.

Ward reported that around 1817, a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale had been the leader

of an expedition to the American Southwest, primarily concerned with hunting buffalo and

or bears.

Beale's group had instead stumbled upon gold and silver deposits in what is now Colorado.

Agreed to keep it all the secret, Biel's team had spent the better part of two years

quietly mining.

Then had taken the metals to Virginia by wagon and buried them all in a vault

underground between 1819 and 1821.

Beale had written three notes explaining where the treasure was and who had the legal

rights to shares in it, encrypting each of these using a different text.

However, Biel had vanished after leaving the notes with a friend.

Eventually, the second of the three texts was deciphered, using a slightly altered version of the Declaration

of Independence.

It specified which county in Virginia the treasure was hidden in, and referred the reader to

the first of the notes for details.

But the first and the third notes remained stubbornly undeciphered.

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor any other ciphertext source produced a

...