Mentalfloss parla del misterioso cifrario Beale e degli sforzi compiuti negli ultimi duecento anni per risolverlo.

A set of 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of millions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver, and jewels buried in rural Virginia. For the past century, the quest to break these codes has attracted the military, computer scientists, and conspiracy theorists. All have failed. Which raises the question: Are the ciphers and the treasure even real?

Non ci sono prove che il cifrario racchiuda davvero l’ubicazione di un tesoro; ma qualcosa nasconde e molti si sono persi nella ricerca della chiave per decifrarlo.

Families have crumbled, bank accounts have evaporated, and jobs have disappeared. One man, Stan Czanowski, spent $70,000 over seven years on dynamite and bulldozers. In the early ’80s, one treasure hunter bankrupted himself after blasting rocks for six months. (He abandoned town still owing the local motel money.) An editor at the American Cryptograph Association spent so much time focused on the ciphers that he was fired. The researcher Richard Greaves, who investigated the Beale story for decades, called it “possibly the worst decision I ever made. If I would have devoted all the hours spent pursuing this treasure legend to the study of medicine, I would easily have become an accomplished neurosurgeon.”

Which makes it all the more painful to consider that Beale’s treasure—the ciphers, the story, the gold, the silver, and the jewels, even Thomas J. Beale himself—might all be a big, fat hoax.

Immagine da Flickr.