10 Mysterious Texts, Notes, And Codes That Have Never Been Deciphered
Back in the early 1800s, a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson Beale reportedly shared in a huge mining find: thousands of pounds of gold, silver, and jewels that would be worth more than $15 million today. As the story goes, he brought his haul back to Virginia and buried the treasure somewhere near what is now Montvale. He then set out again and left behind a strongbox with a man named Robert Morriss, with instructions to open the box after 10 years.
Well, Morriss more or less forgot about the box until 23 years later, when he finally opened it and found three encoded letters from Beale with a note that Beale would be sending along the key to deciphering them. That key never arrived.
Some time later, the second letter was deciphered using a cipher involving the words in the Declaration of Independence. That letter described the treasure and said that the first letter would give directions to the treasure, and the third letter would list the next of kin.
However, to this day, nobody has been able to decipher the first or third letters, despite many efforts. The second letter was a simple substitution cipher, and the other letters appear to be similarly coded. But without knowing what the key is, the letters are unsolveable. Some believe the whole thing was a hoax.
