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The Hunt for Thomas Beale’s Buried Treasure: Is It Real or a Hoax?

A set of 200-year-old codes contain the key to unlocking the location of millions of dollars’ worth (60 million more or less) of gold, silver, and jewels buried in Virginia. With a treasure as large as that, it’s no wonder that for the past century, the quest to break these highly secretive codes has attracted the military, computer scientists, and (of course) conspiracy, theorists. But they have all failed, one after the other.

The landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains / The cover of Beale Papers notebook

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So the question is: Are the codes (also called ciphers) and the treasure real? Well, according to treasure hunters and mediums (those who communicate between the living and the dead), as well as those who have tried to crack the code for over a century, the struggle is, indeed, real.