Decode Beale Ciphers B1 and B3 with any candidate key text. Scan every offset, score with chi-squared and ETAOIN, hunt for treasure.
Users
6
+2 in 30 days
Rating
0.0 / 5
unchanged in 30 days
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0 in 30 days
Store rank
#245K
#205K among extensions
Version
1.4
updated 15 Oct 2026
Users
monthly, 5 months
Latest, 19 Oct 2026:6 usersMove the mouse over the chart for any month
Ratings count
monthly, 5 months
Latest, 19 Oct 2026:0 ratingsMove the mouse over the chart for any month
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About Beale Cipher Hunter - Find the Key to Lost 1800s Virginia Gold
A research tool for the two unsolved Beale Ciphers: B1 (burial location) and B3 (next of kin). Both are book ciphers, each number points to a word in a key document, and the first letter gives the plaintext. The key documents are unknown. If you find them, the treasure, gold and silver worth over $60 million buried in Bedford County, Virginia, may still be there.
Most cipher tools make one attempt at one starting position and score it one way. This one tries every starting position automatically, scores each with three independent signals, and flags keyword matches, exact and fuzzy, across all of them simultaneously. It stacks the odds in your favour in every direction at once.
What it does
Paste any candidate text. The extension tests every possible starting position and flags anything meaningful, even with encoding errors or a slightly wrong document.
🔍 Automatic offset scanning, adjustable range, or scan the full document
⚡ Fast Scan, proprietary triple-gate triage (chi-squared, ETAOIN convergence, bigram analysis) eliminates 99%+ of wrong offsets instantly. A scan of the Federalist Papers, 190,000+ offsets, completes in under a minute
📊 Three independent scoring signals: chi-squared, ETAOIN convergence (original method, shown as its own column), and word matching
🔠 Fuzzy word matching, finds keywords with exactly one character wrong
⚠ Gillogly string detection, flags near-alphabetical sequences with trillion-to-one odds
📐 Word stride, tests alternative numbering schemes (every word, every 2nd, every 3rd) across any cipher mode
🌍 Foreign language support, Spanish, French and Latin word groups included
A built-in B2 Demo decodes the only solved cipher at 97%+ accuracy using the correctly modified Declaration of Independence: six verified transcription errors corrected from Ward's own translation. Full historical background and documentation in the About tab.
🕵 Construction/fakery word group, tests whether a decode points to the cipher's own construction (Ward, the Declaration, testing language) rather than a genuine message
Full documentation built in
The About tab covers the complete history of the Beale papers, how the cipher works, what every score means, the Gillogly strings, the triple-gate Fast Scan architecture, the case for and against authenticity, recommended candidate documents, and foreign language word suggestions.
v 1.4 Fixed issue with words containing apostrophes. Added construction/fakery word group.