00:0063 million dollars in gold and silver are buried somewhere in virginia we have the treasure map
00:06decoded published in plain english and in 200 years nobody has found a single coin
00:15the story begins in january 1820 a man named thomas j beale rode into lynchburg virginia
00:23tall handsome and carrying a secret he was leading 30 men west hunting for fortune
00:3018 months later he was back the expedition had struck it rich gold and silver beyond imagining
00:38but the journey west was too dangerous to repeat so beale did something clever he buried the treasure
00:46in an iron pot in a stone-lined vault on a farm in bedford county then locked three pages of
00:54encrypted
00:55ciphers in an iron box and left it with the innkeeper robert morris beale's instructions were strange
01:03do not open the box until 1832 10 years if no one returns to claim it break the codes beale
01:13rode off
01:13and was never seen again morris kept his promise he waited 23 years on his deathbed in 1862 he handed
01:24the box to a friend who spent the next 20 years trying to crack the codes then came the breakthrough
01:32the second cypher the treasure inventory finally yielded the key was the declaration of independence
01:41number every word match the numbers read the first letters but here's where it gets strange
01:48the decoded inventory confirmed the gold and silver tens of millions in today's money yet cypher
01:56one the exact location and cypher three the names of the men have never been decoded not in 200 years
02:06and skeptics ask an uncomfortable question was any of this ever real the pamphlet's writing matches
02:13an 1885 hoaxer the declaration of independence as a key looks suspiciously convenient thomas j beale
02:20himself may never have existed 200 years two unsolved codes one buried fortune somewhere under virginia
02:31soil the gold weights or it was never there at all the beale ciphers treasure map or the greatest trick
02:41ever
02:41the greatest trick ever told
