Beale Cipher Hunter

🗝️ The Beale Ciphers - 140 years unsolved
In 1885, a pamphlet described three encoded messages left by a man named Thomas Beale. One cipher was cracked using the Declaration of Independence, revealing a buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels in Bedford County, Virginia - worth over $60 million today. The other two, describing the exact location and the names of those entitled to the treasure, have never been solved.
The key is a document. Nobody knows which one.

🔍 What this extension does
Paste any candidate text - a newspaper, a speech, a pamphlet, a land document. The extension numbers every word and decodes B1 and B3 automatically, looking for recognisable words that would confirm a genuine match.

⚙️ Why it works when others don't
The biggest obstacle in book cipher analysis isn't finding the right document - it's not knowing where the encoder started counting. A title page, a preface, a different edition, or simply miscounting by one word shifts every number and turns a correct document into gibberish.
This extension automatically tries every starting point from word 1 to word 500. If the right document produces a readable decode starting at word 47 rather than word 1, it will still be found.
It also tolerates encoding errors. Traditional frequency analysis scores the entire decoded output - a handful of wrong characters corrupts the distribution and the offset gets discarded. Word matching is different: with a curated list of dozens of likely words, one or two encoding errors can only kill the words they land on. The rest still surface. You don't need every keyword to appear - you need any of them to. The signal survives the noise.

✨ Features
🔤 Automatic offset scanning - tries every starting word position from 0 to 500, no manual adjustment needed
📊 Chi-squared scoring - measures how closely the decoded letter distribution matches English. More reliable than Index of Coincidence for texts heavy with "the/that/to/their"
🔠 Smart word list - curated keywords specific to the Beale story, Bedford County Virginia families from the 1820 census, and the known B2 plaintext. Add your own words. Remove any that generate too much noise
📈 Letter frequency chart - visual comparison of decoded output against expected English letter frequencies
🔍 Gillogly string detector - automatically flags near-alphabetical runs in the decoded output. In 1980, cryptanalyst Jim Gillogly found a 14-character alphabetical sequence in B1 when decoded with the Declaration of Independence - a one-in-a-trillion occurrence. This extension detects similar patterns at every offset
🎯 B2 Demo mode - uses the built-in Declaration of Independence to decode the only solved cipher, so you can see the system working before you hunt
📚 Full documentation - history, how the cipher works, what the scores mean, recommended texts to try, and links to primary sources

🏆 Who this is for
Treasure hunters, cryptography enthusiasts, historians, and anyone who has ever wondered whether $60 million in gold is still buried in a Virginia field.