Talk:The Beale Papers

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115, 73, 24, 807

807 does not correspond to 'v' in I have, right? (same as many other number-letter pairs) —unsigned comment by 71.102.239.33 (talk).

You're right. Beale used a version of 'Declaration of Indepedence' different from the original. To extract the hidden message, the following 5 modifications must be applied to the original DOI text:


 * 1. after word 154 ('institute') and before word 157 ('laying') one word must be added (probably "a")
 * 2. after word 240 ('invariably') and before word 246 ('design') one word must be removed
 * 3. after word 467 ('houses') and before word 495 ('be') ten(!) words must be removed
 * 4. after word 630 ('eat') and before word 654 ('to') one word must be removed
 * 5. after word 677 ('foreign') and before word 819 ('valuable') one word must be removed

Furthermore:
 * The first letter of the 811th word of the modified text ('fundamentally') is always used by Beale as a 'y'
 * The first letter of the 1005th word of the modified text ('have') is always used by Beale as a 'x'

Finally, in the decoded text there are 4 errors, probably due to wrong transcription of the original paper:
 * 1st error ---> ... 84(should be 85) 63 43 131 29 ... ---> consistcd ('consisted')
 * 2nd error ---> ... 53(should be 54) 20 125 371 38 ... ---> rhousand ('thousand')
 * 3rd error ---> ... 84(should be 85) 575 1005 150 200 ... ---> thc ('the')
 * 4th error ---> ... 96(should be 95) 405 41 600 136 ... ---> varlt ('vault')

After these modifications, I successfully decoded the exact text. ;-)

Mirko —unsigned comment by 87.4.193.128 (talk).