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> ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’ I'm surprised anyone had any doubts after that.

jandrese 11y ago
Yeah, this is one of those stories like the infamous money pit where it sounds like a real life treasure hunt at first, but when you stop and think about the details you realize that it's almost certainly a hoax. In general burying lots of money doesn't make much sense. Most people want to, you know, buy stuff with it instead. Rugged frontiersmen weren't worrying about saving up for retirement, and it would take an enormous amount of trust in your fellow man to bury all of that money in one place and worry about one of them sneaking back and stealing it all.
shmageggy 11y ago
Actually that's the one thing that makes me think that, hoax or not, there's something encrypted there. That string definitely has structure, indicating it was engineered, but it isn't perfectly sequential or linear, indicating that there may be undecoded information in it, perhaps another layer deeper. And why would the author go through so much trouble just to lead to nonsense cypher? Why not just skip that step?
- colanderman 11y ago
  Probably the differences from the alphabet are just mistakes. Ward meant to just encrypt the alphabet, but just copied down a couple numbers wrong, and did a couple twice.
  - shmageggy 11y ago
    Perhaps, but I think it equally or even more likely that it was intentional. This is someone who went through immense trouble to set up a system that is otherwise rather elaborate and detailed. Maybe he just hacked together the last bit and botched it with a ~25% error rate, or maybe there's more to the story that we've yet to figure out.
pp19dd 11y ago
Still, didn't stop me from looking at these anagram combinations: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiijklmmnohpp&language=english&t=0&d=&include=&exclude=&n=&m=&source=adv&a=n&l=n&q=n&k=1 http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiij... abfdefghiijklmmnohpp Bank Dig He Jiff Hmm Plop "Jiff he dig bank hmm plop." Edit: the server offered ~3,100 combinations but it's currently under load and not allowing as long of word combinations. Just now I thought to try a Latin dictionary. Edit 2: snapshot of the results - http://pastebin.com/BXu2RSxW http://pastebin.com/BXu2RSxW Edit 3: crummy searchable (include/exclude) version because it's Friday: http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/ http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/

Yeah, this is one of those stories like the infamous money pit where it sounds like a real life treasure hunt at first, but when you stop and think about the details you realize that it's almost certainly a hoax. In general burying lots of money doesn't make much sense. Most people want to, you know, buy stuff with it instead. Rugged frontiersmen weren't worrying about saving up for retirement, and it would take an enormous amount of trust in your fellow man to bury all of that money in one place and worry about one of them sneaking back and stealing it all.

shmageggy 11y ago

Actually that's the one thing that makes me think that, hoax or not, there's something encrypted there. That string definitely has structure, indicating it was engineered, but it isn't perfectly sequential or linear, indicating that there may be undecoded information in it, perhaps another layer deeper. And why would the author go through so much trouble just to lead to nonsense cypher? Why not just skip that step?

colanderman 11y ago
Probably the differences from the alphabet are just mistakes. Ward meant to just encrypt the alphabet, but just copied down a couple numbers wrong, and did a couple twice.
- shmageggy 11y ago
  Perhaps, but I think it equally or even more likely that it was intentional. This is someone who went through immense trouble to set up a system that is otherwise rather elaborate and detailed. Maybe he just hacked together the last bit and botched it with a ~25% error rate, or maybe there's more to the story that we've yet to figure out.

pp19dd 11y ago

Still, didn't stop me from looking at these anagram combinations: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiijklmmnohpp&language=english&t=0&d=&include=&exclude=&n=&m=&source=adv&a=n&l=n&q=n&k=1 http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiij... abfdefghiijklmmnohpp Bank Dig He Jiff Hmm Plop "Jiff he dig bank hmm plop." Edit: the server offered ~3,100 combinations but it's currently under load and not allowing as long of word combinations. Just now I thought to try a Latin dictionary. Edit 2: snapshot of the results - http://pastebin.com/BXu2RSxW http://pastebin.com/BXu2RSxW Edit 3: crummy searchable (include/exclude) version because it's Friday: http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/ http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/