Even though there is a lack of information on Thomas J. Beale and similarities in writing style between the published papers and original documents, some argue that the ciphers do seem to be solvable according to researchers and cryptanalysts. Carl Hammer used three computer programs, CRYPTA, CRYPTS, and CRYPTT to perform tests on the ciphers and find any clues to what the ciphers are decoded into. In order to decode the ciphers, they had to study how the solved cipher was created. Cipher number 2 was solved using numbers in the cipher to match the words in the Declaration of Independence. For example, the words in the Declaration of Independence are sequentially numbered, and the first letter in each word corresponds to number the word is attached to. Therefore, the Beale Cipher number 2 contains the numbers “115, 73, 24, 818, 37, 52,…” which correlate to the letters “I, H, A, V, E, …” to spell out letter by letter the words in the cipher. The Beale Cipher number 2 states, “I have deposited in the County of Bedford about four miles from Buford’s in an excavation or vault six feet below the surface o the ground….” (Hammer, 1970). Carl used several similar methods of decoding the ciphers but has failed to do so thus far. Some of the approaches that Carl took were simulation studies with rectangular random numbers, poisson random numbers and other synthetic codes. Carl believed that soon someone will find the correct document to decode the other two ciphers and locate the vault (Hammer, 1970).
In Beale’s third cipher, the quantity of numbers doesn’t seem to have enough numbers to list out all the names and addresses of all 30 of Beale’s workers’s relatives. There are about 600 sets of numbers in cipher number three which means there are about 600 characters in the cipher. Since there are 30 people that are supposed to be listed, that would average to be about 20 characters per person. There doesn’t seem to be enough characters to list the name and addresses of each person unless their names and addresses are extremely short (Leonard, 2012). Additionally, the number 1005, which represented the letter “X”, was not labeled in Beale’s Declaration of Independence. The number was used four times in cipher number 2. There is no word in the Declaration of Independence that started with the letter “x”. This leaves suspicions that there were two authors and the story was fabricated. The first author could have died and left the other author to be confused as to what the number 1005 should be labeled as in the Declaration of Independence (Matyas, 2011).