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.
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?
Re:89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480
by colanderman on Friday December 18, 2015 @01:35PM
(#10760035)
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.
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.
Still, didn't stop me from looking at these anagram combinations: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiij...
abfdefghiijklmmnohpp
Bank Dig He Jiff 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
Edit 3: crummy searchable (include/exclude) version because it's Friday: http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/
I'm surprised anyone had any doubts after that.