The trail for this short reads: “Professor White, cryptographer extraordinaire, is on the trail of the notoriously uncrackable Thomas Beale cipher, a century-old riddle hiding the location of a fortune in gold. But White is not alone – shadowy forces are tight on his tail.”

Mate; this is feature film territory.

Regardless, Andrew Allen’s award winning short film proves that timeless rule: you can’t beat a good old mystery. The Thomas Beale Cipher is based on the true-life infamous Beale Papers. These are a set of cryptograms that’ve been almost solved…onl, there’s the final page of three which has never, ever, to this day, been successfully de-coded.

(How did the bad robot himself J.J. Abrams miss this one? I know; I was thinking the same thing too…)

Heres goes, kids:

The Thomas Beale Cipher by Andrew Allen

The final unsolved Ciphers are believed give directions to a stone vault of huge jewels, silver and a whole bunch of troy ounces of gold (that’s the Acme-styled slabs of the stuff to you and me) which are today estimated to be worth nearly $65 million for the gold alone. Rumours over the years suggest some of the ciphertexts are fake (just ’cause you can’t solve it guys, meh) and that Edgar Allan Poe definitely influenced their creation (kk, he was around way before the Beale texts in order to inspire them…).

Legends aside, amazing, right? Enjoy this pioneering animation of a traditional US piece of fact…and fiction.