In 1819, a Virginia adventurer named Thomas Beale reportedly buried a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels somewhere in Bedford County and left its location encoded in three ciphertexts, handed to a local innkeeper in a locked box. Only one of the three has ever been cracked, using the Declaration of Independence as a key, and it describes the treasure without giving up the map to find it. The film traces the story from its first publication in an 1885 pamphlet through generations of codebreakers, including NSA cryptologists who have taken a run at the remaining two ciphers and come away empty-handed. It weighs the case for a real buried fortune against the strong possibility of a 19th-century hoax, pointing to anachronisms in the text and the suspiciously tidy narrative structure of the original pamphlet. Historians and cryptography specialists lay out both sides, and the film treats the mystery as genuinely open rather than forcing a resolution the evidence doesn't support.