Be sure to take a gander at the photograph attached to the article, which shows the property owner using heavy equipment to “excavate” this supposed proof of prehistoric advanced civilization by smashing it (or at least the rock surrounding it) to pieces while the film crew records the destruction. Science! Hyundai provided the production with “two monster track hoes and a reticulating loader” for unearthing the limestone dyke. Theoretically, of course, one would be a bit more careful if one were actually looking for proof of a lost race of wall builders or the only physical proof of Biblical giants or Atlantis ever found. If the article’s tone is to be believed, all involved are leaning toward a natural geological explanation.

“Regardless of what it is, it is an amazing, weird, cool thing,” Wolter told the paper. “I can see why people really got excited about it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

So why are they smashing the wall? To study the pieces of it for paleomagentism, the record of the magnetic field of the earth at the time the rocks formed.

Also, because this is “serious” science, no one is allowed to know the results of the investigation until the show airs later this year. Wolter will not be conducting the tests himself, but rather merely observing the work of John Giessman, a UT-Dallas geologist who has researched paleomagentism and rock magnetism extensively. Ironically, Dr. Giessman has devoted his career to advocating for the importance of science and combating public misunderstanding of science. I wonder if he ever watched the show.

One of the more interesting takeaways from the article is that Scott Wolter and the producers of the show told the paper they were not familiar with the Rockwall rock wall until someone from the town called their tip line (yes, they have a tip line) to ask them to investigate. According to the son of the property owner, a man named Adam Nix of the Collin County Historical Foundation contacted History about bringing the show to town.

This is especially interesting since last year an article about the Rockwall rock wall appeared in an anthology of Ancient American magazine articles (The Lost Worlds of Ancient America, 2012) that included not one but two articles by Scott Wolter himself. Is he not familiar with the books he appears in, or the magazine he writes for?

Obviously, Unearthing the Truth isn’t as useful after the second season of America Unearthed debuts. As a result, I have decided to remove the variant A rune from the cover of my book so I can sell it faster because I think the information is more important than the graphic design. Not a single word of the actual book text will change.

That said, I don’t come away from this empty-handed. I forced AETN, acting as they claim on behalf of Scott Wolter, into a strategic concession. They admit that neither they nor Wolter own or can own the variant A rune design: “We agree that the ‘hooked X’ letter is in the public domain for all to use.” That will therefore end any attempt to assert control over the design of the variant A rune (beyond the word mark for the exact phrase “Hooked X®”) in any medium, forever. To celebrate, you can all scrawl runes all over every available surface.

Since AETN and Scott Wolter admit that the variant A rune is public domain, I decided to make use of my right, conceded by AETN, to use the design as I see fit in any category except book covers. So, this morning I launched a clothing store (seriously), and I am now first-in-category to offer variant A rune (not “Hooked X®”) clothing and accessory designs! Since these designs use a public domain letter and make no reference to any product or mark owned by Scott Wolter or AETN, nor are represented as relating to such products or works, there’s nothing they can do about it. So, please enjoy a range of t-shirts, mugs, iPhone covers, and whatever else I have time to slap together. I’ll be expanding the merchandise listings as I have time and as it amuses me.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that A+E is so aggressive in protecting what they perceive to be their intellectual property when it comes to America Unearthed while they have allowed others to use the name of Ancient Aliens unmolested. Isn’t it interesting that you can find the following books on Amazon.com with no cease-and-desist order?

These books by ancient astronaut theorists (two of whom are/were associated with Ancient Aliens) clearly imply the endorsement of the Ancient Aliens mother ship, not to mention the clear case for confusion between the officially-licensed Ancient Aliens merchandise and these knockoffs seeking to capitalize on the Ancient Aliens name. (Coppens went on to make a DVD under the same misleading and confusing name.) And yet no one has ordered these books removed. Curious, isn’t it? 

So, I visited the United States Patent and Trademark Office to find out what rights A+E Networks claims for its various marks. (The USPTO does not allow direct linking to marks, so you’ll have to search yourself here.) For America Unearthed, interestingly, they do not claim trademark in connection with books. According to their July 2012 filing, they claim the trademark only for “prerecorded digital video discs and DVDs,” an “ongoing television series,” and “a website,” including podcasts, smart phone graphics, and discussion boards.

Even more interesting, they claim that their program and website are for “entertainment information purposes only.” Contrast that with the service mark application for Ancient Aliens, which states that the mark is associated with “non-fiction documentary subject matter.” What’s the difference? This: the service mark for Ancient Aliens is controlled by Prometheus Entertainment, the production company, while the mark for America Unearthed is controlled by A+E. It looks like Committee Films got a raw deal by giving A+E control over the program while Prometheus kept the rights to its. I wonder why A+E seems to be pushing America Unearthed and easing up on Ancient Aliens? Could it be about money? Could I be using rhetorical questions to make sure I don’t state anything definitively?

Now here’s the fun part: Scott Wolter filed for a trademark on the Hooked X in 2009 to coincide with publication of his book of that name! However, his mark covers only the phrase “Hooked X,” not the specific appearance of the rune character. The USTPO has no record of any trademark assigned for the “hooked X” rune itself, so far as I can find. I had no idea he owned a trademark on the phrase since he does not disclose this fact on the Hooked X website, or on the book cover, nor has he apparently defended the phrase “hooked X” from being used as a generic by other authors and publications, or by bands, as a Google search for the phrase shows. (Part of trademark law involves asserting the mark publicly, usually with a TM or ® symbol, and by defending the mark.) From now on, of course, I will have to write Hooked X®; however, my book does not use the registered mark on the cover and the registered mark does not cover the graphic element, which is in the public domain.

There’s also a good case to be made that the Hooked X® trademark is invalid since the term had been used as a generic for various x-shaped figures in the archaeological literature since at least 1990, when the term appears in the Journal of Indo-European Studies to describe incised figures similar to Wolter’s infamous rune. As in the recent cases of Hotels.com and Mattress.com, federal courts have held that a term that the “relevant publics” (in the case of the Hooked X®, that would be archaeologists) have used as a generic cannot be trademarked. Further, a book title cannot be trademarked until a book series has been established, under unfair competition laws in the U.S. Currently, there is only one Hooked X® book and therefore the title does not qualify for trademark status; subsequent book titles would need to be on the order of The Hooked X®: Desert Dinosaur Adventure or something along those lines, using the series title. I imagine that Wolter must have filed an “intent to use” for the mark as a book series, though I cannot see this information online.

And even if that were the case, I could still use the words “Hooked X” in my book title if I wanted to under the 1992 doctrine of “nominative fair use” in which the trademark is necessary for explaining the content of my book in reference to the mark being criticized. So, I could have titled my book Unearthing the Truth about Scott Wolter’s Hooked X Hoax. But I didn’t do that, so this isn’t really relevant. All I did was use a rune that has been in the public domain for decades. The exact expression of that rune was provided to me, with permission, by Richard Nielsen, in the copyrighted typeface he developed for typing Kensington Rune Stone figures.

I’m not sure there is any way to challenge Wolter’s trademark without going to court to claim that his mark is causing material damage to those using it as a generic. It will, however, expire in 2015 unless… well, I’m not going to help him out with the directions for avoiding cancellation. 

The story begins, I suppose, with Christopher Columbus’ claim in 1502 that the coast of Honduras held gold nuggets and an entire island of gold. In my previous post I quoted Hernando Cortes’ fifth letter to Charles V, in which the conquistador describes his quest for a city called Hueitapalan or Xucutaco, a wealthy metropolis somewhere in Honduras. As with similar Spanish legends of El Dorado, the Seven Cities of Gold (themselves derived from the mythical seven Christian cities of Antilla), and Quivira, the story of Ciudad Blanca is one of exaggeration, wishful thinking, and the imposition of European cultural ideas onto Native landscapes. Shortly after Cortes wrote, actual gold and silver were found in Honduras, leading to a Spanish mining operation and lending credence to the myth of Xucutaco. In 1537, the natives rose up against the Spanish who had enslaved them, and in time African slaves replaced native miners.

Two decades after Cortes wrote to Charles V, Cristóbal de Pedraza informed the emperor-king that he had heard from a Native princess that beyond the sea lay a fabulous civilization where the nobles drank from golden cups.

Nothing much came of this story, but over the centuries various travelers claimed to see glimpses of a forgotten city in the jungles of the Mosquito Coast. Some of these accounts report that the stone gleamed white, giving the city its name. This may possibly be a reference to white outcroppings of rocks that can be seen along rivers in the region. Others may refer to various ruins known to exist in the area. The actual term “Ciudad Blanca” was not in popular usage until the modern era when it seems that Charles Lindberg and some bush pilots began describing sightings of ruins in the jungle as a “white” city (for the reflective quality of their limestone walls), giving rise in 1960 to the “Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Preserve,” the name of which persisted until 1980, when it became a biological reserve under another name. According to many mystery-monger authors, Lindbergh discovered the city in 1927.

So far as I know, Lindbergh’s 1927 claim is where many believe the name Ciudad Blanca comes from, but even this isn’t certain since this legend saw print only in the 1950s, some three decades after the fact. (The oft-quoted phase “an amazing ancient metropolis,” attributed in the recent book Jungleland to Lindbergh, is actually another author’s paraphrase of a third author’s 1958 claim.) I believe, from what I can gather, that the Lindbergh claim is a misunderstanding of Lindbergh’s 1929 flight over the Yucatan, British Honduras (Belize), and other Central American locations, where he identified several hitherto unknown Maya sites; this flight, under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution, was one of the first successful demonstrations of aerial reconnaisance in archaeology.

The oldest reference I can find to Ciudad Blanca by that name was in 1938 in An Archaeological Reconnaissance of Northwestern Honduras, where it is described as a “reputed ruin.” In 1939 an American expedition to chart the Mosquito Coast claimed to have found the “Lost City of the Monkey God” in the region, though the alleged discoverer, Theodore Morde, was run over by a bus in 1940 before revealing its location. By the 1950s, the name “Ciudad Blanca” had stuck, and by the late 1960s, archaeologists were writing that an “important Mayan ruin” was located in the region, but one that had only been spotted from the air. Memories of it were now attributed to “folklore” by anthropologists and folklorists, despite not having existed just decades before! Some tribes in the region have myths of a “sacred” or “hidden” city that later researchers have retroactively applied to the burgeoning myth of Ciudad Blanca, sort of like a black hole sucking in all vaguely related matter around it.

Fun fact: In Lost Cities of North and Central America (1992), David Hatcher Childress copied word-for-word without quotation marks (though with an endnote) from David Zink’s 1979 book The Ancient Stones Speak in describing the lost city. Compare the two authors:

In turn, Zink was paraphrasing Frank Griffith Dawson’s 1977 article “The Ciudad Blanca Quest.” None of these authors, or others, like John Blashford-Snell, who paraphrased their works identified the source of this alleged engraving.

I am not able to find any such engraving, nor can I find a reference to a “White City” in Honduras before the twentieth century, as I noted above, or to the engraving prior to 1977. I can’t say the engraving doesn’t exist, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a misinterpretation of one of the plates from travelogues like Ephraim Squier’s Notes on Central America or Travels in Central America, which covered “aboriginal monuments” of the area, or any number of travelogues from the Yucatan published in those years. I haven’t been able to review all of them, but there are an awful lot to choose from. If there was in fact a Honduran engraving, it does not appear to have ever been reproduced outside Honduras.

Some Christian extremists believe that the White City is part of a Satanic conspiracy. According to conspiracy theorist David J. Dionisi, the modern myth that the White City was the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl proves that the New World Order claimed the Western Hemisphere for Satan. In this reading, Amerigo Vespucci was a patsy chosen to hide the fact that the Americas were named for “Amaru,” another name for Quetzalcoatl (it’s not, really; Amaru was an Incan royal name), who as a serpent god is therefore the serpent of the Garden of Eden, i.e. Satan. Dionisi believes that the site of Ciudad Blanca currently under discussion in the media is the exact spot where Lucifer fell from heaven in yet another myth extrapolated from a misreading of ancient texts. (The myth of the “fall” of Lucifer depends upon a misinterpretation of Isaiah 14:12 as applying to an angel and not a mortal king.)

So, in short, the legend of Ciudad Blanca is a modern extrapolation from an imaginative reinterpretation of what may well have originated as a real ruined city in the Honduran jungle; or the whole thing could be a coincidence based on the fact that an actual civilization once existed where Natives tried to dupe Cortes into going to get him out of their towns. The question is how much the Ciudad Blanca legend is similar to the fabricated story of Atlantis and now much it resembles the vague memories of the lost cities of Troy or Pompeii that persisted into the Middle Ages. Whatever the answer, the fact remains that the Ciudad Blanca story growing out of the 1930s bears little resemblance to the originating passages in the Spanish accounts—a situation almost identical to the elaborate post-1959 myth of the lost colony of Henry Sinclair and the Templars, bearing no resemblance to its one textual source, the Zeno Narrative, similarly misinterpreted and falsified to support a Eurocentric fantasy.

As you can see, the design elements are not particularly unique to Wolter:

And as a matter of fact, I do not own a copy of the Hooked X book, and the similarity in design is in fact a coincidence. I added the Hooked X to my cover design because the space above the title looked a bit empty. The actual inspiration for the cover was, not coincidentally, the thing I was critiquing: America Unearthed. Amazing that A+E did not notice that.

I tried very hard to draw inspiration from the logo without actually duplicating or coming too close to anything in it (unauthorized Twilight and Twilight Zone guides steal more blatantly from their the graphic design of their inspirations), and for my efforts I get accused of stealing from something completely different!

I had a nice conversation with the lawyer involved, and as a result of the conversation I have agreed to make a minor revision to the book cover to include the word “unauthorized” in order to make A+E Networks happy and to avoid confusion among the literally tens of people who will likely encounter my book, one or two of whom may not be aware that a critique is generally critical of the thing being critiqued. This means that the book will not be for sale until the change has gone through. This will take several days.

I cannot, however, make the change until A+E agrees to drop the claim that I am violating Scott Wolter’s intellectual property by using the “hooked X.” This is especially frustrating because A+E does not own the Hooked X book or its intellectual property. They claim the expansive right to act on behalf of Scott Wolter as “talent” for the company, another remarkable claim since Wolter’s intellectual missteps and academic misrepresentation do not fall under the company’s purview, according a network representative I spoke with last month. But the shape of a letter on the cover of a self-published book released six years before joining A+E? Totally their business.

I assert that the hooked X is in the public domain because the character appears on the Kensington Rune Stone, uncovered in 1898 and purportedly dating back to 1362 according to Wolter himself. This puts the shape squarely in the public domain. Further, (a) Wolter’s book features a stone-carved hooked X from the Rune Stone, while mine features a computer-generated hooked X; (b) Wolter’s book superimposes the actual caving over a stone-textured physical map of North America while mine uses a slight shadow over a political map of part of the United States; (c) Wolter’s book is brown and mine is blue; (d) the two designs are in no way substantively similar, not in the lettering, positioning of the title, use of ancillary elements, etc. Even if he did own the hooked X, my book is a substantive critique of the claims made by Wolter about the “hooked X” on America Unearthed, and therefore an illustration of that character is an essential part of the criticism.

When I challenged A+E’s right to dispute the cover design since they don’t own the hooked X, the lawyer told me that I would be wise to accept the changes rather than get Scott Wolter’s lawyer involved. “Do you really want to deal with two sets of lawyers?” she asked. Actually, I’d be thrilled to have Scott Wolter try to make a case in court that he owns the hooked X. That would be a bizarre attempt to rewrite history. But if Disney can try to trademark the Dia de los Muertos, I guess Wolter can try to claim the hooked X as his personal fief.

Well, here is some more people he can sue. Note that the hooked X is clearly visible on the cover on the left, while the one at right is suspiciously similar to the design Wolter uses and also has the hooked X visible.

So how did this happen? Well, the lawyer’s letter mentions the eBook version of Unearthing the Truth, which had been available for less than 24 hours before the letter arrived. According to the lawyer, A+E Networks handed her the complaint after “talent” informed the parent company of the situation. Since the “talent” on America Unearthed is Scott Wolter himself, I guess we know who is really the one willing to use the power of the law to “suppress” the “truth.” I do not believe it is a coincidence that the “talent” became upset just days after a History spokesperson invited me to provide the network with a critique of the show. This is the thanks I get for taking them at their word that they genuinely wanted to know how to make the program better.

This mysterious city of great wealth first appears in the fifth letter of Hernando Cortes to the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Cortes wrote:

Cortes tried to find the city, but he failed to do so.

Many expeditions have tried to find the city, which some believe to be a myth. Now, a new technique called airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has located what appear to be the ruins of pyramids, plazas, and roads—evidence of an ancient city beneath the jungle canopy. The findings are suggestive but tentative for the time being until a ground survey can be conducted. Of course it is impossible to know whether the abandoned city—if it is in fact a city—was the White City of legend, but it’s in the right area and matches the stories told of lost cities in the area reasonably well.

Did archaeologists duck their heads and scream that such a find overturns conventional wisdom and must therefore be shunned? Did they launch a conspiracy to hide the truth? No, the Honduran government and an interdisciplinary team are readying themselves to go out to the site to confirm that the technology has it right.

Also of interest: The ancient astronaut theorists’ world energy grid, which supposedly aligns to the locations of major ancient sites, failed to predict the existence of this city. No node appears in this Honduran location on any of the published grid maps. Similarly, the channeled spirit beings from Atlantis who supposedly detailed the pre-history of the Americas failed to describe the city. Just once I’d like to see ancient astronaut or Atlantis speculation actually predict the location of a lost civilization and then have one actually show up there.



Click here to read my follow-up on the Ciudad Blanca myth.

Let’s stipulate that Brown’s Inferno is a work of fiction, and despite its prologue’s spurious claims to factual legitimacy (a common conceit more popular in the Gothic era), anything presented in the book is, by definition, fictitious and cannot therefore be criticized as some did with the Da Vinci Code for fabricating or manipulating facts.

That said, one of the silliest thing in the book, according to one review I read (I have not yet finished the novel to confirm this myself) is perhaps the claim that the international symbol for biohazards, a set of three almost complete circles overlapping a smaller, finished circle, is in fact a code for the three heads of Satan nibbling on sinning traitors at the base of Dante’s hell. This is only slightly more plausible than Scott Wolter’s idea that the Nova Scotia flag contains a Templar code marking the spot where the Jesus Bloodline came to America.

It’s a fairly well-known fact that Dante’s vision of hell was drawn largely from the Greco-Roman version of the Underworld, and one of the concepts Dante brought to the Inferno from Antiquity was the idea of the “Gates of Hell,” a concept found among the Greeks and Romans as well as Near Eastern peoples going back to the Sumerians. It is this concept that interests me because it suggests that ancient peoples did not have the sophisticated understanding of science and space aliens that ancient astronaut speculators tell us.

For Dante, Hell was fairly clearly in the center of the earth, with Satan occupying the exact center. But for the peoples of Antiquity, the Underworld sat beneath a flat earth. How can we know this? The Sumerians and their successors in Babylon believed that the sun passed through the underworld gates in the west each night and served in the dark hours as the judge of the underworld, returning in the morning through the eastern gate of dawn (Sumerian fragment known as "Sumerian Underworld" and Enuma Elish 5.9-11). Obviously, if the ancients thought the world were round, they could not have envisioned a night job for the sun, or envisioned him as passing into the underworld. This concept carries over, in modified form, into Hesiod, who was influenced by Near Eastern myths. For him, there is a single great bronze threshold to the underworld. While the Greek sun does not descend and rise (taking instead a golden cup across the River Ocean at night), Hesiod does have Night and Day “draw near and greet one another as they pass the great threshold of bronze: and while the one is about to go down into the house, the other comes out at the door.”

But why should the sun, or night and day, need gates to travel from plane to plane? That is where things get interesting. It’s because the ancients believed that the plane of the earth was covered with an impenetrable dome accessible only via specific gates cut into it. For the Babylonians, this dome was made from the flayed hide of Tiamat, the cosmic chaos monsters slain by Marduk and set up over the earth, punctuated with gates. Many scholars believe that since the Sumerians claimed the sky dome had a zenith and that tin was the “metal of heaven” that they believed the sky to be a tin dome. Outside this was an all-encompassing ocean.

The writers of the Hebrew Bible, drawing on Near Eastern myths, also believed that the sky was some sort of dome holding back cosmic waters (Genesis 1:6-8). In the Flood narrative, gates in the sky open to let in those waters (Genesis 7:11). In the Jewish apocryphal literature, we hear speculation about whether the heavenly dome is made “of clay, or of brass, or of iron” (3 Baruch 3:7).

For Homer and the early Greeks, the sky was also a gigantic metal dome, either of bronze (Iliad 17.425) or iron (Odyssey 15.329). This is why gates were needed to reach the underworld below: one could not simply keep traveling to the edge of the earth and jump off. Instead, one had to either pass through the bronze gates of day and night at the edge of the earth, or pass through holes in the earth itself to pass to the plane below, as Heracles, Orpheus, and Theseus did in their journeys to the underworld, a type of adventure called a catabasis.

I’ve mentioned before that this belief strongly suggests that no aliens came to teach the ancients about astronomy or geology. Had they done so, we should expect mythology to reveal some understanding of outer space, or a round earth, or that the stars are not tiny lights suspended from an iron dome on cables, as the Egyptians believed. Where did Zecharia Sitchin think that the ancients imagined all those Sumerian rocket ships flying off to?

Such beliefs equally belie the claims of alternative historians who argue for a prehistoric cult of scientifically advanced priest-kings from a lost civilization who obsessed over astronomy and perfectly understood the finest details of the heavenly motions. How does David Childress square his belief in an ancient global power grid, predicated on the idea of a globe-shaped earth around which the power flowed, with a belief in a solid sky cutting off the world at its edges?

Have you seen the trailer for NBC’s new Dracula series? It actually looks really good, except for the fact that vampires are so overexposed right now that the sight of fangs makes me yawn. I’m glad that they resisted the temptation to modernize the setting (see the upcoming “modern” take on Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow on Fox), and the preview scenes have a lushness about them that seems to bring to life (undeath?) the vanished world of the Victorians.

Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it:

What strikes me, though, is that this revised Dracula is less the vampire count (though, obviously, the producers are cribbing from the reincarnated love interest angle from Francis Ford Coppala’s 1992 movie [update: and the 1973 version before it]) than he is an evil Nikola Tesla (to whom critics have already compared the character). This Dracula is masquerading as an American man of science, wowing Victorian London with electric lights and the wonders of science. Many TV critics are shocked by this change, but they are reacting more to the movie versions of Dracula than the novel, which long ago laid the foundation for this version of the vampire:

In the original conception, Dracula was a scientist, though not a showman. In the novel, Dracula’s medieval view of science, tinged and tainted by the Gothic, is contrasted with his opponents’ dynamic, progressive Victorian science (something I discuss in Knowing Fear), and this TV version undermines the entire theme with its revisionist idea of Dracula embracing the future. I wish that the producers of the new show had dumped the overplayed vampire angle altogether and simply adapted the similar nefarious scientific charlatan Nyarlathotep from H. P. Lovecraft (whom some think was inspired by Tesla), which would at least have been a bit more original and would have made better use of the idea of science as a mask for the Gothic irrational:

Surely the idea of a mad scientific showman leading the world into the apocalypse by using his electric wonders to indoctrinate a cult of followers would be a bit more interesting than the official description of Dracula, which says that the Count is on a quest to reconnect with his lost love and get revenge on those who “cursed him with immortality.” The theme, if this show has one, revolves around those tired TV clichés of the immortality of true love and naughtiness of trespassing on God’s territory. By linking science to the vampire and making the vampire angry at his evil affliction, the program appears to be ready to link science and vampirism as similar affronts to the divine order, which decrees a life of but seventy years for normal people and eighty years maximum for the strong (Psalm 90:10)—extended life is by definition anti-God, a throwback to the bad old days before the Flood when the sinful giants lived centuries.

In raw terms, it’s easier to sell a big name like Dracula over “the soul and messenger of infinity’s Other Gods,” especially since the show is an international co-production and has to be able to appeal easily to people who don’t speak English. And of course he has to pretend to be American or U.S. audiences won’t watch the show, at least according to network executives. (So ingrained is this belief that even BBC America insists on having American-accented characters in all its original programs.)

I thought it might be helpful for everyone, Steve St. Clair included, to have a brief outline of the history of the Zeno-Sinclair myth since it is the essential and only evidence for the Sinclair-Holy Bloodline-Templar myth. St. Clair asked for information about how the myth “became attached to [his] family name,” and here it is:

1558. Nicolò Zeno the younger publishes a hoax narrative and map claiming his ancestors, the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, traveled to the North Atlantic in the 1380s where they met Prince Zichmni, a powerful warlord. Nicolò sailed to Greenland, and later Antonio and Zichmni also sailed to the other side of Greenland. Zichmni established a colony beneath a volcano in Greenland, and the story ends with him still there. No documented evidence for this voyage exists from before this date.

c. 1566. Marco Barbaro claims in an undated manuscript that the voyage to Greenland continued on to North America. He apparently confuses the hoax narrative’s story of sailors who found an island beyond Greenland and reported this to Zichmni with the two Greenland voyages of the Zeni. No claim for Zichmni reaching North America exists before this date.

1570s-1780s. Explorers accept the Zeno map and narrative as genuine and use it to explore the North Atlantic, leading to false identifications and non-existent lands on early maps. Knowledge of the true size and shape of Greenland is retarded for several centuries by attempts to fit it into the Zeno paradigm.

1700s. The Zeni story becomes fodder for Italian political rivalries. Venetian writers, accepting the story’s truth unanimously, begin to claim that the Zeno narrative gives the Zeni pride of place over Columbus, from Genoa, and Amerigo Vespucci, from Florence. According to Vicenzo Formaleone in 1783, “Cosi l’ardito F’iorentino, Americo Vespucci, rapi al Colombo la gloria di dare il nome al Mondo nuovo: gloria per altro nom sua; poiche rapita anch’essa ai nostri Zeni” (“So the bold Florentine, Americo Vespucci, seized from Columbus the glory of giving his name to the New World: glory meant for another name, since it was raped from our Zeni.”)

1784. John Reinhold Forster, a German from a dispossessed Scottish noble family, proposes that Zichmni is Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, because he believes “Zichmni” looks like “Sinclair” as written with really bad handwriting and because Sinclair became earl in 1379, a year before the 1380 date given in the narrative. No connection between Zichmni and Sinclair exists prior to this date.

1808. Cardinal Placido Zurla writes the most sustained defense of the Zeno narrative. Zurla’s and Foster’s claims are repeated by many other authors. After this, Italian writers continue to promote the Zeni cause while northern European writers begin expressing doubts.

1833. Admiral Zarhtmann offers the first sustained skeptical criticism of the Zeno narrative. His skepticism is later confirmed by the discovery of a 1539 map by Olaus Magnus that was almost certainly the source for Nicolò Zeno’s fictional geography.

1873. Richard Henry Major adopts Foster’s identification of Zichmni with Sinclair, although he rejects the handwriting claim, instead basing his version on a distorted account of the “similarities” between the real and fictional man. Major concludes that Sinclair sailed to Greenland and received reports from other explorers about European settlements surviving in North America. After Major’s book, subsequent authors transferred to Sinclair the claims originally made for the Zeni about the voyage, supposing this Scot to be worthier of the honor than what Major described as irrational, hot-blooded Italians. No claim that Sinclair should be awarded priority over Nicolò Zeno occurs before this date.

1892. A series of works tied to the anniversary of Columbus’ voyage attempt to replace Columbus with Sinclair on the strength of Major’s argument. Several remain in print for a century. The most important, though least read, is that of Thomas Sinclair, who asserts on the authority of Barbaro, Major, and others that Henry Sinclair (II, not I) discovered America and should replace Columbus in the American pantheon, all the better to stick it to Italians, whom he views as racially contaminating white society. This is the starting point for the “Sinclair discovered America” theory.

1898. Fred W. Lucas debunks the Zeno map and narrative. Over the next few decades, an academic consensus forms that the document is a hoax as new evidence for Zeno’s sources comes to light. Lucas’s book goes out of print, and the public has little access to academic discussion prior to the Internet age, leaving Major’s book as the main source of information.

1900-1950s. Many alternative books reference Major’s in support of the Zeno narrative, though only as one of many alleged pre-Columbian voyages from Europe to America.

1959. Frederick J. Pohl adopts Major’s conclusions and expands upon them by proposing that Zichmni-Sinclair did not travel to Greenland as Major and the Zeno narrative state but instead traveled to Nova Scotia based upon a misreading of pitch flowing from an imaginary burning mountain (volcano) in Greenland (based on Olaus Magnus’ description of Iceland) as the burning bitumen of a well-known Nova Scotia coal mine prone to fires. He then identifies Zichmni with Glooscap, a local Mi’kmaq deity, based on fabricated reasons. Pohl’s work, expanded in a series of books through the 1970s, becomes the foundation for all later Sinclair-America theories. No claim that Sinclair colonized Canada appears before Pohl.
 
1970s-1980s. Joan Hope reads Pohl’s work and believes that her Nova Scotia home is built atop a castle built by Henry Sinclair during his voyage. There is no evidence for a medieval castle on her land, only a colonial-era mansion. Her view is popularized in several 1980s and 1990s books capitalizing on the growing Sinclair myth. No claim for a Sinclair castle in America precedes Joan Hope.

1992. Andrew Sinclair adopts all previous speculation and weaves it together with the Knights Templar and the Holy Bloodline of Jesus from the infamous Holy Blood, Holy Grail alternative history book from the 1980s. Sinclair’s work creates the final form of the Sinclair myth as it is known today. As far as I can find, no claim of a Sinclair-Templar-Bloodline connection exists prior to Andrew Sinclair.

2006-2009. Scott F. Wolter proposes that Henry Sinclair was involved in a Templar-Cistercian scheme to encode a hidden message in the Kensington Rune Stone (putatively dated to 1362) claiming all of North America for the Sinclair/Templar/Bloodline Grail Kings because Sinclair allegedly built the Newport Tower to “align” to the Rune Stone. Thus, the United States “belongs” to the Sinclair-Templar-Bloodline-Freemason elite. Wolter appears to be the first to connect Sinclair to the Kensington Rune Stone via the Templars.

Thus, we can see that each step of development of the Sinclair myth was built at known points in time and by known individuals upon preceding layers of speculation, with this fact freely admitted by each speculator. Since the foundation was false, the subsequent extrapolations from that false foundation hold no water and cannot be assumed to be true without some sort of external confirmation from outside the Sinclair-Templar-Bloodline alternative ecosystem.