In Brief: Scott Wolter Preps New Book about (Fake) Medieval Journals

​I should start today by acknowledging the passing of John Ward, the National Geographic Explorer and Explorers Club Fellow who excavated in Egypt with his wife, Dr. Marial Nilsson. Readers with long memories will remember Ward as an eccentric figure from a decade ago who tried sell a bizarre TV pilot called History Trippers during the heyday of cable pseudohistory shows, promoted psychic powers and dowsing, and favored fringe pseudohistory. I can’t say I had heard or thought much about him over the last decade, which he spent doing more legitimate archaeological work with his wife, but I am sorry to learn that he is no longer with us.

Meanwhile, former television personality Scott Wolter announced that his new book is nearing completion. It’s called The Greatest Templar Tale Never Told: The Sinclair/Weymss Journals, and it is set to be released next month. (Yes, he spelled it “Weymss” when “Wemyss” is the standard spelling of the Scottish clan; the “Weymss” spelling was associated with Victorian Freemasons.)
 
The “Sinclair/Weymss Journals” are almost certainly fake documents that have been floating around Wolter’s circle of fake history writers for the past few years. You see, the daughter of William St. Clair (Sinclair), the first Earl of Rosslyn (1230-1297) married into the Wemyss family, making them cousins to Henry I Sinclair, the first Earl of Orkney (1345-1400), whom Wolter believes to have been privy to Templar secrets. The Wemyss family owned the Scottish caves in Fife where Knights Templar who fled France following the suppression of the order allegedly took shelter. As I explained when Wolter made this claim on America Unearthed and again when he repeated the claim in 2019, the story is very likely a nineteenth century invention, though locals prefer the more dramatic version.
 
I presume these are the same journals that Diana Muir claimed in 2018 to have discovered and “translated,” without providing any evidence of the originals. According to Muir’s wicked dreams ten volumes of Henry I Sinclair’s handwritten journals fell into the hands of the Wemyss family, through whom they came to rest in Tennessee where Muir found them en route to the Pink Pony Club, or something to that effect.
 
Tim Wallace-Murphy began promoting what he called the “Sinclair-Wemyss journals” in 2023, but with no details other than that they were akin to the so-called “Cremona Document,” which is another fabrication. That same year, Wolter’s now-girlfriend Haley A. Ramsey talked about the close connection between the Templars and the Wemyss family in her book about the divine feminine, drawing on Wolter’s ideas.