North Kingstown, RI Town Council Holds Closed Meeting with Scott Wolter to Hear Jesus-Templar Claims

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to correct the date of Scott Wolter's presentation.

I have a couple of housekeeping points to start with before we get to today’s main event.

First, I have a new favicon for the site. It’s a picture of a flying saucer hovering over a pyramid. I drew it myself, and I think it came out well. On my computer, it shows up in Chrome and Firefox, but for the life of me I can’t force Internet Explorer to dump the old version from its cache and use the new one. Anyway, I hope you like it.

Second, next year marks the ten year anniversary of the publication of my first book, The Cult of Alien Gods, and since so much has changed in the field of ancient astronautics since 2005, I thought it would be a good time for a revised second edition of the book. I have contacted Prometheus Books about the issue, but I have no idea what they’ll say. Prometheus hold the rights to the book until it falls out of publication. To date, they have never stopped publishing a book, so far as I know. When I tried to broach the idea of a second edition in 2007 and 2009, the publisher never responded to my letters. Even if they do think it’s a good idea, publication would depend on the terms of the contact, since Prometheus gave me unfavorable terms in 2005, whereby royalties amounted to less than $0.25 per book thanks to their unique view that they should be paid on wholesale rather than cover prices, and on a downward sliding scale based on a ridiculous number of factors. So, I won’t hold my breath on a second edition of Cult, but we’ll see.

So, on to today’s issue…

Scott F. Wolter is at it again. According to the Providence Journal the America Unearthed host gave a presentation to the North Kingston, Rhode Island town council on Tuesday making his case that the Narragansett Rune Stone, currently housed at the University of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay campus, is physical evidence that the Knights Templar brought the Holy Bloodline of Jesus to North America in the Middle Ages. Wolter told the town council that North Kingston could benefit financially from creating a tourist attraction in the town aimed at Holy Bloodline tourists.

The council agreed to put the Narragansett Rune Stone on display in Updike Park, and during the meeting Wolter agreed to make materials available for a display about the stone to accompany its exhibition.

Although the meeting was held in Town Hall and attended only by the town council, it was not listed as a formal session of the council.  Therefore, Rhode Island open meeting laws did not apply, and a record of this meeting does not appear in the Rhode Island open meetings database or on the town government website, nor is there an indication that members of the public were allowed to attend the presentation or offer commentary. However, a two-hour recording was uploaded to the town council website with an all-caps disclaimer that it was not a council meeting.

I have now viewed the two hour recording. It is pretty much what you would expect, but with PowerPoint. And, oh, do I love PowerPoint.

There are two new (to me) claims: (1) The Jolly Roger is a symbol of allegiance to the Holy Bloodline by symbolizing the Jesus bones in their ossuary, and (2) the secret mysteries of the Bloodline are the Seven Liberal Arts. He also emphasized his belief that Jesus was trained as an Egyptian pharaoh and studied in the temples of both Egypt and Tibet.

Wolter backed up his Templar-Bloodline claim by asserting that his geological analysis of the carving of Scandinavian runes on the stone, which was first discovered in 1984, must be at least one hundred years old. He claimed that the Knights Templar formed “strategic alliances” with Native Americans (citing the alleged Midewin-Freemason rituals again) after the Catholic Church rejected the Templar’s alleged dualist philosophy. He asserted that the so-called Hooked X® rune on the rock was a reference to the Templars’ Cross of Lorraine (illustrated with what he falsely called a Knights Templar coin, though the Knights did not mint currency), and the told the council that the Cross of Lorraine was a secret symbol used by a conspiracy that today includes Exxon gasoline and Oreo cookies.

Wolter falsely asserted that the word Oreo means “the tomb of the goddess” in Latin. As someone who has read Latin for almost twenty years, I know that is not true. He claims that the Oreo medallion central ellipse symbolizes the Ellipse (President's Park South) in Washington, which he says hides the key ancient secret, what he suggests is the resting place of the bones of Jesus. He falsely claims that the Ellipse, which is open to the public, is off limits and that helicopters swarm anyone who tries to approach the center, where the Jesus bones allegedly are buried.

Council member Kerry McKay told the Journal that Wolter told a “great story” and that it was astonishing that the claim that Columbus discovered America “can be turned on its ear right here in North Kingstown, R.I.” Council President Elizabeth Dolan went further and claimed that Wolter’s presentation was so “amazing” that the council needed to ensure that the Rune Stone was protected forever. During the meeting itself, council members expressed their interest in and support of the views they heard from Wolter and brought up additional fringe theories and ideas they heard on TV or read in fringe materials. One seemed to suggest his belief that there is a conspiracy to prevent Wolter from accessing ancient material.

Let’s just note here: Members of the town council were impressed by a conspiracy theory involving secret messages on Oreo cookies.

Wolter also speculated that the man who earlier this year claimed that he carved the Narragansett Rune Stone in 1964, Everett Brown, fabricated his claim because he was either seeking attention or had a philosophical opposition to the Knights Templar’s alleged dualist philosophy.

It’s worth noting that Wolter’s own “scientific” findings fail to prove his elaborate web of conspiracy. Wolter himself says that geology can only tell him that the Narragansett Rune Stone carving is at least 100 years old. This could therefore place the stone’s age anytime from the invention of runes in the early centuries CE down to 1914. His geology therefore fully supports the viewpoint of many mainstream scholars that the stone was carved as a hoax sometime in the 1890s or early 1900s. The presence of a so-called Hooked X® on the Narragansett stone, when it does not typically appear in genuine medieval runic inscriptions, implies a stronger likelihood that it was carved in imitation of the Kensington Rune Stone, the most famous utilizer of the Hooked X® and which received a great deal of publicity during the late Victorian period in question.

Because Wolter’s “scientific” analysis cannot exclude the possibility of a modern hoax (or, really, any post-Columbus date between 1500 and 1900) his other claims therefore do not follow from scientific analysis as he usually claims. Instead, his elaborate Holy Bloodline claims remain a house of cards, with assumption stacked upon assumption.