Scott Wolter Can't Keep His Pseudohistory Claims Straight

​Scott Wolter is back with another bizarre claim about supposed Templar influence in North America. On Facebook and in a YouTube short, posted in conjunction with a lengthy podcast interview on the much-watch The Basement podcast from Why Files host A. J. Stiles to promote his new book The Greatest Templar Story Never Told, Wolter posted a conspiracy theory (in the third person, no less) about Ralph de Sudeley (1133-1192), an English patron of the Knights Templar. The story he tells is straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, down to humility of the worthy:

​Before the 10th century, a collection of biblical era scrolls was hidden inside a North American temple of the goddess - a site guarded by an indigenous leadership council made up entirely of women. Scott describes how Altamira [sic for Altomara] led de Sudeley to this location, where his mission was clear in purpose but rigorous in requirement. The scrolls would not simply be handed over. They had to be earned through a three day and three night ritual conducted across three separate caves - a structured initiation designed to test far more than determination.
 
On the third night, the priestess of the temple herself appeared and offered herself to de Sudeley. His response was immediate - "I am not worthy." That answer, Scott suggests, was precisely the right one. The priestess confirmed he had passed, and the scrolls were surrendered. The detail that makes this account remarkable is not the recovery itself but the nature of the test. A tradition sophisticated enough to design an initiation that only humility could unlock was protecting something it considered far too significant to place in the wrong hands.

​This is a laughable story for many reasons, but it’s worth noting how this strange amalgam of influences developed.
 
Our story begins with Graham Phillips, the British author of pseudo-historical nonfiction. In 2004, he proposed in The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant that Ralph de Sudeley found the Maccabean treasure in the cave of Jebel Madhbah while on crusade in the Holy Land and transported this treasure back to England. He speculated that de Sudeley might even have found the Ark of the Covenant and brought it back with him. The only evidence for any of this is a register listing objets sacrés (holy objects) housed in his personal chapel, the usual term for any of the thousands of relics circulating as Biblical objects in the Middle Ages.
 
Many of the stories told about Ralph de Sudeley by the writers who followed Phillips are patently false. One common tale holds that he was a poor man who went on crusade and returned to his home in Gloucestershire the richest man in England. In reality, de Sudeley inherited his wealth and estates from his father, John de Sudeley, upon the latter’s death in 1165. Nor was his patronage of the Templars particularly unusual. He made gifts of land several times. De Sudeley gave lands to the Priory of Erbury, to the Templars, and to his brother William. Several other lords in the Gloucestershire, including Gilbert de Laci and Roger de Waterville had made similar gifts of land to the Templars at the time.
 
De Sudeley is often called a leader of the Templars, but there is no evidence that he was himself a Templar. De Sudeley’s patronage was almost certainly in recognition of the Templars’ role in protecting travelers to the Holy Land and aiding in the Crusades.
 
The Templar activities in Gloucestershire at the time were not all that mysterious. They ran a series of fulling mills for the making of cloth, which apparently generated quite high rents, according to Emma Dent’s Annals of Winchcombe.
 
Upon the suppression of the order, their property transferred to the Hospitallers.
 
But back to de Sudeley. We next find that Donald A. Ruh made use of Phillips’s account of de Sudeley in discussing the alleged Cremona Document and the Scrolls of Onteora, the hoax texts that so enamored Scott Wolter over the past decade. Ruh copied whole pages about de Sudeley from Wikipedia in his 2019 book on the Cremona Document (with citation), apparently unaware that the Wikipedia article was itself a massive quotation from Phillips’s website.
 
Ruh claimed that de Sudeley had “the connections and reasons to go to America.” In the book, he claims that de Sudeley found the stone tablets of the Law from the Ark of the Covenant and that he made a voyage to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, transporting holy objects from the Temple in Jerusalem to America and writing an account of it that he signed in his own hand, this being the Cremona Document. As I have discussed before, the text, written in code in the (sixteenth century) Theban alphabet, supposedly turned up in Italy in the 1970s before traveling through the hands of a Dr. William Jackson, who willed it to Ruh, who shared it with Soctt Wolter.
 
The full Cremona Document narrative, which runs dozens of pages of dense description, is too long to give here, but a summary can be read here. You will note how the hoaxer brought in many popular pseudohistory tropes. The worshipers of the Goddess in America are, of course, light-skinned white people who speak Welsh, and they are attended by a tribe of what is obviously meant to be descendants of Jewish priests, called Cohens (!), who are “darker” than the Goddess-worshiping Welsh but lighter than Native Americans (i.e., Mediterranean olive). The Templar crew pass through what seem to be the remnants of Norse Vinland and finds a lost temple—in New York! They even find such wonders as coal (anachronistically) in use.
 
Well, now Wolter is promoting a ridiculous section of the Cremona document in which a Freemason-style initiation ritual on Hunter Mountain in the Catskills is described, complete with reference to the Mandan, the tribe notoriously believed to be Caucasian among pseudohistory believers. In Jackson’s “translation”:

Now I must pass through a long dark corridor between two rocks that has been covered with stone and earth to signify my passage from birth into knowledge. She states that now I must spend a night in a different cave opposite the one I spent last night in. On its roof are strange symbols and lines. She states they are rivers showing the way to their brethren far to the South. These are called the Man-Den, Cone, Navasak.
 
[…] When I sat alone in the small cave I set about making a light and by it examined the tube I had chosen. The others were held by Gwyn. In it were four documents. A map on parchment and Signed Tantino d Mandrakis.
 
The second document was in Theban and said nothing til I used the disks and then it told of a vast treasure in gold and gems and precious relics including parts of the tablets given to Moses from GOD and held in a golden chest feared taken by the Romans when they overran Jerusalem and it was hidden below in the tunnels cut for water in the ruined city of Petra in the Valley of Edom and in a cavern with the mark of the crescent moon upon the mountain of Jebel Madhbah.

​It should be obvious that medieval writers would not reference an alphabet invented five centuries later nor refer to Jebel Madhbah, a name not attested before modern times. Even the Valley of Edom was called “Vallis Moysi” (the valley of Moses) in Crusader documents. There are many other anachronisms throughout the rest of the text—such as references to “the prophet of Islam,” a term medieval people did not use to describe Muhammad—even leaving aside the decidedly modern structure and cast to the narrative, so different from genuine medieval texts.
 
Beyond this, as you can see, the modern hoaxer has a fixation on creating a prehistory for America in which a network of Caucasians (and occasionally Jews—Hunter Mountain supposedly has a menorah carved in the ceiling of its lost temple!) preserve holy wisdom hidden from the masses of swarthy natives.
 
However, it is also worth noting what Scott Wolter has changed. The original hoax had de Sudeley receive scrolls after informing the Welsh-speaking priestess of the Goddess that he has taken a vow of celibacy and would not have sex with her. Thus, having passed the test of sexual purity, she then tells him to select a tile with a Greek letter from among many choices, and when he selects the correct tile (alpha), he is allowed access to four ancient scrolls, one of which is the marriage certificate of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (!). Wolter, however, has changed this into an Indiana Jones-style test of humility rather than purity, which is both an odd substitution and evidence of how loose he plays with the “facts” of his baroque and expanding pseudohistory.
 
This is especially strange since in 2024 Wolter and Ruh wrote Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail together, and it contains the whole “translation” of the Cremona Document, and Wolter makes no mention of humility in the book. 

UPDATE: Since I posted this earlier today, I have had a chance to review Wolter's appearance on The Basement ​where he made a similar claim to the one in the short. The majority of the Basement podcast interview was a recitation of the usual Freemason conspiracy theories from Wolter, including the Kensington Runestone, Zeno Map, the Newport Tower, the Book of Enoch, the Holy Bloodline, Oak Island, and the alleged origins of his favorite goddess cult in Atlantis. He also alleged that his father, who drowned, was actually assassinated by the CIA because he knew too much. Naturally, more than a million people have now watched the podcast, the biggest audience for Wolter since America Unearthed ​went off the air.

SECOND UPDATE: I got tired of listening after a few hours and missed the end where Wolter claimed to have an ancient scroll claiming that Jesus will return at 6 p.m. on June 6 of the year 2999 of the "new counting," which apparently is supposed to mean the Anno Domini system that had not yet been invented. Wolter interprets a supposed numerical cypher in the text to mean that Jesus will be cloned by evil government scientists on June 6, 2026. I have posted a full write-up of the scroll in a separate post.