Scott Wolter Embraces Atlantis, Claims Newly Translated Papers Document "Templar" Construction of the Newport Tower

Last week, former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio show.  The first half of the discussion was mainly recaps of Wolter’s usual spiel about the Kensington Rune Stone and Templars, but I was particularly taken by Wolter’s new line that he is moving away from hard science after claiming to discover that there is an “intuitive spiritual aspect” to ancient history that that defies the laws of science. Wolter said that he was not comfortable with this discovery at first but has come to accept and embrace a supernatural aspect to history. Things got weirder and worse from there.

Later, Wolter said he believes in a “highly intelligent culture” known as Atlantis that existed 12,500 years ago and had a “worldwide, highly advanced culture” with a global reach and stood at the root of all world civilizations. His discussion is straight out of Graham Hancock, whom he idolizes and name-checks, but it is still jarring to hear Wolter endorsing Atlantis. He claims to support the views of Hancock, Randall Carlson, and Robert Schoch, all of whom have made extreme claims about a catastrophic end to the Ice Age remembered as Noah’s Flood. “It makes perfect sense to me,” Wolter said.
 
A long section of the interview recaps Wolter’s fantasies about the fictitious “Cremona Document” and other hoax texts and maps he has spent the past seven years imagining were medieval records. Wolter claims to have decoded secret information about hidden treasure “of the Poor Knights of Christ,” in his translation of one of the hoax texts, but he won’t share it until he secures a distribution deal for whatever media product he plans to push next now that America Unearthed has been canceled again. Wolter says he hopes for a new series that will do nothing but hunt Templar treasures in America.
 
He again claims that he is reviewing an English translation of a nineteenth century French translation of a “Theban” text, referring to the Renaissance cypher that he mistakenly believes is a prehistoric language. He also claims to have only just received the translation a few days prior to the interview, which I guess proves that neither he nor his colleagues know French.
 
Wolter claims that one of the documents, nominally dated to 1368, describes the Newport Tower as an observatory which had alignments encoded in it according to day and night observations of the sky. The text on the document allegedly says “Henri [i.e. Henry Sinclair] remains here to oversee construction.” As should be obvious to most readers, this text and accompanying map are almost certainly hoaxes—there is no medieval original, only hand-drawn fake French “copies”—and there is no evidence of Henry Sinclair being absent from Europe for years around 1368 that would support such a claim. Henry was 23 at the time and not yet the Earl of Orkney.
 
Wolter became angry imagining how skeptics like me would take the news that Henry was building the Newport Tower in 1368: “If you don’t like it, shut your mouth. I’ve dealt with you for twenty years and you have no results. […] I’m sorry I’m getting pissed off.” He added that the modern French “copies” of supposed medieval originals prove that Wolter’s fantasy of Henry Sinclair in America is “a done deal, baby.” He promised a new book to share further revelations from the documents, which are suspicious in how closely they track dubious claims about Henry Sinclair that were first proposed only after the 1960s. Wolter will likely have a little difficulty trying to match the claims on this map with Diana Muir’s hoax Henry Sinclair journals, which he also accepts as authentic, since those journals make Henry leave America in the summer of 1368 to return to Scotland. The timeline is rather tight, as though the texts were created by people who didn’t quite think things out all the way.
 
The dating, in case you care, is taken over from Frederic Pohl’s various works on Henry Sinclair, which were based on wild misinterpretations of nineteenth century literature. The various hoax texts need not be the work of one hoaxer so long as they were all working from Pohl’s texts.
 
Wolter stated that Native Americans and First Peoples are planning to endorse Wolter’s claims. He became angry doubters of his claims, saying “all those skeptics, all those deniers, and all those haters can try to attack this, but good luck attacking the indigenous people when they speak up and say this really happened.” I hate to say this, but oral history is not a reliable guide in this case. As I have pointed out in the past, some oral traditions preserve accurate information from the Contact period, but modern keepers of the oral tradition, influenced by cable TV, impose a false interpretation on it. For example, the Mi’kmaq preserve legends of white men wearing white robes with red crosses. These stories appear in the historical record prior to Scott Wolter and therefore can be judged authentic. Today, Wolter’s sources claim these were Knights Templar, but contemporary French accounts from the 1600s show that the stories almost certainly refer to the first French clerics who visited the Mi’kmaq and wore exactly those robes. The stories, therefore, need not be false; they need only be misunderstood. Here, the corrupting influence of decades of pseudohistory in books and on TV transformed contemporary understanding of traditional oral histories, whose new interpretations get read back as accurate reflections of the past.