Scott Wolter Tries to Prove That the Knights Templar Calculated New England Longitudes. It Did Not Go Well.

​A few weeks ago, when Curse of Oak Island introduced the modern “copies” of allegedly medieval maps owned by researcher Zena Halpern, many viewers questioned the fact that the map shown on screen seemed to show accurate lines of longitude long before a reliable method for accurately calculating longitude had been discovered. While the most parsimonious explanation is that the Halpern map is a modern fake, former television personality Scott F. Wolter has instead argued that the maps prove that the Knights Templar (whom he suspects of creating them) were able to accurately measure longitude, despite accidentally proving that he is himself unfamiliar with how longitude is measured and reported.

​In a blog post on Wednesday, Wolter said that he discovered supporting evidence after plotting the location where prominent New England fringe history sites sit and comparing their longitude. He alleges that these figures “prove” that the Templars intentionally placed the objects along the same line of longitude.
 
Here is his chart:

Location	Longitude
​1.   Newport Tower	71.19° W
​2.   In Hoc Signo Vinces Stone	71.19° W
3.   Narragansett Rune Stone	​71.24° W
​4.   Cistercian Monastery in Cumberland	71.24° W
​5.   Westford Knight and Hooked X	​71.26° W
​6.   Westford Boat Stone	​71.28° W
7.   Tyngsboro Map Stone	​71.25° W
​8.   America's Stonehenge	​71.12° W
​9.   Mystery Stone at Lake Winnipesaukee	​71.19° W
10. Old Quebec City	​71.12° W

​Wolter went on to suggest that such measurements could not be a coincidence. 

There is no way this can be a coincidence and since seven of the ten listed have been associated with medieval Templar activity in the North America there are three things this list all but proves.  First, the seven items that have been hypothesized to be related to medieval Templar's are clearly connected to each other and provides strong support they are indeed Templar artifacts.  Second, since the accuracy of the longitudinal locations are so good, the only logical conclusion is the Templar's who created them must have been able to calculate longitude.  Third, knowledge of this important meridian appears to have been known in the distant past (America's Stonehenge) and was passed on within the Cistercian/Templar orders into modern times.  Do you see it anyway else? 

​Well, yes, I see it in another way. Here are some other things that are a stone’s throw from that same line of longitude: Boston, Mass. at 71.04° W; Concord, NH at 71.32°; and Providence, R.I. at 71.25° W. Within a degree, you also find Montpelier, VT at 72.34° W, Hartford, Conn. At 72.4° W, and Martha’s Vineyard at 70.64° W. I think you start to see the problem.
 
New England is very small. The whole of the area from the New York border to Cape Cod is barely three degrees of longitude across. (We will leave most of Maine out since it does not figure into the discussion.) Anything placed between Hartford and Boston is likely to fall within half a degree of the midpoint longitude line. Given, too, that New England was home to a generation of New Englanders who desperately tried to prove that the Vikings had colonized the area, the chances are pretty strong that when they went to fabricate their evidence and traveled into the interior of the region from one of the state capitals to do so, they would end up placing most of the two dozen or so “Viking” (later “Templar”) stones “discovered” there in the 1800s somewhere in the area between 71° W and 71.5° W. It’s pretty much where the open land was in those days, where you could fabricate stones in peace.

I was a bit confused, though, about how Wolter generated his numbers, which don’t match standard maps. He claims that he got the data from Google Earth, but the values I got from the same source don’t agree. The Tower in Newport, R.I., for example is at 71.31° W, not 71.19°, while Narragansett, R.I. is at 71.45° W, not 71.19° W. (If you want to get technical, the rune stone was located for most of its life on Pojac Point, at 71.40° W.).
 
Google gives me different numbers for virtually every site when I look up their coordinates manually. This took me a few minutes to figure out. I think I found the problem. Wolter confused minutes of longitude with decimal values. Take America’s Stonehenge. It is located at 71° 12′, but at 71.21° in decimal form. Wolter has wrongly given this as 71.12°. Similarly, the Westford Knight is located at 71° 26′, but at 71.43° decimal.
 
So, if we correct the table based on the numbers Google reports for each site (or the closest standard location on the map), the distances don’t change, but the decimal shows greater variation since we are working with units of 100 rather than 60, which makes the differences clearer:

Location	Longitude
​1.   Newport Tower	​71.31° W
​2.   In Hoc Signo Vinces Stone	~71.30° W*
3.   Narragansett Rune Stone	​71.40° W
​4.   Cistercian Monastery in Cumberland	​71.40° W
​5.   Westford Knight and Hooked X	​71.43° W
​6.   Westford Boat Stone	~71.40° W*
7.   Tyngsboro Map Stone	~71.40° W**
​8.   America's Stonehenge	​71.21° W
​9.   Mystery Stone at Lake Winnipesaukee	~71.30° W*
10. Old Quebec City	​71.20° W

​* Measurements approximate.
** Measurement based on location published by David Brody.
 
The items marked with an asterisk were alleged to have been found in fields or other places from which they have been removed, and the original location of discovery is known only approximately. The items marked with a (~) were calculated from the closest town or geographical feature to the claimed site. Those without either marking are given from the exact coordinates reported by Google.
 
With the corrected numbers, we see greater variation (0.23° vs 0.14°), and it starts to look a lot more like selection from a normal distribution of random locations in central and eastern New England (and Quebec). If we tie in other sites alleged by Wolter himself and other allied authors to be part of the Sinclair/Templar conspiracy, from Dighton Rock (71.08° W) (which Wolter rejects) to the Spirit Pond Rune Stone (69.8° W), and the Leif Erikson Rune Stone of Nomans Island (70.82° W), we have still more evidence that Wolter simply selected from the data set of New England fringe history sites—already close together due to New England geography—those that were closest together.
 
When challenged to prove that these measurements were anything other than coincidence, Wolter reacted in typical fashion, accusing academics of a conspiracy to suppress the truth about heretic Templars farming Jesus-children by planting their Jesus Bloodline super-sperm among the hybrid Viking/Sinclair/Native American Freemasons in the wilds of North America. He added that Freemasons aren’t aware of their own super-special divine heritage because of the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on higher education!

In fact, most modern Freemasons don’t truly understand what is at the core of the Craft. This lack of understanding combined with the negative ideological influence of the Church with its financial influence over so many academic institutions has created an environment that, along with conservative political forces, are dead set against this historical truth coming out.