Wacky Claims from Reader Mail

Some weird ideas cross my desk every day, and I don’t usually subject my readers to too many of them. But sometimes I just can’t help but share some of the truly nutty things people believe. Today we’ll have a Reader Mailbag edition of the blog. Let’s start with an email I received last week from a very concerned fellow who genuinely believed he made a massively important discovery about recent U.S. history.

White House Secrets
This correspondent, whom I will not name publicly, informed me that he recalled reading a “humorous” newspaper article in the 1980s that stated that a military veteran touring the White House in the Nixon years stumbled by accident into a high-level briefing about outer space thanks to an unlocked door. The government forcibly re-enlisted the man to keep him from talking. My correspondent could not quite remember any of the details, but he has visited the Library of Congress, the Associated Press, and the Nixon Presidential Library in hopes of finding this article. He failed to find any trace of it, suggesting to him a conspiracy of silence.

Nevertheless, at thirty years’ remove he is confident enough about his memory of this “humorous” story to research what the story could possibly have referred to. He believes that no one enters the White House without being already privy to our nation’s most important terrestrial secrets; therefore, he must have stumbled into a meeting about non-terrestrial or supernatural material. (But of course.) Further, because he wasn’t kicked out of the meeting, it must have been so fascinating as to render the President and his officials speechless. (The conspiracy, of course, somehow failed to stop the intruder from telling his story to a reporter.) 

Therefore, the concludes that the officials were examining photographs of Santa Claus examining the golden disc sent into outer space on the Voyager space probe. That’s just logic, right? (In reality, the golden disc launched in 1977, during the Carter administration.)

My correspondent asked me for recommendations of appropriate experts to whom he could submit a paper he had written on the subject (a copy of which, sadly, I now have). I sent him to Giorgio Tsoukalos, care of Prometheus Entertainment.

Sanskrit Fundamentalism
I also received some negative feedback from ethnocentric Indians who would like to see the subcontinent take its place as the center of world history. According to multiple complaints, I have failed to recognize that Sanskrit is so regular and perfect a language that it must have been artificially created by extraterrestrials or Atlanteans at the dawn of time in order to encode high level information for all of time. All of these messages have come from India, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is also the source of daily blog comment spam directing my readers to college cheating websites and spyware websites. As a matter of fact, Sanskrit has plenty of irregular verbs and other irregular constructions that a “perfect” language would not possess. It is one branch of the Indo-European language family, but Indian supremacists want to adopt the long-outdated eighteenth century belief that it is the oldest Indo-European tongue and therefore the progenitor of all European languages.

Sinclair Family Values
I pointed out in my newsletter this past weekend a blog post by a genealogy researcher discussing the ongoing feud within the world of the Sinclair family and its admirers, with various advocates arguing for which people with the Sinclair name are a part of the “true” Sinclair bloodline and who are just pretenders. Linking to that article opened a flood gate of Sinclair mail. I had no idea how many Sinclairs there are, nor how many of them are deeply invested in tracing their royal/divine genealogy back to Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Jesus Christ. Fortunately, most of the people who wrote to me—many of whom asked me to avoid mentioning their names because they have been in disputes with Steve St. Clair over his DNA line—do not believe that the Sinclair family has anything to do with a Holy Bloodline, a Templar discovery of America, or gold-eating aliens. (Laurence Gardner tied the Holy Bloodline to gold-eating Anunnaki, so that made the Sinclairs alien step-children by default.)

Nevertheless, I have never encountered so many people who devote so much energy to analyzing their family tree in search of minor nobility; it became quite clear that many “rank and file” Sinclairs are only interested in their DNA in the hopes of connecting themselves to Henry Sinclair’s alleged discovery (and/or conquest) of America and to Jesus.

Nor have I read through so much very boring material on the DNA markers of various Sinclair claimants—all of which I find somewhat funny since in human history, genetics has played only a partial role in defining family. We are today more absolute than medieval or early modern people would have been in deciding who counts as family. The Romans would have laughed at the idea that adopted children aren’t “true” family, a hurtful concept that lingers even today. Ironically, all it would take—even if a Jesus Bloodline really existed—was a single cheating wife around 300 or 400 CE and the Sinclairs wouldn’t have any Jesus genes at all!

I think the most telling anecdote is one sent to me via email in which a Sinclair reported that after America Unearthed broadcasted its Sinclair conspiracy nonsense, people started stopping him whenever they heard his name to ask him about his relationship to Jesus and to Prince Henry. No reports yet of the public bowing down in worship or offering tributes, though.