Secret Documents

Confirmation of a third order—an order behind both the Templars and the Cistercians—thrust itself upon us. At first, however, we could not take it seriously. It seemed to issue from too unreliable, too vague and nebulous a source. Until we could authenticate the veracity of this source, we could not believe its claims.

In 1956 a series of books, articles, pamphlets and other documents relating to Berenger Sauniere and the enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau began to appear in France. This material has steadily proliferated, and is now voluminous. Indeed, it has come to constitute the basis for a veritable ‘industry’. And its sheer quantity, as well as the effort and resources involved in producing and disseminating it, implicitly attest to something of immense but as yet unexplained import.

Not surprisingly, the affair has served to whet the appetites of numerous independent researchers like ourselves, whose works have added to the corpus of material available. The original material, however, seems to have issued from a single specific source. Someone clearly has a vested interest in ‘promoting’ Rennes-le-Chateau, in drawing public attention to the story, in generating publicity and further investigation. Whatever else it might be, this vested interest does not appear to be financial. On the contrary, it would appear to be more in the order of propaganda—propaganda which establishes credibility for something. And whoever the individuals responsible for this propaganda may be, they have endeavoured to focus spotlights on certain issues while keeping themselves scrupulously in the shadows.

Since 1956 a quantity of relevant material has been deliberately and systematically ’leaked’, in a piecemeal fashion, fragment by fragment. Most of these fragments purport to issue, implicitly or explicitly, from some ‘privileged’ or “inside” source. Most contain additional information, which supplements what was known before and thus contributes to the overall jigsaw. Neither the import nor the meaning of the overall jigsaw has yet been made clear, however. Instead, every new snippet of information has done more to intensify than to dispel the mystery. The result has been an ever-proliferating network of seductive allusions, provocative hints, suggestive cross-references and connections. In confronting the welter of data now available, the reader may well feel he is being toyed with, or being ingeniously and skilfully led from conclusion to conclusion by successive carrots dangled before his nose. And underlying it all is the constant, pervasive intimation of a secret—a secret of monumental and explosive proportions.

The material disseminated since 1956 has taken a number of forms. Some of it has appeared in popular, even best-selling books, more or less sensational, more or less cryptically teasing. Thus, for example, Gerard de Sede has produced a sequence of works on such apparently divergent topics as the Cathars, the Templars, the Merovingian dynasty, the Rose-Croix, Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau. In these works, M. de Sede is often arch, coy, deliberately mystifying and coquettishly evasive. His tone implies constantly that he knows more than he is saying—perhaps a device for concealing that he does not know as much as he pretends. But his books contain enough verifiable details to forge a link between their respective themes. Whatever else one may think of M. de Sede, he effectively establishes that the diverse subjects to which he addresses himself somehow overlap and are interconnected.

On the other hand, we could not but suspect that M. de Sede’s work drew heavily on information provided by an informant—and indeed, M. de Sede more or less acknowledges as much himself. Quite by accident, we learned who this informant was. In 1971, when we embarked on our first BBC film on Rennes-le-Chateau, we wrote to M. de Sede’s Paris publisher for certain visual material. The photographs we requested were accordingly posted to us. Each of them, on the back, was stamped “Plantard”. At that time the name meant little enough to us. But the appendix to one of M. de Sede’s books consisted of an interview with one Pierre Plantard. And we subsequently obtained evidence that Pierre Plantard had been involved with certain of M. de Sede’s works. Eventually Pierre Plantard began to emerge as one of the dominant figures in our investigation.

The information disseminated since 1956 has not always been contained in as popular and accessible a form as M. de Sede’s. Some of it has appeared in weighty, daunting, even pedantic tomes, diametrically opposed to M. de Sede’s journalistic approach. One such work was produced by Rene Descadeillas, former Director of the Municipal Library of Carcassonne. M. Descadeillas’s book is strenuously anti-sensational. Devoted to the history of Rennes-le-Chateau and its environs, it contains a plethora of social and economic minutiae—for example, the births, deaths, marriages, finances, taxes and public works between the years 1730 and 1820. On the whole, it could not possibly differ more from the mass-market books of M. de Sede, which M. Descadeillas elsewhere subjects to scathing criticism.

In addition to published books, including some which have been published privately, there have been a number of articles in newspapers and magazines. There have been interviews with various individuals claiming to be conversant with one or another facet of the mystery. But the most interesting and important information has not, for the most part, appeared in book form. Most of it has surfaced elsewhere—in documents and pamphlets not intended for general circulation. Many of these documents and pamphlets have been deposited, in limited, privately printed editions, at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. They seem to have been produced very cheaply. Some, in fact, are mere typewritten pages, photo offset and reproduced on an office duplicator.

Even more than the marketed works, this body of ephemera seems to have issued from the same source. By means of cryptic asides and footnotes pertaining to Sauniere, Rennes-le-Chateau, Poussin, the Merovingian dynasty and other themes, each piece of it complements, enlarges on and confirms the others. In most cases the ephemera is of uncertain authorship, appearing under a variety of transparent, even ‘cute’ pseudonyms—Madeleine Blancassal, for example, Nicolas Beaucean, Jean Delaude and Antoine L’Ermite.

“Madeleine”, of course, refers to Marie-Madeleine, the Magdalene, to whom the church at Rennes-le-Chateau is dedicated and to whom Sauniere consecrated his tower, the Tour Magdala. “Blancassal” is formed from the names of two small rivers that converge near the village of Rennes-les-Bains—the Blanque and the Sals. “Beaucean” is a variation of “Beauseant”, the official battle-cry and battle-standard of the Knights Templar. “Jean Delaude” is “Jean de l’Aude” or “John of the Aude”, the department in which Rennes-le-Chateau is situated. And “Antoine L’Ermite” is Saint Anthony the Hermit, whose statue adorns the church at Rennes-le-Chateau and whose feast day is January 17th—the date on Marie de Blanchefort’s tombstone and the date on which Sauniere suffered his fatal stroke.

The work ascribed to Madeleine Blancassal is entitled Les Descendants merovingiens et l’enigme du Razes wisigoth (“The Merovingian Descendants and the Enigma of the Visigoth Razes”)—Razes being the old name for Sauniere’s region. According to its title page, this work was originally published in German and translated into French by Walter Celse-Nazaire—another pseudonym compounded from Saints Celse and Nazaire, to whom the church at Rennes-les-Bains is dedicated. And according to the title page, the publisher of the work was the Grande Loge Alpina, the supreme Masonic lodge of Switzerland—the Swiss equivalent of Grand Lodge in Britain or Grand Orient in France. There is no indication as to why a modern Masonic lodge should display such interest in the mystery surrounding an obscure nineteenth-century French priest and the history of his parish a millennium and a half ago. One of our colleagues and an independent researcher both questioned Alpina officials. They disclaimed all knowledge not only of the work’s publication, but also of its existence. Yet an independent researcher claims personally to have seen the work on the shelves of Alpina’s library. And subsequently we discovered that the Alpina imprint appeared on two other pamphlets as well.

Of all the privately published documents deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale, the most important is a compilation of papers entitled collectively Dossiers secrets (“Secret Dossiers”). Catalogued under number Im’ 249, this compilation is now on microfiche. Until recently, however, it comprised a thin, nondescript volume, a species of folder with stiff covers which contained a loose assemblage of ostensibly unrelated items—news clippings, letters pasted to backing-sheets, pamphlets, numerous genealogical trees and the odd printed page apparently extracted from the body of some other work. Periodically some of the individual pages would be removed. At different times other pages would be freshly inserted. On certain pages additions and corrections would sometimes be made in a minuscule longhand. At a later date, these pages would be replaced by new ones, printed and incorporating all previous emendations.

The bulk of the Dossiers, which consists of genealogical trees, is ascribed to one Henri Lobineau, whose name appears on the title page. Two additional items in the folder declare that Henri Lobineau is yet another pseudonym—derived perhaps from a street, the Rue Lobineau, which runs outside Saint Sulpice in Paris—and that the genealogies are actually the work of a man named Leo Schidlof, an Austrian historian and antiquarian who purportedly lived in Switzerland and died in 1966. On the basis of this information we undertook to learn what we could about Leo Schidlof.

In 1978 we managed to locate Leo Schidlof’s daughter, who was living in England. Her father, she said, was indeed Austrian. He was not a genealogist, historian or antiquarian, however, but an expert and dealer in miniatures, who had written two works on the subject. In 1948 he had settled in London, where he lived until his death in Vienna in 1966—the year and place specified in the Dossiers secrets. Miss Schidlof vehemently maintained that her father had never had any interest in genealogies, the Merovingian dynasty, or mysterious goings-on in the south of France. And yet, she continued, certain people obviously believed he had. During the 1960s, for example, he had received numerous letters and telephone calls from unidentified individuals in both Europe and the United States, who wished to meet with him and discuss matters of which he had no knowledge whatever. On his death in 1966 there was another barrage of messages, most of them inquiring about his papers.

Whatever the affair in which Miss Schidlof’s father had become unwittingly embroiled, it seemed to have struck a sensitive chord with the American government. In 1946—a decade before the Dossiers secrets are said to have been compiled—Leo Schidlof applied for a visa to enter the United States. The application was refused, on grounds of suspected espionage or some other form of clandestine activity. Eventually the matter seems to have been sorted out, the visa issued and Leo Schidlof was admitted to the States. It may all have been a typical bureaucratic mix-up. But Miss Schidlof seemed to suspect that it was somehow connected with the arcane preoccupations so perplexingly ascribed to her father.

Miss Schidlof’s story gave us pause. The refusal of an American visa might well have been more than coincidental, for there were, among the papers in the Dossiers secrets, references that linked the name Leo Schidlof with some sort of international espionage. In the meantime, however, a new pamphlet had appeared in Paris which, during the months that followed, was confirmed by other sources. According to this pamphlet the elusive Henri Lobineau was not Leo Schidlof after all, but a French aristocrat of distinguished lineage, Comte Henri de Lenoncourt.

The question of Lobineau’s real identity was not the only enigma associated with the Dossiers secrets. There was also an item which referred to “Leo Schidlof’s leather briefcase”. This briefcase supposedly contained a number of secret papers relating to Rennes-le-Chateau between 1600 and 1800. Shortly after Schidlof’s death, the briefcase was said to have passed into the hands of a courier, a certain Fakhar ul Islam who, in February 1967, was to rendezvous in East Germany with an ‘agent delegated by Geneva’ and entrust it to him. Before the transaction could be effected, however, Fakhar ul Islam was reportedly expelled from East Germany and returned to Paris “to await further orders”. On February 20th, 1967, his body was found on the railway tracks at Melun, having been hurled from the Paris-Geneva express. The briefcase had supposedly vanished.

We set out to check this lurid story as far as we could. A series of articles in French newspapers of February 21st did confirm most of it. A decapitated body had indeed been found on the tracks at Melun. It was identified as that of a young Pakistani named Fakhar ul Islam. For reasons that remained obscure, the dead man had been expelled from East Germany and was travelling from Paris to Geneva—engaged, it appeared, in some form of espionage. According to the newspaper reports, the authorities suspected foul play, and the affair was being investigated by the DST (Directory of Territorial Surveillance, or Counter-Espionage).

On the other hand, the newspapers made no mention of Leo Schidlof, a leather briefcase or anything else that might connect the occurrence with the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. As a result, we found ourselves confronted with a number of questions. On the one hand, it was possible that Fakhar ul Islam’s death was linked with Rennes-le-Chateau—that the item in the Dossiers secrets in fact drew upon “inside information” inaccessible to the newspapers. On the other hand the item in the Dossiers secrets might have been deliberate and spurious mystification. One need only find any unexplained or suspicious death and ascribe it, after the fact, to one’s own hobby-horse. But if this were indeed the case, what was the purpose of the exercise? Why should someone deliberately try to create an atmosphere of sinister intrigue around Rennes-le-Chateau? What might be gained by the creation of such an atmosphere? And who might gain from it?

These questions perplexed us all the more because Fakhar ul Islam’s death was not, apparently, an isolated occurrence. Less than a month later another privately printed work was deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale. It was called Le Serpent rouge (“The Red Serpent”) and dated, symbolically and significantly enough, January 17th. Its title page ascribed it to three authors—Pierre Feugere, Louis Saint-Maxent and Gaston de Koker.

Le Serpent rouge is a singular work. It contains one Merovingian genealogy and two maps of France in Merovingian times, along with a cursory commentary. It also contains a ground plan of Saint Sulpice in Paris, which delineates the chapels of the church’s various saints. But the bulk of the text consists of thirteen short prose poems of impressive literary quality—many of them reminiscent of the work of and each corresponds to a sign of the Zodiac—a zodiac of thirteen signs, with the thirteenth, Ophiuchus or the Serpent Holder, inserted between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Narrated in the first person, the thirteen prose poems are a type of symbolic or allegorical pilgrimage, commencing with Aquarius and ending with Capricorn—which, as the text explicitly states, presides over January 17th. In the otherwise cryptic text there are familiar references—to the Blanchefort family, to the decorations in the church at Rennes-le-Chateau, to some of Sauniere’s inscriptions there, to Poussin and the painting of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”, to the motto on the tomb, “Et in Arcadia Ego”. At one point, there is mention of a red snake, “cited in the parchments”, uncoiling across the centuries—an explicit allusion, it would seem, to a bloodline or a lineage. And for the astrological sign of Leo, there is an enigmatic paragraph worth quoting in its entirety:

From she whom I desire to liberate, there wafts towards me the fragrance of the perfume which impregnates the Sepulchre. Formerly, some named her: Isis, queen of all sources benevolent. COME UNTO ME ALL YE WHO SUFFER AND ARE AFFLICTED, AND I SHALL GIVE YE REST. To others, she is MAGDALENE, of the celebrated vase filled with healing balm. The initiated know her true name: NOTRE DAME DES CROSS.

The implications of this paragraph are extremely interesting. Isis, of course, is the Egyptian Mother Goddess, patroness of mysteries—the “White Queen” in her benevolent aspects, the “Black Queen” in her malevolent ones. Numerous writers, on mythology, anthropology, psychology, theology, have traced the cult of the Mother Goddess from pagan times to the Christian epoch. And according to these writers she is said to have survived under Christianity in the guise of the Virgin Mary—the “Queen of Heaven”, as Saint Bernard called her, a designation applied in the Old Testament to the Mother Goddess Astarte, the Phoenician equivalent of Isis. But according to the text in Le Serpent rouge, the Mother Goddess of Christianity would not appear to be the Virgin. On the contrary, she would appear to be the Magdalene—to whom the church at Rennes-le-Chateau is dedicated and to whom Sauniere consecrated his tower. Moreover, the text would seem to imply that “Notre Dame” does not apply to the Virgin either. That resonant title conferred on all the great cathedrals of France would also seem to refer to the Magdalene. But why should the Magdalene be revered as “Our Lady” and, still more, as a Mother Goddess? Maternity is the last thing generally associated with the Magdalene. In popular Christian tradition she is a prostitute who finds redemption by apprenticing herself to Jesus. And she figures most noticeably in the Fourth Gospel, where she is the first person to behold Jesus after the Resurrection. In consequence she is extolled as a saint, especially in France where, according to medieval legends, she is said to have brought the Holy Grail. And indeed the ‘vase filled with healing balm’ might well be intended to suggest the Grail. But to enshrine the Magdalene in the place usually reserved for the Virgin would seem, at very least, to be heretical.

Whatever their point, the authors of Le Serpent rouge—or, rather, the alleged authors—met with a fate as gruesome as that of Fakhar ul Islam. On March 6th, 1967, Louis Saint-Maxent and Gaston de Koker were found hanged. And the following day, March 7th, Pierre Feugere was found hanged as well.

One might immediately assume, of course, that these deaths were in some way connected with the composition and public release of Le Serpent rouge. As in the case of Fakhar ul Islam, however, we could not discount an alternative explanation. If one wished to engender an aura of sinister mystery, it would be easy enough to do. One need only comb the newspapers until one found a suspicious death or, in this instance, three suspicious deaths. After the fact, one might then append the names of the deceased to a pamphlet of one’s own concoction and deposit that pamphlet in the Bibliotheque Nationale with an earlier date (January 17th) on the title page. It would be virtually impossible to expose such a hoax, which would certainly produce the desired intimation of foul play. But why perpetrate such a hoax at all? Why should someone want to invoke an aura of violence, murder and intrigue? Such a ploy would hardly deter investigators. On the contrary, it would only further attract them.

If, on the other hand, we were not dealing with a hoax, there were still a number of baffling questions. Were we to believe, for example, that the three hanged men were suicides or victims of murder? Suicide, in the circumstances, would seem to make little sense. And murder would not seem to make much more. One could understand three people being dispatched lest they divulge certain explosive information. But in this case the information had already been divulged, already deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Could the murders—if that was what they were—have been a form of punishment, of retribution? Or perhaps a means of precluding any subsequent indiscretions? Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. If one is angered by the disclosure of certain information, or if one wishes to forestall additional disclosures, one does not attract attention to the matter by committing a trio of lurid and sensational murders—unless one is reasonably confident that there will be no very assiduous inquiry.

Our own adventures in the course of our investigation were mercifully less dramatic, but equally mystifying. In our research, for example, we had encountered repeated references to a work by one Antoine L’Ermite entitled Un Tresor merovingien a Rennes-le-Chateau (“A Merovingian Treasure at Rennes-le-Chateau”). We endeavoured to locate this work and quickly found it listed in the Bibliotheque Nationale catalogue; but it proved inordinately difficult to obtain. Every day, for a week, we went to the library and filled out the requisite fiche requesting the work. On each occasion the fiche was returned marked “communique”—indicating that the work was being used by someone else. In itself this was not necessarily unusual. After a fortnight, however, it began to become so—and exasperating as well, for we could not remain in Paris much longer. We sought the assistance of a librarian. He told us the book would be ‘communique’ for three months—an extremely unusual situation—and that we could not order it in advance of its return.

In England not long afterwards a friend of ours announced that she was going to Paris for a holiday. We accordingly asked her to try to obtain the elusive work of Antoine L’Ermite and at least make a note of what it contained. At the Bibliotheque Nationale, she requested the book. Her fiche was not even returned. The next day she tried again, and with the same result.

When we were next in Paris, some four months later, we made another attempt. Our fiche was again returned marked “communique”. At this point, we began to feel the game had been somewhat overplayed and began to play one of our own. We made our way down the catalogue room, adjacent to the ‘stacks’ which are, of course, inaccessible to the public. Finding an elderly and kindly looking library assistant, we assumed the role of bumbling English tourists with Neanderthal command of French. Asking his help, we explained that we were seeking a particular work but were unable to obtain it, no doubt because of our imperfect understanding of the library’s procedures.

The genial old gentleman agreed to help. We gave him the work’s catalogue number and he disappeared into the “stacks”. When he emerged, he apologised, saying there was nothing he could do—the book had been stolen. What was more, he added, a compatriot of ours was apparently responsible for the theft—an Englishwoman. After some badgering, he consented to give us her name. It was that of our friend!

On returning to England again, we sought the assistance of the library service in London, and they agreed to look into the bizarre affair. On our behalf, the National Central Library wrote to the Bibliotheque Nationale requesting an explanation for what appeared to be deliberate obstruction of legitimate research. No explanation was forthcoming. Shortly thereafter, however, a Xerox copy of Antoine L’Ermite’s work was at last dispatched to us—along with emphatic instructions that it be returned immediately. This in itself was extremely singular, for libraries do not generally request return of Xerox copies. Such copies are usually deemed mere waste paper and disposed of accordingly.

The work, when it was finally in our hands, proved distinctly disappointing—hardly worth the complicated business of obtaining it. Like Madeleine Blancassal’s work, it bore the imprint of the Swiss Grande Loge Alpina. But it said nothing in any way new. Very briefly, it recapitulated the history of the Comte of Razes, of Rennes-le-Chateau and Berenger Sauniere. In short, it rehashed all the details with which we had long been familiar. There seemed to be no imaginable reason why anyone should have been using it, and keeping it “communique”, for a solid week. Nor did there seem any imaginable reason for withholding it from us. But most puzzling of all, the work itself was not original. With the exception of a few words altered here and there, it was a verbatim text, reset and reprinted, of a chapter in a popular paperback—a facile best-seller, available at news-stands for a few francs, on lost treasures throughout the world. Either Antoine L’Ermite had shamelessly plagiarised the published book, or the published book had plagiarised Antoine L’Ermite.

Such occurrences are typical of the mystification that has attended the material which, since 1956, has been appearing fragment by fragment in France. Other researchers have encountered similar enigmas. Ostensibly plausible names have proved to be pseudonyms. Addresses, including addresses of publishing houses and organisations, have proved not to exist. References have been cited to books which no one, to our knowledge, has ever seen. Documents have disappeared, been altered, or inexplicably mis-catalogued in the Bibliotheque Nationale. At times one is tempted to suspect a practical joke. If so, however, it is a practical joke on an enormous scale, involving an impressive array of resources—financial and otherwise. And whoever might be perpetrating such a joke would seem to be taking it very seriously indeed.

In the meantime new material has continued to appear, with the familiar themes recurring like leitmotifs—Sauniere, Rennes-le-Chateau, Poussin, “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”, the Knights Templar, Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. Allusions to viticulture—the grafting of vines—figure prominently, presumably in some allegorical sense. At the same time, more and more information has been added. The identification of Henri Lobineau as the count of Lenoncourt is one example. Another is an increasing but unexplained insistence on the significance of the Magdalene. And two other locations have been stressed repeatedly, assuming a status now apparently commensurate with Rennes-le-Chateau. One of these is Gisors, a fortress in Normandy which was of vital strategic and political importance at the peak of the Crusades. The other is Stenay, once called Satanicum, on the fringe of the Ardennes—the old capital of the Merovingian dynasty, near which Dagobert II was assassinated in 679.

The corpus of material now available cannot be adequately reviewed or discussed in these pages. It is too dense, too confusing, too disconnected, most of all too copious. But from this ever-proliferating welter of information, certain key points emerge which constitute a foundation for further research. They are presented as indisputable historical fact, and can be summarised as follows:

1. There was a secret order behind the Knights Templar, which created the Templars as its military and administrative arm. This order, which has functioned under a variety of names, is most frequently known as the Prieure de Sion (“Priory of Sion”).

2. The Prieure de Sion has been directed by a sequence of Grand Masters whose names are among the most illustrious in Western history and culture.

3. Although the Knights Templar were destroyed and dissolved between 1307 and 1314, the Prieure de Sion remained unscathed. Although itself periodically torn by internecine and factional strife, it has continued to function through the centuries. Acting in the shadows, behind the scenes, it has orchestrated certain of the critical events in Western history.

4. The Prieure de Sion exists today and is still operative. It is influential and plays a role in high-level international affairs, as well as in the domestic affairs of certain European countries. To some significant extent it is responsible for the body of information disseminated since 1956.

5. The avowed and declared objective of the Prieure de Sion is the restoration of the Merovingian dynasty and bloodline to the throne—not only of France, but to the thrones of other European nations as well.

6. The restoration of the Merovingian dynasty is sanctioned and justifiable, both legally and morally. Although deposed in the eighth century, the Merovingian bloodline did not become extinct. On the contrary it perpetuated itself in a direct line from Dagobert II and his son, Sigisbert IV. By dint of dynastic alliances and intermarriages, this line came to include Godfroi de Bouillon, who captured Jerusalem in 1099, and various other noble and royal families, past and present—Blanchefort, Gisors, Saint Clair (Sinclair in England), Montesquieu, Montpezat, Poher, Luisignan, Plantard and Habsburg-Lorraine. At present, the Merovingian bloodline enjoys a legitimate claim to its rightful heritage.

Here, in the so-called Prieure de Sion, was a possible explanation for the reference to “Sion” in the parchments found by Berenger Sauniere. Here, too, was an explanation for the curious signature, “P.S.” which appeared on one of those parchments, and on the tombstone of Marie de Blanchefort.

Nevertheless, we were extremely sceptical, like most people, about ‘conspiracy theories of history’; and most of the above assertions struck us as irrelevant, improbable and/or absurd. But the fact remained that certain people were promulgating them, and doing so quite seriously; quite seriously and, there was reason to believe, from positions of considerable power. And whatever the truth of the assertions, they were clearly connected in some way with the mystery surrounding Sauniere and Rennes-le-Chateau.

We, therefore, embarked on a systematic examination of what we had begun to call, ironically, the “Prieure documents”, and of the assertions they contained. We endeavoured to subject these assertions to careful critical scrutiny and determine whether they could be in any way substantiated. We did so with a cynical, almost derisory scepticism, fully convinced the outlandish claims would wither under even cursory investigation. Although we could not know it at the time, we were to be greatly surprised.