The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

everywhere from Alabama to Zambia, which makes for great news items in sensational magazines requiring increased circulation figures. Then someone called Sivle Nora (another anagram) released a record. Then fans spotted that his middle name was spelled on his gravestone as “Aaron”, rather than “Aron”, which was taken as another clue that he was alive. In fact, the middle name given on his birth certificate is “Aaron”; the “Aron” spelling seems to have been Elvis’s own error.

Alternate theories are:

42-year-old Elvis staged his death so he could take his work as a “Federal Agent at Large” (no, really: Richard M. Nixon accorded him this status) undercover;

he was “whacked” by the Mob because his pa, Vernon Presley, bodged some arcane deal over a jet with on-the-lam financier Robert Vesco; he was a victim of Alien Abduction.

His autopsy report is sometimes held up as a dodgy dossier. Shelby County Medical Examiner Dr Jerry Francisco gave the cause of Presley’s death as “cardiac arrhythmia” (irregular heartbeat), which was not unreasonable in view of the fact that Presley was grossly overweight and suffering hypertension, but made no mention of the cocktail of (legal) drugs known to be coursing through Presley’s bloodstream at the time of his death. No matter how hard conspiracy theorists try to make this omission suspicious, it isn’t: Francisco has admitted that he deliberately left out mention of drugs because it was a possibility Elvis had overdosed, or had taken illegal drugs (a definite), and he, Francisco, did not want to upset the dead singer’s friends, family and fans.

Ironically, Elvis fans inadvertently add to the Elvis Lives hysteria by dressing like him. Hence most of the many sightings of “the King”.

Elvis lives: ALERT LEVEL 0

Further Reading

Gail Brewer-Giorgio, Is Elvis Alive? 1988

Priory of Sion

Rennes-le-Chateau is a picture-postcard medieval town atop a hill in Languedoc, southern France—the sort of place where old men should sip pastis between rounds of petanque in the village square. Instead, the cobbled streets of Rennes-le-Chateau are chock-a-block with 100,000 visitors a year and you can hardly swing an arm for petanque.

Why the mass pilgrimage? Occultists head for the village because it’s meant to have energy from ley lines; some UFO buffs regard it as a centre of alien-spaceship activity; but most of the pilgrims go armed with a copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln or The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Rennes-le-Chateau is ostensibly where the 2,000- year-old proof that Christ survived the crucifixion was found, a secret held long and close by the French society known as the Prieure de Sion—the Priory of Sion.

The tale of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Priory of Sion begins in 1885 when the Catholic Church dispatched 33-year-old Berenger Sauniere to the village to serve as its priest. While renovating the Church of Mary Magadelene, Sauniere discovered in a hollow Visigothic pillar some parchment documents covered with codes. When he took the documents to his bishop in Carcasonne, the latter forwarded them to codebreaking priests in Paris, who translated one cipher as: TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD

In Rennes-le-Chateau, meanwhile, Sauniere continued his restoration of the church, but with decorations unusual in the Catholic gallery of images. There was an image of the demon Asmodeus, a wall relief depicting Jesus on a hill at the base of which was a sack of money, and a picture of Jesus apparently being carried out of a tomb. Having revamped the church, Sauniere then forked out a small fortune for improvements in the village. He also began collecting rare and expensive antiques. Tongues wagged as to how he’d amassed his wealth. After his death in 1917, Sauniere’s housekeeper mentioned that he’d possessed a secret that made him rich and powerful.

Most thought that his secret must be a stash of buried treasure, but the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed Sauniere had discovered some form of hidden knowledge. With the help of French aristocrat Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, they uncovered secret dossiers in Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale that contained references to an ancient society called Prieure de Sion, whose members over the years had included Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Jean Cocteau. Checking with the French authorities, the authors found the Priory of Sion was still extant, and that the group’s secretary-general was none other than Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. On the basis of the Bibliotheque Nationale documents and Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965), Lincoln and his co-authors posited that Sauniere had found the Holy Grail but that, astonishingly, the Grail was not the chalice in which Christ’s blood had been caught at the crucifixion but his bloodline.

Their reasoning was elaborate but went like this:

According to the Cathar myths of Languedoc and other oral sources, Christ had two children by Mary Magdalene and these children fled from the Holy Land to France, where they married into the Frankish royal family to found the fabled Merovingian Dynasty.

In medieval texts the Grail appeared as “Sangraal”, which Baigent and his colleagues translated as “sang real”, meaning “royal blood”—the royal blood of Christ’s line. Ipso facto, the descendants of Christ still walked the face of the earth (well, France at least).

It had been the job of the Knights Templar and their inner circle, the Priory of Sion, to preserve the secret of Christ’s bloodline from the Catholic Church. It was the paperwork to this secret, complete with genealogies, that Sauniere had discovered in the hollow pillar in Rennes-le-Chateau’s parish church.

Christ’s children. The Holy Grail. Secret societies… you couldn’t make it all up.

Could you?

Rewind to Rennes-le-Chateau in the 1950s, when the village was a quintessential quiet French hamlet. Too quiet for Noel Corbu, owner of a local restaurant, who decided to drum up business by spreading a rumour that Sauniere had found treasure in his church and reburied it somewhere in the hamlet. After a newspaper published the rumour, hundreds descended on Rennes-le-Chateau, many armed with spades. Among the visitors was Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, a minor aristocrat who had delusions of regal grandeur and concocted a hoax which involved planting fabricated documents in the Bibliotheque Nationale which indicated him as the rightful king of France. The documents also mentioned the Priory of Sion organization, supposedly founded in the 11th century but in fact set up by Saint-Clair in 1956. To give his story credence, Saint-Clair persuaded a friend, Gerard de Sede, to write a history of the Priory of Sion. This was published in 1967 as L’Or de Rennes and presented a number of (forged) medieval documents allegedly discovered by Sauniere in the late 19th century. One avid reader of L’Or de Rennes was British science fiction writer Henry Lincoln, who declared that he could find in the documents hidden codes, including one which translated as TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD. Lincoln parlayed his “discoveries” into a BBC2 documentary and then co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail with Baigent and Leigh. Holy Blood, Holy Grail upgraded the Rennes-le-Chateau story to suggest Saint-Clair was actually a descendant of Jesus Christ. Then Dan Brown fictionalized the fiction as The Da Vinci Code. The rest is bestseller history.

Save perhaps for some proof of Saint-Clair’s hoax. Two of Saint-Clair’s accomplices, Gerard de Sede and Phillipe de Cherisey, admitted the documents placed in the Bibliotheque Nationale and L’Or de Rennes were forgeries (as any sensible examination of them anyway proved: they were written in modern, not medieval, Latin). Sauniere’s wealth, as the records of the Carcassone Bishopric showed, came from a distinctly mundane source: he sold masses and solicited gifts from his flock. In 1910–11 Sauniere was tried in an ecumenical court for these frauds.

French secret society the Priory of Sion protects the bloodline of Christ: ALERT LEVEL 2

Further Reading

Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail,