A few thoughts...

I wanted to share these with you.

Back in 2006 I tracked down Jania Mcgillivray, the BBC researcher who actually found and set up the interview with Pierre Plantard in Paris back in 1979. It was Jania, not Henry Lincoln, who worked closely with Plantard to set up the filming. I asked her, nearly thirty years on, what she made of Plantard. She said he was errudite, polite and very impressive. The other men on the room, especially in his entourage, seemed to differ to him. She didn't detect the slightest sense of a con-man, or hoaxter as so many seem to dismiss Plantard as being.

On another note, when Ben and I went to show Antoine Captier & Claire Corbu the glass vial that was inside the wooden chest, Claire recounted a story that she had been told by Marie Denarnaud shortly before her death in 1953. Marie said that she had given something important, in a small chest ,to her sister and her husband, Barthelmy. She didn't say what was in the chest, though the speculation would be something that Sauniere had found. Claire went onto say that her sister and brother in law owned land down by the couleurs river, and extending up to the 'grotte du fournet' aka 'the cave of the magdalene'. exactly where Ben and I discovered the small wooden chest.

I also wanted to say something about 'Ben's' clues. So many people have questioned their age because they look in such good condition. The reality is that they are most likely written around 1900. So they are just over 100 years old. As they were all tightly wax sealed in bottles, almost no water or air was able to get into the bottles and degrade the paper, hence their crisp quality. It would be much more likely that they were fakes if they were professionally 'tea stained' and distressed like other parchments we were shown. Also remember, that we had the handwriting and the signatures analyzed, and matched to other samples of the priest's papers.