King and Beveridge published the newsstand UFO Reality, perhaps the most credulous of the UK ‘abduction’ magazines. They were often informed by nameless or unnameable sources or, worse, non-professional hypnotic regression. I could never tell who had made up what, or decide just where they belonged on the chain of gullibility at the end of which we readers frequently find ourselves.
The theme of this book is that Princess Diana was murdered, by or on behalf of MI6 and the CIA. Most of the theories surrounding the actual death you’ll have heard before: the authors simply provide extra, and odder, motives. We hear that Diana had been chosen to marry into the Royal Family because she, as a Spencer, was of the ‘grail bloodline’, and could improve the family as breeding stock. Divorced from Charles and intending to marry a Muslim, she simply had to die.
Plugging the ‘grail bloodline’ concept is the real agenda here. The dependence on Holy Blood, Holy Grail is obvious. The authors are totally convinced by the ‘Priory of Sion’ fantasies constructed around Rennes-le-Chateau and we are told – on who knows what authority (the book is devoid of both index and references) – that two of the ‘Saunière Parchments’ contained genealogies, and that MI6, the SOE and the CIA were “largely instrumental in their transfer from France to Britain during the 1950s.”
The authors’ sources are not verifiable. We meet a variety of unnamed spooks, particularly a “former British Foreign Office (MI6) historian”. His job was, they say, to “sift through historical and genealogical data due for classification review”, and his sources included “documents dating back to the first and second centuries AD”. The authors met with him in a hotel, the meeting having been brokered by yet another unnameable. Nonetheless, they were clearly impressed by what they were told. It culminated in the revelation that “the Holy Grail is the most sought-after political artefact in the Western world. It has become the masonic watchword for the royal bloodline of David and Yeshua…” Yes, Diana was of the royal bloodline, and if the Windsors couldn’t have her, then nobody else could…
Those who stand, knowingly, at the beginning of the chain of gullibility here know noticeably more about the curious theories of ‘Sir’ Laurence Gardner’s ‘Bloodline of the Holy Grail’ than about mainstream, fact-based history or genealogy. The self-identified former MI6 historian presents Gardner’s assertions regarding the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a finding of his own research. ‘HRH Prince Michael of Albany’, a young man from Belgium who believes he should be King of Scotland, gave Gardner a ‘knighthood’ among other elaborate titles entirely on his own debatable authority. The ‘Prince’ provides a foreword to the book, and a 25-page interview near the end. Gardner’s popular but, on examination, unpersuasive mix of fringe theology, British Israelitism, interbreeding with aliens and the factualisation of myth, is treated with a respect it doesn’t earn.
The book’s title reflects the question that hangs over it. Was the evidence the authors present hidden until it was given to them? Or was the ‘Diana’ material already out there on the Internet, with only the ‘bloodline’ and ‘Prince Michael’ elements recently added, and fed to them because their track record made them a prime target for persons who wanted specific disinformation to reach a wider audience? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but they could usefully be asked by any potential reader.
Utterly Fantastic, in the original sense of the world.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: