"A Sunday morning coming down..." as Johnny Cash used to intone, and having an hour or two of idle time I thought to turn it to an idle pursuit (I am very good at that!).  

Recently read this hyped-up "Da Vinci Code" thing that is getting so much press these days.  Personally, I didn't find Brown all that engaging a writer (for the murder story part of it which "carries" all the rest) - but murder stories are not my genre anyhow.  As for the underlying thesis about Jesus and the Holy Grail, etc. which I hazard is why most folks read it... well, I certainly lean more to the claims of the earlier 'author group' (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln) who claim Brown has kinda plagerized or at least maybe capitalized on their hard work.  

That is, I read their "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" back when it came out (at the insistence of a then-friend of mine up in CT) and while it can hardly be called "science" - it is a whole lot more interesting a "read" (to me) than Brown's use of the same data.  Different strokes for different folks, anyhow - and we are indebted to Brown in any event for the follow-on punch-up TIME here recently has landed to the chops of Opus Dei - a most dubious and sinister anachronism in our time (to my way of thinking) and of whose existence I had long been aware anyhow.  

But I stray from my thread here...  

Earlier this morning I chanced to touch on some long ago "archaeological" escapades of mine in some e-mail to some of you  - devoted to the search for Viking remains in N.A., etc. - and this put me in mind of one of the oddest things I have ever encountered in my 'career' as a peripatetic and self-made archaeologist.  It was first "thought" (by its finders) to be a "Viking Stone" but we soon dispelled that.   

But it was only out of the frying pan into the fire, as it were, for what "it" then came to be linked to, were personages and times related to those of the Holy Grail search as outlined by Brown's forbears...  

This find is more fully described in a short article of mine which, in the interest of saving space, you should read first at this juncture (if you are interested at all): http://www.bwpowell.com/archeology/marker/fake.html

Now there matters rested for many years in the matter of this Bresson Stone, after my article appeared (and one or two newspaper accounts elsewhere). Then one time years later I was telling a friend of mine (lawyer actually, and rather semi-religious kind of guy) about this stone, and he got all worked up about it, and asked if maybe there was some way someday he could see the stone himself.  

So I said "Sure!" and one day not long after, Keith and I took a ride back up to Newtown.  Though many years had passed, I found the Bresson homestead and drove in and parked and went up and knocked on the door.  Sure enough, Mrs. B. herself came out, a little older and a little more frazzled, but the same woman.  She looked at me and her face fell. (I knew why).  She had recognized me at once as the guy who had pricked their retirement bubble long ago - you see she and her husband (cf. the article) believed they had stumbled on to the greatest archaeological find since the Kensington Stone in N.A. - and that they were going to be rich, and famous and everything.  Then this long-faced drink of water (me!) showed up on their doorstep and proclaimed the whole thing a 'fake" - and the news media departed for more fruitful environs.  

Sigh.  

Anyhow, she was civil enough on our re-meeting, and to my intro of Keith and his dawning interests here - and I asked if we might view the stone.  She acquiesced: they had kept it "out in the garage" ever since.  Keith and I pulled it out from under a workbench: it was the same.  Some idiot in the inevitable attempts idiots always undertake to "improve" antiquities - had painted in the letters with white paint (Sigh!) - giving it a really garish look - but it had not been essentially harmed at all (and the paint could be safely and technically removed by proper treatment some day...).  We thanked her and left.  

All the way back home Keith talked about the stone and how my conclusion it was a fake could be challenged, etc. etc. - and his lawyer instincts rose to the issue and he outlined a number of gambits, etc.  Great fun!  

Many more years passed, and I left CT for retirement in FL.  And around that same time, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" was published.  Keith sent me a copy and insisted I read it and give him a report on what I thought of it.  Didn't I agree that the authors had made out a plausible case for the Grail - this time in its role as an actual chalice of some kind - having been purloined and passed along north many times up into Europe over the Ages, etc. and Gosh! who knows where it wound up? Etc. etc.  

So I decided to write Keith my report on it all.  And I did.  But I told him it was a lesson in reason and reasoned inference along with it (this whetted his appetite: Boy oh Boy! - what was his old buddy, Bernie, going to reveal here? etc. etc.)  

So here's how I "solved" the fate of the missing Holy Grail, and of how I, myself, once almost had it in my own hands, I did (!) - and of further how I, Bernie Powell, know where the Holy Grail is today (!) and who has it and is keeping it!  

Dan Brown shoulda interviewed me and forgot about all that that puzzling over Da Vinci anyhow.  You gotta be careful of them Eye-talians you know... why guy like that ...why he might even a-been in the Cosa Nostra or something... Jeezul!  

So here's what I think really happened:  

As Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln explain in their masterly work, the Grail may have passed on through the hands of many secret societies and groups - including the Hugonots who were so persecuted in France, etc. - and as I recall they "suggest" it may have come at last into the hands of the Teutonic Knights (I think it was) whose gig was guarding merchant ships in the northern European Seas (Hanseatic League) and whose members somehow got into a scrap with no less than Henry III of England  (he of the Bresson Stone!) Ta! Da!  Now this much seems to be factual (according to them).  How or why an English King came to be at crossed swords with the (largely German) League escapes me - someone owed someone, or had not paid up or something.  Or the Knights did pay him something and the something is not known just what or where....  

(Plot thickens huh? LOL).  

Now another thing that is very interesting and you will find in Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, is that Henry was a rather unpopular king in his own realm. (Not the least of his troubles also being ongoing disputes with the Pope...).   So muchso, 'tis recorded, that he is said to have called several of his most trusted courtiers to him one day and secretly enjoined them to "go forth and find some safe, unknown, secure place somewhere where he and the rest of the Court could flee to sometime - in case they had to decamp in the middle of the night as it were, (taking with them, of course - a sack containing the spoons - and maybe one or two other treasured items...").  

Sigh...  

Now there are actual records that show Henry's courtiers went north into Scotland and to the seafaring clans (primarily the Sinclairs) who lived on the outer islands and Hebrides off the northernmost coast.  These odd folk had always been a clan apart from the rest of the Scots (themselves always yet further separated by custom and manner) from their English sovereigns.  The Sinclairs in fact are thought to be in great measure descendants of long-ago Viking raiders who often raided this part of the realm and intermarried and populated the region, etc.  In so doing (the story holds) they imparted to the locals and to their own descendants much of the vast sea lore they supposedly had - including their knowledge of secret routes over the "Western Sea" (North Atlantic) to distant lands and fishing grounds, etc.  

(As an aside: there are supposed to be in the Vatican Library to this day, certain manuscripts and papers, including the "Sinclair papers" and maps and charts which spell out much of this PreColumbian knowledge of, and trafficing to, and from North America, etc.)  

The story continues that the Sinclairs did indeed take Henry's courtiers somewhere - and after many months they returned to his court again to report success: they had indeed found such a place and all would be well if the whole kit and kaboodle had to take to its heels...  

As it all fell out, however - Henry never did have to take them up on this secret retreat and that was that.  

But let us now suppose for sake of argument, that when the courtiers did "take ship" with the Sinclair guides, that they carried along with them a heavy, stone, land grant marker (Ah! the Bresson Stone! Even correctly dated!).  Perhaps also they took along the sack with the spoons and other treasure therein (?) - but this latter would be "mere" speculation, of course, compared to the marker - which does "exist!" H-m-m-m-m. Let's say the Sinclairs knew the secret landfalls of the Northeastern North American coast, and how to gain passage down into Long Island Sound around Montauk Point.  To the mouth say, of the Housatonic River even!  And a few short miles up the Housatonic brings one to the long slope of land up to the ...Bresson homestead!  Voila!  

And so I wrote Keith and told him that long ago - back in the late 1200's - a party of English explorers acting on orders of their King, Henry III, one day hauled a heavy land grant marker stone up through the wooded hills of aboriginal CT and placed it there as a sign to all this was now the King's Own!  And further, just to nail down my inferences piled on inferences here and so he would not overly pester me about it all in the future - I added that I suspected that he - Keith - acting after I had left CT - had one night sneaked back up to the Bresson homestead and tiptoed out into the woods to the onetime tumulus I had excavated (and found negatively for), and he had redug there by the light of the Moon - and (Gasp!) he had found what we had missed: the Holy Grail itself at the heart of the tumulus!  And further I was convinced that he had taken same home with him and that for safekeeping he had hid it most likely under the boot in the back of one of his Sprite cars (he collected them and had several in his garage).  

And so Gentle Readers all, and Messrs. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, and Dan Brown (and Leonardo... wherever you have got off to) ...THAT is what has become of the Holy Grail so there you are!  

Prove me wrong!  

bernie