Did a Scottish nobleman lead an expedition to America nearly 100 years before Columbus? Mounting evidence suggests that in 1398 'Prince' Henry St Clair, Earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia and even established a colony there. The theory about the New World colony originated with a work known as the Zeno Narrative published in Venice in 1558, telling of a voyage to America at the end of the 1390s with a prince of the Scottish islands.

For centuries, the kings and queens of Great Britain have been crowned whilst sitting upon the Stone of Destiny. The Stone was taken from Scone in Scotland by King Edward I of England in 1296 during the Wars of Scottish Independence. His desire to have the Stone was partly due to the tradition that the monarchs of Scotland had been crowned upon it since time immemorial. It was thus seen as the most potent symbol of the Scottish right to being a separate nation from England.The lege...

Whether or not The Illuminati – an elite body claiming an ancient pedigree – does exist, it is important that growing numbers of people nonetheless do believe it exists. So does it exist? If so, is it a force for evil or a force for good - or, as some would have it, a conspiracy aimed at making us believe there is a conspiracy? Was the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt the true inheritor of more ancient knowledge?A force for evil or a force for good? A movement whose benevolent...

Modern hoax or the most powerful and secretive cabal in history? Opinions on the mysterious Priory of Sion - in its native French, the Prieuré de Sion - are polarised between these two extremes.If the Priory of Sion's claims are true, it has existed for almost 1,000 years and has counted some of the greatest names in history - Nostradamus, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and, nearer our own time, Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau - in its ranks. It claims to have been behind some of the...

It was in the early hours of Sunday August 31, 1997, in a tunnel at the Place d'Alma in Paris, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed along with her lover Dodi Al Fayed and their driver Henri Paul. Dodi's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived. The family of Henri Paul not only had to cope with the tragedy of his death but the fact that the official record held that he had been responsible for the crash which claimed their lives through a combination of alcohol, drugs, and driving at hi...

For centuries belief that the Shroud of Turin really bears the likeness of the crucified Jesus Christ had to be a matter of faith alone. Then in 1898 it was photographed for the first time, and suddenly the negative image revealed an astonishingly life-like wealth of detail of a tall bearded man horribly tortured with whip, nails and crown of thorns. Virtually overnight, the age-old faith of the pilgrims seemed to be vindicated. Surely this was the very image of Jesus?

One of the truly great minds of all time, the 15th-century Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci was uncannily ahead of his time, giving the world not only the Mona Lisa and his other extraordinary works of art, but also designs for a helicopter, military tank, submarine, bicycle - and even the sewing machine - among many other incredibly advanced innovations.It has also been argued that he may even have been behind the faking of Christianity's most precious relic, the Shroud of Turin t...

Do ghosts exist? Do you believe in ghosts? Many thousands of people claim to have seen them, even interacted with them - and often even entrenched sceptics have been converted by a moment's brush with 'impossible' paranormal entities. Sometimes ghosts are benign, protecting and warning about imminent danger; sometimes they are neutral, merely appearing and disappearing without any apparent awareness of the living. But sometimes they are evil, causing untold mental and physical problems for...

IntroductionThe first doubts about the official version were raised by Professor Spann's autopsy, which suggested that Rudolf Hess had been strangled with the cable, rather than hanging himself with it - which of course means that somebody else was involved.Background - The prisoner of SpandauUntil his death in 1987, Nazi Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess had been imprisoned since his flight to Britain in May 1941. Sentenced to life imprisonment for Crimes against Peace at th...

Few mysteries of recent times have the power to seize the imagination like that of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, who flew to Scotland alone and unarmed in the middle of the Second World War in order to broker peace.Arrested ignominiously by the Home Guard - 'Dad's Army' - Hess was imprisoned, all the while protesting that he had come to meet the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's Premier Peer and, Hess believed, the leader of an aristocratic peace party. Meanwhile, Hitler denounced him a...

It is the hiding place of the Holy Grail, or a great secret that will rock the Church. It is a place of hidden treasure and dark knowledge. It is the place where Jesus is buried... These are just some of the many theories now current about the village where a Victorian priest became strangely - and massively - rich, and where he left clues to a great mystery in the very fabric of his church. What is the truth about Father Sauniere and the now-famous village of Rennes-le-Château?Thi...

Of all the New Testament characters, few - other than Jesus himself - have exerted such an enduring fascination as Mary Magdalene, believed by the Church to have been a reformed prostitute. Yet her never-ending appeal is odd for one who appears so briefly - and then so elusively - in the Bible: so what has made her so entrancing to generations of Christians and non-Christians alike? Was she, as many now argue, actually Jesus' wife and the mother of his children? And why is she intimately c...