Veritas by Ariel Sabar

Author:Ariel Sabar [Sabar, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

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THE STORY HAD a certain internal logic. But until the point King entered the picture, it was nearly impervious to verification. Laukamp was dead, and Fritz refused to name the London art dealer who’d snubbed him. I decided to contact Urania, the scientific society, the site of the “ancient astronauts” lecture where Fritz said he first met Laukamp. Urania was one of the only named places in Fritz’s account. I could certainly imagine Fritz at an Erich von Däniken lecture. The latter’s gallimaufry of fact and fiction might well have appealed to Fritz in his university days. So might von Däniken’s larger-than-life persona. Soon after his breakthrough 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, was published, Swiss authorities charged him with fraud, forgery and embezzlement in connection with his prior career as a hotelier. According to The New York Times, “A court psychiatrist examined von Daniken and found him a prestige-seeker, a liar and an unstable and criminal psychopath with a hysterical character, yet fully accountable for his acts.”

There were obvious tactical reasons for Fritz to place Laukamp at a von Däniken talk. It would intimate that Laukamp harbored a secret interest in the ancient world that he kept from relatives, friends and neighbors, along, perhaps, with a secret stash of papyri. Yet to accept Urania as the site of their first meeting would require taking Fritz’s word over many of those same friends and relatives, all of whom said that Laukamp had first met Fritz in a gymnasium sauna.

I asked Urania for the dates of von Däniken lectures in the first half of the 1990s, when Fritz said he and Laukamp had met. A press officer wrote back that there weren’t any. “I looked through all the programs very thoroughly,” she wrote. Von Däniken had lectured at Urania four times between 1984 and 1987—the year of Fritz’s arrival in Berlin—but she found no indication of any appearances between 1990 and 1995.

I next combed my notes for inconsistencies between what Fritz told me and what he’d told King. In his emails to her, I noticed, Fritz claimed that “someone in Germany” had translated the Wife fragment in the 1980s and that a Coptic priest had “recently” identified the specific verses contained on his John fragment. I called a number of Coptic churches around Florida, and none of the priests were aware of anyone being approached with Christian papyri. It would have been a wasted effort, they said, because they wouldn’t have been able to read it: Coptic seminarians are trained in the late, liturgical dialect of Bohairic, not in ancient Sahidic or Lycopolitan. Fritz’s remark about the Coptic priest was a red flag that King, who teaches Coptic, had somehow missed or ignored.

Yet it wasn’t only a Coptic priest who had seen the papyri, Fritz had told King in a 2011 email. “I had several people look at some of them in the past couple of years,” he wrote. But to me, he said he had shown them to no one besides the dealer and King.

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