Thanks. Both were great and links as well.

I especially appreciated ** you do not have permission to see this link ** in which we see among other things, his refusal to answer questions because those asking were not sincere. At other times, certain things could not be revealed as he’d been privately asked by unnamed Israeli authorities not to as it would be dangerous for Israeli security.

This ** you do not have permission to see this link ** said to be written by a friend may well contain important insights:

Our team proceeded to the Garden Tomb, whose custodians were expecting our arrival. Wyatt had negotiated cordially and successfully with them. With an assortment of gardening tools we set to work, moving a large pile of rubble and rock which had accumulated where Wyatt had probed earlier. Over several days we were able to excavate our way down into the same cave system that Wyatt had explored two years before. I’m sorry to report that in the end we came up empty-handed. The connecting channel through which Wyatt had claimed to see the furniture was not there. On the final day of excavation, when we could not see the internal cavern landmarks that Wyatt had predicted, Ron himself finally climbed down into the dim space. After a long time he emerged, looking confused. As we waited respectfully to hear his report, he mumbled a few words like: “It’s not the same; it’s changed. It’s not the way I remember it.” There was no opening to be seen, giving a view into an adjacent cavern. There was nothing. In the process of our digging we had come up with a few interesting little objects from Roman times, but they were irrelevant to our main goal.

Our team was disappointed, puzzled, disillusioned. We had enjoyed ten days of close fellowship, with daily shared prayer times, and an excited anticipation of momentous events just before us. Now all those hopes came crashing down. And sadly, Wyatt was not man enough to come clean, to apologize for bringing us on a wild goose chase, or to attempt any kind of explanation. We kept expecting some sort of statement, but he just remained silent, withdrawn. And we were too stunned, and perhaps too sorry for him in his confusion, to demand that he explain.

To this day I cannot give a rational account for the extreme misguidedness that Wyatt revealed. What was happening in his head? His participation in our group worship times had left all of us in no doubt about his sincerity and his devotion to Scripture. He was a competent Bible scholar. He was a brother. Yet he had misled us terribly, and had offered no words of regret or apology or explanation. I have reviewed the whole story many times since then, and am convinced that the church administrator was right: Wyatt might be mistaken, but he himself believed that what he had originally shared was true.

From medical school I remember hearing of a rare state of mind, with a long Latin name, that led its victims to concoct marvelously detailed accounts of events that were pure fabrications, yet which the story-teller himself had come to believe were absolutely true. I am inclined to believe that Wyatt was a florid example of this disorder. He was not a deliberate liar, a fraud. And some of his observations had merit. But I am convinced that some of his “discoveries” were matters which underwent transcription in his mind, and he came to believe as true certain ideas and observations that in fact were his own inventions.

The king of all these kinds of stories is of course claiming to find Noah’s Ark on Mt Ararat.  How many times has that happened?

If ChatGPT is to be believed, over 100 times! Once is never enough. 

In this ** you do not have permission to see this link **, we read of several of the discoveries, including an 1883 April Fool’s Day joke that was taken a little too seriously.