kutipan dari: http://www.cesnur.org/2004/davinci_nyt.htm

"Finally, though, the legitimacy of the Priory of Sion history rests on a cache of clippings and pseudonymous documents that even the authors of ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' suggest were planted in the Bibliotheque Nationale by a man named Pierre Plantard. As early as the 1970's, one of Plantard's confederates had admitted to helping him fabricate the materials, including genealogical tables portraying Plantard as a descendant of the Merovingians (and, presumably, of Jesus Christ) and a list of the Priory's past ''grand masters.'' This patently silly catalog of intellectual celebrities stars Botticelli, Isaac Newton, Jean Cocteau and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci -- and it's the same list Dan Brown trumpets, along with the alleged nine-century pedigree of the Priory, in the front matter for ''The Da Vinci Code,'' under the heading of ''Fact.'' Plantard, it eventually came out, was an inveterate rascal with a criminal record for fraud and affiliations with wartime anti-Semitic and right-wing groups. The actual Priory of Sion was a tiny, harmless group of like-minded friends formed in 1956.

Plantard's hoax was debunked by a series of (as yet untranslated) French books and a 1996 BBC documentary, but curiously enough, this set of shocking revelations hasn't proved as popular as the fantasia of ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' or, for that matter, as ''The Da Vinci Code.'' The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy, it seems, is our desire to believe in one.