Ian Wilson (born 1941) is a British-born author and historian specializing in historical and religious mysteries. Best known for his writings on the Shroud of Turin, he began his writing career in 1978 with the international best-seller The Shroud of Turin and has since explored subjects as diverse as Biblical history, medieval history, the historical Shakespeare, prehistoric rock paintings of Australia’s Kimberley region, also several paranormal topics, the latter often critically. His most recent publication, The Book of Geoffroi de Charny, is an academic study of a lengthy poem by the medieval knight of that name. A practising artist in any spare time, he and his wife Judith have lived in south-east Queensland, Australia since 1995.
Early life Wilson was educated from the age of eleven at Emanuel School, Battersea, south London, an independent Anglican school for boys founded in 1594. Deeply interested in art and its history, his teenage scepticism towards Christianity underwent serious challenge when in 1955 he first came across photographs of the Shroud in an article by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire V.C. in the weekly Picture Post. Unable to dismiss the cloth’s imagery as the work of an artist, he nevertheless put the topic on the back-burner whilst studying for a history degree at Magdalen College, Oxford between 1960 and 1963, a period during which he synchronously attended life drawing classes at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art.
Adopting a business career late in 1963, three years later he took a break in this to research a new angle on the Shroud’s history using what was then the British Museum’s iconic reading room (today the British Library at King’s Cross). From this research he developed his core hypothesis that the Shroud’s pre-medieval history had been as the ‘Image of Edessa’ or ‘Mandylion’, a cloth long thought to have been imprinted only with Jesus’ face and destroyed in 1792. This theory he first launched publicly with a major article contributed to Britain’s Catholic Herald in November 1973,Ian Wilson, ‘A gift to our proof-demanding era?’ Catholic Herald 19 November 1976 followed just a week later by his travelling to Turin to attend the Shroud’s first public showing in four decades. Unexpectedly allowed to examine the cloth without covering glass, and at the closest range, he became very firmly persuaded that no artist had created its imagery. In the immediately following years he approached several British book publishers seeking their backing for a book his findings, only to be rejected.
The Turin Shroud By 1976, Wilson was long settled into a management career with Bristol’s Evening Post newspaper group when some newly released scientific findings supporting his Edessa hypothesis prompted him to write a second article for Britain’s Catholic Herald.Ian Wilson ‘The Holy Shroud – real or false?’ Catholic Herald, 30 April 1976 By sheer chance, the article came to the attention of Bob Heller, religion editor for the major New York publishers Doubleday. Heller wrote to Wilson from the United States specially inviting him to write a full book on the subject. Wilson duly accepted, and in 1978 The Shroud of Turin appeared on US bookstalls soon to be followed by its publication throughout Britain and the Commonwealth as The Turin Shroud. IA bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it met with positive reviews from critics such as Magnus Magnusson.Magnus Magnusson, letter as Rector of Edinburgh University to prospective publisher Liz Calder at Gollancz, 6 February 1978. There followed foreign language editions in French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, Japanese, Greek and Arabic.
The Silent Witness During this same late 1970s period Wilson’s researches had attracted the attention of independent documentary film maker David Rolfe, who secured funding for a field trip to locations associated with Wilson’s reconstruction of the Shroud’s early history. A pilot script initiated by Wilson and adapted by Rolfe and professional scriptwriter Henry Lincoln became The Silent Witness, screened on BBC1 at Easter 1979 and awarded that year’s BAFTA award for best documentary.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253705
Career as a freelance author
Mind out of Time? Having acquired publishers on both sides of the Atlantic keen for further books, Wilson, now long married and with two young sons, embarked on becoming a full-time author. Deliberately branching out from the Shroud, he turned his attention to a topic earlier popularized by American hypnotist Morey Bernstein’s best-selling The Search for Bridey Murphy: Morey Bernstein, The Search for Bridey Murphy, Doubleday, 1956 hypnotic ‘regressions’ into what appear to be ‘past lives’. Intrigued by similar British cases rich in convincing-sounding detail, Wilson set out to determine whether, even if these were not true evidence for reincarnation, somehow the hypnotised subjects might be experiencing genuine flashbacks from the historical past. Gradually it emerged that although both the hypnotists and their subjects were honest enough, when the latter were asked to go back to times before they were born somehow their unconscious mind creatively ‘relived’ episodes from historical novels they had once read and consciously forgotten. In some instances Wilson was able to prove this by tracing the relevant historical novel. Though the resultant Mind out of Time? Reincarnation Claims Investigated produced a result quite different from what Wilson had half hoped to find, it very conclusively shut the lid on the Bridey Murphy phenomenon as having any ‘life after death’ validity. Across the Atlantic Doubleday published it under the title All in the Mind.
Jesus: The Evidence During the early 1980s Wilson’s film-maker associate David Rolfe gained backing from British media outlet Channel 4 for a three-part fact-finding documentary series entitled Jesus: The Evidence. Invited to write the book to accompany the series, Wilson accepted the assignment, only midway to find himself strongly disagreeing with the TV production team on how they were handling certain elements. In the event, although the TV series received heavy criticism for its sensationalist gimmicks such as exploding statues,Richard Wallis (Channel 4 and the declining influence of organized religion on UK television. The case of Jesus: The Evidence. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 36(4), 668–688. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2015.1132821 Wilson’s book of the same title was favourably reviewed for treating the same subject-matter altogether more respectfully. Again published on both sides of the Atlantic,Ian Wilson Jesus: The Evidence, Weidenfeld, London, 1984; Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1985 this proved another international best-seller and in 1996 would be republished in a lavishly illustrated full colour edition.
Later career
The After Death Experience In the later 1980s, Wilson returned to the topic of evidence for life after death, partially prompted by popular Spiritualist medium Doris Stokes' claims that she could relay messages from dead loved ones. In 1986 Wilson, Rolfe and two hired researchers booked gallery seats for Stokes’ 16 November show at the London Palladium from which vantage point they observed that those for whom she produced messages were all seated in the three rows immediately in front of the stage. During the interval, Wilson and Rolfe questioned the Palladium manager and learned from him that Stokes regularly reserved these rows for her own invitees. Synchronously, the two researchers learned from those for whom Stokes had produced messages that all had contacted her beforehand to tell her of their loss, following which all had received free tickets for her show. With now the clearest possible evidence that Stokes rigged her seances, Wilson completed his manuscript and submitted it to his publishers. Perversely, only days after lawyers had cleared the relevant chapter for publication, Stokes died from a brain tumor, thereby dashing Wilson’s intended exposure of a living medium. Published in 1987 as The After Death Experience, the book ranged well beyond cases such as Stokes, finding many that were similarly negative, though there were some, such as near-death experiences, that he acknowledged as altogether more difficult to dismiss. Reviews were mostly favourable, including by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian.Polly Toynbee ‘Making up the message’ The Guardian 17 September 1987
Shakespeare: The Evidence In the early 1990s, with Sam Wanamaker’s project to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe theatre then much in vogue, Wilson turned his attention to the controversies surrounding how a humbly-born actor from Stratford-on-Avon came to write the English language’s greatest collection of plays and poems. Exploring the background of Shakespeare’s first company of actors, Lord Strange’s Company, Wilson found hitherto unexplored significance in its patron Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, being a powerful northern noble strongly suspected of then treasonous Roman Catholic sympathies. Noting that between 1591 and 1593 Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays, then Richard III for Strange’s Company, Wilson opined that Wilson opined that the beleaguered noble had commissioned this tetralogy, which culminates in Strange’s ancestor Thomas Stanley crowning Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry Tudor on the Bosworth battlefield, subtly but firmly to assure the Queen of his family’s unswerving loyalty to her Tudor dynasty. But if this was indeed the ruse it tragically failed, Strange’s sudden, untimely death in 1594 indicating arsenic poisoning infiltrated by Queen Elizabeth’s secret service. For Wilson it was Shakespeare’s direct experience of such dastardly high-level machinations that honed his ultra-keen edge as a dramatist. Detecting signs of similar crypto-Catholic sympathies throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre, Wilson found himself in strong agreement with Jesuit literary scholar Professor Peter Milward who wrote extensively on this same theme.Peter Milward, S.J., Shakespeare’s Religious Background, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973 Wilson's resultant Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and his Work, is Wilson’s longest book. It again received positive reviews including from Oxonian Shakespeare scholar A.L. Rowse,'Full of good sense. The reader will not go wrong with it, as with most books about Shakespeare. Ian Wilson is conscientious, as a good Oxford man should be.’ A.L. Rowse, ‘Dramatist with the Midas Touch’, London Evening Standard 16 September 1993 together with an invitation to speak at the 1994 Sydney Writers’ Festival, a first-ever taste of Australia which directly inspired his and his wife’s decision to emigrate the following year.
The Blood and the Shroud In 1988 a carbon dating test pronounced the Turin Shroud of fourteenth century date, this notably being synchronous with its appearance in the unlikely possession of medieval knight Geoffroi de Charny, lord of an unprepossessing little village in central France. It was a finding Wilson refused to accept on the grounds that it offered no explanation of how an artist faked the cloth’s forensically convincing figurative imprints. Ten years later he wrote The Blood and the Shroud, arguing that the corner location from which the dating sample was taken had provided a deceptive date due to microbiological contamination from the cloth’s prolonged handlings. Fresh public showings of the Shroud during the spring of 1998 renewed public interest and Wilson accompanied both American and Australian TV unitsTime magazine 20 April 1998Frank O’Shea ‘Re-examining the phenomenon of the Turin Shroud;, Canberra Times 18 July 1998CBS TV’s Public Eye and Australian Channel 9’s Sixty Minutes respectively to Turin for special programmes.
Nostradamus: The Evidence