Meet the geologist-turned-TV host who connects the Vikings to the Knights Templar and the Founding Fathers

Scott Wolter is a former University of Minnesota Duluth linebacker who became a forensic geologist adept at discovering how concrete fails.

So, how did the owner of St. Paul-based American Petrographic Services become a TV host whose work dating the Kensington Runestone led to hosting "America Unearthed" and connecting the Vikings in North America to the Knights Templar and America's Founding Fathers?

Eye on St. Paul convinced Wolter, an amateur football teammate, to dish. It started in 2000, when he was hired by the Runestone Museum to determine the controversial artifact's age.

This winding, intriguing interview was, unfortunately, edited for length.

Q: How did you go from a St. Paul geology company to TV celebrity?

A: It really started with the Kensington Runestone that came into our laboratory at American Petrographic Services in the Midway area of St. Paul in July of 2000. I had never heard of the stone before, but we do a lot of interesting stuff. We're currently working on the surfside condo collapse down in Florida, where 98 people were killed, and we worked at the Pentagon after 9/11.

So, basically, what I do is autopsies on concrete and rock. The question they wanted us to answer was how old is the inscription? The date on the stone is 1362, 130 years before Christopher Columbus didn't discover America. I ended up comparing the weathering of tombstones of a known age ... and in the end, I concluded that the weathering of key minerals, biotite in this case, began to come off the surface of the tombstones at about 200 years. On the runestone, they were gone. So my conclusion was it was older than 200 years — and that's from the date it was pulled out of the ground in 1898 — because it hasn't been in a weathering environment since. It was impossible for it to be a late-19th century hoax.

Q: What did the rock tell you?

A: Whoever carved this came to what is now Minnesota a couple hundred years [before Columbus reached America].

I followed the evidence trail and I ended up going to Sweden five times over 2½ years, from 2003 to the end of 2005, and I found everything that they said didn't exist: the language, the runes, the dialect, the grammar, the dating. It all existed in medieval times on this large island in the middle of the Baltic Sea called Gotland and it turns out that in the 14th century the only person capable of carving an inscription of that complexity and length had to be a member of the clergy because the common people weren't educated. I learned about the Cistercians, who were founded around 1100.

They were led by a medieval monk by the name of Bernard de Clairvaux. ... He joined the first Cistercian Abbey in France in 1113. By the time he died in 1153, there were over 300 Cistercian abbeys all across Europe into Scandinavia. Bernard also wrote the charter for a medieval order you might have heard about called the Knights Templar.

Q: So, you were asked to age the runestone and you found a connection to the Knights Templar?

Q: How did you get involved in "America Unearthed"?

A: I was working on a murder case and helped identify a victim through our forensic work at our lab. [Las Vegas police] asked if we could help them age date concrete [that encased a body]. Because if we could go back and tell you when this concrete was placed, presumably this would have been establishing approximate time of death for this victim.

So I flew out to Vegas. ... I did my work and I wrote my report. It was a 22-year-old cold case; a prostitute who'd been killed. They wanted to get dental impressions to match bite marks [with a suspect].

Maria Awes was working for WCCO-TV; she was a news reporter. The Pioneer Press had written a story and she saw the article and wanted to interview me. They came into my office and she saw a poster of the runestone. She asked, "Oh, did you do some work on the runestone?" I said, "Sit down, we're gonna be here for a while."

[Awes' husband owned Committee Films. Working with Wolter, they produced "Holy Grail in America" for the History Channel, which led to "America Unearthed."]

A: We did 39 episodes over the first three seasons. The first episode aired Dec. 21, 2012. We had the number one show, ahead of "Ancient Aliens." [The show moved to the Travel Channel for a final season in 2019.]

Q: You're still involved with your forensic geology company, right?

A: I never left my job. I had so many customers and so much work.

Q: And now you're leading trips to Europe and other sites you've researched?

A: That's nice because I do research at the same time. I've written four books.

A: Yeah, well, I kind of knew a little bit about it because I've done a little bit of TV stuff in the past — minor stuff, like interviews for sports or whatever — but then they said right before the first shoot, "Your life is gonna change forever." And it did.

Q: How do you respond to the critics who slam your work as "pseudoscience?"