Ex-Royal Navy officer says he has solved Holy Grail mystery

London, June 20 (ANI): A retired Royal Navy officer who has spent years studying ancient texts, believes he has at last solved the mystery of the disappearance of the Holy Grail.

For millions of believers, the Holy Grail is the most precious object on earth.

The chalice, which Christ drank from at the Last Supper and was later used to collect some of his blood at the Crucifixion, is a priceless Christian relic.

Faithful have searched in vain to find it. Finally it has been discovered, overlooked and unrecognized, in the corner of a cathedral in the heart of England.

"I never intended to start out on a search to find the Holy Grail. I was interested initially in researching the links between the Crusaders, England and the medieval saints," the Sunday Express quotes E.C. Coleman, as saying. oleman believes that the artifact is the Holy Grail

"However the more I read the more I was led along a trail that explained the extraordinary journey this lost relic has taken.

Historians and academics will be astonished by the revelation that Christendom's most prized historical object has been under their noses for decades.In 1889 Lincoln Cathedral was undergoing repair. A group of workmen lifted a large Portland marble slab and revealed the tomb of Bishop Oliver Sutton, who died in 1299.

Inside the grave, archaeologists found a chalice next to the skeleton; it was still standing where it had been placed almost 600 years earlier. It was made of silver, four-and-half inches high and completely without decoration.

"This was the Holy Grail but no one acknowledged it. Subsequently it went on show on a shelf in the Cathedral's treasury where you can see it today but there is nothing there to say what it really is," says Coleman, who has just published The Grail Chronicles describing his quest.

"Finding such artifacts in the tomb of a bishop was not at all unusual and putting them there may well have been normal practice in the Middle Ages but this chalice was different," says Coleman.

Coleman further says: "Previously discovered examples were richly engraved but this one had a simple elegance rendered slightly homely by the use of plainly visible rivets to join the different parts of the stem. I have never touched it but it has been very nice just to be near it. In my own mind and in all good faith I am confident that the chalice recovered from Bishop Sutton's tomb is the Holy Grail." (ANI)