It started with a stack of books my mother gave me as a kid. The Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown series. Ancient civilizations, secret societies, unexplained phenomena. Most people flip through those and move on. I never did.

That early curiosity eventually led me somewhere most researchers only read about. In my 30s, I became a Scottish Rite Freemason and a Masonic Knights Templar. I wasn’t there to expose anything. I went because I wanted to understand it from the inside. What I found was an organization layered with history, symbolism, and a past far more complicated than its members openly discuss.

Why I write what I write

History is almost always taught at the surface level. The names, the dates, the official story. But underneath that surface there’s usually something more interesting — and often more troubling.

My books explore the hidden layers. The real story behind the Knights Templar. What Dante was actually communicating in The Divine Comedy beyond the poetry. How the Church, the crown, and secret networks of power shaped the world we inherited, and why most of that history never made it into the classroom.

I publish under both Butch Kliemann and Bernard Kliemann. You can find my books on Amazon. The research behind them took years, and some of it changed the way I understand my own life.

A note on the research

I’m not an academic. I don’t have a university position or a department behind me. What I have is decades of obsessive reading, firsthand Masonic experience, and a genuine belief that the connections most historians dismiss are worth taking seriously.

Some of what I’ve found along the way has been hard to explain. Living in St. Clair County, Michigan, steps from the city of St. Clair, sharing a first name with St. Bernard of Clairvaux — the man behind both the Knights Templar and the builders of Rosslyn Chapel. Whether that’s coincidence or something else, I’ll leave that to you.