Azokat a forrásokat nem fogadják el a tudósok hitelesnek. Mert vagy századokkal később készültek, vagy gyakran írói fantázia művei. Régen ha egy krónikásnak nem volt tudása valami felől, akkor kiegészítette fantáziájával , hiszen a megrendelő egy kész terméket várt el tőle.

Javaslom ha tudsz rendesen angolul olvassad el az ál-történelem cikket, ahol az ismertetőjegyek is benne vannak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudohistory

Robert Todd Carroll suggests that a work which is pseudo-historic will meet at least one of the following criteria:

• the work uncritically accepts myths and anecdotal evidence without skepticism.
• it has a political, religious, or other ideological agenda.
• it is not published in an academic journal or is otherwise not adequately peer reviewed.
• the evidence for key facts supporting the work's thesis is:
  • selective and ignores contrary evidence or explains it away; or
  • speculative; or
  • controversial; or
  • not correctly or adequately sourced; or
  • interpreted in an unjustifiable way; or
  • given undue weight; or
  • taken out of context; or
  • distorted, either accidentally or fraudulently.
• competing (and perhaps simpler) explanations or interpretations for the same set of facts, which have been peer reviewed and have been adequately sourced, are rejected or not addressed, contrary to the principle of Occam's razor which favours a simpler and more prosaic explanation of the same facts. For example, the work may rely on one or more conspiracy theories or "hidden-hand" explanations.^[7]

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke prefers the term "cryptohistory", of which he identifies two necessary elements as: "A complete ignorance of the primary sources" and the repetition of "inaccuracies and wild claims".^[8][9]

Other common characteristics of pseudohistory are:

• the arbitrary linking of disparate events so as to form - in the theorist’s opinion - a pattern. This is typically then developed into a conspiracy theory postulating a hidden agent responsible for creating and maintaining the pattern. For example, the pseudohistorical The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail links the Knights Templar, the medieval Grail Romances, the Merovingian Frankish dynasty and the artist Nicolas Poussin in an attempt to identify lineal descendants of Jesus.
• hypothesising the consequences of unlikely events that “could” have happened, thereby assuming tacitly that they did.
• sensationalism, or shock value