In 1995, Topper, who had by then got in contact with a group of German researchers including Gunnar Heinsohn, Heribert Illig, Christoph Marx and others, who all question the established chronology, started to take a closer look on the Middle Ages and published a series of books which try to show that History, as we know it, was created from the 16th century onwards - according to this idea, there are hardly true facts before 1400 AD.
The phantom time hypothesis is a revisionist history and conspiracy theory developed in the 1980s and '90s by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß, Germany).