In the movie, the Time Traveler's letter mentions that the best to happen to him was finding a woman. The traveler is Steffen and the woman is Sharon.
In both versions, Wilfort rejects Steffen's theory that the skeleton belongs to a time traveler, and suggests that someone has tampered with the tomb before discovery as a way to dissuade him, but he never outright states that the finding is a hoax, nor accusses Steffen himself of staging it. As we later know, Wilfort had other evidence of time travel from a previous dig at the site: a pen case with the legend "John Kaun enterprises" found in the 30s in the movie, and in the book, the tapes themselves found by himself in 1947.
The surviving Armenian monk trusts Steffen with the camera after seeing his face up close. Because he recognizes him from the video, obviously? But he also says that the camera is only shown once every 100 years, and the camera has no battery left, so, they watched in recent years and just happened to run out of battery then? Or maybe he recognized him from some painting based on the video that was made over the centuries, which we don't see?
