Year-Old Mystery of Flannan Lighthouse's Missing Keepers

A cool mystery. 

"In December 1900, a boat called Hesperus set sail for the island of Eilean Mor, one of the seven islets (also known as the “Seven Hunters”) of the Flannan Isles off the coast of northwestern Scotland. Captain James Harvey was tasked with delivering a relief lighthouse keeper as part of a regular rotation. The journey was delayed a few days by bad weather, and when Harvey and his crew finally arrived, it was clear that something was awry. None of the normal preparations at the landing dock had been made, the flagstaff was bare, and none of the keepers came to greet the Hesperus. The keepers, as it turned out, weren’t on the island at all. All three of them had vanished."

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=70180

Existential Bummer

I dig this.

The Lost Symbol

The new Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol" was a decent enough thriller listen on my ipod.

 At 16 hours long it seemed longer than neccessary and yet at the same time very light on the details of things like Noetics -- literally the study of thought. Again it takes place in real places but with very loose and embellished details. Takes place in D.C. which sounds a lot more interesting than I ever thought.

Worth a read/listen but not as compelling as "The Da Vinci Code " And the new-agey ending fell quite flat.

From Bookmarks Magazine
"Together again," proclaimed the Wall Street Journal, "an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon"—a view shared by many critics, who remarked on Brown's ability to build suspense into a dizzying, ever-accelerating narrative through short chapters and breathless cliffhangers, but panned his philosophical ruminations and his "habit of turning characters into docents" (Washington Post). Several critics also noted that, while The Lost Symbol shares many of The Da Vinci Code's shortcomings, including melodramatic prose, stock characters, and far-fetched plot devices, it lacks the former novel's emotional punch and audacity. Those who appreciated Symbol most were able to overlook its flaws and lose themselves in the story. Da Vinci Code fans may experience some déjà vu, but they should find this latest novel just as entertaining.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Symbol-Dan-Brown/dp/0385504225

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

A must-read for anyone that's into math, economics, or just thinks the world's gone crazy.

The big idea: there are two classes of unknowns -- the "knowable unknowns" (risks you understand) and the "unknowable unknowns". The latter are things like 9/11, the printing press, and the Kennedy assassination. The impact of these far outweigh and guide the course of our civilization and daily lives than the risks we understand and take into account when we make decisions.

Taleb is a good author but is a little arrogant in his denegration of economists and the like and it will take some getting used to.

Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.

Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it’s something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.

The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.

Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."

In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature. --Chris Anderson
 

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515

Go With Your Gut

I've spent the last dozen years of my life learning to trust my gut. It never lies, even when your eyes and mind don't want to see the truth. I don't regret a single thing that's happened in my life, but I would have avoided a bad marriage, a bad job, and some bad friends.

“People usually experience true intuition when they are under severe time pressure or in a situation of information overload or acute danger, where conscious analysis of the situation may be difficult or impossible,” says Prof Hodgkinson.

He cites the recorded case of a Formula One driver who braked sharply when nearing a hairpin bend without knowing why – and as a result avoided hitting a pile-up of cars on the track ahead, undoubtedly saving his life.

“The driver couldn’t explain why he felt he should stop, but the urge was much stronger than his desire to win the race,” explains Professor Hodgkinson. “The driver underwent forensic analysis by psychologists afterwards, where he was shown a video to mentally relive the event. In hindsight he realised that the crowd, which would have normally been cheering him on, wasn’t looking at him coming up to the bend but was looking the other way in a static, frozen way. That was the cue. He didn’t consciously process this, but he knew something was wrong and stopped in time.”

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/go-your-gut-intuition-more-just-hunch-says-research-15620.html

Entangled Minds

This is a very interesting read.

I wouldn't call myself a scientist by any means, however I do think that this book collates and describes that a statistically significant, yet very small, psychic effect has been repeatedly measured and verified.

By significant, how about odds in the neighborhood of 10^34:1 that it's real. But small, almost insubstantial. Like increasing your odds at guessing coin flips by .1%.

Dean Radin's done an excellent job presenting the findings, the arguements, and counterarguments for the reality of psi. And why this fits in with quantum mechanics.

Many people believe that such "psychic phenomena" are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don't believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.

Albert Einstein called entanglement "spooky action at a distance" -- the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.

In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206737062&sr=8-1

Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?

The Global Consciousness Project looks very cool. It's basically a set of true random number generators that keep logging "random" numbers all day, every day. Except sometimes, like on Sept 11 2001 the randomness becomes less random. In fact, a few hours before the planes hit.

Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realising it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranormal-unexplained/have-scientists-discovered-a-way-of-peering-into-the-future.html

Parapsychology researcher Dean Radin on ESP...

Interesting article on psi research with Dean Radin. I'm about to read one of his books and I happened to come by this article.

 

We've all probably had more than a few moments in our life where we spontaneously had strange premonitions about the future that came true. Certainly there's some "confirmation bias" happening here but Radin's work seems to be teasing out a very small, but significant effect here.

Do you think people can predict events that will occur in the future?

Predict is a little bit too strong. I think that sometimes people have experiences that turn out to be true, and they know it in advance, but prediction implies that I'm going to sit down and figure out what is going to happen. I don't think that the phenomenon is exactly like that. But the fact that people can gain information about future events, of that I'm nearly convinced.

What is the most compelling evidence, in your view, that people can sense what might happen?

I would say that the experiments that I've done which I call "presentiment experiments" are among the most compelling, primarily because the results are more robust than what you typically see in these kinds of experiments.

Can you describe what those are?

They're a class of experiments where you don't ask the participant to consciously try to do anything. You just measure their body's response as a way of detecting that something is happening. So we measure skin response, pupil dilation and things like that.

We ask a person to sit in front of a computer and look at a blank screen, then push a button. A few seconds go by, and then the screen makes a random decision to select a stimulus that is either calm or emotional, and then it goes away after maybe 10 or 15 seconds. And then this process is repeated again and again. The analysis looks at what's happening while you are waiting for the computer to make that random decision about which picture to show. We are wondering whether people would get an unconscious sense of what their future is about to bring them.

When you do this experiment with lots of people on lots of trials, what you end up with is evidence that people significantly show different physiological conditions or states just before emotional pictures are shown as compared to calm pictures, and in the direction that you can predict, as if in fact they were somehow aware of what their future was about to bring.

Do you think that we all have some extrasensory abilities?

I think we do in the same way that we can all play golf, but we are not all going to win the Masters.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/02/25/findrelig.DTL

The Science of the Dogon

The Dogon have always fascinated me since I was eight or nine, watching the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World TV show. This show aired in 1980 or so and featured a short blurb on the Dogon if I remember right.

There's always been a mystery about the Dogon tribe in Africa -- how did they know about the star Sirius being a double star? Later, this mystery has been questionably debunked with the theory that there was some cultural contamination involved.

This book does not focus on this mystery. Instead it focuses on the cultural, mythological, and mystical linkages of the Dogon with Egypt and Christianity and how they link into modern ideas about quantum mechanics, cosmology, and human genetics. Some of these linkages are questionable to say the least, but some are downright odd. Laird Scranton, the author takes several liberties with his ideas but I was left in awe of some of the potential convergences of not only civilizations but modern thought. As the old saying goes, "There are many paths to the top of Mount Fuji but only one summit."

 

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Dogon-Decoding-African-Tradition/dp/1594771332/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203348981&sr=8-1

PKD, The Unicorn and Operation Mind Control

PKD, of course, was Philip K. Dick, the late great speculative fiction novelist, who believed many strange things had happened to his head during the seventies, one such event being an alien invasion with just this type of Tesla technology. Phil later came to believe this Soviet mind control experiment upon his temporal lobe had developed into something far more stranger (if that was at all possible) when an alien entity consisting of pure information skyjacked these psychotronically produced Soviet projections, using them to beam extraterrestrial messages of a benevolent nature into Phil's oft befuddled mind.

"The Unicorn"--as he was known to friends and fellow researchers--was none other than Ira Einhorn, a prominent figure in the New Age Counterculture of the late sixties and seventies. Phil and Ira became acquainted through the auspices of CoEvolution Quarterly, later renamed The Whole Earth Review, a by-product of former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand's revolutionary brainchild, The Whole Earth Catalog. Within the letter section of CoEvolution Quarterly, Dick and Einhorn initiated a dialogue on Soviet psychotronics & mind control, and it's far reaching implications. Shortly afterwards, Einhorn's girlfriend and fellow researcher, Holly Maddux's dismembered body parts were discovered in a steamer trunk in Einhorn's Philadelphia apartment, and Einhorn charged with her murder.

http://www.freedomdomain.com/articles/pkduni.htm

MOD To Open UFO Files

 

Very cool... and just after France does the same thing. I think Canada did it a year or two ago. Are we finally about to have disclosure? I doubt it, but the truth is out there!

 

The Ministry of Defence plans to open its "X-Files" on UFO sightings to the public for the first time. Officials have not yet decided on a date for the release of the reports, which date back to 1967, but it is hoped to be within weeks.

The move follows the decision by the French national space agency to release its UFO files in March, the first official body in the world to do so.

UFO buffs will be keen to find out what officials knew about some of the UK's most famous sightings and whether any action was taken. One celebrated event - at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, in 1980 - has been dubbed "Britain's Roswell" after the UFO incident in the US in 1947. At Rendlesham there were several witness reports of a UFO apparently landing. The released files should support or discount claims that radiation was detected at the site after the event.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2071275,00.html

Part of Rosslyn Chapel Decoded: It's Music!

 

 

 

Amazing... part of the intricate sculptures inside Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland include an encoding of music 600 years old.

The 15th Century Rosslyn Chapel, about seven miles south of the Scottish capital Edinburgh, featured in the last part of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" -- one of the most successful novels of all time which has been turned into a Hollywood film.

Stuart Mitchell said he and his father were intrigued by 13 intricately carved angel musicians on the arches of the chapel and by 213 carved cubes depicting geometric-type patterns.

"They are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here," he told Reuters.

Years of research led the Mitchells to an ancient musical system called cymatics, or Chladni patterns, which are formed by sound waves at specific pitches.

The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody.

The Mitchells have called the piece The Rosslyn Motet and added words from a contemporary hymn to complete it.

Update: Thomas J Mitchell's website is here -- you can find an .mp3 sample of the music there.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070501/ts_nm/britain_mystery_code_dc

Say Goodbye To Reality

Local realism is wrong, say quantum physicists. Not only is the universe strange, it doesn't exist -- at least the way we think it does -- when we're not looking at it.

This is a stunning achievement in science. There are no hidden variables in nature. Consciousness is part of the framework of the universe. We have a direct causal relationship with the fundamental nature and existence of our reality.

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it.

Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many hidden-variables theories would be ruled out if a certain experimental inequality were violated – known as "Bell's inequality". In his thought experiment, a source fires entangled pairs of linearly-polarized photons in opposite directions towards two polarizers, which can be changed in orientation. Quantum mechanics says that there should be a high correlation between results at the polarizers because the photons instantaneously "decide" together which polarization to assume at the moment of measurement, even though they are separated in space. Hidden variables, however, says that such instantaneous decisions are not necessary, because the same strong correlation could be achieved if the photons were somehow informed of the orientation of the polarizers beforehand.

Bell's trick, therefore, was to decide how to orient the polarizers only after the photons have left the source. If hidden variables did exist, they would be unable to know the orientation, and so the results would only be correlated half of the time. On the other hand, if quantum mechanics was right, the results would be much more correlated – in other words, Bell's inequality would be violated.

Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell's inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics.

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."

However, Alain Aspect, a physicist who performed the first Bell-type experiment in the 1980s, thinks the team's philosophical conclusions are subjective. "There are other types of non-local models that are not addressed by either Leggett's inequalities or the experiment," he said. "But I rather share the view that such debates, and accompanying experiments such as those by [the Austrian team], allow us to look deeper into the mysteries of quantum mechanics."

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14

LBJ Ordered JFK's Assasination

 

 

This could be the smoking gun as far as JFK's assasination is concerned. From no less than E. Howard, the guy that planned the failed Bay Of Pigs invasion and the Watergate break-in - one of the CIA's top spymasters. I can't help but get the feeling that we're through the looking glass here, and the towers of conspiracy are starting to crumble. I think in the next 5-10 years we'll see a lot of this as the old guard starts to die off and leave their confessions. Add to that the new guard coming in that's probably willing to cash in on the shame of the old.

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

"By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock," Saint says. "His whole life, to me and everybody else, he'd always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn't like Johnson. But you don't falsely implicate your own country, for Christ's sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that's the last thing he would do."

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: "Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons."

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK's death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint's father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here's what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a "Big Event" and asks E. Howard, "Are you with us?"

E. Howard asks Sturgis what he's talking about.

Sturgis says, "Killing JFK."

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt/print

Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind

Excellent work. Seriously. If you've ever asked yourself who we are as a species, where we came from, and why we're so downright odd compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, check out this book.

The basic premise is this: the human animal has been anatomically the same for almost 200K years. Including the brain. So why did we not have art, writing, culture, and religion until about 25K years ago? What happened?

Additionally, why is most prehistoric cave art so similar? And strange?

The answer: drugs. We discovered hallucinogens and started tripping out. If we take them now, we see similar things that people painted on caves 25000 years ago. This is when we became spiritual beings, when we took hits of mushrooms and other plants and saw spirits. So all religion, and really all creative expression stems from this drug use -- it kickstarted the unimaginitive human brain.

Now here's the odd part? Why is it so similar? Why do people report seeing such similar things that art seperated by tens of thousands of years and continents look so similar?

The answer, Hancock posits is because we aren't seeing stuff that's generated by our chemically altered brains, we're seeing self-consistant evolving worlds in altered realities. In essence, we're changing from "channel normal" to "channel mushrooms" or "channel ahayuasca" and seeing real, living entities there. Not sure about this last bit, but he raises some interesting points, like why would evolution give us as a species the ability to hallucinate similar events? What reproductive advantage would that cause?

Great stuff!

http://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Meetings-Ancient-Teachers-Mankind/dp/1932857400/sr=1-1/qid=1172182111/ref=sr_1_1/103-8294158-2783832?ie=UTF8&s=books

U.S. Admits That Polar Bears Are At Risk

Science is a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. It just is, it's how you use it that's important. It won't uncover all the truths, instead it helps weed out those that aren't true or aren't provable. Don't use science or attempt to invoke it's credibility if you aren't willing to stand up to it.

I have some training in science, although I wouldn't consider myself a scientist. However, if we lose our rational heads in the name of politics, we can become lost along the way and the very kind of people the scientific establishment complains about -- the kooks that won't listen to reason.

However, if we choose to use science as an empirical path to knowledge, it has rules, and like any other path you must follow them. Here's a concise set from wikipedia:

* Observation. A constant feature of scientific inquiry.

* Description. Information must be reliable, i.e., replicable (repeatable) as well as valid (relevant to the inquiry).

* Prediction. Information must be valid for observations past, present, and future of given phenomena, i.e., purported "one shot" phenomena do not give rise to the capability to predict, nor to the ability to repeat an experiment.

* Control. Actively and fairly sampling the range of possible occurrences, whenever possible and proper, as opposed to the passive acceptance of opportunistic data, is the best way to control or counterbalance the risk of empirical bias.

* Falsifiability, or the elimination of plausible alternatives. This is a gradual process that requires repeated experiments by multiple researchers who must be able to replicate results in order to corroborate them. This requirement, one of the most frequently contended, leads to the following: All hypotheses and theories are in principle subject to disproof. Thus, there is a point at which there might be a consensus about a particular hypothesis or theory, yet it must in principle remain tentative. As a body of knowledge grows and a particular hypothesis or theory repeatedly brings predictable results, confidence in the hypothesis or theory increases.

* Causal explanation. Many scientists and theorists on scientific method argue that concepts of causality are not obligatory to science, but are in fact well-defined only under particular, admittedly widespread conditions. Under these conditions the following requirements are generally regarded as important to scientific understanding:
* Identification of causes. Identification of the causes of a particular phenomenon to the best achievable extent.
* Covariation of events. The hypothesized causes must correlate with observed effects.
* Time-order relationship. The hypothesized causes must precede the observed effects in time.

This in short is what science is. Anyone that says that their data or theory is "scientific" must follow these rules. I'm sorry to say that many in this field that say this don't and are misleading seekers such as myself, and should be discarded as such -- unless you are looking for simple entertainment.

You can see why science has such problems in climate change, like many paranormal or fringe areas. You can form theories but you run into problems with prediction, control, and falsifiability. These allow an opening that the US government has used to further it's own political ends until this point, where it's both too late to stop and so abundantly obvious that they've switched to damage control.

Of course there are other paths to truth, but if you're going to use this particular one, follow the rules.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061228.POLAR28/TPStory/National

Smallest Life Form Discovered

In a mine in California, scientists found the smallest bacteria so far discovered -- living in conditions as acidic as battery acid. Why this fascinates me is that one of the problems with the ALH84001 Martian meteorite with potential nanobacteria in the 20-100 nanometer range is that they were too small. The bacteria found in California were in the 200 nanometer range, only twice as big as the artifacts in ALH84001.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/23/MNGETN57UQ1.DTL

Bigfoot! : The True Story of Apes in America

A very fun little book from Lauren Coleman on the facts, and fiction behind the myth of the great north american ape. Well documented, humorous but deadly serious at the same time. I waffle on the topic -- on one hand I want it to be true, but on the other as the population of Canada and America tops 400 million I am skeptical.

I do have some personal history on the topic. I'm reminded of the summers I spent up at my uncle's cabin in the backwoods of B.C. One day we went out and talked to one of his neighbors who showed me casts that he had made on his property nearby of these large footprints. Now, I was probably 8 or 9 but these things were freakin' huge -- the length of my torso or so and so big I could barely lift them. My uncle seemed to take it seriously but maybe it was just for my benefit. The summer or two before, my best friend and I had gone to the small theater in Drayton and saw some kind of Bigfoot documentary where hunters went off and found Bigfoot with dramatic results -- they threw rocks down on the cabin the hunters were staying in and had to be fought off. We spent many afternoons after school in the woods around Drayton setting up bigfoot detection traps and looking for footprints.

Who knows? Another family member swore he saw what at first looked to be a bear while rafting down the North Saskatchewan river near town. It was in the water and looked up when the raft approached, then got up on two legs and ran away like a man.
http://www.amazon.com/Bigfoot-True-Story-Apes-America/dp/0743469755/sr=8-3/qid=1166418845/ref=sr_1_3/102-2845328-8416163?ie=UTF8&s=books

Voyages of the Pyramid Builders by Robert Schoch

Schoch may be a good geologist and may have turned the world on it's head by re-dating the Sphynx thousands of years older than conventional academia will admit. However, he's a terrible book author. Once you get past this, the book proceeds smoothly to his main thesis: that in Sundaland -- a now flooded plain in Asia -- the first protocivilization emerged and spread out across the world when it was flooded, seeding pyramid building civilizations across the globe.
http://www.amazon.com/Voyages-Pyramid-Builders-Robert-Schoch/dp/1585423203/sr=8-1/qid=1159896689/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4124072-5596945?ie=UTF8&s=books

Genesis of the Grail Kings by Lawrence Gardner

This book is a mess.
Don't get me wrong, there's some great research here about the origins of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought -- did you know that the 10 commandments were a re-write of one of the pages in the Egyptian Book of the Dead?
However, the stuff about the Mesopotamians having monatomic gold, and that it is superconductive and antigravitic is simply unproven and speculative. No references are given to back them up, and no current science known supports it.
And the stuff about the Sumerian Annunakai being alien genetic scientists creating us as a slave race in their own image, well... this makes great fiction, but where's the evidence?
http://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Grail-Kings-Explosive-Bloodline/dp/1931412936/sr=1-3/qid=1159896157/ref=sr_1_3/102-4124072-5596945?ie=UTF8&s=books