Amelia Earhart’s Final Flight: What Happened?
Amelia Mary Earhart, born July 24, 1897, and Frederick Joseph Noonan, born April 4, 1893, were last heard from at 8:43 a.m. local Howland Island time on July 2, 1937. They were flying a Lockheed Electra L-10E, civil registration NR16020, on the longest leg of a planned circumnavigation. The United States Coast Guard cutter Itasca […]
Stonehenge: An Astronomical Computer?
Standing on Salisbury Plain at the Hour the Sun Comes Back Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. Looking out from the circle toward the northeast, its entrance points over a single large sarsen, now leaning, called the Heel Stone, toward the midsummer sunrise; looking the other way, it points to the midwinter sunset. What […]
ESP: Exploring Extrasensory Perception
ESP: What a Folklorist Notices First Extrasensory perception is the claimed acquisition of information without the recognized senses, sorted in the parapsychological literature into telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. After ninety years of laboratory work, no robust replicated evidence supports the phenomenon. Yet ESP belief remains widespread, patterned, and culturally substantive, which is itself the […]
The Freemasons: Secrets and Power
The Freemasons: What the Documents Show, and What They Do Not Freemasonry is a fraternal society that emerged from late-medieval Scottish stonemasons’ guilds, organized into a speculative form by the Premier Grand Lodge of England in London on June 24, 1717. Its documented history runs through Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723, the William Morgan affair of […]
Bigfoot: North America’s Elusive Giant
What Bigfoot Actually Is, in Plain Zoological Terms Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, is a hypothesized large bipedal hominid reported across the temperate forests of North America. The modern public case rests on the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, the footprint record analyzed by anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, sighting databases such as the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, and a […]
Pyramids and Aliens
The “pyramids and aliens” question is two stories sitting on top of each other. The first is a documented archaeological record covering roughly seventy years of excavation at Giza, supported by primary papyri, worker housing foundations, and recent muon imaging. The second is a publishing-and-broadcasting phenomenon that began in 1968 with a Swiss hotelier’s bestseller […]
The Tower of Babel: Historical Evidence
The Genesis Narrative and the Babylonian Referent The Tower of Babel survives in two records that have to be read on their own terms before they can be read against one another. The first is Genesis 11:1-9 in the Hebrew Bible, a nine-verse etiology in which the descendants of Noah, speaking a single language, settle […]
Indus Valley: Trade and Communication
The Indus Valley left no decipherable archive of its own commerce. What it left, instead, is a material vocabulary so consistent that scholars have been able to reconstruct the routes, the freight, the partners, and even something of the regulatory grammar of one of the longest-running long-distance trade systems of the third millennium BCE. Etched-carnelian […]
The Lost Expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt
On the morning of 3 April 1848, a forty-seven-year-old Prussian-born naturalist named Ludwig Leichhardt rode west from a sheep outstation on the Cogoon River and into the most thoroughly silent disappearance in the recorded history of Australian exploration. He led five companions, seven horses, twenty mules, and fifty bullocks. He carried his own carefully kept […]
The Ubaid Lizardmen Figures: Representations of Gods or Aliens?
Some artifacts are quiet. They sit in storerooms behind tags from a 1929 excavation season, and only the specialists who handle them remember what they are. The ophidian figurines of southern Mesopotamia are quiet objects: ten or fifteen centimeters of low-fired clay, slender bodies, reptilian heads, almond eyes, traces of bitumen still clinging to the […]