Conspiracy theories of sabotage, murder and even UFOs flourish around the greatest unsolved mysteries of aviation from the twentieth century. This account of the most intriguing loose ends from aeronautical history provides the known details of five great mysteries and the best (and most colourful) attempts to explain what might have happened. Planes disappearing out of the sky, shady dealings with Sri-Lankan businessmen, the plummeting death of the richest man in the world in 1928 and even the Kennedy family all feature in these gripping open cases. Having previously written about the Dyatlov Pass Incident and cast his detail-oriented eye over many other aviation mishaps, Keith McCloskey now turns his attention to reassessing these five mysteries -all of which occurred over water, none of them ever resolved.

The President and the Provocateur explores the parallel lives of John F. Kennedy, born into wealth and celebrity, destined for glory and a violent death, and of Lee Harvey Oswald, born into poverty and obscurity, murdered in police custody and convicted - without a lawyer or a trial - of the killing of JFK. 50 years after both men were murdered, Alex Cox provides a chronological account of their lives' strange intersections, their shared interests, and the increasing body of evidence which suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald was working for some branch of the government - most likely the FBI or IRS - as an infiltrator of subversive groups, and agent provocateur. The President and the Provocateur draws on five decades of accumulated evidence that Oswald was an intelligence agent and agent provocateur. Far from being an active Communist, Oswald was mainly interested in infiltrating right-wing groups (including the White Russian community of Fort Worth, the National States Rights Party, the Minutemen, and the Cuban Alpha 66 terrorist organization in Dallas and New Orleans). From this perspective his alleged purchasing of guns by mail may be the actions of someone attempting to build a case against right-wing gun-runners and their suppliers - something the IRS and Senator Christopher Dodd's Subcommittee were also doing, at exactly the same time. The possibility that Oswald was sent as a spy to Russia has been raised before, but this is the first book to detail Oswald's continued pattern of intelligence-gathering and infiltration of political groups on his return to the USA.

HISTORY / SECRET SOCIETIES Crusade Against the Grail is the daring book that popularized the legend of the Cathars and the Holy Grail. The first edition appeared in Germany in 1933 and drew upon Rahn's account of his explorations of the Pyrenean caves where the heretical Cathar sect sought refuge during the thirteenth century. Over the years the book has been translated into many languages and exerted a large influence on such authors as Trevor Ravenscroft and Jean-Michel Angebert, but it has never appeared in English until now. Much as German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann used Homer's Iliad to locate ancient Troy, Rahn believed that Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic Parzival held the keys to the mysteries of the Cathars and the secret location of the Holy Grail. Rahn saw Parzival not as a work of fiction, but as a historical account of the Cathars and the Knights Templar and their guardianship of the Grail, a "stone from the stars." The Crusade that the Vatican led against the Cathars became a war pitting Roma (Rome) against Amor (love), in which the Church triumphed with flame and sword over the pure faith of the Cathars. OTTO RAHN was born in Michelstadt, Germany, in 1904. After earning his degree in philology in 1924, he traveled extensively to the caves and castles of southern France, researching his belief that the Cathars were the last custodians of the Grail. Induced by Himmler to become a member of the SS as a civilian archaeologist and historian, Rahn quickly grew disillusioned with the direction his country was taking and resigned in 1939. He died, an alleged suicide, on March 13, 1939, in the snows of the Tyrolean Mountains.

‘Timely and troubling’ Evening Standard
‘A necessary book’ David Aaronovitch
‘Frequently jaw-dropping’ Huffington Post

From UFOs to the New World Order, the inside story of how conspiracy theories won over America.

In November 2017, a serial climate change denier and anti-vaxxer was elected President of the United States. The rise of Donald Trump marked the beginning of a new American epoch: the age of the conspiracy theorist.

Now, Anna Merlan goes undercover in America’s sprawling network of conspiracy theorists and uncovers their secrets. She meets the UFOlogist who claims to have travelled to Mars with a young Barack Obama. She chats with the ‘pizzagate’ truthers who think Washington D.C.’s favourite pizzeria is run by a satanic paedophile ring. And she bumps into Alex Jones, the YouTube impresario who thinks the state is using chemical warfare to turn the population gay – and who happens to be on first-name terms with the leader of the free world.

Merlan reveals a world of innuendo and propaganda lying just beneath the surface of US culture. It might just help explain the political turmoil of our time.

The Telescreen is the pervasive media screen put in front of, and injected into, the eyes and ears of humans in the American electronic techno-culture. This begins from birth, and moulds consciousness throughout life: not a genuine human consciousness, but rather is a less-than-human, despiritualized semi-consciousness. People today continually flood their consciousnesses with images and impressions from television, videogames, church, radio, billboards, textbooks, magazines, newspapers, etc.- the "telescreen world" of Orwell's 1984. The Telescreen is about how this pseudosphere destroys consciousness and society as humans give their attention, consciousness, and vital spirit to the telescreen. The result is a society of unholy subhumans, who no longer act like they have souls: They cannot turn off the telescreen world even to have dinner and talk to each other or to their children. When they do talk it is mostly about impressions from the telescreen world. Their inner subjective consciousness is constructed and formed by the telescreen, leading to a world of despiritualization and warmongering by hordes of conformist, petty, unhappy troll-like "yes-men." -- Jeff Grupp The telescreens of 1984 substituted fiction lives for the empty ones of a brainwashed population, as in Plato's cave. Grupp drives it home that this is our world now. Some features of this dream-world of The Telescreen: Materialism and consumerism make people into robots, shallow stooges. Degrading self-images, down-dumbing education of drills, not thinking skills. War propaganda fed on pure fakery and repetition by the media, censored of truth and filled with non-news, gossip and cant. Brainwashing underpinned by fallacious reasoning. Example: Iran and Iraq slandered as murderously planning to unleash WMDs, while the US really has and uses them for genocide against target nations. Information warfare: The bias of "educational" TV shows like the "History Channel." Trusted figures hired to peddle suspect messages. Journalists who stray from the party line into real issues are fired. Exploiting the herd instinct to impose conformity. Psychological tyranny is more effective than brute force. An artificial consciousness is dinned into people by constant electronic stimuli. They depend on it -- and on pharmaceutical drugs too -- for a feeling of well-being: they are addicts. Appendix -- Infowars articles: the NWO is taking over the patriot and truth movements, seemingly attacking itself. We need Jeffersonian militias, not gun control. -- J-P Leonard

The questions have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963? Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, finally provides many of the answers. Though A CRUEL AND SHOCKING ACT began as Shenon's attempt to write the first insider's history of the Warren Commission, it quickly became something much larger and more important when he discovered startling information that was withheld from the Warren Commission by the CIA, FBI and others in power in Washington. Shenon shows how the commission's ten-month investigation was doomed to fail because the man leading it - Chief Justice Earl Warren - was more committed to protecting the Kennedy family than getting to the full truth about what happened on that tragic day. A taut, page-turning narrative, Shenon's book features some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century-Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Justice Warren, CIA spymasters Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as the CIA's treacherous 'molehunter,' James Jesus Angleton. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to the surviving commission staffers and many other key players, Philip Shenon's authoritative, scrupulously researched book will forever change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination and about the deeply flawed investigation that followed.

Modern Conspiracy attempts to sketch a new conception of conspiracy theory. Where many commentators have sought to characterize conspiracy theory in terms of the collapse of objectivity and Enlightenment reason, Fleming and Jane trace the important role of conspiracy in the formation of the modern world: the scientific revolution, social contract theory, political sovereignty, religious paranoia and mass communication media. Rather than see in conspiratorial thinking the imminent death of Enlightenment reason, and a regression to a new Dark Age, Modern Conspiracy contends that many characteristic features of conspiracies tap very deeply into the history of the Enlightenment itself: among other things, its vociferous critique of established authorities, and a conception of political sovereignty fuelled by fear of counter-plots. Drawing out the roots of modern conspiratorial thinking leads us to truths less salacious and scandalous than the claims of conspiracy theorists themselves yet ultimately far more salutary: about mass communication; about individual and crowd psychology; and about our conception of and relation to knowledge. Perhaps, ultimately, what conspiracy theory affords us is a renewed opportunity to reflect on our very relationship to the truth itself.

If 9/11 was the great pretext for the turn to fascism in the USA, London's 7/7 bombings were the enabling act for an Orwellian new reign of "anti"-terror in Britain, where the Home Office recruits tens of thousands of citizens to fight the "threat of Al-Qaeda". Is there a basis to this frenzy - or is the government merely terrorising the populace? The answer is here, in this craftsmanly masterpiece of detective work. Nick Kollerstrom, a private researcher acting on his own initiative, has solved the mystery of the 7/7 bombings: something Britain's billion-budget security apparatus can't or won't do. It's a compelling investigation and a convincing indictment of the real criminals: the British, US and Israeli secret services. It's the demolition of the fabricated evidence they brought into play. It's the posthumous exoneration of the four innocent young men, sacrificed and framed to shore up the rule of a crime cabal over this planet. Nick Kollerstrom has single-handedly done for 7/7 what a whole generation of authors did to expose 9/11 -- assembled the body of independent research into a coherent, balanced and authoritative appeal to justice. An appeal against the wars of aggression and neo-fascist police state that are underpinned by the propaganda trick of false-flag terror.

Since 1933, when a completely drugged and trial-conditioned human wreck confessed to having started the Reichstag fire in Berlin, Dr Joost A M Meerloo has studied the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. The first two and one-half years of World War II, Dr Meerloo spent under the pressure of Nazi-occupied Holland, witnessing at first-hand the Nazi methods of mental torture .on more than one occasion. During this time he was able to use his psychiatric and psychoanalytic knowledge to treat some of the victims. Then, after personal experiences with enforced interrogation, he escaped from a Nazi prison and certain death to England, where he was able, as Chief of the Psychological Department of the Netherlands Forces, to observe and study coercive methods officially. In this capacity he had to investigate not only traitors and collaborators, but also those members of the Resistance who had gone through the utmost of mental pressure. Later, as High Commissioner for Welfare, he came in closer contact with those who had gone through physical and mental torture. After the war, he came to the United States, where his war experiences would not permit him to concentrate solely on his psychiatric practice, but compelled him to go beyond purely medical aspects to the social aspects of the problem. As more and more cases of thought control, brainwashing, and mental coercion were disclosed -- Cardinal Mindszenty, Colonel Schwable, Robert Vogeler, and others -- his interest grew. It was Dr. Meerloo who coined the word menticide, the killing of the spirit, for this peculiar crime. His knowledge of these totalitarian procedures has been officially acknowledged; he served as an expert witness in the case of Colonel Schwable, the Marine Corps officer who, after months of subjection to physical and mental torture following his capture in Korea, was made to confess to having taken part in germ warfare. It is Dr Meerloo's position that through pressure on the weak points in men's makeup, totalitarian methods can turn anyone into a "traitor". And in this book he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurising people's minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematised "rape of the mind". He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The book is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.