For nine years the popular website Futility Closet has collected arresting curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics. This book presents the best of them: pipe-smoking robots, clairvoyant pennies, zoo jailbreaks, literary cannibals, corned beef in space, revolving squirrels, disappearing Scottish lighthouse keepers, reincarnated pussycats, dueling Churchills, horse spectacles, onrushing molasses, and hundreds more. Plus the obscure words, odd inventions, puzzles and paradoxes that have made the website a quirky favorite with millions of readers -- hundreds of examples of the marvelous, the diverting, and the strange, now in a portable format to occupy your idle hours.

Bradford, Ohio is noted in history as being a "railroad town." Locals tell a story of floating orbs and a sanitarium in town. Is this simply an urban legend or are there really ghostly orbs coming from the former location of a long-gone sanitarium filled with spirits of the past? "Bradford, Ohio: Floating Orbs & A Sanitarium" answers these questions

On 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. Less than an hour after take-off, somewhere over the South China Sea the plane simply vanished. One eyewitness saw a burning object crash into the sea. But confusing radar signals trace tracked an aircraft taking an erratic course across the Malaysian peninsula, then on to the Andaman Sea. Did it crash there? Or did it fly on to land safely in disputed lands of Central Asia, or the top secret CIA 'black site' on Diego Garcia? Data from the Rolls Royce engines tracked by Inmarsat was said to indicate that it might have ditched in the furthest reaches of the South Indian Ocean. We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the sea there. And the weather and currents are so bad, it may never be found. Convenient? Two years later, the Australians are still search - at the cost of billions - and have found nothing. But was the search in such a remote place part of a cover-up to distract the world's attention because the US Navy had, in fact, shot the plane down?Since the invention of radio, radar, satellite navigation and the internet, the world has become a smaller place. The answer must be out there. Or, perhaps, hidden within the pages of the secret files.

How-and why- were UFOs so prevalent in both conspiracy theories and the New Age milieu in the post-Cold War period? In this ground-breaking book, David G. Robertson argues that UFOs symbolized an uncertainty about the boundaries between scientific knowledge and other ways of validating knowledge, and thus became part of a shared vocabulary. Through historical and ethnographic case studies of three prominent figures-novelist and abductee Whitley Strieber; environmentalist and reptilian proponent David Icke; and David Wilcock, alleged reincarnation of Edgar Cayce-the investigation reveals that millennial conspiracism offers an explanation as to why the prophesied New Age failed to arrive-it was prevented from arriving by malevolent, hidden others. Yet millennial conspiracism constructs a counter-elite, a gnostic third party defined by their special knowledge. An overview of the development of UFO subcultures from the perspective of religious studies, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age is an innovative application of discourse analysis to the study of present day alternative religion.

The first in a series, Bonnie Geyer Florek brings you Totally Haunted UK. It is packed full of exciting tales of ghostly sightings and experiences from the most haunted county in the UK, Cornwall. Impossible to include every story and sighting in this extensive collection, the most haunted and unusual encounters have been included. From a variety of Cornwall locations, you will read of eerie experiences of people who have visited Cornwall, from around the world.