This cogent exploration of the murky world of pseudo-history, now available in paperback, reveals the proven fact, the informed speculation and the pure fiction behind lost continents, ancient super-civilizations and conspiratorial cover-ups - as well as the revisionist historical foundations behind religions such as the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Drawing on the best scholarship available, Ronald H. Fritze shows that in spite of strong, mainstream historical evidence to the contrary, many of these ideas have proved durable and gained widespread acceptance. As the examples in Invented Knowledge reveal, pseudo-historians capitalize on and exploit anomalies in evidence to support their claims, rather than examining the preponderance of research as a whole. From Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to 10,000 BC, the sensationalist topics of pseudo-history captivate audiences and permeate popular culture. Invented Knowledge offers many entertaining and enthralling examples of spurious narratives, artificial chronologies and ersatz theories in a book guaranteed to intrigue, inform and provoke both skeptics and believers alike.

'My favourite author has done it again. Numbers Don't Lie is by far his most accessible book to date, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is curious about the world. I unabashedly recommend this book to anyone who loves learning' Bill Gates Is flying dangerous? How much do the world's cows weigh? And what makes people happy? From Earth's nations and inhabitants, through the fuels and foods that energize them, to the transportation and inventions of our modern world - and how all of this affects the planet itself - in Numbers Don't Lie, Professor Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge lazy thinking. Smil is on a mission to make facts matter, because after all, numbers may not lie, but which truth do they convey? 'Smil's title says it all: to understand the world, you need to follow the trendlines, not the headlines. This is a compelling, fascinating, and most important, realistic portrait of the world and where it's going' Steven Pinker 'The best book to read to better understand our world. It should be on every bookshelf!' Linda Yueh 'There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like Smil' Guardian Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of over forty books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment and public policy. No other living scientist has had more books (on a wide variety of topics) reviewed in Nature. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. This is his first book for a more general readership.

From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.

Narratives based on conspiratorial and paranoid thinking have become increasingly prominent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These stories range from sinister tales of malevolent reptilian beings infiltrating our government to fears that the forces of the New World Order rounding up patriotic Americans and putting them into internment camps. These concerns possess a long history in the United States and, often, have been bolstered by revelations of real conspiracies and cover-ups by private and public entities. From the prosaic to the outlandish, conspiracy narratives involve aliens and Nazis, underground bases and mind control technology. Conspiracy theories and the narratives constructed by those who believe them present a unique window into the history of the United States, highlighting fears both founded and unfounded.

This book provides new answers to who and psychologically why individuals sometimes adopt conspiracy beliefs and thoughts of violence. Five conspiracy beliefs are considered: Government Malfeasance, Malevolent World Power, Extra-terrestrial Cover-up, Personal Well-being Threat, and Control of Information. Using a survey of 977 US citizens, the book compares thirteen possible demographic characteristics (who?) to see which ones are most associated with extreme beliefs. The book then evaluates a three-step psychological sequence (why?) in which individuals experiencing intense life stressors (health, money, or loneliness), combined with powerlessness (displayed as PTSD symptoms), have increased risk for extreme beliefs, perhaps because they offer a sense of understanding, strength, and community.

The path that brought us here as a species is not only filled with lies and deception of unimaginable proportion, but also with continuous manipulation of the human race that goes back thousands of years all controlled by money. Michael Tellinger has come full circle since his epic Slave Species of god in 2006, by proposing a blueprint for the emancipation of the slave species called humanity. The world, and everything in it, has been incorporated, including every single human being, without their knowledge. But how do we use the knowledge of the past effectively, to benefit all of humanity into the future?

Tellinger redefines the previously misunderstood origins of money and the rise of the royal banking elite, that have controlled the world for millennia, and who continue to do so today through the modern banking families. He points out that money did not evolve from thousands of years of barter and trade, but that it was maliciously introduced to the human race as a tool of absolute control and enslavement. Tellinger makes a strong case, that if we do not understand our human origins, we cannot come to terms with why the world is so utterly confusing and messed up in the 21st century.

He demonstrates that our current situation presents us with a unique opportunity to change the course of our destiny. Michael Tellinger describes how the ancient African philosophy of UBUNTU will allow us to seamlessly move from a divided, money-driven society, to prosper in united communities driven by people, their God-given talents and their passion for life. Coming to terms with our enslavement as a species by the global financial system, is critical to discovering the path to full enlightenment.

UBUNTU Contributionism presents a solid foundation for a new social structure to take us into a new era of true freedom from financial tyranny, towards real prosperity on every level of human endeavor.

Since 2010, Michael Tellinger and a small group of brave individuals, have spearheaded the civil defense against the fraudulent activities of the South African banks. Over a period of three years, during which they defended themselves at great personal loss and cost, against the most seasoned lawyers money can buy, Tellinger and friends successfully uncovered the criminal activity of the "banksters," how they hide behind their legal watch dogs and the infinitely complex legal system. He uncovered how they manipulate the justice system for their continued benefit and how they get away with crimes against humanity, destroying millions of people's lives in the process on, day by day.

Tellinger's in-depth expos of the global banking fraud includes the privately owned FEDERAL RESERVE BANK in the USA, the very powerful SOUTH AFRICAN RESERVE BANK, and other central banks of the world including the BANK OF ENGLAND. This journey has taken him through the halls of the Supreme Court in Johannesburg and the Constitutional Court, indicating clearly by the words of the registrar of the court that, "our courts do not dispense justice, they uphold the law..". no matter how crooked the law may be.

While the courtroom dramas were largely ignored by mainstream media, it attracted the attention of millions of people around the world, leading to the birth of the New Economics Rights Alliance, which became the third largest NPO in South Africa within six months of its launch.

Over the years, startling evidence has been uncovered, challenging established notions of the origins of life on Earth--evidence that suggests the existence of an advanced group of extraterrestrials who once inhabited our world. The first book of the revolutionary Earth Chronicles series offers indisputable documentary evidence of the existence of the mysterious planet Nibiru and tells why its astronauts came to Earth eons ago to fashion mankind in their image. The product of more than thirty years of meticulous research, The 12th Planet treats as fact, not myth, the tales of Creation, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and the Nefilim who married the daughters of man. By weaving together the biblical narrative with Sumerian and Babylonian clay-tablet texts, it challenges the established notions of the origins of Earth and mankind, and offers a compelling alternative history and prehistory of both.

A UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO THE WORLD'S most mysterious manuscript. Since its creation in the first half of the 15th century, the Voynich Manuscript has fascinated and obsessed students of the esoteric, of magic and of alchemy, yet to date no one has managed to crack its code. It truly is one of a kind: the only book in existence that has been written in its particular language and alphabet - a language that no one can read. This magnificent edition presents stunning full-colour reproductions of every page of the Voynich Manuscript, along with helpful diagrams that show exactly how the folios are bound into this complex codex. Two introductory essays invite readers to interpret for themselves the clues found in the manuscript's strange and beautiful illustrations of plants, star constellations, enigmatic bathing women and cosmological diagrams. Dr Rafal T Prinke and Dr Rene Zandbergen also draw on the manuscript collections of eastern Europe, not normally accessible to English-speaking scholars, to offer the fullest explanation so far of the Voynich's incredible journey through history, while Dr Stephen Skinner explores the parallels to the Voynich Manuscript in the cryptography of Leonardo da Vinci and the Enochian angel language of John Dee.

Meghan Misunderstood is a pioneering book that sets the record straight on the most talked about, unfairly vilified and misrepresented woman in the world. Meghan Markle was eleven when she first advocated for women's rights; a teenager when she worked in a soup kitchen feeding the homeless; a popular actress when she campaigned for clean water in Africa and passionately championed gender equality in a speech to a United Nations Women's Conference. Even before she met Prince Harry, hers was an extraordinarily accomplished life. Meghan's wedding to Harry was a joyful occasion, marking happiness at last for the Queen's grandson who had captured our hearts twenty years earlier when he bravely walked behind his mother Diana's coffin. Theirs was a story that the screenwriters of Hollywood - where Meghan had made her name - could scarcely have imagined. The rom-com fantasy, however, soon turned into disturbing drama: any expectation of a life happily-ever-after was cruelly dashed by bullying tabloid newspapers and their allies, both on social media and within the walls of the Palace itself. Meghan was targeted for her gender, her race, her nationality and her profession. The abuse became so bad that seventy-two female MPs signed a letter of solidarity against the 'often distasteful and misleading press', calling out the 'outdated colonial undertones' of the stories. Now, Sean Smith, the UK's leading celebrity biographer, pulls no punches as he reveals the remarkable and powerful story of this self-made, intelligent American woman with a strong social conscience who has made such an impact on our lives.

America's favorite cultural historian and author of Ghostland takes a "thought-provoking and delicoiusly unsettling" (Publisher's Weekly) tour of the country's most persistent "unexplained" phenomena In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational--in fringe--is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity and insight that made Ghostland a hit with readers and critics, Colin looks at what all fringe beliefs have in common, explaining that today's Illuminati is yesterday's Flat Earth: the attempt to find meaning in a world stripped of wonder. Dickey visits the wacky sites of America's wildest fringe beliefs--from the famed Mount Shasta where the ancient race (or extra-terrestrials, or possibly both, depending on who you ask) called Lemurians are said to roam, to the museum containing the last remaining "evidence" of the great Kentucky Meat Shower--investigating how these theories come about, why they take hold, and why as Americans we keep inventing and re-inventing them decade after decade. The Unidentified is Colin Dickey at his best: curious, wry, brilliant in his analysis, yet eminently readable.

Most people's concept of the 'end of the world' comes from the book of Revelation. Alternative apocalypses can be found in the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, in ancient Hindu scriptures and Norse myths. Today, there are an estimated 25 million Christian fundamentalists in the US who believe it will come with the 'Rapture'; others point to an ecological catastrophe, the AIDS pandemic or nuclear and biological warfare. What happens when, in the grip of apocalyptic prophesy, individuals and groups see themselves as the 'elect' and above conventional mores? As with the Ranters of the English Civil War, it can lead to comedy. But it can also lead to sinister extremism - the Nazis recast it as the Third Reich; latter-day doomsday cults such as the Waco Branch Davidians believed that they too were divinely elected - and could kill in the name of the coming apocalypse. The world today is in the grip of an apocalyptic struggle between the neo-Conservatives in America and a supposed global network of Islamic fundamentalists. For Bush, the war is a 'crusade', for Osama Bin Laden it is a jihad; for both, it is a struggle against absolute evil. From its Biblical beginnings to suicide bombers, via the Vikings, the French Revolution, the Pilgrim Fathers, Hitler's Apocalyptic rhetoric, asteroids and Hollywood, Pearson shows that as long as human beings seek to make sense of the world in which they live, endings will continue to have a future.

On the morning of April 29, 1992, Exxon International president, Sidney J. Reso, left his home for the office. He stepped out to pick up the newspaper at the end of his drive as he did every morning. A van screeched to a stop and a large man wearing a ski mask and wielding a .45-caliber pistol leaped from the vehicle and grabbed Reso, shoving him into the back of the van. The female driver sped away. No one saw or heard anything, sparking the largest kidnapping investigation in US history since Patty Hearst's abduction.

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the former CIA operative known as "X," offers a history-shaking perspective on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. His theories were the basis for Oliver Stone's controversial movie "JFK." Prouty believed that Kennedy's death was a coup d'etat, and he backs this belief up with his knowledge of the security arrangements at Dallas and other tidbits that only a CIA insider would know (for example, that every member of Kennedy's cabinet was abroad at the time of Kennedy's assassination). His discussion of the elite power base he believes controlled the U.S. government will scare and enlighten anyone who wants to know who was really behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In this enjoyably iconoclastic book, George Watson discusses some of the great heresies of the twentieth century, and the cultural heretics who espoused them, often with surprising results. Watson provides us with examples of 'true', original heretics, many of whom he has met and taught: from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who asserted that his study of the remote past had made a radical of him, rather than any influence of modernism, to Douglas Adams, whom Watson knew as an undergraduate. Watson forces us to question various long-cherished political and intellectual assumptions in his witty and conversational style. Is snobbery really such a bad thing? Have we ignored the links between socialism and genocide? He touches entertainingly upon subjects as diverse as literary theory (experimental fiction is often the last resort of those who have nothing to say), and the unoriginal conformism of teenage Marxists (incapable of actually reading Marx, as he is too boring). This is a work which will delight any reader seeking a uniquely personal perspective on the culture, history, and personalities of the twentieth century.

In this ethnographic study, the author takes an agnostic stance towards the truth value of conspiracy theories and delves into the everyday lives of people active in the conspiracy milieu to understand better what the contemporary appeal of conspiracy theories is. Conspiracy theories have become popular cultural products, endorsed and shared by significant segments of Western societies. Yet our understanding of who these people are and why they are attracted by these alternative explanations of reality is hampered by their implicit and explicit pathologization. Drawing on a wide variety of empirical sources, this book shows in rich detail what conspiracy theories are about, which people are involved, how they see themselves, and what they practically do with these ideas in their everyday lives. The author inductively develops from these concrete descriptions more general theorizations of how to understand this burgeoning subculture. He concludes by situating conspiracy culture in an age of epistemic instability where societal conflicts over knowledge abound, and the Truth is no longer assured, but "out there" for us to grapple with. This book will be an important source for students and scholars from a range of disciplines interested in the depth and complexity of conspiracy culture, including Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Ethnology, Folklore Studies, History, Media Studies, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. More broadly, this study speaks to contemporary (public) debates about truth and knowledge in a supposedly post-truth era, including widespread popular distrusts towards elites, mainstream institutions and their knowledge.

Why do obviously intelligent people believe things in spite of the evidence against them? Will Storr has travelled across the world to meet an extraordinary cast of modern heretics in order to answer this question. He goes on a tour of Holocaust sites with David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during 'past-life regression' hypnosis, takes part in a mass homeopathic overdose, and investigates a new disease affecting tens of thousands of people - a disease that doesn't actually exist. Using a unique mix of personal memoir, investigative journalism and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals why the facts just won't convince some people, and how the neurological 'hero-maker' inside all of us can so easily lead to self-deception and science-denial. The Heretics will change the way you think about thinking.

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers -- and outraged the Bush Administration -- with his explosive stories in The New Yorker, including his headline-making pieces on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Now, Hersh brings together what he has learned, along with new reporting, to answer the critical question of the last four years: How did America get from the clear morning when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center to a divisive and dirty war in Iraq?

In Chain of Command, Hersh takes an unflinching look behind the public story of the war on terror and into the lies and obsessions that led America into Iraq. Hersh draws on sources at the highest levels of the American government and intelligence community, in foreign capitals, and on the battlefield for an unparalleled view of a critical chapter in America's recent history. In a new afterword, he critiques the government's failure to adequately investigate prisoner abuse -- at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- and punish those responsible. With an introduction by The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, Chain of Command is a devastating portrait of an administration blinded by ideology and of a president whose decisions have made the world a more dangerous place for America.

Right now, there is an enormous infusion of higher dimensional energy--a "Galactic Super Wave"--that is dramatically raising the vibratory rate of our planet and everyone on it. As Bob Frissell explains, in order to catch this wave of ascension and survive and thrive during the coming Great Awakening, we must undergo a personal transformation to raise our vibration and align with the Higher Self within each of us. Frissell explores the forces working to advance our planetary ascent into higher consciousness--as well as those seeking to block it. Going back over 500,000 years of Earth history, he looks at the role of the ancient Builder Race from Venus and other ET races, such as the Greys and the Anshars, in our evolutionary development and rapid technological advancements. He exposes government cover-ups of alien encounters as well as the startling details of our Secret Space Program, the New World Order, and the Depopulation Agenda. He explains how the Precession of the Equinoxes is directly influencing Earth's awakening and how the dance between the "forces of darkness" and the "forces of light" actually allows consciousness to evolve. Sharing exercises, tools, and techniques to transmute the energies blocking access to your Higher Self, Frissell explores how the infusion of higher dimensional energy is impacting planet Earth and each of us. He shows how reconnecting with your Higher Self enables you to harness the ability to create great abundance and recognize our intimate connection to all life and to the Infinite Creator. Unveiling the incoming new energetic configuration for the Earth, Frissell details how the Great Awakening is nothing less than the birth of a new humanity and how, by raising your vibration, you help in the co-creation of Heaven on Earth.

Thousands of years ago, the Earth was a battlefield. These were the wars that would shape man's destiny--terrible conflicts that began lifetimes earlier on another planet.

Parting the mists of time and myth, the internationally renowned scholar Zecharia Sitchin takes us back in this volume to the violent beginnings of the human story, when gods--not men--ruled the Earth.

In a spellbinding reconstruction of epic events preserved in legends and ancient writings, he traces the conflicts that began on another world, continued on Earth, and culminated in the use of nuclear weapons--an event recorded in the Bible as the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah.

After a hall of records was discovered beneath the Romanian Sphinx in 2003, an ancient parchment surfaced in the highest mountains of Tibet. This book tells the story of the detailed political intrigues behind these remarkable finds and also how these matters have been subject to intervention by superior spiritual forces. While the parchment presents five invaluable techniques for spiritual advancement, its very presence in the world has ignited a series of quantum events, one of which is a mysterious antenna-like structure that reveals itself as a result of melting ice near a secret American base in Antarctica. Acting as some sort of cosmic buoy, it has an energy signature connecting both to Jupiter's moon, Europa, and an area of Transylvania where the remains of an ancient civilization were uncovered in 1990 amidst vast tunnels of solid gold. This gold is revealed to facilitate super-consciousness as well as lead to the nexus of the Inner Earth where "all the worlds unite."

Can psychedelic drugs help us tackle the biggest problems we face globally? Can they heal the cultural, spiritual, and political wounds we’re wrestling with? Psychedelics have hit the mainstream as powerful new mental health treatments. But as clinicians explore what these molecules can do for our individual minds, The Bigger Picture goes further to illuminate how psychedelics can help us find new ways to make sense of and come through the crises we face around the world. Drawing on the latest research, as well as his unique experience as a participant in a ground-breaking clinical trial investigating the potent psychedelic DMT, Alexander Beiner reveals: - the role of psychedelics in addressing global issues such as global warming, geopolitical instability, and political polarization - the dark side of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ and ‘psychedelic capitalism’ - what it takes to elicit huge personal and cultural transformation through psychedelics Embark on a journey into The Bigger Picture – a new era of science and spirituality with the potential to radically transform our perceptions of ourselves, one another, and our life on this planet.