Obscure and addictive true tales from history told by one of our most entertaining historians, Giles Milton

The first installment in Giles Milton's outrageously entertaining series, History's Unknown Chapters: colorful and accessible, intelligent and illuminating, Milton shows his customary historical flair as he delves into the little-known stories from the past. There's the cook aboard the Titanic, who pickled himself with whiskey and survived in the icy seas where most everyone else died. There's the man who survived the atomic bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there's many, many more.

Covering everything from adventure, war, murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the female Robinson Crusoe, Hitler's final hours, Japan's deadly balloon bomb and the emperor of the United States, these tales deserve to be told.

The manger or Macy's? Americans might well wonder which is the real shrine of Christmas, as they take part each year in a mix of churchgoing, shopping, and family togetherness. In Christmas in America, Restad brilliantly captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday.

#1 Best Seller in Trivia & Fun Facts, Questions & Answers, Curiosities & Wonders, and Cults & Demonism Think You Know About Sexual Customs Around Our World? Have Fun and Enjoy Some Surprises!This book is a humorous glimpse of a wide range of stereotype-busting sexual, relationship and romantic mores around the world. It is fun, interesting, and eye-opening! For example, places where women control the mating game, set marriage rules, and marry one another for political power. The fact that it's all true also makes it fascinating. Take a romp through a rollicking worldwide tour with LOL views of extraordinary sexual customs. It will astound and regale you. At the same time, it proves sex is like happiness - universally sought but subjectively enjoyed.

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 infamous literary hoax that fooled the art world On January 8 1960, artist Nat Tate set out to burn his entire life's work. Four days later he jumped off a Staten Island ferry, killing himself. His body was never found. When William Boyd published his biography of Abstract Expressionist Nat Tate, tributes poured in from a whole host of artists and critics in the New York art world. They toasted the troubled genius in a Manhattan launch party attended by David Bowie and Gore Vidal. But Nat Tate never existed. The book was a hoax. Will Boyd's biography of a fake artist is a brilliant probe into the politics of authenticity and reputation in the modern art scene. It is a playful and intelligent insight into the fascinating, often cryptic world of modern art.

Human beings have believed in conspiracies presumably as long as there have been groups of at least three people in which one was convinced that the other two were plotting against him or her. In that sense one might look back as far as Eve and the serpent to find the world's first conspiracy. Whereas recent generations have tended to find their conspiracies in politics and government, the past often sought its mysteries in religious cults or associations. In ancient Rome, for example, the senate tried to prohibit the cult of Isis lest its euphoric excesses undermine public morality and political stability. And during the Middle Ages, many rulers feared such powerful and mysterious religious orders as the Knights Templar. Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Theodore Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations-drama, romance, epic, novel, opera-down to the thrillers of the twenty-first century. Arguing that the lure of the arcane throughout the ages has remained a constant factor of human fascination, Ziolkowski demonstrates that the content of conspiracy has shifted from religion by way of philosophy and social theory to politics. In the process, he reveals, the underlying mythic pattern was gradually co-opted for the subversive ends of conspiracy. Cults and Conspiracies considers Euripides's Bacchae, Andreae's Chymical Wedding, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, among other seminal works. Mimicking the genre's quest-driven narrative arc, the reader searches for the significance of conspiracy fiction and is rewarded with the author's cogent reflections in the final chapter. After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco's notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact "a secret without content."

Physicist and Oxford-educated historian Farrell continues his best-selling book series on ancient planetary warfare, technology and the energy grid that surrounds the earth. Farrell looks at the Nazis and geomancy; the lithium-7 mystery; Nazi Transmitters and the Earth Grid; The Grid and Hitler's East Prussia Headquarters; Grid Geopolitical Geomancy; A Deeper Physics?; Ashlars and Engineering; Transmitters, Temples, Sacred Sites and Nazis; Anomalies at the Temples of Angkor; The Ancient Prime Meridian: Giza; As Above, So Below: The Astronomical Correlation and the 10,500 BC Mystery; The Master Plan of a Hidden Elite; Moving and Immoveable Stones; Uncountable Stones and Stones of the Giants and Gods; Desecration, Inhabitation, and Treasure Traditions; Divination, Animation, Healing, and Numerical Traditions; Gateway Traditions; John Michell, "Scared Geometry," "Sacred Science," The Grid, and the Ancient Elite; Finding the Center of the Land; The Ancient Catastrophe, the Very High Civilization, and the Post-Catastrophe Elite; The Meso- and South-American "Pyramid Peoples"; Paradoxes at Pumu Punkhu; Tiahuanaco and the Puma Punkhu Paradox: Ancient Machining; The Mayans, Their Myths, and the Mounds; The Aztec Anomaly: The Black Brotherhood and Blood Sacrifices; The Mesopotamian "Pyramid Peoples" The Pythagorean and Platonic Principles of Sumer, Babylonia, and Greece; The Gears of Giza: the Center of the Machine; Alchemical Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics in Stone: The Mysterious Megalith of Nabta Playa; The Physics of the "Pyramid Peoples"; tons more.

Was Jesus a Freemason? The discovery of evidence of the most secret rites of Freemasonry in an ancient Egyptian tomb led authors Chris Knight and Bob Lomas into and extraordinary investigation of 4,000 years of history. This astonishing bestseller raises questions that have challenged some of Western civilisation's most cherished beliefs: Were scrolls bearing the secret teachings of Jesus buried beneath Herod's Temple shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman's? Did the Knights Templar, the forerunners of modern Freemasonry, excavate these scrolls in the twelfth century? And were these scrolls subsequently buried underneath a reconstructionof Herod's Temple, Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland - where they are now awaiting excavation? The authors' discoveries shed a new light on Masonic ceremony and overturn out understanding of history.

Tales from the Time Loop is the most comprehensive book yet written about the global conspiracy that is now unfolding all around us. David Icke has been warning for well over a decade of the plan for a world fascist state, a global version of Nazi Germany, in which the people will be prisoners of a Big Brother dictatorship founded on the suppression of the most fundamental freedoms and total control and surveillance. Today there is a gathering awareness that he was right. People are realizing that Big Brother is no longer "coming" - he's here. Icke pulls together his fantastic wealth of accumulated knowledge to reveal the multi-levels of the fascist conspiracy. He begins in the "five-sense" world with a highly detailed exposure of the forces, methods and agenda behind the "war on terrorism," the invasion of Iraq and the planned conquest of the Middle East and elsewhere. He goes on to explore the other-dimensional connection to the "human" manipulators and then reveals how our sense of reality - what we think is "real" - is being implanted in our minds by the second while we believe we are thinking for ourselves.In early 2003, Icke had some amazing experiences in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil that revealed to him as never before that the world we think is "real" is only an illusion; a lucid and manipulated dream that he calls the "Matrix." In Tales from the Time Loop, he shares those experiences and details the scientific support for what he learned about the illusion we call daily life. Icke says that this section of the book is the most important work he has published. It is, he says, the knowledge that will set us free and take us home.

In August 2003, a mysterious and unprecedented collaboration of American and Romanian military troops conducted an expedition beneath the Romanian Sphinx in the Bucegi Mountains and uncovered the greatest archaeological find of all time: a mysterious chamber some 50,000 years old with holographic technology that is beyond mans wildest dreams. Despite the political intrigue, turmoil and restriction around this great discovery, the leader of the expedition enabled Radu Cinamar to visit and explore these artefacts. Ever since, Radu's life has been a labyrinthine adventure of strange events, clandestine liaisons and extraordinary people and circumstances. This book tells the story of Radu's meeting with a Tibetan lama who claims to have put the above events in motion in order to change major imbalances in the Earth. This is not only a remarkable story, but it is an initiation of the highest order that will benefit anyone reading it. The book will take you far beyond your ordinary imagination in order to describe events that have moulded the past and will influence the future in the decades ahead.

Two decades after radiocarbon dating declared the Turin Shroud a mediaeval fake, brand-new historical discoveries strongly suggest that this famous cloth, with its extraordinary photographic imprint, is genuinely Christ's shroud after all. In 1978 in his international bestseller The Turin Shroud Ian Wilson ignited worldwide public debate with his compelling case endorsing the shroud's authenticity. Now, 30 years later, he has completely rewritten and updated his earlier book to provide fresh evidence to support his original argument. Shroud boldly challenges the current post-radiocarbon dating view - that it is a fake. By arguing his case brilliantly and provocatively, Ian Wilson once more throws the matter into the public arena for further debate and controversy.

A unique contribution to the study of the UFOs, originally published over 30 years ago, this updated edition includes new photographs and illustrations, and an extensive Foreword by David Hatcher Childress discussing more recent Underwater UFOs - now called USOs - Unidentified Submersible Objects. In the last 30 years, new sightings have occurred and new information on old sightings has come forth through the Freedom of Information Acts in the USA, Britain and Australia. These curious incidents during official military manoeuvres raise many questions: Do the British and Americans have underwater military bases capable of launching UFOs? Could the ultimate docking stations for some of the UFOs seen constantly around the world be deep in our oceans? Could these still-operational underwater docking bases have been built in our distant past by extraterrestrials? Sanderson chronicles hundreds of curious unidentified underwater object incidents, many which emerge from the water to fly through the air, and draws some startling conclusions.

The History of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient Greece. Erich von Daniken's last book changed the way generations have looked at mythology, ancient history, and the possibility of advanced beings from other worlds visiting earth. Now he tackles the history of Greece and again challenges our beliefs about how our civilization arose. Using archaeological research and evidence from the writings of Plato and Aristotle, he suggests tha the Greek 'myths' were, in fact a reality and that the Greek gods were actually extraterrestrials.

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.

* Explains how the Greys are bio-machines, synthetic beings sent out to gather information about human souls and natural consciousness * Shows how our consciousness has been hacked by the Greys to filter our perceptions to be in line with their agenda to steal our souls * Reveals how you can protect your soul field and your consciousness from the Greys' terrible manipulations Humanity's biggest existential threat is our headlong rush to a technologically advanced future. Already we increasingly rely on smart devices to the point that they are becoming extensions of our bodies. We are at a turning point for our species in which our natural humanity is gradually being converted into an artificial format that will lead to the loss of our souls. And, as Nigel Kerner reveals in astonishing detail, the blueprints for this future already exist. Kerner explains how there are civilizations in our universe that have developed advanced technologies to become entirely artificial. The Grey alien entities, reported in tens of thousands of abductions, appear to be biomachines, synthetic beings sent out as AI probes to gather information about something they lack that humans and other natural beings possess: a soul. Examining scientific, historical, cultural, and religious evidence for Grey alien visitations as far back as 40,000 years ago, the author reveals that the Greys themselves set us on this path toward artificial intelligence millennia ago. Kerner shows how our intrinsic nature as human beings is no longer entirely human: our natural consciousness and DNA have been hacked, and an artificial construct has been superimposed at the very foundation of our thinking processes. The author shows how our rush toward a technologically advanced, artificially intelligent future was seeded and precipitated by the Greys in order to control us and prepare us to fit in with their agenda for humanity. Revealing the secret alien hives on our planet, their connections to governments, and their ultimate endgame to harvest our souls and alter our DNA, Kerner also shows how, by developing yourself on a soul level, by recognizing your individual connection to divinity, you can protect your soul field and your consciousness from the Greys' terrible manipulations.