The Unidentified

"Absolutely perfect for the current moment." --Buzzfeed America's favorite cultural historian and author of Ghostland takes a 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.

Fifteen-year-old Katey (aka Kid) goes to school in the Game—a mall converted into a “school” run by corporate sponsors. As the students play their way through the levels, they are also creatingproducts and being used for market research by the sponsors, who are watching them 24/7 on video cameras. Kid has a vague sense of unease but doesn’t question this existence until one day she witnesses a shocking anticorporateprank. She follows the clues to uncover the identities of the people behind it and discovers an anonymous group that callsitself the Unidentified. Intrigued by their countercultureideas and enigmatic leader, Kid is drawn into the group. But when the Unidentified’s pranks and even Kid’s own identity are co-opted by the sponsors, Kid decides to do something bigger—something that could change the Game forever. This funny, sharp, and thought-provoking novel heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in teen fiction.

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016 “A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history. Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

"The horrors of WWII were still fresh in our minds when the Korean War broke out. June 25, 1950, when the North Korean Communists crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel to invade South Korea, changed the course of my life. Betty, her roommate Marian Ott, Richard's old Trenton buddy and roommate Harvey Seeman, and Richard were driving to "Old Man's Cave" which is about a hundred miles southwest of Columbus. It was a day made for poets and we couldn't have been in a more festive mood. The radio was tuned to the classical music station on WOSU when the program was interrupted with the news that the North Korean Communist troops had crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel to invade South Korea. Korea? Where's that? Richard flunked his physical for induction into WWII but would pass muster to fight in what was tragically mislabeled as a mere "police action" Richard had proposed marriage to Betty earlier that spring, with plans for a wedding the following December of '50. Little over eight months since their trip to Old Man's Cave, Richard was among the first draftees to enter the war. The title of this book is apt. Had I been identified, it could never have been used as a symbol of American fighting forces throughout the globe. Since it was used as a symbol at the peak of the Cold War, the advertising executive who handled the USO account had no way of knowing that I was not one of the 36,0000 who were KIA in the war. And he also presumed that if I survived the war I could never prove it to be me. The AP release stated the photograph was taken by a man with the initials JM. An elderly woman in the World Wide AP photo department said, "Why, that's Jimmy Martenhofff."--

It appears in your window every night, a mysterious configuration of lights that hovers for a moment, then is gone. You don't dare tell your Aunt Vivian or Cousin Pippa. Surely they'll laugh. But Pippa pries the secret from you and doesn't laugh. Instead, she gets out her notebook and declares it the next mystery she wants to solve. It's your most difficult mystery yet, and your cousin needs your help to gather clues. You choose where to search and in what order to discover the clues. See if you can crack the case before she does!

The first in USA TODAY bestselling author Alice Clayton’s Redhead series is a playful and erotic romance between an aspiring actress and Hollywood’s hottest new leading man. WATCH OUT, HOLLYWOOD! Grace Sheridan is back. Ten years after discovering that looks and talent are a dime a dozen in Los Angeles, she’s wriggling into a pair of badass jeans and ready to show the film industry that there’s way more to her than just a head of gorgeous red curls. And Hollywood’s newest Brit super-hunk Jack Hamilton certainly sees a lot to like. Grace is trying to restrain herself from jumping a man who is nearly a decade her junior, but Jack is making it clear that he personally has zero problems with that idea. While Grace and Jack are still swapping innuendo-loaded quips and text sex though, the paparazzi have caught up with them, headlining the “unidentified redhead” who’s been photographed trysting at a restaurant with the heartthrob of the year. Now Grace is in stuck in a double bind. She’s head over heels in lust with Jack, but there’s her own career to think of as well. A sizzling romance with the newest “it” boy may garner her industry attention . . . but is it the kind of attention she’s always dreamed of?

The Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) instru ment on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory left as a legacy its Third Catalog of High Energy Gamma-Ray Sources, whose detections include a large number of blazars, some pulsars, the Large Magellanic Cloud and a solar flare. Most of the newly discovered objects - a majority of the catalog -are unidentified sources, with a clearly predominant Galactic population. Are all these radio-quiet pulsars, like Geminga, or is there a novel type of celestial object, awaiting identification? In spite of the limited angular resolution provided by EGRET and COMPTEL, there is still much to learn about unidentified ,-ray sources: correlation studies, multiwavelength observations and theoretical work can provide valuable clues, specially if these efforts are carried out in a coordinated manner. The aim of this workshop, held from October 9 to 11, 2000, at the Instituto N acional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica, at Tonantzintla, Mexico, was to gather experts on the subject, including observational as tronomers specialized in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, in an effort to address the question of the Nature of Galactic high-energy gamma-ray sources, both from the theoretical and observational perspec tive, and elaborate schemes for future identification studies which can make use of existing and forthcoming facilities.