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  The Roswell Triangle runs across eleven States including parts of the South and mid-America, going from Roswell, New Mexico to Graceland in Memphis, and thence up to Delaware, Ohio—where ‘The Wow! Signal’ was received either just possibly or absolutely definitely having been sent by aliens (page 149).

  Bermuda Triangle Roswell Triangle

  Mainly Ocean Land

  Area 350,000 square nautical miles and upwards 120,000 square miles

  Aircraft lost 130+. 1095+.

  Reported ditchings or disappearances All fatal crashes, almost all being individual light aircraft

  Great lighthouse incidents 1 0

  The Great Isaac Lighthouse incident, In 1969 the two Bahamian keepers were found to have just disappeared

  Worst nautical loss of life 306 dead 1800 dead (estimated)

  The collier USS Cyclops carrying ore and passengers, disappeared somewhere between Barbados and Baltimore in 1918. Not confirmed as having sunk in The Bermuda Triangle The third greatest disaster in United States history after 9/11 and Pearl Harbour. The greatly overcrowded SS Sultana suffered a boiler explosion on the Mississippi river just north of Memphis near submerged island 42 in the late evening of 27th April 1865. Those who died mostly comprised Civil War prisoners of war returning home to the North

  The number of deaths was around 300 greater than the number lost on the RMS Titanic

  Who knew? America’s third biggest disaster occurred as far inland as the RMS Titanic was offshore, around 350 miles. No-one had known how many soldiers had boarded the Sultana, and none of them were rich or famous and it would be hard to imagine more competing news—being comparable in contemporary terms to the simultaneous ending of the Second World War and President Kennedy being murdered quickly followed by Lee Harvey Oswald being murdered.

  When the SS Sultana exploded in late April 1865, the four year American Civil War had just ended, confusedly, over a period of days that included John Wilkes Booth’s killing of President Lincoln. Booth escaped and had been on the run for two weeks when news of his being shot at a farmstead in Virginia was the headline on the day the SS Sultana sank. The country could be said to be in a state of confusion and shock, the newspapers being filled with the stories of the ending of the war, the President’s assassination and of the crowds still gathering to pay their respects to Lincoln’s body at the towns where the train carrying the coffin was halting in a two week journey from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. The deaths of the people on the SS Sultana weren’t as newsworthy, and so sank with little trace.

  The Tumbleweed Men

  ‘Camera.’

  ‘Doh!’

  Larry loosed a hand from the DS and tapped the Big Red Stop Button which—following a neat exhibition of soldering-iron work by Sergey—now simultaneously muted Bohemian Rhapsody on the camera car’s funky retro eight-track. The 42 from Albuquerque had brought the Google guys into Corona, New Mexico. She was a hot one. Two locals tasked to the tumbleweed blower on Main Street were turning HTML #FF0000*.

  ‘Say, do you know where we could get a couple of good green chile cheese burgers?’ yelled Larry over the hum of a Pratt & Whitney TF33 turbofan jet engine that the small town had enterprisingly salvaged from a surplus B-52 Stratofortress.

  Two fingers were slowly raised directing them to a low building that seemed an insufficiently grand design to support a freshly-painted and unmissably large sign that read: ‘Good Green Chile Cheese Burgers’. Waiting for a gap in the Mach 1 tumbleweeds Larry and Sergey crossed the road and once inside gave involuntary air-con shivers as they stood absorbing the sights and smells of another fast-food paradise.

  ‘Hello, Dave,’ rasped a voice from back in the kitchen followed by the appearance of a sharp dressed man with an Elvis quiff and aviator glasses who neither apologised nor explained away the curious greeting, instead placing on the counter the Albuquerque Tribune and returning their gaze in mirrored lenses.

  Sergey ordered two Corona Specials. On the radio a local station was reporting excitedly on a big basketball derby; the Albuquerque Grays were a short nose ahead of The Roswell Incidents at 43 to 41. Larry headed for an empty booth with the newspaper, it seemed that Corona had made the front page, below the fold:

  CORONA COUNTER-COUNTER-CONSPIRACY FACILITY DENIAL TO BE CONFIRMED BY CIA

  The CIA issued a press release today (10/10/10) stating that a statement is expected confirming the denial of the existence of the CIA Corona Counter-Counter-Conspiracy Facility (Area 2a). The bulletin will probably reveal that the government’s Corona Enquiry has found that the small town of Corona in New Mexico is a small town in New Mexico and has never been a front for the world’s leading source of supply for mis-mis-information.

  Corona’s non-connection with the CIA didn’t start in 1947 when a local rancher drove into town and told of finding a weather balloon in the desert, fourteen days earlier the world’s first ever flying saucer had been reported over Idaho. Within hours a call had been put in to the Air Force at Roswell saying that what looked like a crashed alien spacecraft had been found 42 miles north-west of the secret atomic airbase and that rushing out an official military press release describing the incident by using the word ‘disc’ at least four times would be an outstanding idea.

  Sergey brought over the burgers that were, like, totally historic; each being quite large enough to have been served on its own tectonic plate. Happily refuelled, the Google guys stepped out into the heat to continue their epic mission to film America. Larry clicked on the Motorola to catch the basketball result. Strange, the station wasn’t there now. Pulling an iPad from the rear seat he googled the game:

  No results found for “Albuquerque Grays

  v The Roswell Incidents”.

  Whoa. Sergey tried the Albuquerque Tribune’s website: a journalist’s last lament told of a circulation of 42,000 copies twenty years earlier but that February 20, 2008 was to be the final issue and that no further newspapers would ever be published. Double Whoa. The Google guys decided it was time to leave Corona. ‘Camera,’ reminded Sergey as they pulled away.

  The tumbleweed men removed their sunglasses and stared at the sedan until it was a small dot disappearing in the inhuman heat of the New Mexico desert. Their lidless eyes had never blinked.

  Real Stardust

  The element molybdenum has the atomic number of 42 and is also the 42nd most common element in the universe. This isn’t a pleasing coincidence; most of the stuff in the universe is truly ancient hydrogen and helium that has existed since almost the time of Big Bang. Hydrogen and helium are the lightest elements with atomic numbers 1 and 2. Everything heavier such as the elements for making fingernails or aircraft carriers got formed later within stars which shone, burnt out, and got recycled. The way this process works generally means there is less and less of each element according to its atomic number.

  Molybdenum is an element of surprises. It has the fifth highest melting point of 2632 degrees centigrade and DIY drill bits are made of molybdenum-rich steel. It is also needed within enzymes used by all animals, all plants and most bacteria. You would be dead without the five milligrams of molybdenum your body contains.

  The isotope of calcium known as 42Ca has an isotopic mass of almost exactly 42. There is nothing else of interest to be gleaned from 42Ca, please pass on to the next exhibit.

  Eye of newt & toe of frog

  ‘It’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.’

  Woody Allen

  Hawking wrote that for every equation he employed the readership of A Brief History of Time would halve—and proceeded to find space for one equation for his nine million book-buyers. This was the equation keeping the brake on book sales:

  E = mc2

  The world’s most famous equation is from Einstein’s theory of special relativity. In a fun book, Why Does E=mc2? Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw of Manchester University answer the nontrivial question
of their title—along the way including a request to readers to remember Douglas Adams’ ‘Don’t Panic’ message from The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Despite the ‘equals’ sign positioned centre stage E-equals-mc-squared really means that energy and mass are two forms of one thing and that energy is always conserved. Energy leaving matter removes mass from it, and energy joining matter adds mass to it. But with c standing in for the speed of light* and which is promptly self-multiplied the numbers are—as Douglas Adams described space—vastly, hugely and mind-bogglingly big.

  If you take just one gram of mass (m), and I see you have selected the eye of a newt and the toe of a frog, then you also the seemingly unbelievable equivalent of the energy (E) that would be the result of the simultaneous explosion of 42 million sticks of dynamite. Taking the mass of the ink in the full-stop at the end of this sentence, and just taking the ink not the paper underneath please, it contains the potential explosive power of approximately 12 sticks of dynamite, which should be a good reason for knowing the best way to handle punctuation. Having safely read the aforementioned terminal mark I can tell you that it didn’t explode under normal reading conditions because virtually all of the energy is to be found in the force that keeps atoms as atoms (it had been believed within living memory that it was impossible to split the atom).

  Non-nuclear explosions don’t split atoms. When dynamite explodes, exotic, easily excited nitroglycerine molecules rearrange their atoms into plainer and steadier molecules: oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carbon dioxide. Despite the trauma not a single atom would have been harmed, or found to be missing or have changed into a different element. Measure the mass before & after and you will find there is a shortfall after the blast. From 42 million sticks that shortage would be a gram—the energy released in the explosion.

  It is impossible, today, but if amphibian body part matter could be converted wholly into energy then the opposite is the case—not a single atom would remain. All would have become notional ex-atoms. The universe would be one gram short of the elements comprising newt and frog and would possess an additional gram of heat and electromagnetic radiation mass. Other matter, anything, could absorb the heat and the radiation and gain one gram in the mass of its matter. If the universe were a person, she just can’t lose weight.

  In 1945 the world’s third man-made nuclear explosion destroyed much of the north of a Japanese city, Nagasaki. It ended the Second World War but killed some 70,000 people and caused injury, disease and suffering for many more. When Fat Man detonated, an estimated 1200 grams of synthesised plutonium metal changed into 1199 grams of other elements. The death and suffering of Nagasaki was caused by the single gram of energy released with the destructive power of 42 million sticks of dynamite.

  And Last Year’s Winner Is

  The German physicist recognised as the world’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein, received the Nobel Physics Prize for the year 1921 when he was 42, although his prize wasn’t announced until late in 1922 when the 1922 physics prize was announced simultaneously in the same breath.

  The prize had followed headlines in 1919 that observations made during a solar eclipse had confirmed Einstein’s prediction that light from a star would be seen to be bent by the Sun’s gravity. Relativity still being a hot topic for debate the Nobel prize was deliberately not linked to e-equals-mc-squared. It was more of a lifetime achievement award with special mention of discovery of the law of a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. This introduced the photon to the world as the then accepted answer to the tough question of how light could pull off a trick that made it appear to be a wave and a particle in the same instant. Digital cameras are a direct result of Einstein’s work here.

  It seems most surprising today to learn that for a further 17 years after first writing e-equals-mc-squared even Albert Einstein didn’t know that it meant incredible amounts of energy could be released from matter. That insight required the thinking of a younger man. Further knowledge on the structure of atoms had been gained and in 1923 Enrico Fermi, an Italian scientist working at Pisa University, was the first to see that within e-equals-mc-squared lay the potential for nuclear energy. A modest man of great genius, it was Enrico Fermi who first knew that the world would begin a nuclear age rather than Albert Einstein. Ironically, Fermi was to die aged 53 from stomach cancer caused by having worked without sufficient protection close to sources of radiation.

  * Pantone® 1795 C♠

  ♠ Lobster red mainly

  * Which moves a distance equal to 42 trips between New York and Rome in one second.

  Crime, Mystery, and Disaster

  Doggo, or Dead?

  Between four and eight am on Friday, November 8th 1974 a motorist parked a dark grey Ford Corsair fitted with a roof-rack near 42 Norman Road, Newhaven, West Sussex. After putting the keys in the glove box, he walked down Norman Road into one of the greatest mysteries of modern times.

  ‘Lucky’ Lord Lucan was a 39 year old English aristocrat known as John to his many friends. He had just murdered, according to the last inquest jury ever permitted to deliver such a verdict, Mrs Sandra Rivett, the 29-year-old single mother newly employed as nanny to his children, in what appeared to be a case of mistaken identity; his intended victim was possibly their mother with whom he was embroiled in an embittered divorce—he had mistakenly believed that Sandra Rivett would be out of the house on her regular night off.

  Lord Lucan’s body has never been found. His alibi was to have been that he was dining with friends a mile away in Mayfair’s swanky Clermont Club, two doors away from 42 Berkeley Square (the address of London’s Number 42 Club). After also attacking his wife, who had found him with the body but escaped, he drove 42 miles to Uckfield where, in the house of a friend, he wrote at least three letters, saying in one, ‘I will lie doggo for a while.’ Since Newhaven, where two fishermen believed they may have seen him near the harbour, there have been only false sightings (notably resulting in the capture in Australia of a surprised John Stonehouse, the fake-suicide English MP). In 2009 The Sun newspaper reported that Lord Lucan was still registered as a member of the Clermont Club. If still alive, this year he would be marking 37 years on the run and his 77th birthday.

  Dodi Fayed

  Because of allegations of conspiracy to murder, a criminal investigation was conducted by the UK police into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales (36) and her companion Dodi Fayed (42) who were killed in a Paris car crash in 1997 while being chased by paparazzi. The investigation lasted three years and concluded that there had not been a conspiracy. A coroner’s inquest in London returned a verdict, ten years after their deaths, that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed as a result of ‘gross negligence’ by the driver, Henri Paul and the paparazzi. Hours after the crash a security guard, Le Van Than, had sprayed red a white Fiat Uno of the same year and colour as a vehicle that had been in collision with the rear wing of Diana and Dod’s rented Mercedes. Le Van Than and a paparazzo, Langevin, known by Henri Paul, refused requests to give evidence at the inquest.

  Alumni of the Forty-Two Gang

  The Forty-Two Gang started around 1925 in Chicago’s Little Italy. The gang members comprised boys, teenagers and young men who committed crimes including theft and burglary. A possibly true story has the reason for the name down to a wish to be one better than Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves although, of course, Ali Baba was distinctly not allied with the 40 thieves.

  Alumni of the gang and their subsequent spheres of nefarious influence include ‘Milwaukee Phil’ Alderiso* (Milwaukee), ‘The Typewriter’ Nicoletti* (Chicago), ‘The Waiter’ Ricca (Chicago), ‘Diamond Joe’ Esposito (Chicago), ‘Mad Sam’ DeStefano (Chicago), ‘Willie Potatoes’ (Chicago), Marcello Caifano (Las Vegas), ‘Skids’ Caruso (Chicago) and Sam Giancana (Chicago), ‘Cock-eyed’ Fratto (Des Moines), ‘Teets’ Battaglia (Chicago)—the latter supposedly being the first of the 42 gang to join the Capone Gang and who, after Ricca, emulated Al Capone as boss of the powerful Chicago Outf
it.

  Gang leader Sam Giancana had a mistress, Judith Exner, who had been introduced to President Kennedy, when he was 42, by another of her lovers, Frank Sinatra. Reputedly she became one of JFK’s lovers, later giving varying accounts of her relationships. In one she said that the President requested her to contact Sam Giancana with a view to arranging for the assassination of Fidel Castro and a book by the Cuban intelligence chief, Fabian Escalante called Executive Action: 638 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro, lists the many CIA anti-Castro plots he estimates were detected. Demarcated by presidency, 42 of these were during the time of the Kennedy White House.

  In 2007 the existence of a formal link between the CIA and the mafia departed from the flaky conspiracy theory zone with the publication of a US government report known as the ‘Family Jewels’. Along with much else the report confirmed Sam Giancana’s role (in the guise of ‘Sam Gold’) in accessing two disaffected Cubans willing to attempt to poison Castro’s comestibles. The CIA then dispensed six poisonous pills, effectively bearing Fidel’s name, to characters it circuitously described as ‘assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action’. Completing the final leg of the poison’s journey was more difficult, and that particular plan was said to have been abandoned after the substantial failure of an invasion of Cuba which included two CIA agents, Grayston Lynch and ‘Rip’ Robertson, at Girón Beach near the Bay of Pigs shortly into the new dawn of the Kennedy administration.