Books: The Adventures of Doc Savage

Today's topic is an archetypical hero from the Pulp era who had an amazing run - and isn't done yet. There are few who would consider the pulps great literature - but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of fun to be had indulging in them.

The interval between the World Wars: a time of turmoil, innovation, deprivation, and the continuing struggle for good in a world of misfortune, bungling, and evil. The horrors of World War I had ground to a halt only after tremendous bloodshed, and idealistic efforts to build a better world out of the wreckage managed only a mixed success.

The U.S. had its own hubristic experiment in morality, again with mixed results. The Roaring Twenties still managed to party thanks to bootleggers and bathtub gin, but all parties come to an end - and this one crashed hard. The world was becoming a smaller place, thanks to advancing technology and daring, but that too would prove to have mixed results. The world of popular music was entering into the jazz age; art was transforming the machine age, culminating in a future that is a long time gone. It was a time of heroes and exciting adventures - in the world of fiction!

'Ghost Hunters' Grant Wilson: 'I'll never stop investigating'

"Life after ghosts," says Grant Wilson. "That's pretty funny."

On Wednesday, May 16, Syfy's long-running reality hit "Ghost Hunters" loses half of its founding team, as plumber-turned-paranormal investigator Wilson puts down his flashlight, EMF meter and infrared motion sensor and leads his last investigation with partner Jason Hawes.

In real life, shooting on his final episode took place some time ago, and Wilson is already settling into his new reality.

"It hasn't really sunk in yet," he tells Zap2it, "because as soon as I was done with the show, I was busy with a lot of other things in life. Now I've just started really sinking into reality, which is funny, because it's a reality show."

He's been spending time with his wife and three boys, ages 13, 12 and 9.

"When we started," he says, "my youngest was 1, and now he's 9. It's all those Halloweens, not being home and stuff, it takes its toll. My wife's ecstatic. She loves having me around."
Grant's also got some new career goals.

"I'm looking at going back to school for graphic design. I've started a board game company with my lifelong friend since the age of 5, Mike Richie, who's a game designer. I'm doing all the art. We're making some board games and having a lot of fun. The company's calledRather Dashing Games.

Rare Tyrannosaurus skeleton to be auctioned

A nearly complete skeleton of a towering Tyrannosaurus bataar is set to go on auction on May 20. The skeleton measures some 8 feet tall and 24 feet long.

This is the first full Tyrannosaurus specimen to go on auction since "Sue," a Tyrannosaurus rex, sold for $8.3 million in 1997, said David Herskowitz, director of Natural History at Heritage Auctions, the auction house conducting the sale.

The Tyrannosaurus bataar was uncovered in the Gobi Desert roughly eight years ago and has an estimated value of $950,000. Also called Tarbosaurus bataar, this species is an Asian relative to the North American T. rex.

While the specimen's skull is 80 percent complete, the body is about 75 percent complete, Herskowitz said, adding that it is "an impeccably preserved specimen of the sort that is almost never seen on the open market."

The auction is scheduled to include other fossils and minerals, including a T. bataar tooth, an akylosaur skull from the dinosaur Saichania chulsanensis, and a skeleton from a troodontid — a group of dinosaurs whose anatomy suggests they were closely related to birds.

The auction takes place at Center 548 (548 W. 22nd Street in New York City), andthe specimens will be on public display before the auction, from May 17–19.

"To find any dinosaur already mounted and ready for sale is extremely rare and quite uncommon because of the amount of time, energy and money it takes to prepare a mounted specimen," Herskowitz told LiveScience. "To find a complete dinosaur of any kind on the market is really quite rare, but the rarest of them all are the theropods."

Theropods are a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that included Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus and others bipedal meat-eaters. As top predators, they were less abundant than other species, he said.

Old prisons unlock new paranormal tourist attractions

Old prisons, from famous ones such as Alcatraz to less-known small state facilities, are becoming tourist attractions and drawing a growing number of visitors, operators say.

"We've been shocked by the interest and continue to work on expanding our operation," said Steve Picker, director of the Jefferson City, Mo., Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has seen visitors through the shuttered Missouri State Penitentiary increase from 3,290 visitors in its first tour year in 2009 to 17,200 last year.

"We've been growing by double-digit percentages every year for the past 10 years," added Sean Kelley, director of public programming at the Eastern State Penitentiaryin Philadelphia, which now draws more than 250,000 visitors a year.

Operators say their visitors are made up of curious people, history buffs and increasingly, ghost hunters. Picker said his prison saw a big increase in visitors last year after it was featured on the cable television show Ghost Hunters.

A Paranormal Journey in Knoxville

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- Michael J. Kouri is an investigator, of the paranormal. He says he can see spirits, and communicate with them about the past, the present and the future.

Kouri was in Knoxville, investigating haunted sights for his next book. One of the first stops he made was at the Bleak House on Kingston Pike in Knoxville.

"I'm feeling a lot of spirits in this house," Kouri said immediately after going inside. "I can actually see spirits, converse with them, communicate back and forth."

Kouri lead a group of 13 die-hard ghost adventurers on a journey with him. He says there are spirits that haunt the Bleak House, and he was able to help the tour experience what he does. Those on the journey with him say they were able to feel things that they really couldn't explain.

"I just felt like I was being compressed, real tight, like a weight was being put on me," said Lisa Myers about her experience.

Lisa Cope had a different reaction.

Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead

ROME—A project to drill deep into the heart of a “supervolcano” in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep.

The Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project was set up by an international collaboration of scientists to assess the risks posed by the Campi Flegrei caldera, a geological formation just a few kilometers to the west of Naples that formed over thousands of years following the collapse of several volcanoes. Researchers believe that if it erupted, Campi Flegrei could have global repercussions, potentially killing millions of people and having a major effect on the climate, but that such massive eruptions are extremely rare.

Pensacola UFO incident revisited 36 years later

A new book written by retired U.S. Army Col. John Alexander, Ph.D., is bringing new attention to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects over Northwest Florida.

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Pensacola and Gulf Breeze were thrust into the world’s consciousness after multiple sightings of alleged UFOs were reported in the nowdefunct ‘Gulf Breeze Sentinel.’

In his book ‘UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities,’ Alexander – a former Green Beret A-Team commander and developer of weapons at Los Alamos, N.M. – writes about an encounter that Marine Reserve Squadron Capt. Larry Jividen and his crew of five aboard a T- 39D Sabreliner combat trainer allegedly had with a UFO in the skies over Pensacola.

On Feb. 6, 1975, Jividen – a nine-year Marine Corps officer – and five Naval pilots took off for a two-hour training flight that began and ended at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

During the flight at approximately 9 p.m., Jividen spotted a solid red light in nearby airspace off the right nose of his aircraft.

Jividen and the other five crew members mutually described the UFO as a “solid, circular object about the relative size of a kid’s marble held at arm’s length,” Jividen recalled. In the following five minutes, the object appeared to respond to various moves from the flight path of the T-39D.

Eventually, Jividen said, the UFO flew away at a very high rate and disappeared southwestward over the horizon. The T- 39D returned to base at Pensacola NAS, and Jividen filed a report. Nothing else was ever said or written about the alleged incident until 2011 with Alexander’s book and a subsequent story written by the ‘Huffington Post’Web site.

Alexander is a private consultant and a Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University. His previous books include ‘The Warrior’s Edge’ (1990); ‘Future War’ (1999); and the sequel ‘Winning the War’ (2003).

[gulfbreezenews.com]