X marks the spot

Now that I have Netflix and have to think up something to rent each week, I've been trawling old TV series, as well as movies. If you guys have any recommendations to make in that area, I'd appreciate them. If I had to recommend some TV series to ohers, one that would be at the top of my list would be The X-Files.

I think many people may have missed watching The X-Files, believing it an obscure cult series devoted to alien invasion/abduction and hokey government conspiracies. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This Peabody, Edgar, and Emmy Award-winning science fiction series was character driven, and though there was a "mythology" that drove the series, the bulk of the episodes were stand-alone, ... they were of all genres including horror and comedy, were based on subjects ranging from spirituality to history to science, and were influenced by works such as The Grand Inquisitor, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Elephant Man. Guest writes for some episodes included Stephen King and William Gibson.

I sometimes joke that everything I know I learned from The X-Files, but in truth, I did come across a lot of info through those nine years of episodes. Here below are some of the things I first heard of on The X-Files ...

Cryptozoology ..... Cryptozoology (from Greek: κρυπτός, kryptós, "hidden"; ζôιον, zôion, "animal"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge" or "study" – c.f. zoology) is the search for animals hypothesized to exist, but for which conclusive proof is missing. The field also includes the search for known animals believed to be extinct .....


- The coelacanths, which are closely related to lungfishes, were believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period, until a live specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa, off the Chalumna River in 1938.

Einstein's Twin Paradox .... In his famous work on Special Relativity in 1905, Albert Einstein predicted that when two clocks were brought together and synchronised, and then one was moved away and brought back, the clock which had undergone the travelling would be found to be lagging behind the clock which had stayed put .......

The Nephilim ...... In the Torah and several non-canonical Jewish and early Christian writings, nephilim (Hebrew, הנּפלים, those causing others to fall) are a people created by the crossbreeding of the sons of God (b'nei elohim, בני האלהים) and the "daughters of men" ......

Operation Paperclip ..... Operation Paperclip was the code name under which the U.S. intelligence and military services extracted German scientists from Nazi Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II .....

Navajo Code Talkers ..... Code talkers were Native American Marines serving in the U.S. armed forces who primarily transmitted secret tactical messages. The Code Talkers transmitted these messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages. The name is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers specially recruited, for the first time during World War II, by the United States Marine Corps, under the Dept. of the Navy to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater .....

Trepanation ..... Trepanation (also known trepanning, trephination, trephining or burr hole) is a form of surgery in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull ..... Trepanation was carried out for both medical reasons and mystical practices for a long time: Evidence of trepanation has been found in prehistoric human remains from Neolithic times onwards .....


- 18th century French illustration of trepanation

The Golem ..... In Jewish folklore, a golem (גולם, sometimes, as in Yiddish, pronounced goilem) is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. In modern Hebrew the word golem literally means 'cocoon', but can also mean "fool", "silly", or even "stupid". The name appears to derive from the word gelem (גלם), which means "raw material" .....

Jerusalem Syndrome ..... The Jerusalem syndrome is the name given to a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences, that are triggered by, or lead to, a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not endemic to one single religion or denomination, but has affected Jews and Christians of many different backgrounds ......

The Tunguska Event ..... The Tunguska event, sometimes referred to as the Tunguska explosion, was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Under Rock) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, between 7:00 and 8:00 AM on June 30, 1908. The explosion was most likely caused by the airburst of a large meteoroid or piece of a comet about 20 m (66 ft) in length 5 to 10 kilometers (3–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. The energy of the blast was later estimated to be between 10 and 20 megatons of TNT, 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or equivalent to Castle Bravo, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated by the US. It felled an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi). An overhead satellite view, from nearly a century later, centered at 60°55′N, 101°57′E (near ground zero for this event) shows an area of reduced forest density, with a fully visible irregular clearing of somewhat less than one square kilometer in area. It measured 5.0 on the Richter scale ......


- Agent Fox Mulder in his office in the basement of the FBI ... our tax dollars at work :-)