Monthly Archives: July 2007

The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border.

The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine.

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The goddess KaliOn a well-worn road through central India, Lieutenant Subhani of the Bengal Native Infantry and his three traveling companions were nearing the final leg of their journey. Ordinarily the Lieutenant would have only his pair of loyal orderlies to keep him company as he traveled, but today a third man walked alongside his horse—a stranger who had joined him only that morning.

The year was 1812, and the pleasant October weather made for an easy trek. Subhani knew these roads could be dangerous for travelers, especially at this time of year, but he was untroubled. Trained soldiers and well-armed, he and his men were an unlikely target for roving bandits. But a much greater threat loomed over them on that dusty road, closer at hand than the travelers could have possibly conceived.

Accounts of a secret cult of murderers roaming India go back at least as far as the 13th century, but to modern history their story usually begins with the entrance of the British Empire in the early 1800s. For some years, India’s British administrators had been hearing reports of large numbers of travelers disappearing on the country’s roads; but, while disturbing, such incidents were not entirely unusual for the time. It was not until the discovery of a series of eerily similar mass graves across India that the truth began to dawn. Each site was piled with the bodies of individuals ritually murdered and buried in the same meticulous fashion, leading to an inescapable conclusion: these killings were the work of a single, nation-spanning organization. It was known as Thuggee.

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In October 1918, World War I was gradually drawing to a close in the Argonne Forest in northeastern France. Inch by inch, more than one million Allied fighting men slowly wrestled Europe from the occupying Germans, with considerable casualties occurring on both sides. Losses were particularly heavy amongst a battalion of Americans which had pressed too far into enemy territory, leaving 550 soldiers surrounded, outnumbered, and cut off from communications. For days the men valiantly deflected enemy attacks amidst a hail of friendly artillery, but rapidly dwindling forces and supplies soon led to a desperate situation.

Left with no alternative, a member of the US Army Signal Corps named Cher Ami was given the dangerous task of darting past the enemy forces with a message for the Allied commanders. The hastily scribbled note politely requested that headquarters increase the supply of men while decreasing the supply of red-hot shrapnel. As Cher Ami dashed from the forest, enemy gunfire left him with a gunshot wound to the chest and a badly mangled leg, but nonetheless he managed to traverse the twenty-five miles to the command post to deliver his message. As a result, the misplaced battalion was finally rescued.

Cher Ami was awarded France’s Croix de Guerre medal for his heroism, but due to his wounds he did not long survive. When he passed away several weeks months later, his remains were placed in a crate and sent to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, where he was stuffed, mounted, and put on display. Cher Ami, the American war hero, was a homing pigeon.

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A macrophage (purple) attacks a cancer cell (yellow)On October 1st 1890, William B. Coley, a young bone surgeon barely two years out of medical school, saw one of his first patients in private practice at the New York Memorial Hospital. Although he’d only finished his residency earlier the same year, he’d already gained a good reputation and many considered him a rising star of the New York surgical scene.

The seventeen year old patient had a painful, rapidly growing lump on the back of her right hand. She had pinched the unlucky appendage between two railway carriage seats on a transcontinental trip to Alaska some months before, and when the bruise failed to heal she assumed the injury had become infected. However the bruise turned into a bulge, the pain steadily worsened, and her baffled doctors were eventually compelled to call for Dr. Coley. As a surgical man, Coley would never have guessed that this innocuous referral would take his career in a totally new direction– into an unusual branch of medicine now known as cancer immunotherapy.

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Wardenclyffe TowerIn 1905, a team of construction workers in the small village of Shoreham, New York labored to erect a truly extraordinary structure. Over a period of several years the men had managed to assemble the framework and wiring for the 187-foot-tall Wardenclyffe Tower, in spite of severe budget shortfalls and a few engineering snags. The project was overseen by its designer, the eccentric-yet-ingenious inventor Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943). Atop his tower was perched a fifty-five ton dome of conductive metals, and beneath it stretched an iron root system that penetrated more than 300 feet into the Earth’s crust. “In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth,” he explained, “otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver.”

Though it was far from completion, it was rumored to have been tested on several occasions, with spectacular, crowd-pleasing results. The ultimate purpose of this unique structure was to change the world forever.

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