When a resident on the Isle of Eigg decided to clean his drains, he had no idea that he would stumble upon a mystery that would baffle archaeologists around the world. The islander's discovery of a boulder with the letters "Furku.Al" scratched into its surface has sparked a lively debate among experts as to whether it is a genuine runic inscription.

The resident alerted Camille Dressler, chair of the Eigg History Society, about his potentially significant find, and she sent a photograph to Historic Environment Scotland (HES). "It looks quite ancient. We are intrigued by it," Ms Dressler told The Daily Telegraph. "We just hope it is a genuine Norse inscription as that would highlight the Norse heritage of the island." The island, which off the coast of Scotland and is home to around 100 residents, was invaded by the Vikings around 1,300 years ago.

John Borland, a survey manager and member of the HES Heritage directorate, wrote to Ms Dressler, explaining that he consulted several experts in runic inscriptions about the find. "My reading of the inscription was furkusal. Whilst this might be a recognisable Norse name, I thought it more likely that it was a humorous (attempted, anyway) play on words," he said.

The accepted image of the Vikings as fearsome marauders who struck terror in the hearts of their innocent victims has endured for more than 1,000 years. Historians' accounts of the first major Viking attack, in 793, on a monastery on Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England, have informed the Viking story. "The church of St. Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God," wrote the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York, "stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans....Who is not afraid at this?" The Vikings are known to have gone on to launch a series of daring raids elsewhere in England, Ireland, and Scotland. They made inroads into France, Spain, and Portugal. They colonized Iceland and Greenland, and even crossed the Atlantic, establishing a settlement in the northern reaches of Newfoundland.
But these were primarily the exploits of Vikings from Norway and Denmark. Less well known are the Vikings of Sweden. Now, the archaeological site of Fröjel on Gotland, a large island in the Baltic Sea around 50 miles east of the Swedish mainland, is helping advance a more nuanced understanding of their activities. While they, too, embarked on ambitious journeys, they came into contact with a very different set of cultures—largely those of Eastern Europe and the Arab world. In addition, these Vikings combined a knack for trading, business, and diplomacy with a willingness to use their own brand of violence to amass great wealth and protect their autonomy.

The CIA has published online nearly 13 million pages of declassified records, including papers on the US role in overthrowing foreign governments, but some of the most mind blowing information is in reference to the secret 'Star Gate' telepathy project.

The details of CIA's "Project Star Gate" are riveting, and expose uncharted waters to be researched as far as there is virtually no mainstream science or pop culture awareness of the phenomena exposed in the project - and is often ridiculed as the stuff of science fiction.

The revelations come as part of a massive almost 13 million file dump of declassified reports - that are now available on the internet for the first time.

Project Star Gate, was the code name for a CIA project that attempted to harness what until now has been thought of as "supernatural" or psychic abilities for military and intelligence use - noting in some of the documents that the method was "passive," "inexpensive," and that there was "no known defense."

The papers show how the CIA was attempting to harness these abilities in individuals to spy on people and alter important objects, amongst other abilities.

On the M.I.T. symposium The Public Patron: Drafting a Mandate for a Federal Arts Agency & related matters.


The life of art in this country has clearly entered upon an entirely new phase of its history in this last decade of the twentieth century. For a large part of this terrible century, the gravest assaults on art and its institutions have been mounted by totalitarian regimes in the course of their efforts to impose an absolute and remorseless control over every aspect of life and thought. Now, for the first time in the history of modern democracy, we are witnessing a similar assault on the art and culture of a free society from within the ranks of its own intelligentsia and its official cultural bureaucracy. The effects of this incipiently totalitarian incursion into the life of art are proving to be all the more insidious, moreover, for being made in the name of democracy itself.

It is not only that the politicization of art and its institutions is rapidly accelerating. As a direct consequence of this politicization, every aspect of the life of art has also been increasingly bureaucratized. In more and more of the art world's activities, the center of intellectual gravity has already shifted from decisions made by artists in their studios to decisions made by committees of non-artists that take a purely instrumentalist view of art. An immense superstructure of art advisers, art consultants, art lobbyists, art activists, and other non-artist art professionals, working in close conjunction with a vast network of arts councils, offices of cultural affairs, public art projects, minority and "community" arts groups, and other special-interest cultural organizations, both in and out of government, now exerts an enormous influence in determining public policy as well as private patronage in the art world.

Secret CIA documents show the US had plans to either give the Falkland Islands to Argentina and repatriate the islanders to Scotland or allow them become Argentine citizens because the spy agency thought the UK would lose the 1982 war.

The papers, called 'Solution to the Falkland Islands Crisis,' appear to the show the intelligence agency felt the UK had seriously underestimated the capabilities of the Argentine military when the two countries fought a short but savage war over the South Atlantic archipelago. The documents comprise just a few pages of 12 million formerly-classified internal papers published by the CIA this week.

The Falklands plan was written by Henry Rowen, then head of the National Intelligence Council. "For a period of three years the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands will be given a chance to consider whether they wish to remain on the Falkland Islands or whether they wish to relocate to an area of British jurisdiction, either in the UK or elsewhere under British sovereignty, with a relocation grant of $100,000 per person," he said.

He said it was probable "that many residents will find this sufficient inducement to relocate to some other area, perhaps in Scotland or elsewhere where conditions may be similar to the Falkland Islands."

A "lost" dark age kingdom has been discovered in Dumfries and Galloway after archaeologists finally solved the mystery surrounding the location of the elusive stronghold. The kingdom of Rheged has been found following excavation work by Gatehouse of Fleet in Dumfries and Galloway.

Previously, it was thought the kingdom was headquartered in Cumbria although no evidence of it was ever found. Archaeologists were first drawn to the site by Pictish carvings in stones at Trusty's Hill given the unusual southerly location of the markings. But the team from GUARD Archaeology now believe the carvings belong to the stronghold of King Urien's where inauguration ceremonies for the Britons of Galloway were held around 600AD.

Ronan Toolis, who led the excavation, said: "The new archaeological evidence suggests that Galloway may have been the heart of the lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged, a kingdom that was in the late sixth century pre-eminent amongst the kingdoms of the north." Excavations have revealed the summit of the hill was fortified with a timber-laced stone rampart.

The Copenhagen Post reports that a large tomb has been found in north Jutland by Bjarne Henning Nielsen of the Vesthimmerlands Museum. Nielsen speculates the tomb may have been constructed for the early eleventh-century Viking chief Ulv Galiciefarer, who was known for his raids on Galicia and was sometimes referred to in historic documents as an "earl of Denmark." Nielsen says the burial site is surrounded by dark soil that may have been left by a building placed over the tomb—a practice reserved for the nobility.
Nielsen also recovered a sword from the grave that dates to the early years of the second millennium. The region where the tomb was found is thought to have belonged to Valdemar the Great, king of Denmark from 1157 to 1182, whose great-grandfather is known to have been Ulv Galiciefarer. "It is private property he inherited from his father's side," Nielsen said, "and Galiciefarer is part of the lineage."

To read about another discovery in Denmark, go to "Bronze Age Bride."

When Penn archaeologist Josef Wegner and colleagues first came across structures buried deep beneath the sand in the Egyptian city of Abydos, they anticipated finding more evidence of a pharaoh cemetery they discovered in 2014. Instead, in the middle of the desert, they found a vaulted building.
"We thought it might be a good prospect for a large royal tomb," says Wegner, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in the School of Arts & Sciences and associate curator at the Penn Museum. "We discovered it wasn't a tomb at all, but a subterranean bunker for a boat." Within the cavity, the team found wooden planks now attributed to a boat that was part of the funeral procession for Pharaoh Senwosret III, who reigned around 1850 B.C.E. They also discovered about 150 jars and 120 preserved boat drawings on the building's walls.

"Originally, the building must have had hundreds and hundreds of boat drawings," Wegner says. "They are phenomenal images, with a lot of detail showing the structure of the boats, the form of the hulls, masted and unmasted boats, rowers, oars."

History's spookiest spook.

On the afternoon of April 22, 1954, reporters massed at a press conference in Bonn, Germany. They'd been invited to meet one Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov, a captain in the Soviet Union's newly minted security force, the KGB. Well, a former captain. Khokhlov had arrived in Germany tasked with assassinating the leader of an anticommunist organization. Instead he defected, tipping off the target and surrendering himself to U.S. agents. He was now no longer at the center of a murder plot, but a media event.

The 32-year-old Khokhlov was a "slight, scholarly-appearing blond young man. He was neatly dressed in a dark blue suit. He wore glasses," reported,The New York Times. The Times reporter observed that the defector was self-possessed and calm, "adroitly" fielding questions in Russian.

Though Khokhlov's press conference came just weeks after another high-profile defection of a KGB official in Australia, his actions were thrilling enough to grab headlines. Even better, he had brought with him the exotic murder weapons constructed for the plot: two seemingly normal cigarette cases. "But they are ideal weapons for an assassin," wrote the Associated Press at the time, "because of their innocent appearance, lightness and efficiency." Flip the lid of the case back, and it revealed what appeared to be rows of run-of-the mill smokes. But press a concealed button, and a tiny four-inch-long pistol hidden inside would fire hollow-nosed bullets spiked with potassium cyanide. Upon being fired, the "resulting noise is no louder than the snap of the fingers and might pass unnoticed in the moderate conversation in a normal office," wrote the AP.

A feat of ancient engineering may be getting uncovered among forests and valleys in central India. Scientists are excited as excavations indicate the existence of a "great wall".

Nestled in the heart of India, one of the country's most important archaeological discoveries in a century has recently come to light. Excavations have revealed a wall like structure running through many villages, forests and valleys in India's central state of Madhya Pradesh. Could this be India's very own ancient Great Wall?

Some historians have projected that the wall might run for at least 80 kilometers and may be India's longest. Globally, it would then be the second longest fortification after the Great Wall of China. However, many sections are buried deep inside rubble and need to be excavated. This may take a few more years, a state archeology official told Sputnik.