We've become a race of leering voyeurs
We're big on progress, sex and death.
Something evil's lurking in the darkness here with me
I can smell its stinking breath.
-- Garnet Rogers, Stormfront

"Sorry -- I forgot what my point was."
-- Prof. Koschmann, HIST 298 lecture, 27 March 2000

If you thought that Gryphon, Megazone, and friends went off the deep end when they crossed X-Com, 2001, The X-Files, and Tomb Raider with Evangelion[1], you haven't seen tonight's Lain episode yet. The Roswell Greys, MIT, and the WWW are about to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the plot. Lain answers the Vorlon Question, and the Knights answer the Shadow Question[2] -- not that these answers are particularly useful, but we are beginning to see who, if anyone, is in control of the Wired.

Majestic 12: Supposedly an operation initiated by President Truman to analyze and cover up the Roswell object. The chairman of this committee was Dr. Vannevar Bush, at the time the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In reality, the M-12 documents are crude forgeries.

Vannevar Bush: A professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering (that's course 6) at MIT from 1919-1944, and the dean of that department from 1932. In July 1945, Bush proposed the memex, a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." (Quote from "As We May Think".) Dr. Bush was a major figure in the early development of hypertext and analogue computers.

Ted Nelson: Coined the term "hypertext" in 1965. From then on, has been developing Xanadu, an advanced hypertext system, which inspired Dr. Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. The Xanadu system was never deployed; recently, Dr. Nelson released it as open source.

Schumann Resonances: Standing waves in the volume between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere. The primary resonance has a frequency of 7.8 Hz.

Bibliography:

The M-12 "documents": http://www.artbell.com/majestic.html

The M-12 debunking: Klaas, P. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Amherst, New York, USA: Prometheus Books, 1997.

Memex: Bush, V. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 176, no. 1 (July 1945), pp. 101-8.

Schumann Resonance: http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/q768.html

Footnotes:

[1] http://www.eyrie.net/NXE/

[2] For those who haven't yet watched Babylon 5, the questions are "Who are you?" and "What do you want?", respectively.