Thank you for reading the "Ghost from the Grand Banks", a science fiction full of scientific facts. In the Sources and Acknowledgements section Dr.Arthur C. Clarke has given some very interesting information. I am presenting here for your 'edutainment' the most interesting and unbelievable facts excerpted from it.

"I have not invented the unusually large mollusk in Chapter 12. Details (with photographs) of this awesome beast will be found in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (Collins, 1980). Octopus giganteus was first positively identified by F. G. Wood and Dr. Joseph Gennaro( Natural History, March 1971), both of whom I was happy to get on camera for my Mysterious World TV series."

"According to Omni magazine, the question described in Chapter 13 was actually set in a high school intelligence test, and only one genius-type pupil spotted that the printed answer was wrong. I still find this amazing; skeptics may profitably spend a few minutes with scissors and cardboard. The even more incredible story of SrinivasaRamanujan, mentioned passim in the same chapter, will be found in G. H.Hardy's small classic, A Mathematician's Apology , and more conveniently in Volume 1 of James Newman's The World of Mathematics.

"The full story of 1974"s "Operation JENNIFER" has never been told, and probably never will be. To my surprise, its director turned out to be an old acquaintance, and I am grateful to him for his evasive but not unhelpful replies to my queries. On the whole, I would prefer not to know too much about the events of that distant summer, so that I am not handicapped by mere facts."

While writing this novel, I was amused to encounter another work of fiction using the Glomar Explorer , though (luckily!) for a very different purpose: Ship of Gold , by Thomas Allen and Norman Polmar (Macmillan, 1987).

"The discovery of major explosive events on the seabed, referred to in Chapter 33, was reported by David B. Prior, Earl H. Doyle, and Michael J. Kaluza in Science , vol. 243, pp. 517-9, 27 January 1989, under the title "Evidence for Sediment Eruption on Deep Sea Floor, Gulf of Mexico."

"On the very day I was making the final corrections to this manuscript, I learned that there is now strong evidence that oil drilling can cause earthquakes. The October 28, 1989, Science News cites a paper by Paul Segall of the U.S. Geological Survey, making this claim in the October 1989 issue of Geology."
"The report on the Neolithic grave quoted in Chapter 34 will be found in Nature , 276 , 608, 1978."
"Ralph C. Merkle's truly mind-boggling paper "Molecular Repair of the Brain" first appeared in the October 1989 issue of Cryonics (published by ALCOR, 12327, Doherty St., Riverside, CA, 92503) to whom I am grateful for an advance copy."

As a closing note, I think it is appropriate to mention here a quotation from Mark Twain, another of my most favourite authors. "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."