Geeking Out on Lost Again

I always suspected Christian Shepherd could be alive. It was just too weird that his casket was empty, and then he kept popping up in front of Jack and Claire, leading him to the caves, leading her into the jungle. It wouldn't have been hard for him to fake his death in Australia so he could have a new life on the island (I have a theory that some kind of "homing device" was placed on flight 815, as well as the boat Desmond was given, which pulled them straight to the island). As a doctor, he could've been a part of DHARMA. Another theory I had at one time was that Christian was DHARMA and knew all about the island. He wanted his kids to go there, so he had the psychic Richard Malkin convince Claire to take 815 to the States, then killed himself knowing that Jack would pick up his body and take that same flight home (and knowing that it would take them to the island).

But now it looks like the faked-death theory was right, after all, and I think Christian is able to go invisible at will. This is how he appears at different points on the island without being seen by everybody.

The whispers sometimes heard before something strange happens (Walt appears, Cindy the stewardess disappears, etc.) may be invisible people. They're probably not aural/intracranial hallucination, since those who hear them look around in all direcions, indicating an external source. Auditory hallucinations usually seem, to the listener, to be internal.

Other thoughts:
- The ageless Richard Alpert was testing Locke to see if he was a certain reincarnated person. This is the same technique used to determine if certain children are really reincarnated lamas. But who was Alpert looking for? Clearly, Locke could be this person - it's just that his strong attraction to knives threw the test.
- The island isn't stationary. Maybe it's not even "real" in the accepted sense at all. Explains why it can be rendered invisible, and why it's so hard to find even for guys like Widmore. We know that the release of elecromagnetic energy caused by Desmond's use of the failsafe key rendered the island briefly visible, allowing it to be located by those guys in the Arctic station set up by either Penny Widmore or her father.
- More and more, Lost is utilizing themes central to what I call the West Coast Conspiracy Theory Matrix (made up of the Philadelphia Experiment, Ong's Hat, and Montauk): time travel, covert experiments, and the science of invisibility.

- Ben's fearful reaction to Jacob's cabin explodes one other theory I had, that Jacob was able to possess the body of Ben when he was a young DHARMA employee. As Ben, Jacob took part in the Purge and went on to become a tyrant who only pretends to defer to Jacob (who is the real Ben Linus, trapped in an invisible body - hence his plea to Locke, "help me").