After last night's episode, I've got a lot of new thoughts.
I'm definitely still holding on to my "experiments" theory.
When Locke was talking on the phone last year trying to convince a woman to go to Australia with him.  Wasn't her name Helen?  Last year most, if not all, of us were thinking she was some sort of "adult phone companion."  Guess she wasn't.
I'm growing more and more convinced that "The Others" are from different DHARMA installations on the island.  The founder of DHARMA from the movie had a bushy beard, right?  Didn't the guy on the boat that took Walt have a bushy beard as well?  It was longer and more grey, but if the "movie" was shot years ago, it could make sense.
Ethan, last season, seemed able to appear almost out of nowhere.  Did he come out of concealed hatch doors?  Or is there a tunnel system as I've theorized previously?
I'm also of the belief that the Shark is from another experiment/installation.  Is there an underwater hatch?
One of the experiments was Parapsychology.  Could this explain the "visions" of Jack's dad and Walt that Jack and Shannon have seen.
Earlier in this thread someone mentioned seeing the closed captioning of the "whispers" in the forest being the voices of a man and a woman.  Is it a large reach to think that these voices and whispers are the voices of the man and woman who created DHARMA and they're letting people who are alone in the jungle hear them as part of the experiments?
The picture of the girl in Desmonds locker, in the brief glimpse I got from it, looked a little like Jack's wife, but I wouldn't think this is possible.
Looks like they got us with Ana-Lucia.  Pretty slick on the LOTF crews part.
WTF is up with this Jin speaking english stuff?  All I heard him say in last night's episode was "Others"  was him speaking English in the previews for next week?  I didn't get that here in Canada, what'd he say?
		
		
	 
The Other guy on the boat is definitely not the Alvar Hanso guy. The Other guy is a pretty well known B-list actor, known in a sense that you don't know his name but you have seen him in lots of shows/movies. He doesn't look anything like the guy on the Hanso web site.Also, I agree with you and jplvr that this is one of the experiments and that the shark, polar bear, visions, voices, etc. might all be other areas of the Dharma initiative.
On the Hanso web site, if you mouse over the bottom of the Active Projects, a hidden link for Dharma Initiative shows up, but the link is to a nothing JavaScript command (void(0)). I wonder if it will become a real link later on. I even tried to ad di.html to the URL since all of the other project links were just the initials.
Personally, I actually like where they are going now. It shows a little more foresight into this show, like they really do have an end game in mind, but that they might fill in more backstories and add extra stuff to make it go a few seasons.
Also, the LOTF folks are definitely the tail enders and maybe a drug smuggler (someone mentioned that and I guess he could be and joined the tail enders). When she grabbed the gun and got pulled out, Ana and the big guy were talking about who those guys were. If they were the Others, they would already know. I think after some negotiation, the tail enders will join up with our original survivors.
When we had the earlier discussion about the tail enders we wondered why they looked so primitive, but Ana did give us a clue in that she said the tail end was under water, maybe not 100%, but enough that salvaging much would have been much harder than the original survivors where the fuselage was on the beach.