I haven't read the entire thread, but in the interests of fairness it seems as if the "Golden Age" was actually a forerunner of "Watching The World" columns in back of the Awake!, serving as a "news aggregator" of sorts; it's not stuff fantasized by WTBTS or doctrinal stances taken by GB.
Reason I say that is I was interested in the 'Mary Kate Ware' story above (posted a year ago by Black Sheep) to find out if doctors ever figured out what her "Zodiac Malady" was, so Googled, only to find the same report had hit the 'Associated Press News And Universal Telegraph And Cable Service' and was printed in the Reading, PA Times on 26 March 1935 (about 5 months before the story ran in the Golden Age):
http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/48188217/
Point being, it's a tad unfair to blame 'Golden Age' for passing on the outdated news stories of the day or claim it as coming from the GB, although it DOES point out how Divinely-uninspired the WTBTS was/is to pass along ideas of the day which science has later demonstrated to be false (a flaw from which the Bible also suffers, talking about long-disproven ideas from the World of cosmology, human anatomy, bacteriology, etc, etc).