Sorry, Dick, your information on that canard incident is incorrect, unless there was some flat-spin incident with a very similar sequence of events that I do not know about (which is of course possible). You are probably refering to a deep stall that occured during the "Velocity" flight testing. At the time, it was flown by Carl Pascarell. He was doing stall testing with the aircraft with the CG at different locations inside the designed CG envelope. The incident occured when flying with the CG in the most rearward of these positions. Here is a good summary of the incident:
http://www.aeroman.de/html/best_pilot.html
It was later discovered that the descent rate was probably quite a bit higher than the pilot thought at the time.

That particular incident wasn't the only deep stall incident with a canard - one of them (an inverted deep stall) killed the pilot. These deep stalls have also happened on Long-EZ's. The deep stall is quite different from a flat spin since there is no rotation present at all. The similarity, however, is that in both cases the angle of attack is almost 90 degrees (aircraft descends vertically with the fuselage in a horizontal attitude). From the link I posted above: "The aircraft was neither yawing nor rolling, and the ride was strangely comfortable. Rudder and elevator were useless." The pilot was able to make it turn, but it did not help to recover from the deep stall.

I think the "rotational lift" that you are talking about is actually "vortex lift". It is something you often see on delta's at high angle of attack, but it can be present on other aircraft as well. It will certainly be present on your small foamies with low aspect ratio wings when you fly them at high AoA. After the velocity incident, there was a lot of speculation that vortex lift was the reason the aircraft descended so slowly. Further research and testing shows, however, that the descent rate was not quite as low as initially thought (as I also stated above), so if vortex lift was present it was not quite as powerful as originally speculated. For what it is worth - vortex lift as a phenomenon is very well known and also quite well understood, it is discussed in most of the aerodynamics text books I own, and if you looked at published NASA and AIAA papers over the years you will see many occurences of this term. A google search should also turn up some discussions on the theory if you are interested...

Cheers,
Bennie