he 1924 edition of Sir Robert Baden Powell's Scouting For Boys is dedicated by permission to His Royal Highness the Prince of wales and His Royal Highness Prince Albert Duke of York. Two of the Proficiency Badges illustrated therein, the Thanks Badge and the Medal of Merit, are made up of the Prince of Wales's fleur-de-lys superimposed upon the Swastika.

a)The Thanks Badge b) The Medal of Merit

The swastika is of course a solar symbol used by many cultures long before Hister's crew adopted it. It is interesting here in the light of the speculation that Prince William is in fact the Solar Beast whose number is 666. The eurocentric suggestion that users of the swastika symbol are necessarily fascist is as silly as suggesting that users of the circled 'A' symbol (truck manufacturers Seddon Aktinson and followers of the secular version of the apocalyptic faith, for example) are necessarily anti-authoritarian.

In Scouting for Boys, this key text of obedient citizenship through woodcraft, the sadist Baden Powell draws upon occult sources from around the world, the samurai, the Arthurian knowghts. The Cub Scouts are of course steeped in the anthropomorphic symbolism of Freemason Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, The same symbol manipulation system was picked up and worked into the celluloid images of the Disney studios. In The Jungle Book, Pocahantas, The Lion King,, the Disney studios repeatedly re-hash the theme of monarchy and the "animal kingdom", reinforcing the lie that the hierarchy relationships promoted by bourgeois culture are some kind of natural law.

In Scouting for Boys, Baden Powell also warns of the dangers of "beastliness";

"Smoking and drinking are men's vices; men have nothing but contempt for a fellow who gives way to it. Some boys, like those who start smoking, think it a very fine an manly thing to tell dirty stories, but it only shows them to be little fools. Yet such talk and the reading of trashy books or looking at lewd pictures, are very apt to lead a thoughtless boy into the temptation of self-abuse. This is a most dangerous thing for him, for, should it become a habit, it quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind, and excessive cases have led to the lunatic asylum.

"Sometimes the desire is brought on by indigestion, or from eating too rich food, or from constipation. It can therefore be cured by correcting these, and by bathing at once in cold water, or by exercising the upper part of the body by arm exercises, boxing, etc.

"If you still have trouble about it, do not make a secret of it, but go to your scoutmaster and talk it over with him, and all will come right."

MORE WAYS TO SKIN A CAT

Research into anomalous phenomena has recently concentrated on explanations such as false memory syndrome anderrors in observation.There are however simple physical explanations which may account for evidence of Alien Big Cats and other wildlife in strange contexts.

As a professional arbitrator of what is and what is not "possible", Professor Stephen Hawking has revised his earlier conclusions. In his forward to the book The Physics of Star Trek, he says that time travle might in fact be possible. His obviously flawed earliar argument in his six million hardback bestseller, A Brief History of Time was that the laws of physics did not permit time travel. There were such things as wormholes in space, connecting different parts of the universe, but they could not be used for time travel.

Others were not convinced, for example, Hawking's friend Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology. He argued in the book Black Holes and Time Warps, that the predictions of general relativity permitted time travel down a wormhole in space, provided you could find some way of keeping one open and then getting a worm, or possibly a Wild Cat down it.

Wormholes are hypothetical warps in space, predicted by Einstein. If there are warps in space, then there must be warps in time too.

Another scientist, Richard Gott of Princeton, proposed that if you took two cosmic strings left over from the Big Bang and moved them past each other quickly, you might end up with a method of time travel. By November 1995, Stephen Hawking was at last beginning to admit that the observed data concerning black holes did not fit the conclusions he had jumped to earlier. In his Waterstone lecture, Stephen Hawking went on to point out that the uncertainty principle implies that rather than the nearest black hole being a few light years away in space, that space is full of black holes, a hundred billion times smaller than the nucleus of the atom. Because they are so small, the rate at which information is lost is very low - which is why the laws of science appear to be deterministic to a very good approximation. We can predict the motion of the planets, even the weather, for a few days ahead, but the universe is constructed in a way that is intrinsically indeterminate. "One can calculate probabilities, but one cannot make any definite predictions," he said. "Thus the future of the universe is not completely determined by the laws of science and its present state"

"The Cat, he walked by himself, and all places were alike to him."

Rudyard Kipling Just So Stories

NETSAH NEWS

Another person sometimes known as the Beast 492, Aleister Crowley wrote that cabalist adventurers will become aware of landscapes and figures "such have a quality of their own, they are not like material things - they will seem to be between the two." Occult travellers who come across a leopard or lynx will, according to overrated dead smackhead Crowley's system of correspondence for gullible adolescents, find themselves in the region of Netsah, the sphere of Venus. Crowleyites and numerologists may like to investigate the connection between the death by bombing of an adolescent IRA member aboard a number 171 London bus and the Home secretary's subsequent tightening up of police powers to harass pedestrians.

NATURAL HISTORY

The November issue of Membership, the newsletter for members of the Natural History Museum in London, calls the beast reports "a mystery worthy of Conan Doyle". The newsletter tells how the skull found in the River Fowey was sent to the Zoology Department at the museum where Daphne Hills was asked to identify it. There it was decided to use traditional methods of skeletal comparison and the experience of their scientific team, rather than modern DNA profiling, to identify the skull. They compared it to other skulls in their vast collection and found it was most similar to a leopard, the shape of its nasal bones meant it was of Asian or Indian origin.

Ms Hills then compared the skull to male and female specimens and decided it belonged to a young adult male. Staff at the museum noticed a series of cut marks on the skull, which looked like the flesh had been stripped off with a craft knife. It also looked like the projecting part at the base of the skull had also been severed by the use of a sharp implement. The remains of an insect egg-case, identified as that of a tropical cockroach, was found inside a piece of dried brain membrane. The museum newsletter says that these cockroaches do occur in Britain, as pests in heated buildings, but they are never found living wild on moorland or other inhospitable environments. From this evidence the museum experts congratulate themselves on having ."Holmesian" gifts of observation and deduction with their conclusion that "the skull ended up in Cornwall only by human agency." . . . Enough of this expert balderdash! If Sherlock Holmes wasn't a fictional character, he might have visited the GoIitha Woods nature trail where the skull evidence was found and would have noticed the close proximity of heated buildings. His conclusions then might be that there might have been human interference with the skull, but he would not necessarily have jumped to the conclusion that the skull did not come from Cornwall. It's interesting that the Natural History museum mob should invoke Conan Doyle, who after all was a total sucker for table tapping spiritualists and believed a photo taken by two little girls of some cardboard cutouts was real live fairies!

MAGICK CIRCLES

A s NASA's Columbia mission orbited the Earth in October 1993, five rats on board were decapitated without anaesthetic in a procedure allegedly "to give us the first opportunity to study the physical changes caused by microgravity."

It has long been an open secret that the NASA programme his been one of ritual magic, using tactics well-known to black magickians in their hunger for power. Their animal sacrifice rites have an echo in the Bodmin events. In occult theory, a living creature is a storehouse of energy and when it is killed most of this energy is suddenly liberated. The amount of energy let loose when the victim is killed is very great, out of all proportion with the animal's size or strength. The killing is done inside the circle (or orbit) to keep the animal's energy in and concentrate it. Please do not try this at home. We only expose this unpleasant and foolhardy activity in the hope that that it will soon be abandoned. .

THE HACKER

T here have been rumours of a government and military cover-up regarding the big cats seen on Exmoor and Bodmin. Bodmin Beast investigator, Jonathan Downes tells in Animals and Men how he received a mysterious phone call from a former marine who claimed he was involved with the scandal that took place when the relationship between Princess Di and Major James Hewitt became public knowledge. This caller said that when the Royal Marines made their well publicised and apparently fruitless hunt for the Beast of Exmoor in the mid 1980's that he was a sergeant in one of the reconnaissance parties. He says that the Beast search was not the primary aim of the project, but couldn't reveal the real purpose. However he says that three animals were shot, but there was a cover up because this had happened while trespassing on private ground and the marines had not had permission to carry firearms.

There is an inference that the skull found this summer belonged to one of the three beasts shot in the 80's.