Historic UFO audio archive dating back to the 40s recovered

"A historic UFO audio archive documenting the beginning of the modern UFO era has been made available online. The archive was compiled by Wendy Connors and Roderick Dyke, and re-discovered and made available online by Isaac Koi and Giuliano Marinkovic.

"You can find the Faded Disk archive at Archive.org."

Source: Open Minds.

This Exists: South Africa Occult Crime Unit with membership restricted to Christian police officers

It exists, and University of Cape Town professor Jacques Rousseau calls it out:

Decades after its formation, the Occult-Related Crime Unit (ORCU, founded by Kobus "Donker" Jonker in 1992) continues to waste public resources, misdirect police attention, and stigmatize young people who are by and large more misunderstood than malignant.

Amongst all the crimes that we can speculate police in this unit might have seen, there's one we can be sure of - and it's one that they are complicit in. The crime in question is against common sense and morality, and is vested in the reinforcing of a Christian evangelical "Satanic Panic".

In the context of South Africa's constitutionally-protected freedom of religion, restricting membership of a police unit to only Christians - and dedicating that unit to protecting a Christian version of reality - is itself worthy of special attention as an occult-related crime.

Because a unit can't investigate itself, I'd ask the Minister of Police to consider funding a new Occult-Related-Related Crimes Unit, which I volunteer to lead. Our mission? To be ruthless in pursuing crimes related to simplistic, moralizing, and religiously prejudiced views of crime, society at large, and especially the youth.

Even on the very fuzzy definition of "occult" used by ORCU, too few such crimes occur to merit the existence of a dedicated unit. But it is in the definition of these crimes, as well as the background metaphysics and psychology, that ORCU starts to appear just as spooky as the crimes and motivations ORCU exists to combat.

In response (I presume) to a fairly constant barrage of criticism on social media, the South African Police Service (SAPS) removed the web page that gave us our best insight into how a unit in a 21st-century police force is being guided by ideas from the Dark Ages.

But thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can see not only that "Child has an interest in computer" is a sign that said child might be involved in a cult, but also that this and other equally ridiculous diagnostic advice has remained unchanged since September 2004 (the archived page from then - the earliest date the page was captured - being identical to the one that was removed in November 2013):

http://web.archive.org/web/20040922161210/http://www.saps.gov.za/youth_desk/occult/occult.htm

I don't mean to dispute that adolescents, and others, commit crimes in the service of motivations they themselves think of as occult. But when they do so, why is it that this motivation is singled out for special attention? We don't have a jealousy-related crimes unit, or a greed-related, tender-related, BEE-related, or alien-related unit - even though all of these provide possible motivations to commit crimes, mostly with far greater regularity than the occult would.

Then, if we find that a crime is committed because the guilty party thought themselves under some supernatural instruction, we know full well what to do next: arrange for that person to get the psychological help they clearly need, alongside whatever other sentence is appropriate.

The mystery of Scotland's dog suicide bridge (Video)

Studies have shown that since the 1950s or 1960s numerous dogs have have been jumping off a bridge near Overtoun House in south-west Scotland at the rate of about one dog per year -- and no one knows why.

Overtoun House is a 19th-century country house and estate in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. It is located on a hill overlooking the River Clyde, in between the village of Milton and the town of Dumbarton. Built between 1860 and 1863 for James Black & White, a retired lawyer and a co-owner of the J&J White Chemical Works, the house and the estate were given by a descendant of his to the people of Dumbarton in 1938. It was then converted into a maternity hospital, and now houses a 'center for hope and healing.'

In a recent article, Ned Donovan wrote, "The area has long been thought to be haunted, and in 1994 a father threw his child off the bridge, claiming the infant to be the Anti-Christ before himself attempting to jump off the bridge. In fact, the sinister background of Overtoun can be traced directly back to Celtic mythology: it is said to inhabit an area of Scotland which is 'thin', i.e. where our world crosses with that of heaven, allowing spirits to cross over into our Earthly domain.

Dogs that leap over the bridge parapet fall 50 feet (15 m) onto the waterfalls below. Some dogs that survived the drop have jumped again. The only linking factors for this unexplained event are that dogs mostly jump from the same side of the bridge, in clear weather, and they are breeds with long snouts.

As to why, Donovan observed, "Over the years it has been argued that dogs are sensitive to supposed paranormal activity and could be naturally drawn towards the spiritual barrier that may exist on the bridge, a barrier we cannot detect.

"The locals in the area believe that the cause lay nearby at Her Majesty’s Naval Base Faslane, where the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent resides. Residents believed that secret naval communications emitted a sound only heard by dogs and caused them to jump off the bridge. Others placed the blame in the sound of the waterfall next to the bridge where the dogs land after their jump.

"The most emotionally charged explanation is that the dogs are simply depressed, and that Overtoun Bridge is for them what the Golden Gate Bridge is to humans."

In 2005 the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent an animal habitat expert to investigate the causes as to why dogs kill themselves at Overtoun Bridge. Initially Dr David Sands examined sight, smell and sound factors. After eliminating what a dog could potentially see and hear on the bridge, he eventually focused on scent following the discovery of mice and mink in undergrowth on the side of the bridge from which dogs often leaped. In a test, the odors from these animals were spread around an open field. Ten dogs were unleashed - representing the most common breeds that jumped off the bridge. Of the dogs tested, only two showed no interest in any of the scents while nearly all the others made straight for the mink scent. Sands concluded that, although it was not a definitive answer, the potent odor from male mink urine was possibly luring the dogs to their deaths. His theory is that curiosity killed the dogs.

At the time Dr. Sands appeared in a TV documentary about his study of thee phenomenon and he has since updated that report for National Geographic in 2010 and then again for William Shatners 'Weird or What' in 2012. Watch video clips from these below:

Sources: Wikipedia, The Kernel, The Animal Behaviour Clinic, The Herald Scotland and Overtoun House.