Despite the combined efforts of the media, conspiracy freaks, cultists, and UFO fans, investigators have found the real answer to the greatest nonmystery of our time.
Cattle Mutilations: The Truth at Last
After the death, the animal’s rectum and sex organs always are removed in a mutilation case with a precision many investigators believe could be accomplished only with a sophisticated instrument, such as a laser beam ….
Strong evidence exists that cattle are killed elsewhere, then flown by aircraft to the spot where they are found, and dropped to the ground. …
There is much speculation as to why Los Alamos wants less attention paid to mutilations, including the fact that they do know why the mutilations are occurring, but that the reason is classified material.
Excerpts from a grant application submitted to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) by the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, Santa Fe, N.M., in 1979.
The same month — April 1979 — that the Santa Fe DA’s office received a $50,000 government grant to investigate animal mutilations throughout the country, U.S. Sen. Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico convened public hearings on this topic, which terrifies some and, as we shall see, strangely comforts others. Ranchers, law-enforcement officers, Indian chiefs, scientists, veterinarians, and assorted devotees of The Unknown flocked to Albuquerque to enunciate with new force what has become the Holy Writ of cattle mutilations:
- Since 1967, from 8,000 to 10,000 cows and horses have been mutilated with “surgical precision” across more than 20 states ranging from Alabama to Oregon and extending out of the country into Canada, Puerto Rico, and perhaps the entire world.
- The mutilations, accounting for a loss to U. S. ranchers of more than $3 million, occur without witnesses in the dead of night.
- The perpetrators leave no tracks whatsoever.
- The mutilated carcasses are almost always utterly devoid of blood and brain fluid.
- In the “classic” mutilation case, the animal is missing part of its lips, one eye, one ear, its tongue, and its genitals. Its rectum is also absent, expertly “cored” out with great finesse.
- Sometimes various internal organs are missing, even though there are no external incisions.
- “Mystery helicopters,” strange lights, and assorted UFOs are frequently reported in association with cattle mutilations.
- “Clamp marks” are found on the legs of some of the mutilated animals, indicating they may have been hoisted into the air.
It all began, according to those who speak with apparent authority on this subject, with Snippy the horse. On September 8, 1967, the hapless gelding failed to show up for his customary daily watering at the corral on the King Ranch near Alamosa, Colo. A search was launched the next day, and the absent Appaloosa was shortly discovered dead in a small meadow north of the ranch house. Missing was all the flesh from the shoulders up; the skull and shoulder bones were entirely exposed. It was a terrifying sight.
A Denver pathologist is often quoted by the media and by those who cite this case; the doctor is said to have examined the shocking remains and ruled out the possibility that the cutting was done with a knife or that predators could have accounted for the bizarre mutilations. News accounts add that internal organs were discovered missing, as was the blood and brain fluid. UFO activity is said to have been intense at the time of the incident.
The Valley Courier, a Colorado paper, reports that in the wake of Snippy’s sensational demise, “a line of traffic resembling a freeway wound its way to the King Ranch for months. Reporters from major newspapers in the country and television cameras were numerous in the area.” Even today, Snippy still finds his way into the lead paragraphs of most accounts of the “cattle mutilation mystery.” It was in the wake of the initial wave of publicity surrounding the horse’s death that animal mutilations began to be reported with vigor throughout the United States. The uncontrolled media surge had begun.
Who, or what, is behind this phenomenon? The headline writers have never hesitated to speculate: DID POOR HORSE POKE HIS HEAD INSIDE RADIOACTIVE SAUCER? (Tucumcari Daily News, October 1967); UFO’S LINKED TO WEIRD ANIMAL MUTILATIONS (National Enquirer, October 1977); IS IT THE WORK OF A WITCHES’ CULT, SPACE ALIENS, OR THE CIA? (Weekly World News, October 1979). None of these speculations, representative of hundreds of others, comes even remotely close to the truth — which is, in one sense, dull by comparison but, in another sense, for what it tells about human nature, very interesting indeed.
In his opening statement at the public hearings in Albuquerque, Senator Schmitt declared that animals are being “killed and systematically mutilated for no apparent purpose, by persons unknown. One of the most extraordinary facts of this problem is that the group or groups responsible for the mutilation killings have shown almost unprecedented discipline. There have been no leaks or informants.”
As the day wore on in Albuquerque, it quickly became evident that most of those testifying had little difficulty comprehending this “unprecedented discipline.” They had a pretty good idea of who-or what-was doing it. Predators? The CIA? Fanatically dedicated cultists? Not likely, said Richard Sigismund of Boulder, Colo., who described himself as an investigator of “the UFO phenomenon for over twenty years” and “heavily into psychology.” He spoke articulately and at great length about the UFOs and argued that many sightings seemed to.be related, in time and place, to cattle mutilations. He dismissed the idea that a secret military or intelligence unit was conducting experiments with cattle, persuasively observing that public clamor would eventually “blow the lid from any secret project’’ and thus entail far more risk than any post-Watergate government would be willing to assume.
Predators, he added, were out of the question: “The classic cases of mutilation toward which we are directing our attention do not, by any stretch of the imagination, bear the all-too-well-known characteristics of the work of predators.”
“Cultists?” he asked. “If so, we are dealing with a large and very well funded nationwide organization of such cultists, whose audacity must indeed be matched by seemingly inexhaustible financial resources and outstanding scientific and technical capabilities. That such an organization exists and would or could continue its depredations over the course of at least a decade, leaving few if any clues, also seems hardly likely.”
Numerous others, who had similarly devoted significant parts of their lives to UFO investigations. echoed these ideas. obviously finding in the phenomenon of cattle mutilations the comfort of added ammunition in their persistent efforts to pressure Congress and the president to launch a new federal investigation of UFOs. Not everybody in Albuquerque that day, however, was a “UFO freak.” Gabe Valdez, of the New Mexico State Police, spoke, too. He has been investigating cattle mutilations in his home state for several years, and because he rejects the predator hypothesis (“It’s very hard for me to believe that a predator can take the heart out of an animal through a small wound on the neck”), he is willing to consider other explanations.
Sheriff Harry L. Graves of Logan County, Colo. who investigated dozens of mutilations between 1975 and 1977, reasons similarly. “There’s absolutely no evidence that the ‘mute’ deaths were caused by predatory animals. In fact, the lack of visible footprints or tracks seems to leave us with little or no physical evidence or traces at all. However, there is the surgical removal of the animals’ organs, coupled with the appearance of mysterious lights during the time of the mutilations.”
Ken Anderson, a toxicologist in Montana, where mutilations have also been numerous, says that “the reason more mutilated cows are found as opposed to bulls is that some lab specimens could be utilized more appropriately from the female than from the male. In the milk-producing system of the cow, the physiological anatomy would give you specific data, such as: what is being concentrated in the milk after it goes through the manufacturing and breakdown processes?”
The idea here is that some secret research group may be exposing cattle to “exotic substances,” as Anderson puts it, then killing them, taking their organs and blood for analysis. Howard Burgess. a retired radiation instrumentation scientist, who is assisting the New Mexico State Police in their mutilation investigation, has posited a similar theory.
Blood cults, satanic groups, and the like have not yet been entirely dismissed, however, as a possible explanation. Newsweek, in early 1979, declared: “For almost a decade, the gruesome livestock killings have baffled law-enforcement officials. Hundreds of cattle in twenty-seven states have been found dead and mutilated… with almost surgical precision…. After seven such deaths in central Iowa in the past several months, the state Department of Criminal Investigations says it finally has some suspects-members of certain unnamed ‘satanic groups.’”
The impression was thus left, by this naive piece of reporting, that it was the beginning of the end for the quite hu man — satanically inclined-perpetrators of these cattle mutilations. All this because investigators in Des Moines “discovered several abandoned Iowa farmhouses with strange writings on the walls and floors indicating satanic worship.” The clincher seemed to be that when said officials went to the Des Moines public library to consult books on satanism. “every volume on the subject had been checked out.” (They demanded to know by whom; library officials refused to comply.) Very suspicious. Except: why would cultists capable of carving up livestock “with almost surgical precision,” a habit of theirs for at least a decade, suddenly need to avail themselves of the satanic knowledge sequestered in the Des Moines public library?
“The cattle-mutilation hype has cost millions of dollars in anxiety; lost law-enforcement, legislative, veterinary, and medical man-hours; and millions in media hysteria.”
This is a story not of the macabre but of the mendacious. The mendacity has not always been intended, for this is also a story of human nature, and human nature is notorious for self-deception. The Newsweek article is reflective of this tendency. Cattle mutilations are a good story — so long as there are sensational hypotheses and ultimately no satisfactory solution.
A mystery solved is a mystery lost. The media, as much as the conspiracy freaks, cultists, and UFO advocates, all have their own peculiar vested interests in the non-solution of this story and thus consciously or unconsciously have assiduously ignored and/or beaten back the one solution that is overwhelmingly supported by the best evidence.
Let us return to that melancholy meadow where it all allegedly began — to the carcass of Snippy the horse. What those who continually lament the late Snippy conveniently or ignorantly overlook in their ellipses of the event is the troublesome fact that the pathologist they all like to quote (out of context) found two bullet holes in the horse, indicating the possibility, you might say, of some rather mundane foul play. Whoever shot the horse may have stripped the animal’s head and shoulders of its flesh, as well, or that might possibly have been the work of predators, as we shall see.
As for the missing blood, brain fluid, and internal organs, it is of more than casual significance, I believe, to note that this horse was not necropsied until several weeks after its death, at which time it was in an advanced state of decomposition. The pathologist who performed the necropsy was not surprised to discover internal organs missing, noting that it is commonplace for weasels and other small scavengers to tunnel into the carcass through the anus — if no more inviting aperture is available — and enjoy an indoor lunch or dinner. The blood was not missing; it had merely coagulated, as is the case in most of these “mutilations.” The brain. in the normal decomposition process, had liquefied and seeped away. As for the UFO sightings which it is now said concurred with Snippy’s “slaughter,” the local press in Colorado indicates that these sightings actually took place several months before the incident. The “relationship” of the two phenomena was conveniently established ex post facto.
Accounts of livestock mutilations almost always give the impression, as the Newsweek article did, that officials have long been hopelessly “baffled” by the phenomenon. A survey of law-enforcement organizations in several states indicates this simply isn’t the case. Carl W. Whiteside, of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, conducted an inquiry into the 1975 “wave” of mutilations in that state. He quickly discovered that “authoritative” statements made by vets, police officers, and others at the scene could not be relied upon for scientific accuracy. Most vets are familiar with living animals but have little knowledge of how an animal will or should look hours, days, or weeks after death. Forensic pathologists, who do have the expertise to make authoritative pronouncements about dead animals, have time and again, in state after state, found that “mutilated” animals brought to them for examination died of natural causes and were attacked by scavengers and predators after death. This was true in Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming.
Arkansas is the site of some of the most widely publicized mutilations, most of which occurred in 1978 in Benton County. A study of all 20 cases in the files of the sheriff’s office there was conducted by Dr. Nancy Owen, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, working under a grant from the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Owen’s findings explode a number of the myths. She found, first, that the “classic” cattle-mutilation pattern simply doesn’t exist. The idea that the same body parts are always missing, excised with surgical precision, isn’t true.
“There was really no uniformity at all. In several of the animals one eye, the tongue, and the genitals were missing — but often not entirely missing. And then even in these cases there was almost always some other parts missing, which varied from case to case — like the tail had been partly chewed off, or there was a hole in the animal and some internal organs were gone.”
The notion that female animals of reproductive age are the primary targets of the mutilators was also shot down by Dr. Owen. She discovered that two-thirds of the Benton County cases involved “young calves, many of them just a few days old — where you have a much higher mortality rate in the natural course of events.”
A few of the Arkansas cases, she believes, may have been the work of cultists attracted by all the publicity. And in isolated cases other factors may have been at work. The proponents of UFO and secret-research hypotheses, for example, have found encouragement in the report of a vet in Pea Ridge, Ark., who conducted postmortems on three Benton County “mutes.” Two were cows, one a horse. The horse in particular excited attention-and continues to do so — because its castration, according to the vet, was achieved with “much expertise.” More-over, he reported finding trace of “a powerful muscle-relaxant drug” in the dead animal.
At no time during his conversation with me did this vet give any indication that there might be a logical explanation for this death. Instead, without personally subscribing to such a viewpoint outright, he spoke of a writer who advocates a UFO explanation for the mutilations, and said, “Maybe he’s got a point.” He neglected to tell me what I later learned from a police report of the incident — that the owner of the horse in question castrated the animal. Other people I approached were equally reluctant to mention this. Many farmers and ranchers do some of their own veterinarian work with mixed results. Unfortunately, succinylcholine, a powerful muscle-relaxant drug used in the castration of horses, is dangerous even in the hands of the experienced. Maladministration can easily kill a horse, resulting not only in loss but embarrassment.
Still, some questions remain about the overall phenomenon. Some of the “cutting” does, indeed, look exceptionally clean. Studies have shown that coyotes and other predators possess teeth that can make almost scalpel like cuts, but even this fact wouldn’t account for some of those “cored” anuses. And so it was, in search of the “surgeon,” that Herb Marshall, the enterprising sheriff of Washington County, Ark., set up an experiment in which two of his men parked themselves in some bushes for 30 hours straight and observed a calf that was night the officers observed the carcass through a Starlite scope, a device utilized by military intelligence. They photographed what they saw.
“At the end of those thirty hours,” Sheriff Marshall says, “we had us a ‘classic’ case, a carcass that looked exactly like most of the others that were being reported to us. Its tongue was gone, one of its eyes was missing, its anus had been cored out, the whole thing.”
What happened? “First, we observed what any pathologist will tell you happens after an animal dies. The tongue protrudes and lies right out there on the ground; the anus inverts and sticks out three or four inches. Then the predators and scavengers come along and eat the parts that protrude, the soft, easy-to-get-at parts: the tongue, the genitals, the udder if it’s a female, and the anus. We saw all of this. Then, as the animal gets colder, the tongue, or what’s left of it, retracts back into the mouth so it looks like it was cut off way down deep. The anus retracts, too, and gives the appearance it’s been operated on, especially after the blowflies have finished with it.”
Blowflies. Those are the “surgeons.” Swarms of them pick over the wounds made by other scavengers, cleaning off every ragged edge. “When they get done with the exposed eyeball,” Sheriff Marshall notes, “it looks like it’s been removed by an expert surgeon.” Most cattle mutilations are reported in warm months, he adds, “when the blowflies are around.” Those that are reported in the cold months, and such reports are few in number, often lack the “surgeon’s touch.”
“The media, as much as the conspiracy freaks, cultists, and UFO advocates, have their own vested interests in the non-solution of this story and have ignored the best evidence for its solution.”
Among the “mutilators” observed, in addition to the blowflies, were a skunk, some buzzards, and a stray dog, all of which enjoyed a good meal. After Marshall presented his report and slides to the local cattleman’s association, reports of mutilations in Washington County came to a screeching halt.
Meanwhile, back in New Mexico, center of all the current cattle-mutilation activity, Santé Fe District Attorney Eloy Martinez’s chief investigator in the government-funded animal-mutilation inquiry, Kenneth Rommel, Jr., states that he won’t be asking for an extension or a renewal of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant. The mystery, so far as he and his coinvestigators are concerned, is solved. Though he hints there may have been isolated cases of cult involvement — or simply people occasionally hacking up carcasses they come across, as a joke-the “problem” is imaginary. The “culprits” are almost entirely of the four-footed, feathered, and winged variety — coyotes, birds, flies, etc.
Rommel, a colorful, tough investigator who was a special agent with the FBI for 28 years, bristles when he hears the term “surgical precision” used. If it shows up in a police or press report, he wants to know exactly who used the term, how they define it, and by what authority they employ it. He has been at the scene of most of the New Mexico cattle mutilations in the past year and has yet to see anything he or his experts say justifies the use of that term.
Apart from all the other evidence pointing toward predators (tracks, teeth marks, and so on). Rommel finds it of more than passing interest that, in every mutilation case he has investigated where an eye and an ear have been partially or entirely missing, the absent parts have always been taken from the accessible “up” side, never from the down side, where small predators can’t get at them. Rommel has done his homework.
He scoffs at those who say that animals could not have stripped Snippy’s flesh of all that meat in so little time, noting that eagles, ravens, buzzards, and the like can eat two to three pounds of meat at one sitting. He’s also familiar with the biophysics of bloat and the dynamics of gas buildup in the carcasses of horses and cattle. In some cases, he observes, gases build up to the point where internal organs are extruded through the vagina and/or anus. making them easy pickings for predators and scavengers and creating fright and mystery among the misinformed who discover the missing parts later.
Rommel says that he has no doubt that no matter how definitive his findings and those of others are, there will, always be people who “believe in” cattle mutilations. “What we’re dealing with here,” he says, “is something like religion.”
“A team of psychiatrists, anthropologists, and sociologists should have a field day with this,” Rommel observes, declining to speculate further on why people are so fascinated by cattle mutilations. One sociologist who has made a study of the phenomenon and has labeled it “a classic case of mild mass hysteria” is James R. Stewart of the Department of Social Behavior, University of South Dakota. Stewart has presented a study called “Cattle Mutilations: An Episode of Collective Delusion,” based on a wave of alleged mutilations that swept through Nebraska and South Dakota in through Nebraska and South Dakota in late 1974. Because early reports of the mutilations could not immediately be explained, the “wave” grew, Stewart says, and continued to build until pathologists at the two state veterinary-diagnostic laboratories began studying the animals. They issued a report stating that every animal examined had died of natural causes and had then been set upon predators
Because of initial confusion and misleading statements made by vets and sheriffs inexperienced in dealing with dead animals and “for reasons associated with strain and anxiety,” Stewart continues, “people began to interpret an everyday occurrence in a new, bizarre manner.” Cattle deaths, he adds, were occurring at the same rates they had and for all the same reason “but the widespread reporting of these incidents gave the appearance that there was a sudden, inexplicable increase in the deaths.”
He likens the situation to one that developed in the Seattle area in the mid-1950’s, when people suddenly began noticing pits and nicks in the windshields of their cars and trucks and concluded that some invisible devastation was literally raining down upon them from the heavens. The more that was said and written about it, the more people believed something unusual was happening. “In a study of that episode,” Stewart observes, “the investigators concluded that it was caused by the fact that people [alerted to the ‘phenomenon’] suddenly started looking at their windshields rather than through them,” thus discovering pits that has been there all along.
The pitted-windshield hysteria, however, is small potatoes compared with cattle mutilations, which have cost not millions of dollars in lost livestock, as is claimed, but rather millions of dollars in anxiety and lost sleep; lost law-enforcement, legislative, veterinary, and medical manhours; and millions in media hysteria (air space and white space that might better have been devoted to something else). As an added tax, we have had to put up with some of the most pre prosperous and ponderous hypothesizing imaginable. Jacques Vallee, for example, declares:
“The symbols attached to the UFO phenomenon are the primary images of life: blood, death, sex, time, space, and sky. Carl Jung could expand vastly on his archetypal hypothesis about UFOs if he came back today to study the documents that have accumulated on this subject. What are the organs taken by the mutilators? The eyes, the ears, the tongue, and the genitals: that is, the organs concerned with communication and reproduction. The culprits deserve credit not only as good surgeons, but also as good psychologists.”
Ah, yes: there is no surgeon like the blowfly, no psychologist like the coyote. You can turn over, Carl, but don’t bother to get up.
