Friday, September 30, 2022

Cattle Mutilations from the Other Side of the Fence with Chris O'Brien

 

The plan had been to speak with Chris O’Brien about cattle mutilations, but in this world of technical miracles, we had trouble with the initial connection. Not to spill too many of our internal secrets, I hoped we could make the connection but we had


to start the show. What this means, simply, is that the first segment was what I now suggest is an intense monologue as opposed to a rant.

Chris joined during the break and after I attempted to wrap up the information I had suggested would start that segment, we brought Chris on to give the other side of the cattle mutilation controversy. You can, of course, listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51411020

And for those with stronger stomach, or who might be interested in what part of my office looks like, not to mention seeing Chris, you can watch here:

https://rumble.com/v1lx5e0-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-christopher-obrien.html

We did talk about the “history” of the mutilations, including the story from the seventeenth century about a huge sheep kill in which the animals were left partially butchered where the fell. Butchered might not be the right word because most of the animal and the fleece were left behind. It is an interesting story, only for the historical aspect of the notes and you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/08/chasing-footnotes-cattle-mutilation.html

To Chris’ delight, I brought up the 1897 “calf-napping” reported by Alexander Hamilton (no, not that Alexander Hamilton who had died long before this… and not the one killed in Custer’s assault on Black Kettle’s peaceful village of Cheyenne at the Washita in 1868). He provides a counter to the explanation of hoax that was first suggested by Jerry Clark. I have written about this myself. You can read more about this here:

http://www.spaceshipsofezekiel.com/html/misc-kansas-airship-cownapping.html

Chris had thought we should talk about the mysterious helicopters seen around the country. There seemed to be a correlation between mutilations and these helicopter sightings, though I’m not convinced of that. Tom Adams had contacted the public affairs office at Fort Carson, Colorado, to ask about their helicopter operations, which seemed to rule them out as being involved in the mutilations at all.

However, I was a member of the Iowa National Guard as a helicopter pilot in that time frame and suggested that it might have been important to check with the National Guard aviation units as well. The restrictions placed on us were a bit looser, and I mentioned that I had traveled to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri at the time as a cross country training mission and to make a run on the PX there. In other words, military aircraft had not been ruled out completely, only those at a single installation.

Huey helicopters in formation flight. Yes, I took the photograph from the 
cockpit of another aircraft in the formation.


I had wanted to talk about one of the obviously terrestrial mutilations that had been recorded. I mentioned it in my longer posting on here. The relevant paragraph is:

The Washington County Sheriff Herb Marshall, in 1979 kept a recently dead cow under observations for two full days. Over that time, bacteria caused the skin to tear in a manner consistent with the cuts described by ranchers and farmers. Expanding gas split the stomach to expose the internal organs. Blowflies laid eggs in the soft tissues of the eyes, lips and anuses. The maggots, hatched in as little as ten hours, then would eat the soft tissues to the bone. For Sheriff Marshall, that ended the controversy and explained the mutilations.

After the show, I did email Chris and ask about his response to this observation by sheriff’s deputies. He wrote back:

This procedure has been done a number of times and is a perfect illustration of what happens to a head of livestock that dies and then nature takes its course. I've seen this process unfold many times. However, I've had cases that do not conform to this sequence of events. I had one case where hundreds of flies that landed on the carcass died and there was no maggot bloom. I've had a number of cases where scavengers would not get w/in 50 feet of the carcass and no birds would land on them. I had a case that inexplicably had 300 to 600 percent increased levels of magnetite around the body which went untouched by predators. The amount of magnetite went to control levels 50 feet out from the carcass. As I mentioned on the show, only 20% or so of my cases IMO appeared to have been perpetrated w/ intelligence and a sharp implement. 40 out of around 200. I had two cases that had evidence of high-heat used as the cutting agent. This is a tricky subject that has been used by some individuals to promote their notoriety and careers w/ an alien agenda...

Our discussion seemed to circle the same place when I asked about the report written by Ken Rommel, a former FBI agent hired to investigate cattle mutilations in New Mexico. That document seemed to line up with where my investigations had taken me, but for Chris, he thought it was more like the Condon Committee report in which the conclusions were written before the investigation began.

Given the abbreviated nature of the show, we didn’t get to some of the items I wanted to talk about it and which I had mentioned in the past. The one thing that came out of the show that was interesting is that our opinion about the source of the mutilations matched to a degree.

Next week, I’ll be talking with William Puckett of the Northwest UFOs website about the trends he sees in this changing world of UFO investigation. This moves us from the subset of cattle mutilations back into mainstream Ufology (or will it now become Uapology… that doesn’t seem to role off the tongue, though I’ll take credit for inventing the word).

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Lue Elizondo and Two Crashes on the Same Day

 

While I was reading the material posted to the Anomalist website (www.anomalist.com), I followed a couple of links and came to a story headlined, “’Roswell Was Real, Claimed Apollo 14 Astronaut, Elizondo Suggests 2 UFOs Crashed That Day.” (No, the headline is not suggesting that Elizondo was an astronaut… I think they needed a semi-colon rather than a comma to make it clear.)

That headline intrigued me because of the suggestion that two UFOs had crashed on the same day. This was the theory spun by Stan Friedman in an attempt to validate the Plains of San Agustin crash site identified by Barney Barnett. Friedman’s theory was that the UFOs had collided with one falling to the Brazel (Foster) ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and the other coming down farther to the west, on the Plains.

I do not believe there was a crash on the Plains in July 1947, and the reason that theory was ever considered was that the original information, provided by Jesse Marcel, Sr., had no mention of alien bodies. Barney Barnett, however, who lived in Socorro, New Mexico, did tell of something falling on the Plains and that he had seen the bodies of an alien flight crew. Ruth Barnett kept a diary for all of 1947, and there is no mention of anything like that in her written record. I have explored this in the past, at length, and you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/finding-ruth-barnett-diary.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-plains-of-san-agustin-crash.html

The point is, given the information I have uncovered and the investigation that I conducted, there was no evidence substantiate the dual crash aspect of the Roswell case. In one of the more notorious tales told, Gerald Anderson, said that he was on the Plains that day and saw the crashed craft and the alien creatures. Friedman continued to support Anderson long after it was clear that Anderson lied about his involvement. You can read more about that here, but you need to scroll down to find the relevant information about Anderson:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

Don Schmitt at the Anderson crash site with the Plains behind him. In the far distance is
the location of the bat cave where scientists were working beginning on July 1. They would have 
seen the crash had there been one, but none of them did.


To me, if Elizondo was, in fact, saying that two UFOs crashed that day, it suggested he was not on the inside because two UFOs had not crashed that day. The Barnett tale had been single witness with no corroboration, and in fact, scientists who were in the area at the time and who had a perfect view of the entire Plains, did not corroborate the story. Given all that, it seemed that Elizondo might not have been the insider that he claimed.

However…

And you knew there would be a “however”…

I wanted to know exactly what he had said, and I wanted to know where he had said it. According to the story in the Roswell Daily Record, Elizondo said, “Before I was part of AATIP, I had no idea about Roswell, other than that there was sort of some alleged crash at some point and some farmer found debris – but during my time with AATIP, there was some very interesting anecdotal information that suggests there wasn’t just one crash, there may have been two crashes, and that somehow it may have been related to some sort of testing that was being done at the time at White Sands, and that the material was recovered.”

He didn’t add much in that article about what he knew, only that these were things that he had heard from those who had been around since the days of Project Blue Book. This is exactly the same sort of thing that Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I have heard for many years from people who were actually in Roswell at the time or who were in the Army Air Forces when the object crashed. Brigadier General Arthur

Arthur Exon

Exon, for example, provided us with these same stories about what he had heard when he was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947. Exon even talked about the recovery of alien creatures and what happened to the bodies once they had been moved out of Roswell.

My original purpose here was to suggest that if Elizondo was talking about two crashes on the same day, that would tend to undercut his importance to the UFO investigation given that there was only the single event. But the newspaper story doesn’t say anything about two crashes on the same day, only that there were two crashes. And, he says that these were anecdotal tales he had been told, not that he had seen documents or classified studies which changes the importance of what he said. Only that he had heard these things from others who he suggested would have known the truth.

This turned out not to be much of a chase for accurate information. I guess you could say that it was a “nothing burger.” I was intrigued by the headline that was inaccurate and reading the whole story gave the correct information. It does, however, show that Roswell is still alive in the UFO world.

Monday, September 19, 2022

Let's Kill Ufology?

Many years ago, my pal, Rich Reynolds, thought that we geezers in the UFO field should step aside and allow the youngsters to take over. I don’t think he phrased it quite that way but the implication was clear. We had failed to solve the riddle of the flying saucers, so let someone else, with newer ideas, come forward. Maybe they would do better than we had.

Now we have Lue Elizondo, a late comer to the party, saying that he wanted to kill Ufology so that whatever replaced it might by more holistic and harmonized. He wanted a community that was far more academically serious and representative of the topic. You know, like the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yes, I know that he is no longer associated with it, but then, it certainly wasn’t, exactly, serious and representative of the topic.

What he seems to have missed was that Ufology has always been relegated to the civilian world for any serious investigation. The Air Force spent its time ridiculing the topic, often suggesting that those who see UFOs are not the most reliable of observers and providing useless answers to high quality cases.

Oh, you want an example?

In a word, “Levelland.”



Here was a case in which witnesses, who had observed a UFO close to the ground, that stalled their car engines, dimmed their headlights, and filled their radios with static, provided multiple chains of evidence. Sightings lasted for minutes, giving the witness enough time to get a good look at the UFO before it took off in a bright red glow. The craft interacted with the environment and there are even hints of landing traces having been found. The local sheriff saw the UFO but if you read the Air Force report, it said that he’d only seen a streak red light in the distance rather than an object. Before the Air Force investigator arrived, he told reporters that he had seen a glowing red object that was oval or football shaped. After he talked with the Air Force investigator, and according to the Project Blue Book file, he said he had only seen a streak of red light in the distance. Later still, he told Don Berliner that he had seen an object.

Witnesses around the Levelland, Texas, area independently reported the craft, reported the electromagnetic effects, and there were reliable reports of landing traces. The Air Force said that only three people saw the object and ignored most of the reports of stalled engines. The Air Force concluded that the sightings were the result of ball lightning even though, at the time, scientists argued about the reality of ball lightning. Doesn’t really matter because ball lightning has been described as never being larger than a foot to two feet in diameter and existing for mere seconds. Witnesses talked of large craft that remained close to them for five or more minutes. The sightings by multiple witnesses lasted for two and a half to three hours in and around the Levelland, Texas, area.

The Air Force didn’t issue an immediate explanation for the Levelland sightings because they were waiting for NICAP to issue theirs first. The Air Force believed that it was easier to respond to NICAP than it was for them to issue the first report. By waiting, the Air Force was able to change the tone of the discussion from the sightings to the number of the witnesses to those sightings, and then to lie about those numbers. They claimed that only three witnesses had seen an object but their own files provide five names and newspapers, some of the clippings in the Air Force file, reported on many other names.

This wasn’t the only deception by the Air Force related to the sightings in November, 1957. James Stokes, an engineer working at Holloman Air Force Base, reported that just days after the Levelland sightings, his car had been stalled by a low flying UFO

James Stokes

near Orogrande, New Mexico, just south of the Air Force base and near the White Sands Missile Range. Stokes also spoke of a slight, sunburn effect, that reddened his skin. Although the sunburn was seen by others, including the news director at an Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station, the Air Force investigator, who arrived two days later, didn’t see the burn. The Air Force officers also made a big deal out of the claim that Stokes was an engineer, saying that there was no record of his graduating with any sort of engineering degree and that he was just a technician assigned to the base. It was a smear designed to reduce Stokes’ credibility by suggesting that he was misrepresenting his job status.

The problem was that the Air Force officers assigned to Holloman AFB and who knew Stokes, refuted the other Air Force claim. They said that Stokes was an engineer, had been doing the work of a trained engineer for some eighteen months, and was a twenty-year veteran of the Navy. It was an example of the attitude suggesting that if you can’t explain it, then ridicule it. We had two Air Force organizations dueling over Stokes’ qualifications which, of course, changed the discussion from the reality of the sighting to the credibility of the witness which was what some in the Air Force wanted anyway.

The point here is that the problem wasn’t the quality of the civilian investigations into UFO sightings, but the government and the Air Force attitude and interference in them. Rather than conduct a real investigation, the Air Force just labeled the cases, smeared the witnesses, and went on about their business as if they had supplied accurate analysis.

There are other examples of this, including the case of the photographs taken by William Rhodes in 1947. I have detailed this on the blog and you can access some of that information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/still-more-on-rhodes.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/rhodes-wrap-up.html

I certainly could supply additional examples of these tactics but after a point it becomes tedious. For those who wish to read more information about Air Force attempts to smear witnesses, including members of the Air Force, I point you to:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/07/air-force-character-assassination-and.html

Elizondo complains that some self-professed Ufologists (is there really another kind) on social media have been less than productive. He reminds us that the Intelligence Community and the Defense apparatus watch social media. I’d suggest their time might be better spent engaging those of us who stay away from social media and the nonsense produced there. While Elizondo mentions a “few naughty children… that have decided that no other children are allowed to play in their sandbox…,” I would suggest that these spats, once called flame wars, have little to do with the scientific work being done by those of us associated with the Center for UFO Studies and the recently formed Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), which embrace the scientific method and rejects these other spats as counterproductive.

Many of these “spats” are not between members of the UFO community on the side of alien visitation, but are the result of half-truths and lies created by the so-called skeptical community. Philip Klass had a habit of attacking those with whom he disagreed. In the past, I have enumerated some of these allegations. Rather than go into them, at length now, you can read find the information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/09/philip-klass-and-his-letter-writing.html

I would also point out that there are scientific journals that routinely report on UFOs. The Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer reviewed scientific journal, publishes research into the UFO phenomenon. This is the sort of thing that Elizondo advocates but seemed to know nothing about.

And there is the MADAR system created by Fran Ridge and others. These are stations around the world with sensor arrays that detect and record a wide range of anomalies in the environment. Then, tracking with MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center, they search for visual observations of UFOs, looking for correlation. Although the results have been slim, there have been some interesting correlations between alerts from the MADAR array and UFO sightings. This brings another level of science to the investigations that provides corroboration for the visual sightings and adds another link in a chain of evidence.

Elizondo wrote that the first place the newcomers go for information about UFOs is social media and that suggests a rather superficial look at UFOs. There are some very good websites and blogs that provide solid and well thought out examinations of the evidence but, of course, there are those that are filled with conjecture, conspiracy, and conflicting data. Shouldn’t anyone interested in the topic seek out multiple sources of information rather than just searching social media? Shouldn’t they be given the opportunity to draw their own conclusions rather than have some suspected and self-appointed authority tell them what the truth is and where to find it?

Elizondo wrote, “Sadly, the UFO Community as of late has become somewhat of an irrational morass of mob rule and popularity seekers.  Gone is the respect and decorum, in favor of mosh pit elbow shoves and boot kicks.  Voices of those who would otherwise apply a scholarly focus are being drowned out by those social media personalities sensationalizing their efforts as ‘disclosure activists’ in order to generate revenue through viewers and subscribers.  Those who seek ‘credit’ instead of cooperation are hijacking the topic for their own enrichment at the expense of genuine truth advocates.”

While I might point out that science is often driven by the same sad motivations, and would point to the Dinosaur Wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as but a single example, it would seem that some of these newcomers are driven by the same motivations. Some of these newcomers have engaged the services of agents and public relations specialists for the very purpose of enriching themselves and propelling themselves into the spotlight. Others have used their connections, however indirect those connections might be, to suggest inside information and knowledge as a way of improving their access to media and those important monetary rewards.

I have often wondered, however, why researching and writing about UFOs is about the only field in which it is a sin to profit from hard work. I can name several older UFO researchers who have written books and given presentations about their research to share the information for the purpose of sharing that information. For those who visit my blog, there is no pay wall or donation button. The information is offered freely. But I still wonder why I am criticized for publishing books on the topic when the compensation rarely covers the expenses for gathering the information. I don’t know how many times I have been accused of only being in it for the money, when there are easier and better ways for me to make money such as historical fiction. The accusation is hurled as a way of dismissing my work, and that of many others, without having to do much research into how we gathered the data or what credentials we might hold.

And while Elizondo condemns us for many of the problems in Ufology, I would suggest they grow from the attempts to cover up what is happening. I can point to the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel from early 1953 as a good example. Their recommendations after their alleged investigation were to debunk the phenomenon, have teachers deny students permission to use UFOs as research projects and reject reports on UFO books. They suggested an “education” program to demystified UFOs so that the public would lose interest all the while knowing that the truth was much more interesting.

We also have had the Air Force sponsored, University of Colorado “Scientific Study” of UFOs, commonly called the Condon Committee. We have the documentation showing that the conclusions were written before the investigation began. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler wrote to Dr. Robert Low of the committee telling him what the Air Force wanted, that is, there was no national security threat, there was no scientific benefit in continued in the investigation of UFOs, and that the Air Force had done a good job with their investigation. For the next fifty years, science beat us all over the head with the results of this “scientific endeavor” only to learn that it was more anti-UFO propaganda paid for by the US Government and the Air Force. You can learn more about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Now we learn that “the social media circus of today has challenged the government’s confidence in UFOlogy as a worthy area of study.” I submit that this social media circus might be driven by the government that has worked for 75 years to prove that UFOs do not exist and are not worth the expenditure of government resources. I suggest that the podcasts, YouTube channels, Twitter fees, and Instagram pages are not the problem here, but the decades of ridicule, misinformation and outright lies spread by official government and Air Force sources are the reason that there is the confusion and division that Elizondo condemns as he attempts to propel himself into a leadership role in the UFO community. That ridicule and division was exactly what the Air Force and the government wanted to keep the answers hidden and it has worked for 75 years.

And now we have a bunch of ex-government officials, some with questioned credentials, lecturing us on what is wrong in the world of UFOs. While many of us have been toiling for decades to bring science to UFOs, have written about it, made suggestions about it, and have attempted to apply science, we have the newcomers telling us that we should now embrace science as if we hadn’t thought of that all by ourselves long ago. Well, thanks for the enlightened view of the situation and I’m sure everything will now change… except, of course, the government is again wrapping its investigation in the cloak of national security so that they can bury the information. John Greenewald just reported that the Navy has determined that the majority of the information and video evidence they have gathered is a national security issue and will not be released to the general public anytime soon. This is the same dodge they used for the last 75 years.

But that’s okay because we have these newcomers who have the answers as they find themselves on the lecture circuit and writing the books, for which they are paid, sometimes quite handsomely, all the while condemning us for writing books and appearing on the lecture circuit. But that’s okay because their motives are pure. We know this because they have told us so.

So, obviously, I find it difficult to read the suggestions made by someone who doesn’t seem to know the history of UFO research. I find it difficult to listen to the suggestion that we embrace science when many of us have done that for years. I wonder just how useful Elizondo’s suggestions are because they seem to address a symptom of the problem but not the problem itself. The problem isn’t the current state of UFO research, but to interference by government, DoD, and Air Force officials. Had they not attempted to hide the information, we would be having a completely different discussion and we would have “solved” the problem decades ago without the help of the enlightened newcomers.

 

PS: I do wonder if putting in links to other articles that have relevance here is worth the effort. Those links lead to other links so that a comprehensive picture can be drawn. The problem is that it can take a long time to wade through the material. Does putting in the links help or hinder the discussion. I would like to know. Please provide a comment with your thoughts. 

Thursday, September 15, 2022

"X" Zone Broadcast Network - Tom Carey and a Lot of Things

 

Tom Carey was the guest in a two-part interview. In the first part, we talked about Roswell and his investigations into it. He explained what had dragged him into the investigation and how it seemed to dominate his life for some thirty years. You can listen to both parts here:

Tom Carey

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51261982

and here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51262024

I did ask him for his assessment of the Glenn Dennis tale of the missing nurse and her role in getting information about the alien bodies to him. There were elements of the Dennis tale that Tom found problematic and said that if we were in a court of law, the changing story would be enough to impeach him as a witness. If I understood correctly, Tom believes that there are elements of the Dennis story that are credible, but only because he might have heard them from others who were involved. He also mentioned that several witnesses had said that Dennis had told them about the bodies over the years. I, of course, don’t believe Dennis and have written about it in the past. You can read more about my investigations and impressions of the Glenn Dennis story in Understanding Roswell and on this blog here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/04/glenn-dennis-lies.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/05/x-zone-broadcast-network-tom-carey-and.html

And to delve even deeper into this, if you wish, you can just type Glenn Dennis into the provided search engine and find all references to him that I have published here.

Tom did say that investigations were not a straight path to the answer, unlike what is seen on TV. One person leads to another who might have a document that leads somewhere else. Sometimes the trail just runs cold and there is nowhere else to go, but sometimes there is a nugget waiting at the end that furthers the investigation. It is those nuggets we often chase.

We also talked about the Gerald Anderson tale of seeing a crashed craft over on the Plains of San Agustin, and the connection between Anderson and Winfred Buskirk, who held a Ph.D. in anthropology. Anderson had identified Buskirk as having been on the Plains to see the crash. Unfortunately for Anderson, Buskirk was still alive when Anderson began to spin his tales, and Buskirk denied had been involved. Both Tom and I had communicated with Buskirk. We were able to put them, Buskirk and Anderson together at the Albuquerque High School while Anderson was a student and Buskirk a teacher. Anderson’s tale unraveled and it was clear that his involvement was an invention by him to inject himself into the Roswell tale.

In the second part, we moved away from Roswell, and I asked about what he thought about alien abduction. I knew that Tom hadn’t wanted to get into it, but I thought, as someone around the UFO field for decades, he might provide some insight into the subset of the UFO phenomenon.

Tom said that we had never discussed alien abduction and I can confirm this. Our work, our conversations and our studies took us away from the world of alien abduction. Tom said that he had attended, well, not a party but a gathering, hosted by David Jacobs of alien abduction and alien hybrid fame. Tom danced around the description of many of the men there, but I understood immediately what he was suggesting. I pointed out that Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I had interviewed some 316 abductees in the course of the investigation that led to the writing and publication of our book about abduction, cleverly called, The Abduction Enigma.

What is interesting is that I told him that we had discovered a disproportionate number of gay men in our sample. We weren’t making any claims about their homosexuality, only that they were overly represented, given the number of gay men in the general population. Tom added, that his observations at the Jacob’s gathering, seemed to have more gay men than would be expected in a general gathering. Or, in other words, Tom had noticed something that we had found in our research but it was something that we had not talked about. Tom had never said anything because it was a discussion that he didn’t really want to get into and given the world of cancel culture, it becomes problematic. Neither of us were saying anything pejorative about homosexuality, only that we had noticed a disproportionate number gay men in the abduction population. I have said that this is something that needs to be explored in the interest of scientific research, and that our observations are based on our investigations into the abduction phenomenon.

Also, in that part two, in the last two segments, Tom talked about his new passions. One is the reoccurring suggestion that FDR and the governmental leadership had known the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, but did nothing so that the United States could get into the Second World War. I have heard this idea for a long time but Tom suggested there was a smoking gun, found in a diary kept at the time, which he explained. It is an interesting theory and there is some evidence for it.

His second passion was bigfoot but he was distracted by sightings of some sort of dog man in eastern Pennsylvania. He mentioned a documentary about this that is in the final stages of being completed.

Next time, I will be talking with Chris O’Brien about cattle mutilations. I think of this as his counter to my solo show on that topic. I’ve known Chris for a long time and we have, occasionally talked about these mutilations. It should be an interesting show.

Thursday, September 08, 2022

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Cattle Mutilations

I had thought that the interest in cattle mutilations had waned in recent years. I thought that the evidence had suggested terrestrial explanations for those mutilations. In fact, I had thought that those terrestrial explanations dealt mostly with nature at work with an occasional intervention by a human agency.

I would be wrong.

Tucker Carlson is revitalizing the mutilation controversy without understanding the years of investigation that had solved the mystery, contrary to what he might think. His interest is that of a novice who believes that he had discovered something that the rest of us have missed.

My problem here, which I freely admit, is that I haven’t seen his whole documentary. I have seen the promos for it and I have seen an interview with him, but the documentary is hidden behind a paywall known as Fox Nation and I refuse to add money to their coffers.

The first thing that I noticed in the promo was the claim that more than 10,000 cattle had been mutilated. It seemed that this was a current figure, but those of us who had been around this aspect of the UFO phenomenon for very long, recognized it. I believe it was Tom Adams who created that number in the 1970s. At the time it was admitted to be an estimate based on the numbers of cases that were being reported then, but not on any recognized statistical analysis.

That number was reinforced when Jack Hitt reported in GQ (February 1997), “Since 1967, 10,000 cows have inexplicably turned up dead, their ‘soft tissues’ removed.”

That Carlson was using that 25-year-old quote seems to suggest that no animals had been mutilated in the last two and a half decades. Sure, I’m playing something of a semantics game here, but seriously, isn’t that number suggestive of superficial research into a topic that has been around for a lot longer.

I got involved in this in the mid-1970s when Jim Lorenzen of APRO called to ask if I could look into a series of mysterious cattle deaths in Minnesota. Let’s think about that for a minute. In the mid-1970s, the news media was worried about cattle dying in the field. I even remember the CBS Evening News reporting on it. Dead cows taking up part of their 22-minute broadcast of the important news of the day.

But I digress…

Lorenzen told me of reports of cattle slaughtered, circles melted in the snow that were reminiscent of UFO landing cases, landing marks in the ice on a nearby lake, and, of course, dead animals. The was also a mention of Satanic Rituals that were somehow involved. I called Bob Cornett and we made plans to travel to Minnesota as quickly as possible.

Bob and I spent a week in Minnesota. We learned that the landing traces talked about had mundane explanations. The farmer told us that the circles melted in the snow were the result of decomposition of silage left behind when silos were moved, creating the illusion that something round had landed. The landing gear marks were the result of a farmer chopping holes in the ice to get water for his livestock.

In fact, working with Michael J. Douglas, the news director at a local radio station, we were not able to find any evidence that UFOs were involved. It seemed, based on our work there, that misinterpretation of the evidence was the problem rather than some agency, meaning human or alien, was responsible. Everything we saw there related to the mundane.

We weren’t the only ones who had found little in the way of a mystery. Dane Edwards, publisher of the Brush, Colorado Banner, said that the mutilations were not a recent development. He first heard about them in 1963, when he lived in Texas. He said that he had traced the history back to 1961. He didn’t follow up until 1969 when eight cows were killed along the Texas-Mexico border. Again, there wasn’t any coverage and he thought nothing of it until the mutilations began in Colorado. He said that there had been six cows killed in one night.

Edwards was now interested in the phenomenon but he didn’t like the theories proposed by the local authorities. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation said that the cattle were dying of natural causes. Predators and scavengers were attacking the carcasses. According to them, the areas most vulnerable to animals were the very parts that were “removed” by the mutilators, whoever or whatever they might be. Carl Whiteside of the CBI, released a report that there had only been a single mutilation in Colorado that couldn’t be explained as something natural.

That sort of idea wasn’t confined to Colorado. Craig Beek of the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation said that he didn’t think there had been a single mutilation in Iowa. At the height of the mutilation scare in the fall of 1975, there had been a rumor that Satanic cultists had used a gas grenade to kill six cows in Dubuque, Iowa. Vets who examined the cows reported that all six had died of Blackleg.

Roy Kebech, assistant director of the Attorney General’s Division of Criminal Investigations said that about ninety percent of the mutilations they investigated happened after the animals had died. Kebech was quick to point out that the mutilations he was talking about had been caused by scavengers.

Back in Iowa, I think I might have solved another part of the mystery after talking with men who worked at a local packing house. They had found the remains of several cows and had cut them up as a joke. They laughed at veterinarians’ claims of surgical expertise of the mutilators, though I’m not certain that it was veterinarians who had originally made the surgical precision claim.

CBS News reported that in one case, a blue plastic valise containing a cow’s tongue, ear and a scalpel had found at a mutilation site in Colorado. They didn’t know how it had gotten there, but believed it had been dropped by humans rather than aliens.

Robert Lounsberry, the Iowa Secretary of Agriculture claimed in 1977, that he might have accidentally solved the mutilation problem. He thought that insurance companies should investigation some of the reports. He noted that farmers with policies that didn’t pay for the natural caused deaths of the animals, might be inclined to mutilate the body for the insurance money.

I found some evidence of that in Wisconsin. Percy Stitch, the Grant County Sheriff told me that a cow found mutilated on a Grant County farm had died of respiratory failure. A local vet, Dr. Jeff Davis, told me that he knew of a mutilation in which an ear had been raggedly hacked off a dead animal. He said mutilation had happened after death. Davis said that the animal had been sickly from birth and the death would not be compensated by the insurance company, unless there was another cause of death.

According to Whiteside, Beek, and Kebech, there was another factor in play here. Ranchers and farmers never really looked at the dead animals before the hysteria about cattle mutilations swept the country. Now, any cow found with any sort of mutilation damage, whether it fit into a pattern or not, was another victim of the mysterious mutilators.

In fact, there was article published in an obscure and now defunct magazine, The Zetetic, which evolved into The Skeptical Inquirer. A sociologist, Dr. James R. Stewart, studied two groups of mutilation reports, one from Nebraska and another from South Dakota in 1974 in an article entitled “Collective Delusion: A Comparison of Believers and Skeptic.” He suggested that the mutilations began as an expression of concern for the herd. The death is seen as unusual when the rancher is anxious as outside forces, such as the prices of feed, climb wiping out any profit. He noted that it seemed the mutilations didn’t affect dairy herds because of government subsidies, which meant the farmer was not concerned about some of those outside influences.

Stewart showed there was a positive correlation between the number of reported incidents in a prescribed area and the number of news inches devoted to livestock mutilations by the media.

Steward also wrote, “Local law enforcement personnel have little, if any, experiences in determining the causes of cattle deaths. Consequently, they were inclined to adopt the farmer’s explanations in the absence of any solid refuting evidence of their own. The same was true of some local veterinarians. Rarely do they examine dead cattle; instead they are usually asked to treat living animals.”

This sort of thing has been seen in the past. In 1954, there was the great windshield pitting epidemic in Washington state. It seems that after there were stories about the H-bomb tests in the Pacific, a few people living north of Seattle noticed small, pinhead-sized nicks in their windshields. There were a few reports from a Naval base not that far from Seattle and then, in one two-day period, there were more than 3,000 reports of damage to the windshields in cars in Seattle.

And then the hysteria faded. The explanation was not damage caused by radioactive fall out but by asphalt kicked up from the roads. It wasn’t something new. The damage had always been there, it was just that most people didn’t notice it. They never really looked at the windshields as opposed to looking through them.

To try to determine what was happening in the world of cattle mutilations, retired FBI agent Ken Rommel was commissioned to make an independent study. His report, which ran to 297 pages, was an investigation of the mutilations in New Mexico. I corresponded with Rommel a number of years ago and he provided me with a copy of his lengthy report.

One point that Rommel made, and something that I heard in either the promo for Carlson’s documentary, or in the interview of him, was the term surgical precision. Rommel suggested that you have sheriff “Numnutz [his term, not mine] saying it looks like laser surgery.” The reporters love the quotes like that but never ask about the sheriff’s experience with laser surgery or bother to get some sort of confirmation from a real expert.

In keeping with those thoughts from Rommel, I noticed that one of the comments made back then and repeated today is that the mutilation phenomenon goes back hundreds of years. Supposedly, there was an unexplained death of dozens of sheep in 1606. It was claimed that “nothing was taken from the sheep but their tallow and some inward parts, the whole carcasses, and fleece remaining behind. Of this sundry conjectures but most agree that it tendeth towards some fireworks.”

I confess that I have no real idea what the last part of the entry means. The idea that what was taken was tallow, makes some sense, since tallow was used for a number of things including making soap and candles. The inner parts, which I suspect were the “offal meats,” would be the nutritional value.

There is additional information about these mutilations. The Washington County Sheriff Herb Marshall, in 1979 kept a recently dead cow under observations for two full days. Over that time, bacteria caused the skin to tear in a manner consistent with the cuts described by ranchers and farmers. Expanding gas split the stomach to expose the internal organs. Blowflies laid eggs in the soft tissues of the eyes, lips and anuses. The maggots, hatched in as little as ten hours, then would eat the soft tissues to the bone. For Sheriff Marshall, that ended the controversy and explained the mutilations.

These observations were duplicated in Alberta, Canada, in 1989, when researchers there published the results of their investigation. They concluded, “The parts reported missing from mutilated cattle are the same as those known to be removed by scavengers, primarily coyotes and birds, in the early stages of scavenging a carcass… the mutilations are the work of scavenger animals, mainly coyotes and birds; the mutilations occur after the animal has died; and any investigation of bizarre gross findings in dead cattle must rule out scavenging beyond any reasonable doubt before proceeding to investigation of other possibilities.”

I have heard these precision incisions, these surgical cuts as a reason we can rule out natural causes. I don’t know how they came up with this idea and I have never seen anything to suggest it is true. The Arkansas observations argues against this idea. It’s just one of those statements that is repeated without any sort of documentation or evidence. I had to wonder where the idea originated and what evidence produced the theory, but I have never found a satisfactory answer. Maybe Tucker Carlson has one.

I also noticed that in one of the photographs used during the promo there was a New Mexico State Trooper near the body of a cow. We are told that there are no footprints around it and by extension, there is no evidence of scavengers. But a look at the cow shows bird droppings all over it.

Mutilated animal with bird droppings suggesting a mundane cause for the mutilations.


Yes, I have looked at the other side of the debate. Criticism has been directed at Ken Rommel, suggesting that during his investigation he didn’t see a “classic” mutilation. I read where he didn’t personal inspect the dead animal but sat, upwind, in the car while someone else gathered the evidence. An examination of his report that is now backed up by these other observations in Arkansas and Canada and additional conclusions drawn by experts rather than ranchers and farmers, and my own investigations that revealed a profit motive (I’ll freely admit, a rather limited explanation) and copycat mutilations, reduces the overall mystery to virtually nothing.

This is now much longer than I intended. Of course, had I paid to see Carlson’s report, it might have been much longer. It was the promo and the interview that suggested the direction of his documentary. I would assume that someone on his staff found a copy of Rommel’s report, and I would hope some would read Mute Evidence by Daniel Kagan and Ian Summer. And, yes, I have read the books by Christopher O’Brien and Linda Moulton Howe, the reports written by Tom Adams and others.

But, based on my investigations and my research, I believe that the solution to the cattle mutilation phenomenon has been discovered. It is not aliens with a taste for cow anus. It is not a government program of either searching for evidence of biological contamination or test of biological weapons. The rather mundane solution is simple scavenging and predation by animals and insects. I don’t know what Tucker Carlson has decided to bring this back into the limelight but he had done a real disservice by doing so.

Coming up on September 28, I’ll talk with Chris O’Brien who has written several books about cattle mutilations including Stalking the Herd to provide, well, a different perspective on the topic. Chris has worked with sheriffs and others during his years long investigation.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Tom Carey about his investigation into the Roswell case and other aspects of the UFO phenomena. Since he had been around UFO research for decades, it will provide and interesting commentary on the state of UFO research.

 

Saturday, September 03, 2022

Sightings and Photograph from Coast to Coast

 

For those interested in more about the Hottel Memo, see the following posting. It contains a link to the conversation with John Greenewald.

Much more recently, on May 30 of this year the witnesses were walking on a trail in the Toms River area of New Jersey. One of the witnesses spotted a fireball that was, at first hovering, and then began to move to the northeast. The object seemed to be swirling in a clockwise rotation. The witness said something and the woman with him said that she saw it too.

There was no noise from the UFO and the motion was not constant. It would move slowly and pick up speed and then slow down. It was in sight for two to three minutes before it disappeared behind a tree line and they lost sight of it.

On August 28 of this year, the witness in Littleton, Colorado, saw a “tic tac” shaped object. The UFO hovered and moved slowly without making a sound. The witness took video using an iPhone 12 camera. William Puckett suggested that this was a high-flying jet aircraft but looking at the photo, I’m not convinced that is the explanation.

Photo courtesy of William Puckett at UFOSNW website


I’m not a fan of lights in the sky but on August 15, near Lehi, Utah, the witness reported his car suddenly stalled. As he got out to look under the hood, he saw a light hovering overhead. He said that he didn’t see a shape behind the light and would have thought nothing of it, but once that light was gone, having flown to the northeast, he was able to start his car without a problem.

Friday, September 02, 2022

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - John Greenewald

 

John Greenewald was the guest this week and I invited him on the show because he had finally obtained an unredacted copy of the Hottel Memo. This was short note about the crash of three UFOs in New Mexico sometime prior to 1950. John said

John Greenewald

that the unredacted version had the names of sources, though the names were not those he had expected. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51099167

Or you can watch it here:

https://rumble.com/v1i63g3-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-john-greenewald.html

Rather than finding the name, Silas Newton blacked out, the names seem to indicate a connection to Washington, D.C. law enforcement, though Washington, D.C. wasn’t specifically mentioned. I wondered, given the timing, if the Metro Police being mentioned in the memo might be Denver. On March 8, 1950, Silas Newton gave a lecture at the University of Denver about three UFO crashes that had taken place a couple of years earlier.

The Hottel Memo mentioned New Mexico specifically as the crash sites and the source of that information seemed to be Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully, and possibly a Time magazine article from January of that year. Everything is rather vague and without the original sources, which were not mentioned in the memo, nothing new can be learned.

That is not to say, that the names in the memo won’t lead to those original sources. All we have are the names of men who apparently received the story from others. According John, the information was relayed to the FBI through the sex crimes unit of the Metro Police. Yeah, we don’t know why sex crimes were mentioned.

We also talked about NASA and its move into UFO research. I wondered if that suggested that “Disclosure” might be closer. John noted that the NASA investigation was going to be more transparent than that of the DoD. He said that the NASA scientists who would be involved did not have the proper security clearances to be fully “read into” what the DoD was learning. He thought this would inhibit the NASA investigation because the solution of something strange could be a clandestine project of the US military. Without access to that information, any analysis attempted would be skewed. They wouldn’t have all the proper data.

Next week, I’ll be talking about cattle mutilations from my perspective, which is not the one that seems to be favored in the UFO community. I will note here that that was inspired by some of the nonsense spread by Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to have a real handle on this. At the end of the month, I’ll be talking with Chris O’Brien, getting his perspective on the mutilations and see if we can’t find some common ground.