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.
