Another of the fringe phenomena that some people attribute to UFOs and aliens is animal mutilations. Most people call these "cattle mutilations", because cattle seem to be mutilated much more often than anything else. However, the first mute that got any publicity was a pony dubbed Snippy by the media (Her real name was Lady).Besides cattle, many other animals such as buffalo, cats, rabbits and what-have-you have also been found mutilated by unknown perpetrators.
So what's strange about the mutilations? The most common features of mutilation cases are:
- The animals die and are found mutilated quite suddenly. An animal may be fine one day and be found the next day, dead and mutilated.
- The animals are often found completely drained of blood, but there is no blood soked into the ground beneath the animal.
- The animal's soft tissues, such as lips, eyes, ears, sex organs, rectum, udder, etc, are missing.
- The edges of the cuts made to remove these organs look as if they were done with surgical precision. Some are even reported to be cauterized, as if they had been done with a laser. The unexplained ones have no tooth-marks, no jagged tears such as would be left by most predators.
- There are no footprints, no tracks of any kind around the dead animals.
- Many times there are reports of UFOs, helicopters, or just lights in the sky on the nights that the mutilations occur.
Although there are reports of mutilations before 1967, the finding of the mutilated remains of Snippy on September 8, 1967 set off a brief wave of mutilation reports. That was just the beginning, because in the mid 1970s ranchers across the Midwestern United States began to report mutilation incidents.
By the late 1970s, mutilations appeared to be such a growing problem that the FBI got involved and in 1979 they published a report on the phenomenon. However, their conclusion was that the phenomenon was the result of predators rather than aliens.
Documentary filmmaker Linda Moulton Howe also investigated the mutilation phenomenon, culminating in her 1980 documentary film A Strange Harvest, which came to a quite different conclusion than the FBI report.
The phenomenon came to the forefront of UFOlogy in the Early 1980s when APRO investigator Paul Bennewitz, a physicist in Albuquerque, NM, traveled to Dulce, NM to investigate reports of cattle being mutilated on the ranch of Edmound Gomez. He became friends with the local law enforcement official in the area of the Jicarilla Indian Reservation, Gabe Valdez, and the two investigated the mutilations and also some mysterious lights reportedly seen over Archuleta Mesa.
During the period from1980 to 1987, many other UFO researchers, including John Lear and Linda Moulton Howe visited Bennewitz. Soon the UFO world was abuzz with stories of aliens mutilating cattle and of an alien base inside Mount Archuleta.
The next major wave of mutilations occurred in the early 1990s in Alabama. For a time the area around the town of Fyffe, in Northeastern Alabama, was plagued with mutilations.
The San Luis Valley, on the Colorado/New Mexico border has for years been a particular hotspot for mutilations, as well as other strange occurrences. Mutilations don't get the publicity they once did, but they're still occurring.
What's the answer?
- For a time, it was thought that satanic cults were mutilating cattle as part of some cultish ritual. It just didn't pan out, because there were too many mutilations, they were too spread out, and there was just no evidence to connect the phenomenon to cults.
- The alien hypothesis is well known, but except for UFO reports in the same area as mutilations, the evidence is rather vague.
- Mutilation waves often seem to occur in the vicinity of military bases. Fyffe, Alabama is not far from Redstone Arsenal and the Huntsville Manned Spaceflight Center. Not only that, but since the 1980s, there have been continuing reports of "black helicopters" and "silent helicopters" in the areas where mutilations occur. This has led many to believe that it's our own military that's doing the mutilating. Why? Suppose they were testing some sort of germ warfare and, using a harmless organism for the test, wanted to see how far from a release point that a particular organism would spread…..? That's one idea, anyhow.
- The stock answer is still predators. Predators certainly attack the soft parts of a dead animal first, and some authorities say that it's possible for the damage to a dead animal from predators to look like "surgical precision."
This article was previously published in 2000. It has been revised slightly
by removing dead links and adding new ones as needed.
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Print References:
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• The Mysterious Valley by Christopher O'Brien
• An Alien Harvest by Linda Moulton Howe
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