The mysterious 1967 death of Nellie Lewis' appaloosa pony Lady
in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado was the beginning of
thirty years of animal mutilation reports. Lady, or Snippy, as
the filly was renamed by the media, was found on the morning of
September 8, 1967 with all of the flesh stripped from her shoulder
to the tip of her nose. The bones of her neck and skull were as
white as if they had bleached in the sun for years. What happened to
Lady and to the thousands of mutilated cows that have been discovered
since her untimely demise has been an enduring mystery connected by
some with both UFOs and government conspiracies.
Lady was found by Nellie's brother Harry, who tracked the family's
three horses' movements in the soft ground that was still muddy from
several days' rain. He found that the three horses had been running
together when Lady had broken away from the other two. The record
gets foggy here. Some of the stories say her tracks stopped while she
was still at a full gallop, and some say she ran in tight circles as
if something was chasing her. Some sources say her corpse was found
twenty feet from the last set of tracks and some say one hundred
feet. The only other tracks found near her were what was described as
five "giant horse tracks", eighteen inches wide. When Nellie and her
family went back to the site a week after Lady was discovered, they
found several black spots that Nellie called "burns".
Nellie called the Alamosa County Sheriff's office to report Lady's
death, but Sheriff Ben Phillips decided that Lady had probably been
struck by lightning, and didn't bother to investigate. Nellie was not
convinced. There were no burn marks on Lady, which made lightning
unlikely. Besides, Nellie had been thinking about the mysterious
lights that had been seen in the sky recently, and she had become
convinced that there was a connection. She and her husband Berle
Lewis and some of their friends had themselves seen odd lights in the
sky the previous spring.
Almost as soon as the story of Snippy became public, misinformation
began to fly. The horse was a filly named Lady, but the press got
confused and reported that the animal was a colt named Snippy.
Nellie, for some reason, didn't correct them.
In interviews with the press, Nellie mentioned the things about the
case that she considered unusual:
- There wasn't a scratch on Lady up to her shoulders, where the
flesh was completely stripped from her head and neck. The cuts at her
shoulder were smooth, as if from a sharp knife, not jagged like those
made by a predator's teeth.
- There was a strong but unidentifiable medicine smell around the
corpse.
- There were no tracks in the soft mud around the corpse.
- There were "burn marks" on the ground near the corpse.
- There was no blood in or on the body and none on the ground.
- The brain cavity was empty.
As the press said, Nellie believed that "Flying Saucers Killed My Horse!"
The Condon Commission UFO study was in full swing at the University
of Colorado, and the Commission investigated the case. Their
investigator found that the "giant horse tracks" were likely just
ordinary horse tracks that had been made in the deep mud and then had
dried out. The "burn marks" appeared to be growths of a black fungus
that thrived in the alkaline soil of the area. The Commission asked a
Colorado State University pathologist, Dr. Robert O. Adams, to examine the body.
Adams, assisted by Dr. Fred Ayers from the Condon Commission, did a
partial autopsy. He found that Lady had a badly infected leg and his
opinion was that someone had cut her throat to put and end to her
suffering. Once the throat was cut, he said, birds easily stripped
away the flesh of the neck and head.
Nellie was having none of that, however. She was convinced that UFOs
had killed her horse. According to friends, Nellie changed after
Lady's death, becoming obsessed with UFOs and the occult. She
committed suicide on the day of her mother's burial.
The autopsy was not the last of Lady, as former FBI agent Kenneth Rommel Jr. found. Rommel investigated Lady's death in 1979 as part of his work as director of Operation Animal Mutilation. He found that Lady's corpse was donated to science, and that
during the preparation of the skeleton for use as a teaching
specimen, Dr. Wallace Leary found two bullet holes in the bones of the horse's pelvis.
However she died, it seems likely that "Snippy" will live on in the annals of ufology as the first well-known "mute", the one with a name.
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
• Watch the Skies by Curtis Peebles
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