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A Wave of Mutilations
29 Plays1 year ago
M's not available this week, so Josh takes a look at an oldy but a goody - honest to goodness cattle mutilations. Once a staple of UFO lore, they haven't had much press lately until they unexpectedly did. What's really behind this phenomenon? Why cows? Is this just an pretext to say "anus and genitals" more often than we usually do in this podcast? These and other questions will go unanswered.
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Transcript
Introduction and Absence of Co-host
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, and unfortunately, circumstances have conspired to keep Dr. M. Denteth from us this week, so it's just me. I could, I suppose, do the next episode by myself, but if you've been keeping track, last episode was our 399th one.
00:00:38
Speaker
which does suggest that the next episode would be our 400th episode, which is, I suppose you could call that significant, and we really need the two of us to do that one, so it's just another week of filler just for me, I'm afraid.
Introduction to Cattle Mutilations
00:00:54
Speaker
Luckily for me though, I did have a story that I was going to talk about in the bonus episode for this week's episode, but there won't be one of those.
00:01:03
Speaker
about a topic, a topic that I have not heard about or thought about in quite a while, a classic, a classic, if you will. And an interesting enough of a topic that I thought, well, maybe I can stretch this into not a full episode, but just one of these more, more cut down, fillery type episodes that we do when one of us can't make it for whatever reason.
00:01:28
Speaker
So I have nothing else to say at the start of this episode, so I'm going to play a chime and then get straight into it.
Detailed Accounts of Queensland Cases
00:01:41
Speaker
Cattle mutilation. Actual, honest-to-goodness cattle mutilation. In the year of our Lord 2023, I happened to see an article in the news about cattle mutilations in Queensland.
00:01:58
Speaker
So yeah, I thought they were out of fashion. I didn't think we did cattle mutilations anymore, but lo and behold, here we have it. And this is an article largely from reports in the Daily Mercury, a newspaper in central Queensland, I guess, talking about a couple of graziers, the cooks, who say that at least 20 of their cows have been killed strangely over the last 18 years.
00:02:27
Speaker
The last one it says was six months ago, so I'm not quite sure why there's a report of them just now, but still works out for me. And it's your usual good old-fashioned cattle mutilation stuff. They say cows have
00:02:42
Speaker
had their organs removed with surgical precision without a trace of blood left at the scene. The most recent one six months ago they found the carcass of a cow with its outer cheek and tongue cleanly removed and no blood or marks of movement at the scene.
Historical Context and UFO Research Queensland
00:02:58
Speaker
Now, the headline for this article, I should say, was, aliens only explanation for mutilated cows found on Aussie farm, farmers say. That only explanation, I should in fairness point out, isn't quote marks because it's referring to exactly what these farmers said. They say the only explanation is aliens. One of them, Judy Cook, says, how is it happening? It must have something that lifts it up and puts it down and doesn't leave any marks. Aliens are the only explanation I've got.
00:03:28
Speaker
They also talked about strange bright lights in the distance that they weren't quite sure what was going on, and said that it looked like last time she saw a light in the distance, looked at the boundary of the property, and then there was a mob of cattle there the next day who looked terrorized and started running as soon as she got close to them, which was very strange.
00:03:48
Speaker
and the article itself goes on to talk about cattle mutilations in general but it does quote the president of UFO research Queensland
00:03:59
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Who says it is interesting? There hadn't been an incident in Queensland for some time. Again, they talk about the various stories they've heard match the reports of mutilations in the US, which usually involve cattle being found dead on their side, mutilated.
Exploring Theories on Cattle Mutilations
00:04:15
Speaker
And then there's always this case that often all the blood is removed. And as they put it, I think this is, who is this quoting?
00:04:24
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one Cheryl Gottshaw, the president of the UFO Research Queensland Society Institute. I don't know what to do there. She says, when an animal is laying on its side, you look for hoof marks where the animal has tried to get up and there is none. So it looks like it has come from somewhere else and has been laid on the ground there.
00:04:42
Speaker
And it talks a little bit about similar cattle mutilation type things that have showed up in other times in other countries. Finishes with them saying, it really makes you think that there's something going on the general public doesn't know about. Maybe there's something being kept hidden from us. Although she says this, if anything, makes her less scared of the idea of UFOs and extraterrestrials because as she puts it, if they want to, they're going to come and get you. So what's the use of worrying? What indeed?
00:05:10
Speaker
But cattle mutilation. Cattle mutilation. I mean, we've talked about UFO stuff before. We must have at least mentioned cattle mutilations before, but I don't recall specific incidents. So let's talk about them now. Cattle mutilation.
00:05:26
Speaker
It was big in the
The Snippy Case and 1970s Mutilation Wave
00:05:28
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70s. The 1970s was when cattle mutilation and UFO explanations for it really took off. There have for centuries been strange cases of livestock dying in odd ways. But it wasn't until 1967, apparently, when there was a story about a horse called Snippy
00:05:53
Speaker
that was mysteriously killed and mutilated somewhere in Colorado. Now apparently the horse wasn't called Snippy, it was called Lady, but was incorrectly identified as Snippy who was actually that horse's sire. But it became known as the Snippy case, the case of the horse called Snippy. So on September 9, 1967, a woman called Agnes King and her son Harry, so supposedly they found their horse dead
00:06:22
Speaker
its head and neck had been skinned and the body displayed cuts that to to then looked very precise also apparently again there was no blood at the scene and a strong medicinal odor was in the air so this this got reported um it was apparently the first to feature people speculating that that maybe aliens maybe maybe UFOs could have been responsible
00:06:45
Speaker
for the mutilation of this animal, but there was an investigation of it which concluded there was no evidence to support the assertion that the horse's death was associated in any way to abnormal causes.
00:06:59
Speaker
Now, they say it wasn't properly investigated. Supposedly, when people talked to the county sheriff, he just said, it was probably a lightning strike and never bothered to look at it. Supposedly, sometime later, two students from the local Alamosa State College confessed that they had gone out and shot this horse.
00:07:22
Speaker
didn't explain why the mutilations had happened as they did, but supposedly that was human intervention. But in the 1970s, this is when this really took off, and obviously the first publicised case may have been a horse, but from then on it was cattle, cattle all the way.
00:07:38
Speaker
So 1973 there was apparently a wave of cattle mutilations. I should point out I found one paper talking about this that references the song Wave of Mutilations by the Pixies, a song which I believe has nothing to do with cattle mutilation. It's something to do with
00:07:57
Speaker
family suicide, weirdness, I don't even know. So that's good. But no, this wave of, this first wave of mutilation went all across seven counties in Kansas and Nebraska. They reported sexual organs having been removed. And this seems to be sort of the common thing they talk about. Eyes being removed, genitals, anuses sometimes, various organs, tongues, lips sort of flesh around the teeth and so on.
00:08:22
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Now, at this point, it got up to 38 reported mysterious deaths across 11 counties, although there were testing that suggested that at least, possibly not all, but many of them had died from a disease called blackleg, which is some sort of bacterial infection, which does indeed
00:08:42
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When it gets bad, it can seemingly eat away at the skin, leaving patches of exposed flesh, which possibly matches the lack of skin on some of these mutilated animals. Then in 1974,
1970s Helicopter Sightings and Cult Activity
00:09:00
Speaker
We get to 1974 and there's reports spreading to Lancaster County, also in Nebraska. In 1974, this is when there, as I said, there had been suggestions of a UFO connection. In 1974 is when we see reports of strange unidentified helicopters. So not being, not suggestions that there's some sort of alien craft, but helicopters shining spotlights into fields that would soon become mutilation sites.
00:09:28
Speaker
despite the fact that the FAA and the National Guard were not aware of any helicopter activity in the area. It got to the point that apparently ranchers started forming night vigils and the local National Guard warned that it's actual helicopter pilots to fly higher than normal when they're going over farmland in this county in Nebraska, just in case any quote-unquote jittery farmers happen to take a potshot at them.
00:09:54
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So it got to the stage that the authorities did actually investigate. There was one investigation in 1975 that was specifically looking to see if there was a connection between cult activity and cattle mutilation.
00:10:13
Speaker
So as well as the suggestion that it's aliens coming down and doing these weird things to animals, there are also suggestions that maybe it's weird cults of Satanists doing blood sacrifices. Who the hell knows what? I mean, we're getting close.
00:10:30
Speaker
We're getting close to the time of the, you know, the satanic panic of the eighties, which would have had its roots earlier. There was things like Jonestown and stuff that had been happening. So cults were in the national consciousness. And so basically, I think it seemed to be a case of a weird thing happens. People are worried about cults. So let's make sure that none of them are involved. So there was there was the US Treasury Department assigned a man called Donald Flickinger
00:10:54
Speaker
To investigate this, the operation came under, it says here, the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and cattle mutilation, I guess. So Mr Flickincher, he recorded a number of unusual incidents, but he was unable to find evidence of cult involvement. That would justify them taking it anything further. It seems to be
00:11:19
Speaker
What we seem to see is they can usually explain away a lot of the cases, but not all of them, and the reaction to the remaining ones tends to sort of be, huh.
00:11:31
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Kind of weird. But yes, so in 75, there were reports of people in black hooded robes being seen. And where was this one? This was Idaho, this particular incident. And then mutilated cattle were found in the area the following day. And then in 75, another motorist claimed that 15 masked individuals had formed a roadblock with linked arms, forcing him to turn around from where he was going. And this was also in an area.
00:11:59
Speaker
where our cattle mutilations are being reported. So the FBI and the ATF, the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms folks, basically weren't able to find evidence that would suggest that the analysts had been victims of any sort of ritual or organized effort, in particular because while there are sort of commonalities in your cattle mutilation cases, they're not all the same. And so the fact that it wasn't the same things apparently happening
00:12:28
Speaker
to each of these animals every time was one of the reasons that they thought it's unlikely to be some sort of organized coordinated activity, otherwise you'd expect there to be a lot more uniformity to exactly the bits that are being removed from animals and things like that.
00:12:46
Speaker
So they say most of the mutilations in this 1975 investigation were basically just ruled to natural causes or the cattle when they came to examine them were too decayed to be able to investigate properly. They said some cases of cult hysteria were traced back to fabrication by individuals unrelated to the incident.
00:13:07
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And things like apparently one of these claims, a false claim being made by a convict who was trying to get a reduction of a sentence for providing information. Another case, it was high school students circulating rumours as a joke. But as I say,
00:13:25
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It was we're starting to get into the area where people are getting a little bit silly around the idea of cults existing in society. So it was the sort of thing where a silly joke like that would be taken seriously.
FBI's Operation Animal Mutilation
00:13:38
Speaker
The next investigation was in 1979. This was an FBI one. The investigation was dubbed Operation Animal Mutilation, which
00:13:48
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If it were investigating anything other than cattle mutilation, the name operation animal mutilation would be quite a badass name for an operation. But as it is, it just comes across as unimaginative, quite frankly.
00:14:05
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unless it were an investigation into muppets somehow, then it would have taken a particularly dark turn. But nevertheless, Operation Animal Mutilation, so it was funded by a $44,000 grant, which it says here is equivalent to about $165,000.
00:14:23
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A man by the name of Kenneth Rommel, FBI agent, hid it, and it had five key objectives, which were 1. To determine the reliability of the information on which the grant was based, which entailed gathering as much information as possible about the cases reported in New Mexico prior to May 1979,
00:14:40
Speaker
Two, to determine the cause of as many mutilations as possible, especially those reported in New Mexico. Three, to determine if livestock mutilations, as described, constitute a major law enforcement problem. Four, if these mutilations do constitute a major law enforcement problem, to determine the scope of the problem and to offer recommendations on how to deal with it. And finally, five, if it is shown that the mutilation phenomenon is not a law enforcement problem, to recommend that no further law enforcement investigations be funded.
00:15:05
Speaker
So this was basically, we want to find out if there's something to it. If there is, what are we going to do about it? If there isn't, then we're done, quite frankly. That'll do. Thank you. So the report, the final report of this investigation was released in 1980. It was 297 pages long.
00:15:26
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According to some estimates, by 1979, there had been 10,000 instances of cattle having been mutilated. But the conclusion was basically that mutilations were mostly the result of natural predation, but that some cases contained anomalies that couldn't be accounted for.
00:15:44
Speaker
by conventional wisdom. The FBI couldn't identify any individuals responsible for the mutilations. So apparently from 1980, according to this, the details of the investigation are available under the Freedom of Information Act in the States. And what has been released includes correspondence where Mr. Rommel, guy in charge, says, quote, most credible sources have attributed this damage to normal predator evidence scavenger activity.
00:16:13
Speaker
Now, some people have questioned this. There's one fellow estate patrolman in New Mexico by the name of Gabe Valdez. He reckoned that Mr. Rommel himself basically didn't do much investigating of anything. Apparently, he was disgusted. Mr. Rommel himself was disgusted by these decomposing cows.
00:16:37
Speaker
and let other people actually go out and investigate them while he waited upwind in the car. People thought it was, people sort of said suspiciously that while these cattle mutilations were being investigated in New Mexico, there were very few mutilations reported during this time as though to imply that whoever or whatever had been doing the mutilations
00:17:01
Speaker
knew this investigation was going on and moved somewhere else. Some people said that Canada, Western Canada supposedly then had a whole bunch of cattle mutilations during this period suggesting that the cattle mutilators went up north. I'm not quite sure. So yes, people have suggested that the sky didn't do a good enough job of investigating, but I don't know.
00:17:27
Speaker
So when it comes to explanations, the way people describe these things is often
Natural Causes vs. Surgical Precision
00:17:33
Speaker
very weird. The lack of marks around it. In the Snippy case, for instance, they claimed that there was an absolute absence of tracks in a 100-foot radius of the carcass. Even the horse's own tracks disappeared within 100 feet of the body. We have sort of these strange things in the environment, and then we have all the various
00:17:55
Speaker
weird, weird mutilations that, you know, why are certain things removed like that? What's with the, they always talk about the quote unquote surgical precision of the cuts that seem to be, but which they mean straight, I think, straight and not having much of a ragged edge.
00:18:12
Speaker
And yet the official things seem to be happy to write it off as natural causes, and they accounted for most of these things in a variety of ways. So it's basically, when an animal dies and starts getting in and the local scavengers get wind of it, the first thing that will go is basically all of the softest tissues. So that is, that's your eyes and your lips.
00:18:36
Speaker
and indeed the anus and genitals stuff. The softest parts of the animal are the easiest parts to get naught on and so are the most likely parts to go missing once scavengers have their way with it. So apparently dehydration can cause contraction of missing or damaged areas, the flesh to pull away from it exposing things looking like they've
00:19:00
Speaker
you know, the flesh around it has been removed when it hasn't. So small scavengers and burrowing parasites will go into the body where the skin is the thinnest. They talk about, yeah, missing eyes and soft internal organs can be explained by carrion feeding insects like blowfire, flies, carrion birds like vultures, and they will go straight towards these soft parts of the body and openings of the body. That's your bodily orifices.
00:19:28
Speaker
to try and feed on the organs inside. Now the absence of blood, which is, this is one of the things that often gets pointed out and I think it's meant to sound particularly spooky because surely, surely if this, you know, animal had been cut open, these things being removed, there should be blood all over the place and yet there's never any sign of it. But apparently there is a natural explanation for a lot of this that blood, when an animal dies, blood just
00:19:49
Speaker
pools due to gravity in the lowest parts of the animal, which means other areas that then get predated or scavenged upon don't actually have a lot of blood in them to bleed. Blood that does end up outside the body gets eaten by insects or just desiccated by being out in the sun and blown away. And now the supposed surgical incisions
00:20:11
Speaker
Another part of the decomposition process is, as you're probably aware, bloating can occur, and also dehydration can cause the animal's hide to shrink and split, especially if there's bloating pushing it outwards. And when an animal skin splits, it isn't a ragged tear, it is often a straight line that appears to be like a cut.
00:20:35
Speaker
And then also incisions made by scavengers or predators. If you have a hole in the skin, then these processes will then cause it from there to tear right along. And apparently people have done investigations to do things like this. People have taken a recently dead cow, left it out in the sun and just kept an eye on it for
00:20:59
Speaker
One study they talked about looked at it for 48 hours. Apparently during the 48 hours that it was observed, post-mortem bloating was reported to have caused incision-like tears in the cow's skin that matched the quote-unquote surgical cuts reported on mutilated cows while the action of blow-full eyes and maggots reportedly matched the soft tissue damage observed on mutilated cows.
00:21:19
Speaker
Now, some people say, okay, fine, that might account for some of it, but then other people, especially sort of the ranchers who own these cattle, will dispute some of this because they claim that they know what it looks like when a cow's been fed on by the local predators. That's something that happens. They'll say that some of these cows that they'd found didn't appear to be unhealthy in any way, so it didn't seem likely they would have simply fallen dead.
00:21:47
Speaker
and then being able to have been scavenged and what have you. So the natural causes possibly can't explain away everything. Now, of course, the other thing is we've talked about cults doing it, and the idea that cult activity was behind cattle mutilations didn't seem to have a lot of legs.
Human Involvement and Experiments
00:22:07
Speaker
But there's also the fact that human beings are just dicks sometimes.
00:22:12
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And it's entirely possible that there are some cases that are caused just by people cutting up animals for the fun of it because they're psychos. There are many cases and instances of sort of psychopath sociopath type behaviors of the cliche is always harming family pets, but apparently there have been instances of larger animals, especially I guess if people live near farms and there's a lot of that.
00:22:42
Speaker
And the other thing, which I guess is sort of halfway between the prosaic animals and bastard humans did it and it was aliens or something, is the idea that there's some sort of government or military experimentation going on. And some people have suggested that there is some sort of conspiracy by government people to
00:23:04
Speaker
who are mutilating these cattle for, you know, as some sort of form of limited dissection or something like that, to investigate diseases, to transmit diseases, who knows, things like that. And that possibly also, you know, that ties into the idea of these mysterious helicopters, they're government, government helicopters.
00:23:26
Speaker
this is the black always it's always black helicopters who have been out conducting experiments without the consent of these farmers and presumably without the consent of the cows and that's kind of kind of all there is to say about cattle mutilation i guess it's interesting to see the commonalities
Conclusion: Natural vs. Mysterious Causes
00:23:45
Speaker
that the idea that you have things which look strange to we human beings who don't spend a lot of time outdoors and don't have a lot of knowledge of what can happen to dead things that are out in the open. With a little bit of
00:24:02
Speaker
then they always sort of get dressed up with a little bit of extra storytelling as well. Reading this, it reminds me of course of, I'm sure we've talked about the Dyatlov Pass incident, another one you've probably heard about, one of those weird cases in Russia where a bunch of people went missing outdoors and then were found later and the positions of their bodies were very strange. The tents appeared to have been ripped open and the bodies were found outside naked despite it being out in the snow and
00:24:30
Speaker
various bits of their bodies were missing and so on. And a lot of it could be accounted for, you know, there's the paradoxical undressing thing of when you're close to freezing to death, you start feeling very hot, which has seen people removing their clothing in cold places before. The suggestion is there being some sort of avalanche that caused them to run and then freeze or fall and hit their heads or something. And then the mutilations of the bodies once again were
00:24:55
Speaker
the things that have been removed, that have been supposedly mysteriously removed from their bodies were once again the soft tissues, eyes and tongues and things like that, which gross as it may be, is the kind of stuff that small scavenging animals go for first. And then as well,
00:25:11
Speaker
in the Dyatlov Pass incident, there were also things like supposedly their bodies, you know, appeared to, well, like, had, were orange, like, badly suntanned and setting off Geiger counters and stuff like that. And yet the more, the more potentially supernatural, weirdy weird stuff doesn't actually show up in any, any real reports that anyone's ever been able to find. And it certainly sounds like a case of embellishment after the fact. So
00:25:39
Speaker
It just sort of goes to show that unexpected things, things that seem weird to us can happen and yet not knowing how the world works, I guess, in the relevant ways, turns out a lot of it can be explained and then the bits of it that can't be explained sometimes just turn out to be people making stuff up.
00:25:59
Speaker
I mean, as even the official report said, some of these cases they just couldn't account for, which always seems to be the way. So who knows? Maybe there's hope. Hope? Is that the right word? Hope that there actually are aliens running around doing horrible things to perfectly innocent cows? Maybe not. But nobody has 100% ruled it out. But that's about the best you're going to get in the way of positive talk of cattle mutilation.
00:26:27
Speaker
So I think that's enough talk of poor animals having unfortunate things happen to them, even if it is simply part of the circle of life, you know, even if it is just what happens in nature. So I'll
00:26:42
Speaker
I'll leave you now. Hopefully things will be in a state next week that we can record our our proper honest to goodness 400th episode spectacular. I am of course recording this on the Thursday night before Easter so who knows if Easter will end up delaying things or who knows quite frankly but um
00:27:03
Speaker
All I can say for now is that the next official episode, whenever that happens, should be a doozy. This one, I think you could argue, probably wasn't, but that's okay. It's just a little bit of filler to tide you over until you get a proper episode from me and the good Dr. Denteth together, which will hopefully be next week. And all I can really say at this particular point in time is goodbye.
00:27:30
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Stentors.
Closing Thoughts and Listener Engagement
00:27:38
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember,
00:27:58
Speaker
Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. But conditions apply.