I have been reading a number of accounts recently about a new crop of cattle mutilations taking place in the Southwest. There have also been reports of mutilations in Great Britain of cattle and perhaps water buffalo. The first thing that must be ascertained is whether there is a pedestrian explanation for any an individual case. Such prosaic explanations would include predatory animals killing livestock or ritual animal murder by a cult. To me ritual murder of animals is repulsive but it is not paranormal. In examining the possibilities concerning those reports that are truly anomalous I have come to the following conclusions: It appears that the killers come by air, because in the truly anomalous cases there are no tracks to be seen. There are also no teeth marks and often the victims have had organs and tissues removed with beyond normal surgical precision. There are often reports of both UFOs and helicopters being seen in the area. Helicopters may indicate that humans are involved and it has been speculated that government agencies are involved. Some people think that the government or some parallel agency is testing for Mad Cow Disease. There is some plausibility to this concept, but why as in the recent case below test four calves from one farm? And why the weird coring procedures? It seems more likely to me that someone in a helicopter, likely from the government, has observed or heard that a mutilation has taken place and is investigating it themselves, but as with many questionable government investigations, will not admit to doing so.
This is reminiscent of reports of UFOs from Stephenville, Texas, wherein certain reliable citizens who made radar verifiable reports were hounded by helicopters and told by phone calls purportedly from Air Force personnel to keep quiet.
There is an even stranger explanation of the helicopters as screen memories. It is speculated that the occupants of UFOs are able to replace memories of accidental observers with more prosaic images, or perhaps the human brains of some observers are not able to process seeing a UFO.
Two of the most interesting accounts are here:
CATTLE MUTILATIONS BAFFLE COLORADO RANCHERS
By DeeDee Correll
Los Angeles Times
December 14, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-dead-calves14-2009dec14,0
,3007910,full.
DENVER – Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the
fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado.
Over the past month, he’s found four calves dead in a way that he cannot
reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears
missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of
fine cuts.
Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And
Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human
invader — nor even bloodstains he’d expect to find around the carcasses if
someone had butchered them.
“There’s nothing to go by,” said Sanchez, who estimated his financial loss
at $10,000. “I can’t figure it out.”
Costilla County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Chavez agreed: “There’s nothing to
follow up on.”
Besides Sanchez’s calves in San Luis, several cases have been reported near
Trinidad.
It’s not the first time.
In the 1970s, ranchers in eastern and southern Colorado filed more than 200
mutilation reports, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports.
The agency investigated, even conducting an undercover operation, but to no
avail.
“It was such a bewilderment,” recalled Tillie Bishop, a state senator at the
time.
Some people suspected satanic cults. Others grew convinced of an
otherworldly explanation — space aliens.
But rancher Bill Bledsoe of Hugo, in eastern Colorado, said the deaths
weren’t suspicious at all.
“People find a dead animal and think it died strange, but usually it turned
out something had been eating on it,” he said. “I think they were just
jumping to conclusions.”
Some veterinarians also attributed the mutilations to predators.
Northern New Mexico suffered scores of cases too. A 1980 report by a state
task force blamed predators. Ranchers widely panned it.
Then the mutilations appeared to stop.
But in the mid-1990s, 27 cattle in northern New Mexico were mutilated in 16
months, the Associated Press reported. Again, ranchers found cattle with
genitals removed, tongues cut off at the roots, and eyes and ears missing.
The incisions appeared to have been cauterized, they said.
Again, the reports stopped.
This year, reports began trickling in from southern Colorado.
In March, Mike Duran discovered a cow dead on his ranch near Trinidad, the
udder and vagina missing. “It was like a laser cut,” not a rip, said Duran.
He’d seen such carnage before: In the ’90s, he found a dead cow missing the
same parts.
Sheriff’s investigators were mystified. “I don’t know how to explain it.
They’re just missing. There’s no evidence of blood, of anything being cut,”
said Las Animas County Undersheriff Derek Navarette.
In northeastern Colorado, some Weld County ranchers joke about “coyotes with
scalpels,” the Greeley Tribune reported. Some don’t bother reporting
mutilations anymore because of skeptics, the paper said.
The Las Animas County sheriff’s office investigated another case in March in
which a cow was missing the udder. There was no sign of human or animal
presence. “Unexplainable once again,” Navarette said.
He said his office didn’t order necropsies because of the prohibitive cost.
About 100 miles away, Sanchez found two dead calves in late October. A week
later, a third carcass was found, and the fourth in mid-November.
Frustrated by the lack of leads, Sanchez consulted Chuck Zukowski, a
Colorado Springs paranormal investigator who runs UFOnut.com.
Zukowski also investigated the cases in Trinidad, taking tissue samples from
two of those animals to Colorado State University.
Veterinary experts determined that the cuts were made before death and
didn’t involve cauterization.
Zukowski says he’s as baffled as everyone else.
Sanchez said that with the mystery unsolved, he didn’t want to risk losing
any of his 32 remaining calves the same way. So he sold them at auction this
month.
“I didn’t know when this was going to end,” said Sanchez, who has 40 cows
left. “There’s no way to catch these people. I don’t even know if it’s
people.”
Colorado cow mutilations baffle ranchers, cops, UFO believer
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// ]]>SAN LUIS — Manuel Sanchez tucks his leathery hands into well-worn pockets and nods toward a cedar tree where, last month, he found his fourth mysteriously slaughtered calf in as many weeks.
“I have no idea what could do this. I wish I did,” he says.
Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin.
In his life in the piñon-patched pastures where his father and grandfather raised cattle, the 72-year-old Sanchez has seen
mountain lions and coyotes kill cattle, elk and deer. He’s seen birds scavenge carcasses. He’s heard of thieves slaughtering livestock in the field for their meat. He can’t explain what he saw last month.”A lion will drag its kill. Coyotes rip and tear flesh. These were perfect cuts — like with a laser or like a scalpel. And what would take the waste — all the guts — and leave the nice, tender meat?” Sanchez says, as he nudges his old Ford through rutted trails, rosary beads swinging from his rearview mirror. “No tracks. No blood. No nothing. I got nothing to go by. They don’t leave no trace.”
Every rancher who has reported similar cattle deaths — and there have been at least eight such deaths in southern Colorado this year — uses the same description.
“They just stripped this one,” says Tom Miller, who in March was one of three ranchers near Trinidad who discovered mutilated cattle.
Cow raises the alarm
One morning, he went out to his concrete troughs to feed his herd of about 80 red and black Angus cows and calves. The herd was racing about. A cow that a week before had birthed a calf was bellowing, “raising all kind of devil,” Miller says.
There by the trough — past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne — was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.
Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere.
“If anyone can show me how this happened, I will believe them. I know it’s not coyotes, especially in one night. Only a human or something like that can cut the ears like that,” says Miller, a 72-year-old rancher who was raised on the prairie bordering the Purgatoire River.
“If it was done by people, they sure went out of their way to bother and confuse me. And really, why? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Mysteriously mangled
Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams came out and looked at Miller’s calf. He lives next door; the calf would be the last of three strangely mutilated cattle that he would investigate in March of this year.
“I’ve heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones,” Williams says.
That same month, ranchers had called Williams to grisly scenes northeast of Aguilar and west of Weston to investigate mysteriously mangled cattle that had been seen healthy the day before.
To add to the weirdness, Sanchez, Miller and Mike Duran, who found a sliced Red Angus cow near Weston in March, have all experienced similar mutilations before. Sanchez lost cows in 2006 and 1993, Miller in 1997 and 1980, and Duran in 2000 and 1995.
“It’s weird and unexplainable,” says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as “laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch.”
Cops, like Williams and the ranchers, are stumped.
“We can’t come up with anything,” says Las Animas County sheriff’s Deputy Derek Navarette, who investigated the Miller and Duran calves.
“We’ve seen these before and they are all kind of the same. No one has ever explained it. Northern New Mexico has had some of these same cases, and in those cases they never got any further than we did.”
Predators ruled out
Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs investigated three of the eight mutilated cows in southern Colorado this year. The amateur UFO investigator and reserve deputy in El Paso County documents each scene, testing for radiation and scanning carcasses with ultraviolet light.
Despite his extraterrestrial inclinations, Zukowski’s studies — found on his ufonut.com website — fall short of concluding anything paranormal. He seems certain all the animals he studied were killed and drained before they were sliced, which explains the lack of blood found near the animals.
The way the tongues were sliced off in straight lines back behind the teeth indicates it is not a predator kill, he says.
“I’m looking for obvious things,” Zukowski says. “I don’t like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow.”
Sanchez is a salt-of-the-earth-type fellow who put three kids through college running cattle. Yet, he says he and his wife marveled at incandescent blue lights hovering over a ridge near his pastures in July and August. He declined to speculate about the lights.
“I just say the truth and that’s what I saw,” he says.
Duran, on the other hand, is willing to take the next step. He’s looked at it from every angle, he says. If it wasn’t human and wasn’t a predator, he says, there’s only one other option.
“I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here,” he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.
“I bet there is something out there.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13956752#ixzz0ZyF0JgPq
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